Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  Weather-cocking in the gusts, bouncing from wheel to wheel, the Cub jackassed all the way down Barclay’s strip.

  When he got to the end of the field, my father stood on the right brake. The Cub careened around on one wheel for a ground-loop. Ordinarily this was a maneuver to be avoided but my father didn’t have a choice in this case, and he knew how to ground-loop a plane. He allowed the tail to sway up high before he corrected with down stick, so there would be enough air blowing over the tail controls for them to respond. He did one other thing at that moment that I’ve never heard of or seen since. Halfway through the ground loop, he firewalled the throttle and the prop roared, yanking him the rest of the way around the ground loop. It was an extremely dangerous thing to do, but stylish too, and he was so skilled and dumbass-lucky that it worked for him.

  Coming around, the right wingtip almost touched the ground and the locked tire threw up a spray of grass divots.

  All of this occupied just a few seconds and it wasn’t very elegant. But the plane was down and stopped and nobody cares about elegance when the crosswind component has just been exceeded by 100 percent. The little Cub stood alone on the grass, framed by the sky and the low clouds behind it so that it looked like it was still flying, because the ground all around it fell off steeply and buffets of wind were still catching the wings and lifting them slightly. My father gave the propeller one last blast and taxied up to gain the protection of the tree line. The Cub was splattered all over with mud, but it didn’t have a scratch.

  Kern and I ran down and hung off the wing struts to steady the plane. In the cockpit, my father was shivering and his face was bright red from taking all that slipstream with his head out the side. He looked over to Kern and shrugged with that gleeful, boyish smirk he always had when he’d done something insane in a plane and gotten away with it again. The prop shaft went click-click-click as he shut the engine down.

  As I hung from the wing strut, my heart pounded like a ball-peen and tears stung the corner of my eyes. I never knew whether to love or detest my father at such moments. I was annoyed by not being able to control my emotions and even more by their frustrating lack of certainty. In just a few seconds, I had passed from certainty that my father was going to crash to the elation of watching him getting the plane stopped. Yet right now, I knew, I could just as easily be down at the bottom of the hill, pulling him out of an overturned plane.

  These anguished feelings always passed quickly, though. Then suddenly the arresting beauty of the landing—the steep sideslip down over the trees, the turn low to the ground, then the wheels meeting the grass and the ground-loop—would go by as a blur and merge with another, dominant feeling. I forgot everything else I felt about my father and knew only pride. Maybe he lived too dangerously and was always frightening us by testing himself, but that was the father I had. He was a great old flyer and nobody could out-barnstorm the man.

  Barclay walked down with his wolfhounds. He stepped underneath the wing and helped my father out, disentangling his legs from the rudder cables than ran along the floor of the cockpit.

  Barclay was relieved and amazed, but he was too polite and understated a man to say the wrong thing.

  “Well, that’s a crosswind landing, Tom.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for letting us use your strip.”

  Then Barclay walked back up the hill with his dogs.

  We could usually take apart a plane in less than an hour. It was more or less just a matter of removing the wings from the fuselage. The bolts holding the main beams of the wing, the spars, come out just above the cockpit. The strut supports that hold the wings up by triangulating down to the landing gear are also disconnected by removing bolts. Secondary parts such as the control cables and fuel lines are detached. Once lifted off the fuselage, the wings of a Piper Cub aren’t that much heavier than a metal canoe, and Kern and I mounted them on the wooden cradles bolted to the fenders of our pickup.

  We secured the wings on the cradles with hay-rope. Removing the propeller from the engine shaft, we wrapped it in a blanket and laid it on the bed of the pickup. Then we chained the Cub’s tailwheel to the Jeep’s rear-hitch and bounced off across Barclay’s field toward home.

