by Rich Horton
Icke stood on the tarmac near the control cab, a small, round, glass-windowed bump protruding from the belly of the giant teardrop. Tall and broad-shouldered, his square face featured a tall, Roman nose and steady, brown eyes that stared out from under the visor of a Red Sox cap. He watched me approach, flicked his cigarette away, and nodded at me.
Icke had been one of the few to respond to my Internet forum ad asking if any of the long-haulers would be willing to take a writer for the Pacific Monthly on a haul. “I’ve read some of your articles,” he had said. “You didn’t sound too stupid.” And then he invited me to come to Lanzhou.
After we strapped ourselves in, Icke weighed off the zeppelin—pumping compressed helium into the gasbags until the zeppelin’s positive lift, minus the weight of the ship, the gas, us, and the cargo, was just about equal to zero. Now essentially “weightless,” the long-hauler and all its cargo could have been lifted off the ground by a child.
When the control tower gave the signal, Icke pulled a lever that retracted the nose cone hook from the mooring mast and flipped a toggle to drop about a thousand pounds of water ballast into the ground tank below the ship. And just like that, we began to rise, steadily and in complete silence, as though we were riding up a skyscraper in a glass-walled elevator. Icke left the engines off. Unlike an airplane that needs the engines to generate forward thrust to be converted into lift, a zeppelin literally floats up, and engines didn’t need to be turned on until we reached cruising height.
“This is the American Dragon, heading out to Sin City. See you next time, and watch out for those bears,” Icke said into the radio. A few of the other zeppelins, like giant caterpillars on the ground below us, blinked their tail lights in acknowledgment.
Icke’s Feimaotui is three hundred and two feet long, with a maximum diameter of eighty-four feet, giving it capacity for 1.12 million cubic feet of helium and a gross lift of thirty-six tons, of which about twenty-seven are available for cargo (this is comparable to the maximum usable cargo load for semis on the Interstates).
Its hull is formed from a rigid frame of rings and longitudinal girders made out of duratainium covered with composite skin. Inside, seventeen helium gasbags are secured to a central beam that runs from the nose to the tail of the ship, about a third of the way up from the bottom of the hull. At the bottom of the hull, immediately below the central beam and the gasbags, is an empty space that runs the length of the ship.
Most of this space is taken up by the cargo hold, the primary attraction of long-haulers for shippers. The immense space, many times the size of a plane’s cargo bay, was perfect for irregularly shaped and bulky goods, like the wind generator turbine blades we were carrying.
Near the front of the ship, the cargo hold is partitioned from the crew quarters, which consists of a suite of apartment-like rooms opening off of a central corridor. The corridor ends by emerging from the hull into the control cab, the only place on the ship with windows to the outside. The Feimaotui is only a little bit longer and taller than a Boeing 747 (counting the tail), but far more voluminous and lighter.
The whole crew consisted of Icke and his wife, Yeling, the woman who was re-painting the grinning mouth on the zeppelin when I showed up. Husband-wife teams like theirs are popular on the transpacific long haul. Each of them would take six-hour shifts to fly the ship while the other slept. Yeling was in the back, sleeping through the takeoff. Like the ship itself, much of their marriage was made up of silence and empty space.
“Yeling and I are no more than thirty feet apart from each other just about every minute, but we only get to sleep in the same bed about once every seven days. You end up learning to have conversations in five-minute chunks separated by six-hour blocks of silence.
“Sometimes Yeling and I have an argument, and she’ll have six hours to think of a comeback for something I said six hours earlier. That helps since her English isn’t perfect, and she can use the time to look up words she needs. I’ll wake up and she’ll talk at me for five minutes and go to bed, and I’ll have to spend the next six hours thinking about what she said. We’ve had arguments that went on for days and days this way.”
Icke laughed. “In our marriage, sometimes you have to go to bed angry.”
The control car was shaped like an airplane’s cockpit, except that the windows slanted outward and down, so that you had an unobstructed view of the land and air below you.
