Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  I couldn’t wait to get into the shop every night. Mostly I was overjoyed about the way I was weasling out of my homework, but I also surged with new feelings of competence and technical knowledge. Kern was pleased too, because he could see that he had converted me into a dedicated tool-geek. I became increasingly fussy about “my own” workspace, insisting that all of the parts and tools I needed for a particular project be neatly segregated in a corner of the shop, away from Kern’s parts and tools. With the pride of a mentor, Kern detected these nascent indications of compulsiveness in me and decided to reward them. One Saturday morning, at Sears, he decided to blow some of our Cub money on a new Craftsmen tool box, socket wrenches and a top of the line, rubber-handled set of screwdrivers for me. Back at the shop, he showed me how to etch my initials onto every tool with a soldering gun. “Rink,” he said. “You can always tell a good mechanic. He doesn’t let anybody fuck with his tools.”

  Bizarre things happen to a boy undergoing profound life changes like this. One morning in late February I woke just before dawn with a start, deranged by a terrible nightmare. In the dream, I was being chased around a room with no exits by a man who was attempting to poke my eye out with a carburetor-heat cable. The dream was reminiscent of the scene in the three-dimensional Three Stooges movie where Moe and Curly are menaced by a doctor with a long syringe. I wiped the sleep from my eyes. The only way my tormentor could have gotten that carb-heat cable off, I figured, was if the bolt assembly on the inlet valve beneath the carburetor was not properly secured. This happened to be the exact part I was working on before I came into bed that night. Shit.

  So, I threw on my clothes, tiptoed past my brother’s room, and crossed the snowy lawn outside in the romantic gray light of dawn. I pushed through the barn door and threw on the lights to inspect the Cub. Underneath the carburetor, the bolt was properly installed on the inlet valve, and the cable running down from its control in the cockpit was secure. But, sure enough, I’d forgotten to attach the safety nut which kept the whole assembly in place.

  I found the nut right where I left it, on top of one of the engine cylinders, and torqued it on with my new socket-wrench.

  It was a close call. Every night, as soon as we had finished my homework, Kern inspected everything I’d done the night before. Most of the mistakes he found were minor—I might have used the wrong washers, for example, or the wrong grade of safety wire—and Kern was very patient about that. But the missing nut on the carburetor-heat assembly was serious. It would have earned me a stern lecture from Kern, because you need that carb heat to prevent ice in wet conditions.

  “Rink, do you know what would have happened if we hit a rainstorm in Ohio and the carb heat didn’t engage?”

  “The engine quits, and we wipe out the gear during a forced landing.”

  “Exactly. Then we don’t get to California.”

  Late in the winter, on a Saturday night, Kern took a rare break from the plane and went up to a dance at school with a date. It was one of those assignations that my sister Macky set up by writing a phone script out for Kern on a yellow legal pad. As soon as I got wind of the deal Macky was setting up for Kern, I bailed out on the dance myself. I still didn’t want to be seen socially with my brother.

  I was restless at home that night. Three straight months of working every night on the Cub had given me a routine, a mission, and I simply didn’t know what to do with myself inside a house any longer. I felt drawn to the plane in the barn outside.

  I headed for the front door with my reading book. When I got there, a shipping box from a midwestern aviation supply company was sitting on the hall table. It contained the magneto ignitions for the Cub, which we’d removed from the engine a couple of weeks before and sent out for reconditioning. I stuffed the box of magnetos under my arm to carry out to the barn.

  The magnetos. Kern and I were very proud of this step. Most of the pilots we knew—including my father—never bothered to have their magnetos rebuilt until one broke. But Kern and I could afford to go first-class on our ignition system because we’d made so much money plowing drives. It was the kind of precaution we were taking on our coast-to-coast ship. Nothing could fail on our plane, nothing was too good for 71-Hotel.

  It was a lovely, moonlit night outside, and I liked being alone with just the sound of my boots crunching on the snow, and the brisk wind chilling my face.

  When I got inside and threw on the lights, the engine cowling was off the Cub. On the aluminum firewall, I could see the two spots, bright and shiny, where the old magnetos had been. Out of curiosity, I leafed through Kern’s Piper Cub manual and found the pages and diagrams on the magnetos. One thing just lead to another, I guess. Before I knew what I was doing I had pulled the magnetos out of the box and begun installing them on the plane.

  Putting magnetos on isn’t very complex, no more difficult than changing the oil filter on a car. I’ve installed dozens since. But I was excited about my first set, and impressed by the importance of the repair. These were the little dynamos that would fire sparks into our cylinders all the way out to the Pacific.

  When I was done, I left the wiring down to the spark-plug harnesses alone. The electrical hookups were too easy to get crossed and Kern would be very particular about that.

  I was pleased with myself and didn’t want to leave the plane yet, so I made a fire in the tack-room woodstove and sat inside reading, leaving the door to the shop open so I could gaze into the Cub now and then.