  I always felt embarrassed in that leafy, plush community of winding country lanes and quaint horsefarms, riding home in our shitrigged pickup and plane. Our truck was an old beam-chassis Willys, blue and rusting out on the sides, with exhaust and smoke from the burning clutch wafting up through the floorboards. The muffler had blown a hole years ago and we’d never bothered to replace it. As we belched along Blue Mill Road, traffic backed up behind us and people stared. Barclay’s place sat right in between the big Kirby and McGraw estates. Beyond that we had to pass the Colgate and Francis homes, and then Congressman Freylinghuysen’s vast spread. Most of our neighbors were quiet Protestant bluebloods, or rich Catholics aping Protestant bluebloods, projecting a veneer of effortless social perfection. They glided by in polished Jaguars or new Chevy Suburbans towing matching horse vans, and spent the Thanksgiving weekend riding with Jackie Kennedy in the local fox hunts. We were the neighborhood Joads, dragging home a 1946 Piper Cub behind our dilapidated Jeep.

  But I could get over my social embarrassment, because my father was always revived by our annual rite of bringing home a plane. It reminded him of his salad days in the 1930s and 1940s, when he began every winter by stashing a plane in a barn somewhere. He was giddy and red-faced, laughing all the way home as the traffic clogged up behind us.

  My father was particularly pleased with himself that day. He hadn’t flown in quite a while and he was glad to have acquitted himself so well in front of us at Barclay’s. But he was still shivering and cold when we pulled into our place. We left him at the porte cochere, so he could go inside and warm up in the bath. Kern and I could stow the plane in the barn ourselves.

  My father stepped out of the Jeep, lit his pipe, and leaned into the cab beside Kern with his leg resting on the running board.

  “Well good, boys, good. Now you’ve got your airplane.”

  “Dad,” Kern said. “I’m very grateful for this. Thanks. Not many pilots could do what you did today.”

  “Nah, nah, nah, Kern,” my father said. “I mean, shit. In my day, every pilot flew like this.”

  In his white scarf and sheepskin flying suit, he skipped brightly up the steps and across the porch of the house, whistling and pleased with himself, an old flyer who hadn’t lost his touch.

  Kern let out the clutch of the Jeep and steered for the barn.

  “Rink, you wanna know something?”

  “No, what?”

  “Daddy’s a hot shit.”

  This was the problem I had with my brother, the effect he had on me. He always insisted on looking at the bright side of life, half of the truth, bubbling all over with enthusiasm about something that had just happened, especially if it involved my father. They crashed airplanes together, and he was happy about it. They got into screaming matches, but, Kern thought, this was “good for their relationship.” For Kern, at the end of every rainbow, there was a big, freaking pot of gold. His ebullience was so maddening to me that I would instinctively disagree with him about everything, even when he was right, and I would feel this desperate urge to look at the bleaker and more realistic side of life, simply because he refused to do it.

  My silence riled him and I knew it, so I didn’t say anything at first. When we got to the barn he tried again. He wasn’t going to shut off the Jeep and stow the plane until I agreed with him.

  “Rink, are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah . . . I’m listening.”

  “I just said: Daddy’s a hot shit.”

  “Ah Kern. He’s a maniac. He practically killed himself in the Cub today.”

  “See? See? That’s you, isn’t it? You’ve always got to be shitting all over Daddy!”

  “Kern, that’s not shitting all over Daddy. It’s the truth. I’m only saying, he’s a maniac.”

  “But R
ink. It’s the same thing! You say maniac. I say hot shit. It just depends on how you look at it, that’s all.”

  “Fine Kern, fine,” I said. “If it’s the same thing, let’s call him a maniac.”

  “Okay Rink. Fine,” Kern said. “Look, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll call him a maniac if you call him a hot shit.”

  Ah Jesus. This was another thing Kern did to me, the old Tom Sawyer–Huck Finn routine. You get my bag of marbles, I get your dead cat.

  “Fine, Kern. Deal,” I said. “Now let’s just get this over with, okay? Daddy’s a hot shit.”

  “Great! You said it. Now it’s my turn. Daddy’s a maniac. A maniac! Now, that wasn’t so hard Rink, was it?”

  “Oh no Kern, no,” I said. “It was easy. Listen, one other thing.”