Icke had covered his seat with a custom pattern: a topographical map of Alaska. In front of Icke’s chair was a dashboard full of instruments and analog and mechanical controls. A small, gleaming gold statuette of a laughing, rotund bodhisattva was glued to the top of the dashboard. Next to it was the plush figure of Wally, the Green Monster of Fenway Park.
A plastic crate wedged into place between the two seats was filled with CDs: a mix of mandopop, country, classical, and some audio books. I flipped through them: Annie Dillard, Thoreau, Cormac McCarthy, The Idiot’s Guide to Grammar and Composition.
Once we reached the cruising altitude of one thousand feet—freight zeppelins generally are restricted to a zone above pleasure airships, whose passengers prefer the view lower down, and far below the cruising height of airplanes—Icke started the electrical engines. A low hum, more felt than heard, told us that the four propellers mounted in indentations near the tail of the ship had begun to turn and push the ship forward.
“It never gets much louder than this,” Icke said.
We drifted over the busy streets of Lanzhou. More than a thousand miles west of Beijing, this medium-sized industrial city was once the most polluted city in all of China due to its blocked air flow and petroleum processing plants. But it is now the center of China’s wind turbine boom.
The air below us was filled with small and cheap airships that hauled passengers and freight on intra-city routes. They were a colorful bunch, a ragtag mix of blimps and small zeppelins, their hulls showing signs of make-shift repairs and shanzhai patches. (A blimp, unlike a zeppelin, has no rigid frame. Like a birthday balloon, its shape is maintained entirely by the pressure of the gas inside.) The ships were plastered all over with lurid advertisements for goods and services that sounded, with their strange English translations, frightening and tempting in equal measure. Icke told me that some of the ships we saw had bamboo frames.
Icke had flown as a union zeppeliner crewman for ten years on domestic routes before buying his own ship. The union pay was fine, but he didn’t like working for someone else. He had wanted to buy a Goodyear-Zeppelin, designed and made one hundred percent in America. But he disliked bankers even more than Chinese airship companies, and decided that he would rather own a Dongfeng outright.
“Nothing good ever came from debt,” he said. “I could have told you what was going to happen with all those mortgages last year.”
After a while, he added, “My ship is mostly built in America, anyway. The Chinese can’t make the duratainium for the girders and rings in the frame. They have to import it. I ship sheets of the alloy from Bethlehem, PA, to factories in China all the time.”
The Feimaotui was a quirky ship, Icke explained. It was designed to be easy to maintain and repair rather than over-engineered to be durable the way American ships usually were. An American ship that malfunctioned had to be taken to the dealer for the sophisticated computers and proprietary diagnostic codes, but just about every component of the Feimaotui could be switched out and repaired in the field by a skilled mechanic. An American ship could practically fly itself most of the time, as the design philosophy was to automate as much as possible and minimize the chances of human error. The Feimaotui required a lot more out of the pilot, but it was also much more responsive and satisfying to fly.
”A man changes over time to be like his ship. I’d just fall asleep in a ship where the computer did everything.” He gazed at the levers, sticks, wheels, toggles, pedals and sliders around him, reassuringly heavy, analog, and solid. “Typing on a keyboard is no way to fly a ship.”
>
He wanted to own a fleet of these ships eventually. The goal was to graduate from owner-operator to just owner, when he and Yeling could start a family.
“Someday when we can just sit back and collect the checks, I’ll get a Winnebago Aurora—the forty-thousand-cubic-feet model—and we and our kids will drift around all summer in Alaska and all winter in Brazil, eating nothing but the food we catch with our own hands. You haven’t seen Alaska until you’ve seen it in an RV airship. We can go to places that not even snowmachines and seaplanes can get to, and hover over a lake that has never seen a man, not a soul around us for hundreds of miles.”
Within seconds we were gliding over the broad, slow expanse of the Yellow River. Filled with silt, the muddy water below us was already beginning to take on its namesake color, which would deepen and grow even muddier over the next few hundred miles as it traveled through the Loess Plateau and picked up the silt deposited over the eons by wind.
