The Books: “Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah” (Richard Bach)

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah – by Richard Bach.

This was the first of his books I read. I was in high school. I think I was a junior. I loved it. There are still snippets from “The Messiah’s Handbook” I reference in my mind, from time to time. The fact that the book ends with the words “Everything in this book might be wrong” is enlightened and humble. (Bach, when he got divorced from Leslie and caused a shitstorm among his most loyal fans, said that one of his major mistakes was NOT adding the words “Everything in this book might be wrong” at the end of Bridge Across Forever. He really should have!)

Illusions tells the tale of a man named Richard who is a barnstormer in the midwest. Just like Richard Bach was.

He sleeps in his bedroll beneath the wing, he lands in isolated fields and takes people up for rides. He’s a mechanic. One day he meets a fellow barnstormer whose name is Donald Shimoda. Shimoda is mysterious. His plane is spotless. As Richard and Donald hang out, it becomes apparent that Shimoda is quite an extraordinary individual. He performs miracles in a casual off-hand way. He is referred to as “The Reluctant Messiah”. He begins to “train” Richard, giving him a ratty little book called “The Messiah’s Handbook”. They experiment with things like walking thru walls, walking on water, moving clouds, etc. etc.

The ending of Illusions is, perhaps, predictable, but I remember it packing a huge punch.

You know what I get from this book, reading it now as an adult? My main perception is Richard’s loneliness. His ache for connection, communication, friendship. Even though he must be “free”, he is dying for human connection. And so, lying under the wing of his plane, he dreams up a friend, who appears out of the blue, who is exactly what he needs.

Excerpt from Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah – by Richard Bach.

It was toward the middle of the summer that I met Donald Shimoda. In four years’ flying, I had never found another pilot in the line of work I do: flying with the wind from town to town, selling rides in an old biplane, three dollars for ten minutes in the air.

But one day just north of Ferris, Illinois, I looked down from the cockpit of my Fleet and there was an old Travel Air 4000, gold and white, landed pretty as you please in the lemon-emerald hay.

Mine’s a free life, but it does get lonely, sometimes. I saw the biplane there, thought about it for a few seconds, and decided it would be no harm to drop in. Throttle back to idle, a full-rudder slip, and the Fleet and I fell sideways toward the ground. Wind in the flying wires, that gentle good sound, the slow pok-pok of the old engine loafing its propeller around. Goggles up to better watch the landing. Cornstalks a green-leaf jungle swishing close below, flicker of a fence and then just-cut hay as far as I could see. Stick and rudder out of the slip, a nice little round-out above the land, hay brushing the tires, then the familiar calm crashing rattle of hard ground under-wheel, slowing, slowing and now a quick burst of noise and power to taxi beside the other plane and stop. Throttle back, switch off, the soft clack-clack of the propeller spinning down to stop in the total quiet of July.

The pilot of the Travel Air sat in the hay, his back against the left wheel of his airplane, and he watched me.

For half a minute I watched him, too, looking at the mystery of his calm. I wouldn’t have been so cool just to sit there and watch another plane land in a field with me and park ten yards away. I nodded, liking him without knowing why.

“You looked lonely,” I said across the distance.

“So did you.”

“Don’t mean to bother you. If I’m one too many, I’ll be on my way.”

“No. I’ve been waiting for you.”

I smiled at that. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s all right.”

I pulled off my helmet and goggles, climbed out of the cockpit and stepped to the ground. This feels good, when you’ve been a couple hours in the Fleet.

“Hope you don’t mind ham and cheese,” he said. “Ham and cheese and maybe an ant.” No handshake, no introduction of any kind.

He was not a large man. Hair to his shoulders, blacker than the rubber of the tire he leaned against. Eyes dark as hawk’s eyes, the kind I like in a friend, and in anyone else make me uncomfortable indeed. He could have been a karate master on his way to some quietly violent demonstration.

I accepted the sandwich and a thermos cup of water. “Who are you, anyway?” I said. “Years, I’ve been hopping rides, never seen another barnstormer out in the fields.”

“Not much else I’m fit to do,” he said, happily enough. “A little mechanicking, welding, roughneck a bit, skinning Cats; I stay in one place too long, I get problems. So I made the airplane and now I’m in the barnstorming business.”

“What kind of Cat?” I’ve been mad for diesel tractors since I was a kid.

“D-Eights, D-Nines. Just for a little while, in Ohio.”

“D-Nines! Big as a house! Double compound low gear, can they really push a mountain?”

“There are better ways of moving mountains,” he said with a smile that lasted for maybe a tenth of a second.