  “Yeah Rink?”

  “Kern, you’re a jackass.”

  We stripped the old fabric off the Cub that afternoon. As the shop lights cast spooky shadows of us on the walls, we ran our pen-knives down across the fuselage fabric, pulling the stiff linen off the plane in long rectangular sheets. When we got to the wings, the stench of stale butyrate dope greeted us from inside the rib compartments. It had seeped in there and been trapped for years as the Cub baked outside in the hot sun. The smell assaulted our nostrils and filled the barn, and I always liked that first whiff of airplane dope in the fall. It reminded me of the long winter of inebriation that we faced re-doping the plane.

  The metal airframe was in better shape than we expected. Here and there the tubular steel framing was pitted with rust, but that could be easily fixed by sanding and then applying a new coat of rustproof paint. The wing structure consisted of aluminum ribs arrayed in a parallel row, held in place by the two metal spars. Except for a dent or two in the sheet metal that formed the leading edge of the wing, the wings were in excellent shape.

  Kern and I baled the old fabric with twine and carried it outside to burn in a one hundred-gallon drum. We started a fire with newspaper and kindling, piled on the bales of fabric, and stood back as the highly flammable linen ignited. Then we warmed up some apple cider on the shop hotplate and carried two chairs outside to watch the fire.

  Stripping a plane and watching the fabric burn was a Druid ritual for us, and we looked forward to it every fall. Misty snow began to fall and patches of yellow light splashed out the windows from the shop lights. After the first bales of fabric burned down we threw on the rest. Immense orange and purple flames climbed for the trees, vaporizing the falling snow into wisps of steam and crackling up to the branches above.

  Kern grabbed a stick and drew a rough map of the country in the snow. We hadn’t talked about the coast to coast flight very much yet and he was anxious to draw me into his scheme.

  “Rinker,” he said, “here’s the plan.”

  He made little triangular scratchings for the Allegheny Mountains and a long squiggly line for the Ohio River. Then he drew in the Mississippi and the western plains. He’d been looking at the big world air chart out at the airport. You’d think that to get to Los Angeles all we had to do was take off from New Jersey and point the Cub due west, he said, but actually we’d fly a southwest course for most of the trip, cutting a diagonal across the midwest and the Mississippi Valley before we turned right for the “wide open spaces” of the great west.

  Kern was very excited about that, the wide open spaces of the west, especially Texas. He talked about places in mythic Texas—Texarkana, Wichita Falls, El Paso—as if he had already been there. The only thing he couldn’t figure out was the Rocky Mountains. They had him stumped, even a little bit afraid.

  He was much further along in his thinking than I thought. Still, I wasn’t confident about this trip. I didn’t see why we had to do it.

  Kern stared into the flames, brooding with his hands on his chin. He could sense my reluctance and was frustrated by it. He wanted to get through and explain why he wanted to make the flight, but was afraid of how I would react. Whenever my brother turned sincere on me and revealed a part of himself, I would dig into him for it, and my verbal assaults on him wounded him a lot more than I realized at the time. It wasn’t simply the indignity of it. He had this image of what an older brother should be, partly his own expectations, and partly expectations drilled into him by my father. The older boy was supposed to be tough, impervious to insult, such an authority figure that the younger brother wouldn’t dare cross him. But that wasn’t the case with us and this never stopped bothering Kern.

  But I had a lot of admiration for the way he got out what he had to say that night, while we were outside watching the fabric burn. He knew that I would probably rip him to shreds but he said it anyway.