Below us, small sightseeing blimps floated lazily over the river. The passengers huddled in the gondolas to look through the transparent floor at the sheepskin rafts drifting on the river below the same way Caribbean tourists looked through glass-bottom boats at the fish in the coral reef.
Icke throttled up and we began to accelerate north and east, largely following the course of the Yellow River, towards Inner Mongolia.
The Millennium Clean Energy Act is one of the few acts by the “clowns down in D.C.” that Icke approved: “It gave me most of my business.”
Originally designed as a way to protect domestic manufacturers against Chinese competition and to appease the environmental lobby, the law imposed a heavy tax on goods entering the United States based on the carbon footprint of the method of transportation (since the tax was not based on the goods’ country-of-origin, it skirted the WTO rules against increased tariffs).
Combined with rising fuel costs, the law created a bonanza for zeppelin shippers. Within a few years, Chinese companies were churning out cheap zeppelins that sipped fuel and squeezed every last bit of advantage from solar power. Dongfengs became a common sight in American skies.
A long-haul zeppelin cannot compete with a 747 for lifting capacity or speed, but it wins hands down on fuel efficiency and carbon profile, and it’s far faster than surface shipping. Going from Lanzhou to Las Vegas, like Icke and I were doing, would take about three to four weeks by surface shipping at the fastest: a couple days to go from Lanzhou to Shanghai by truck or train, about two weeks to cross the Pacific by ship, another day or so to truck from California to Las Vegas, and add in a week or so for loading, unloading, and sitting in customs. A direct airplane flight would get you there in a day, but the fuel cost and carbon tax at the border would make it uneconomical for many goods.
“Every time you have to load and unload and change the mode of transport, that’s money lost to you,” Icke said. “We are trucks that don’t need highways, boats that don’t need rivers, airplanes that don’t need airports. If you can find a piece of flat land the size of a football field, that’s enough for us. We can deliver door to door from a yurt in Mongolia to your apartment in New York—assuming your building has a mooring mast on top.”
A typical zeppelin built in the last twenty years, cruising at one hundred ten mph, can make the sixty-nine-hundred-mile haul between Lanzhou and Las Vegas in about sixty-three hours. If it makes heavy use of solar power, as Icke’s Feimaotui is designed to do, it can end up using less than a fraction of a percent of the fuel that a 747 would need to carry the same weight for the same distance. Plus, it has the advantage I’d mentioned of being more accommodating of bulky, irregularly-shaped loads.
Although we were making the transpacific long haul, most of our journey would be spent flying over land. The curvature of the Earth meant that the closest flight path between any two points on the globe followed a great circle that connected the two points and bisected the globe into two equal parts. From Lanzhou to Las Vegas, this meant that we would fly north and east over Inner Mongolia, Mongolia, Siberia, across the Bering Strait, and then fly east and south over Alaska, the Pacific Ocean off the coast of British Columbia, until we hit land again with Oregon, and finally reach the deserts of Nevada.
Below us, the vast city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, stretched out to the horizon, a megalopolis of shining steel and smooth glass, vast blocks of western-style houses and manicured gardens. The grid of new, wide streets was as empty as those in Pyongyang, and I could count the number of pedestrians on the fingers of one hand. Our height and open view made the scene take on the look of tilt-shift photographs, as though we were standing over a tabletop scale model of the city, with a few miniature cars and playing figurines scattered about the model.
Ordos is China’s Alberta. There is coal here, some of the best, cleanest coal in the world. Ordos was planned in anticipation of an energy boom, but the construction itself became the boom. The more they spent on construction, the more it looked on paper like there was need for even more construction. So now there is this Xanadu, a ghost town from birth. On paper it is the second-richest place in China, per capita income just behind Shanghai.
