It hasn't been a great summer for flying. Well... actually it has been a fantastic summer; for months on end, we have been able to count on good weather on most any given day. Week after week storms moved across the country and fizzled as they reached us on the way to the coast. Weather systems that pulled southern moisture ahead of them were infrequent. I could have flown anywhere most any day that I had the time.

Ahh, the time. This spring was so nice that my wife and I decided to build a hideaway cabin in the woods behind the house. We both agreed that it was foolish, and each waited for the other to put the brakes on, but inertia took control. There were other plans for the summer too, and they were folded around the cabin. Every hour in the airplane was stolen from the summer's household projects, and that is why this summer has not been kind to flying.

Labor Day Sunday was simply too splendid to pass up though. Friday's cold front gave us a rambunctious breeze on Saturday, but by Sunday the center of a huge high pressure area laid directly over us. Skies were bright and winds were light. The weather, as it turned out, was so good that valley fog covered everything but the highest ridgetops throughout the hill country.

As I left Dundee about an hour after sunup and headed southeast, I gazed over an uncharted ocean of fog that offered no chance for visual navigation. Villages, roads, rivers, and hillsides hid silently in the cool gray murk at the bottom of this ocean. Dundee, at the edge of the Great Lakes plains was free of fog, and my destination in the western Catskills was on high ground and likely to be clear. My $130 pocket GPS guided me between the two.

It was a particularly beautiful day, and I wanted to go someplace special. White Birch airport is on a hilltop right next to the Hancock VOR station, just south of the Cannonsville Reservoir. I used to pass directly over it every evening en route to Newark, and I would often look for it in the fading light of a summer evening or on moonlit winter nights. I had been told that they had a breakfast every Sunday, but it certainly seemed to be a quiet place every time I saw it. For two years it has been on my list of places to visit.

Like many country airports it has a character. It was hewn from the hilltop by a group of local pilots 35 years ago, and it is a compromise between what was desired and what circumstances would yield. Life, death, and everything in between is that way though. Next to the clubhouse, in front of a lilac bush is an unmarked gravestone and a small monument inscribed "Pearl A. Webster 1904 - 1908...". It was hard for me to imagine a family scratching out a living from the shallow lichen- covered soil of that hilltop.

Years of work by the area's pilots have made the little airport a great Sunday destination however. They offer a table- service breakfast from late May to early October in their comfortable clubhouse that overlooks the runway. There was plenty of airport activity to watch, and I saw people arrive by car, by airplane, by ultralight, and by parachute. There was also a beautiful hilltop view that stretched forever to the southwest on this autumn morning at the start of September.

On these morning jaunts, I usually fly a "scenic route" to the destination and then a direct course home. On a typical round trip, the extra distance of a somewhat triangular course might add twenty percent to the flight time, but it usually doubles the enjoyment. The fog spoiled my plan to drift low along the river valleys enroute to breakfast, so I took the long way home instead.

Leaving White Birch, I flew towards Deposit and then followed route 17 until the D & H railroad tracks turned south towards the Susquehanna River as it makes a short loop through northeast Pennsylvania. The village of Susquehanna is at the bottom of this loop, and I had been intrigued by it since passing over it earlier this year. Even from 8000 feet it looked as if it hade a stroy to tell.

As the railroad tracks near the town, they pass over a graceful viaduct at Lanesboro, a sight which rivals the DL & W viaduct at Nicholson, PA. The town seems much bigger than it should be, and the buildings and the shallow dam on the river suggest it was a manufacturing center. An impressive railroad station still stands, as does a huge concrete coal tipple which spans the double tracks on the northeast edge of town.

I considered landing at a private strip along the river but was uncertain whether I would be welcome. I passed it up and continued down river, past the closed airport at Hallstead (now a trailer park), and consoled myself with a landing at Kirkwood New York, just a few miles north. It is a nice grass strip, and home to a biplane fly- in early in the summer, but nobody was home on that morning. I framed a nice picture of my old airplane at an old hangar at this airport nestled between timeless wooded hills, but I was out of film. I suppose I should return someday just to capture that picture.

I would call the rest of the trip "routine", except it was too nice for that; "Routinely beautiful" might be more accurate. I was delighted to see the old roundhouse and turntable in the Binghamton train yards, and I watched as the triple cities slid past the right window. I turned north at Owego and followed the quiet valley that holds half a dozen small towns all the way to its abrupt end, where it drops into the deeper glacial valley at Montour Falls.

I don't fly my airplane enough, and even if I did, there would be no way quantitative way of justifying its keep. I have the airplane because it makes me feel better. Call it a character flaw, an addiction, or a disease but on some mornings the imperatives must stand aside while I take the cure.

On the hilltop north of Hancock New York: the Hancock VOR is in the foreground, and the White Birch Airport is beyond it to the right. I didn't take a picture of the fog as I was flying over it, but you can see it laying over the hills in the distance, and you can see a shred of it in the right foreground.

A quiet morning far away from- and well above- the daily grind.