  During the years that we were learning to fly at Basking Ridge, the star of the strip was a young airshow pilot, Eddie Mahler. Eddie was a legend on the east coast airshow circuit, even nationally, the best of a new breed of stunt pilot that was revolutionizing airshow work. Among other astonishing maneuvers, Eddie was credited with inventing the “inverted ribbon pickup.” Screaming in over a runway with his open-cockpit biplane rolled upside-down, Eddie plucked a ribbon off a pole with his landing gear and then zoomed back up over the crowd. But most of his airshow work was done in a pearl-white T-6 Texan, virtually identical to my father’s. He and my father often flew off for the shows together, buzzing in low over the crowds in their Twin-Texans and doing some formation aerobatics. When they rumbled in with the Texans and threw open their canopies in front of the stands, the show announcers called them Big Eddie and Peg-Leg Buck. Both of us hero-worshiped Eddie and were impressed that my father could fly with him like that, but it wasn’t as big a deal for me. It was the sort of crazyass thing that I expected my father to do. But Kern couldn’t get over it. He was awed by them both.

  Kern looked up from the flames.

  “Rink, you’re gonna laugh at me for this, but I’m going to say it.”

  “Kern, I won’t laugh.”

  “Bull, but I want you to know this. Look, I don’t want to be this scrawny little teenager nobody ever heard of, okay? I want to be like Big Eddie Mahler. Flying across the country is the most exciting thing we can do with our lives right now. People will notice. It’ll be a great thing for aviation. Even guys like Big Eddie will have to respect us. Rink, I want to be known, okay? And, you know, I wake up in the morning and remember this trip, and I say to myself, 'Jeez, who the hell came up with this crazy idea?’ I mean, I’m afraid of it, Rink, really afraid sometimes, but we have to do it. The only thing I could come up with, the only thing I could think of, was flying coast to coast in the Cub.”

  The great Eddie Mahler (left) was a legend on the airshow circuit, and we hero-worshipped him as boys.

  This was a moment, I suspected, when my personality could be fatal for my brother. I tried to get the right words out.

  “Kern, I can understand that. I mean, I actually do. But don’t call yourself scrawny, okay?”

  “But I am scrawny.”

  “Fuck that Kern. We’re both scrawny.”

  “But Rink, that’s the point! It’s easy for you. You’re an athlete. You’re popular at school. Even when you mooned that old lady everybody loved you for it. All I’ve got is aviation, and I just want to do this one thing really well. Just one thing Rink. One thing! I need you for this. Just help me fly the Cub to California.”

  Jesus. I felt I could cry about this. To Kern, everything I did well qualified me as an awful brother. What was I supposed to do? Throw on a pair of dork shorts and play with Louie? Turn myself into an athletic spaz? I wasn’t miserable because Kern blamed me for my success. I was miserable because I couldn’t understand why he just didn’t ignore me.

  “Ah shit Kern . . . okay. It’s fine. I don’t want to fight about this. But there’s still one thing I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Look,” I said. “What do you need me for? If I were in your shoes, I’d make this flight alone. You know, screw the younger brother, just leave
his ass at home. Then you get to California and you can hog all the credit for yourself.”

  “Rink, no. You’ve got to understand this part. It’s important. I can’t make this trip alone. Jeez, think about it. We’ll hit weather. We’ve got mountains to cross. And the deserts—I think there’s eight hundred miles of deserts between here and L.A. It’ll be a full-time job for me just handling the plane. We’re going to need positive contact with the ground at all times, a navigator, Rink. We can’t get lost. I can’t do both of those jobs at once.”

  Most of what he was saying was true, but I wouldn’t appreciate it until we got out there. Part of my problem was that I was less experienced at flying, and I didn’t understand everything that went into it. My brother had always made it look easy, and I took a lot for granted. But mostly I was stalled by my congenital personality clash with Kern. Everything he said and did burned with earnestness and conviction. It was like atmospheric static out there, cluttering up a radio signal. Now that there was really something to be earnest about, I couldn’t hear it.

  But I really didn’t want to fight with Kern anymore. I felt awful because he always seemed to be jealous of me. I would have to make the effort.

  “All right Kern. I’m going to do this thing for you. For the next six months, you own my ass.”

  “No Rink, no. We’re going to do this together, and share everything. I want you to bone up on navigation, study the books, learn the maps. It’s something you’re good at and we’ll need it on the flight. We’re a team, Rink. We’re going to do this as a team.”