As we flew over the center of Ordos, a panda rose up and hailed us. The panda’s vehicle was a small blimp, painted olive green and carrying the English legend: “Aerial Transport Patrol, People’s Republic of China.” Icke slowed down and sent over the cargo manifests, the maintenance records, which the panda could cross-check against the international registry of cargo airships, and his journey log. After a few minutes, someone waved at us on from the window in the gondola of the blimp, and a Chinese voice told us over radio that we were free to move on.
“This is such a messed up country,” Icke said. “They have the money to build something like Ordos, but have you been to Guangxi? It’s near Vietnam, and outside the cities the people there are among the poorest in the world. They have nothing except the mud on the floor of their huts, and beautiful scenery and beautiful women.”
Icke had met Yeling there, through a mail-order bride service. It was hard to meet women when you were in the air three hundred days of the year.
On the day of Icke’s appointment, he was making a run through Nanning, the provincial capital, as part of a union crew picking up a shipment of star anise. He had the next day, a Saturday, off, and he traveled down to the introduction center a hundred kilometers outside Nanning to meet the girls whose pictures he had picked out and who had been bused in from the surrounding villages.
They had fifteen girls for him. They met in a village school house. Icke sat on a small stool at the front of the classroom with his back to the blackboard, and the girls were brought in to sit at the student desks, as though he was there to teach them.
Most of them knew some English, and he could talk to them for a little bit and mark down, on a chart, the three girls that he wanted to chat with one-on-one in private. The girls he didn’t pick would wait around for the next Westerner customer to come and see them in another half hour.
“They say that some services would even let you try the girls out for a bit, like allow you to take them to a hotel for a night, but I don’t believe that. Anyway, mine wasn’t like that. We just talked. I didn’t mark down three girls. Yeling was the only one I picked.
“I liked the way she looked. Her skin was so smooth, so young-looking, and I loved her hair, straight and black with a little curl at the end. She smelled like grass and rainwater. But I liked even more the way she acted with me: shy and very eager to please, something you don’t see much in the women back home.” He looked over at me as I took notes, and shrugged. “If you want to put a label on me and make the people who read what you write feel good about themselves., that’s your choice. It doesn’t make the label true.”
I asked him if something felt wrong about the process, like shopping for a thing.
“I paid the service two thousand dollars, and gave her family another five thousand before I married her. Some people will not like that. They
’ll think something is not altogether right about the way I married her.
“But I know I’m happy when I’m with her. That’s enough for me.
“By the time I met her, Yeling had already dropped out of high school. If I didn’t meet her, she would not have gone on to college. She would not have become a lawyer or banker. She would not have gone to work in an office and come home to do yoga. That’s the way the world is.
“Maybe she would have gone to Nanning to become a masseuse or bathhouse girl. Maybe she would have married an old peasant from the next village who she didn’t even know just because he could give her family some money. Maybe she would have spent the rest of her life getting parasites from toiling in the rice paddies all day and bringing up children in a mud hut at night. And she would have looked like an old woman by thirty.
“How could that have been better?”
The language of the zeppeliners on the transpacific long haul, though officially English, is a mix of images and words from America and China. Dao, knife, dough, and dollar are used as interchangeable synonyms. Ursine imagery is applied to law enforcement agents along the route: a panda is a Chinese air patrol unit, and a polar bear Russian; in Alaska they are Kodiaks, and off the coast of BC they become whales; finally in America the ships have to deal with grizzlies. The bear’s job is to make the life of the zeppeliner difficult: catching pilots who have been at the controls for more than six hours without switching off, who fly above or below regulation altitude, who mix hydrogen into the lift gas to achieve an extra edge in cargo capacity.
“Whales?” I asked Icke. How was whale a type of bear?
“Evolution,” Icke said. “Darwin said that a race of bears swimming with their mouths open for water bugs may eventually evolve into whales.” (I checked. This was true.)
Nothing changed as an electronic beep from the ship’s GPS informed us that we crossed the international border between China and Mongolia somewhere in the desolate, dry plains of the Gobi below, dotted with sparse clumps of short, brittle grass.