The dog had wandered in from somewhere, homeless and shy. It had hung around, keeping its distance, and people had started leaving food for it.
Now it seemed to be the official airport dog, dividing its time between patrolling the line of small planes parked on the ramp and bumming food from the men on the porch.
Ty Greenlees and I felt a lot like that dog when we landed at Habersham Tuesday morning in my little orange Grumman AA-1B. We had wandered in from the cloudy sky, knowing nothing about this airport, what the people would be like or how long bad weather might force us to depend on their hospitality.
Showing my city habits, I closed the canopy and locked it when we got out.
Credit: Ty Greenleees
Credit: Ty Greenleees
The office was a wood-paneled room with wide windows, linoleum floor tiles and Spartan furniture with chrome frames and red or blue vinyl cushions.
A white-haired woman in her 60s worked on a word finder puzzle. Near her, a man of similar age with a two-day beard and a battered Georgia Tech baseball cap busied himself with a Reader's Digest. The only sounds were the tick of a clock set to international time and the occasional voice of a pilot crackling over the radio speaker.
Behind a wooden counter in a corner of the room stood a potbellied man with a ring of gray hair around his head. Wrinkles creased his face in cheerful patterns. The counter was piled high with the black logbooks of student pilots, and a wall facing it was covered with the shirt tails of student pilots who had made their first solo flights. On every shirt tail, thick black letters noted the student's name, the date of the solo and the name of the instructor, James Tatum.
Tatum was the man behind the counter. He was Habersham's flight instructor, charter pilot, aircraft mechanic and airport manager. The white-haired woman turned out to be his wife, Marene.
We exchanged some friendly comments about the sky, which was growing thick with clouds and haze. Without asking us who we were, where we were from or even whether we were going to buy fuel, Tatum laid a set of car keys on the counter.
"You might want to go get some breakfast," he said in a gravelly voice. "I got a Buick you can take. The transmission slips sometimes, but it usually gets you there."
In an age of gated neighborhoods, car alarms and bank machines that scan your retina for identification, flying into small airports like Habersham is like flying back through decades of time.
This feeling is partly evoked by the airplanes you find. Near us on the ramp stood a half-century-old Luscombe, its aluminum skin stripped for repainting. Cessnas dating from the 1950s and '60s were tied down around the airport. Even my own Grumman is an artifact from 1973.
But the country-store feeling of small airports comes mainly from the people who work, fly or just hang around there. Mechanics and airplane owners tinker with their machines in the hangars. Pilots and students sit in the office or on the porch, hoping for flyable weather or just passing time by swapping tales. And managers like Tatum oversee it all, knowing that pilots - private pilots, anyway - spend more time at airports than in the air.
Transient pilots usually fit right into the picture. Most people involved in aviation share a common bond, the love of flight, and an appreciation for the hardships fliers endure to pursue their passion.
So it didn't seem to matter to Tatum who we were or why we had arrived. A pilot himself, he could guess that we were on a cross-country flight to somewhere, had skipped breakfast to get an early start, and had sought out his airport as a refuge from deteriorating weather.
And, now that we were there, he knew we had no way to go anywhere or do anything without help.
We borrowed Tatum's car. The man in the Georgia Tech cap, Richard Wallace, came along to help us find a restaurant.
Wallace wore a blue button-down shirt, blue jeans, and a silver belt buckle with a Pratt and Whitney aircraft engine emblem on it. Over greasy omelettes and hash browns, Wallace told us he was a retired aircraft mechanic from the giant Delta Airlines hub at Atlanta's Hartsfield International. The airport was a lot smaller and Delta was still flying Douglas DC-3s when he started there, he said.
"I've got a small airplane I built myself," he said. Back at the airport, he led us to his hangar and slid back the wide steel door, exposing a pretty white Kelly biplane with red stripes and tandem cockpits.
Wallace showed us the plane the way a mechanic would, opening inspection planes and cowling panels.
He smiled as we admired his work. "Yeah, I'm sort of getting attached to the old bird," he said.
The weather kept getting worse. We unloaded my plane, and Richard drove us to a motel in his pickup truck.
Credit: Ty Greenleees
Credit: Ty Greenleees
We were back Wednesday morning in a cab. Tatum was in the airport hangar, changing the oil on the twin engines of a Cessna 340. It was raining, and the forecast called for rain most of the day, but Tatum wasn't surprised to see us; he knew pilots with nothing better to do hang out at airports.
And he knew that to pilots, few things are better.