  It was either that night or a couple of nights later that I came across the passage in Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis that simplified our navigation planning. Kern and I still didn’t have any idea of where we would cross the Rockies. So I had turned to Lindbergh’s book, and the writings of Wiley Post, because both of them had done a great deal of transcontinental flying before they made their famous international flights. On one flight, experiencing engine trouble over the Rockies, Lindbergh had turned “south toward the Mexican border, where the mountains are lower.” Post referred to the same area as “the old southern airmail route through El Paso.” It took me some time just to find El Paso on the map, and I still didn’t know what pass to fly, but indeed the peaks down there were a lot lower than up north. I figured that El Paso would be a major waypoint for our trip, the gateway to the far west, and that we should base our navigation planning on that.

  It was that kind of night for me, a time for insights and reflection. Mostly, I just enjoyed being alone in the barn with the plane.

  The next day Kern and I pulled our usual Sunday morning routine. We put on our best jackets and ties, exited the house through the kitchen so my mother could see us dressed for Mass just the way she liked, and left in the Willys. As soon as we got out of the drive we ripped off our ties, turned left at the intersection instead of right for the church, and drove up to Morristown for breakfast at the Lackawanna Diner.

  At the diner, Kern was excited when I told him about El Paso and we began doodling on paper napkins, drawing maps of the country and discussing the various advantages of one route over another. Most of our flight planning was done that way. All winter Kern and I were engaged in a kind of Socratic dialogue about routes—Ohio to Indiana, Indiana to Illinois and so forth—before we reached a consensus on how to cross each state. In stages, we mapped the entire flight on paper napkins at diners and on the back of shipping receipts in our shop.

  When we got back to the barn that day, Kern saw the shiny magnetos bolted onto the engine firewall.

  “Ah shit Rink. You didn’t try to put the mags on, did you?”

  “Kern, I followed the drawings. Look. Just look at them.”

  Kern pored over the mags with the meticulousness of an FAA inspector. Frowning a lot, he looked from the drawings to the engine, then back to the drawings several times, exhaling his mantra of worry, “Jeez . . . Jeez . . . Ah Jeez.”

  But I could tell that he was pleased, and surprised.

  “Gosh Rink. I can’t get over th
is. These mags are perfect. You wanna know something?”

  “No, what?”

  “Well, I always had you pegged as strictly airframe. But, Jeez, you can do powerplant stuff too!”

  “Hey, thanks man,” I said. “I really appreciate that.”

  CHAPTER 4

  When the spring thaw arrived, in mid-March, we rolled the airframe out onto the driveway in front of the barn. It was a bright, sunny Saturday with the fragrance of daffodils and crocuses blooming. My brother was right about the plane. The reconditioned Cub looked factory-fresh, with the tubular steel fuselage sparkling under zinc paint, and the new metal baggage compartment and tail augur gleaming like Cadillac tail fins.

  My father was home sick that week. Several times over the winter he was felled with phantom-pain attacks on his leg, and his doctors had ordered bed rest. He wasn’t much good at that and he had spent most of his time down in his library, banging out speeches and a book idea on his typewriter. From his library window, he saw us roll out the Cub. He’d kept his promise all winter and left us alone, but he was restless after several days of inactivity and decided to come out and inspect the plane.

  From the barn, Kern and I saw him step out to the porte cochere, gaze down the drive, then stop to light his pipe. Gingerly favoring his bad leg, which gave him a funny kind of kangaroo gait, he walked down toward us.

  “Rink! It’s Dad,” Kern said. “He’s coming to see the plane.”

  Kern raced into the tack room and carried a rocking chair out to the Cub.

  My father was going through a lot of painful changes that year. For more than a decade politics and charitable causes—AA mostly, but also a lot of fund-raising for Catholic hospitals and schools—had been his lifeblood, defining his identity outside of work and his family. After John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, he managed a few more political campaigns, but the shooting in Dallas and its aftermath broke his spirit and gradually he lost faith in electoral politics. He was sickened by the escalating war in Vietnam, especially after one of my cousins, Jerry Kernahan, was killed in the conflict. He was always looking for something new to do with himself anyway. By the mid-1960s he had gravitated toward reform movements, first civil rights and then the antiwar effort, and now on weekends he was flying off somewhere to join protest marches, or writing speeches for civil rights leaders, even delivering a few of his own.

  It was a fascinating and even a noble soul-searching for a man of my father’s background and achievements, and within a few years literally millions of middle-aged men like him would be transformed in the same way by the fabled sixties. But this could only be appreciated with the passage of time. To many of his closest friends in politics and business, civil rights and peace in Vietnam were issues that you paid lip service to, espoused to your children, and then promptly forgot. Successful businessmen with good jobs in New York—at the time, my father was associate publisher of Look magazine—weren’t supposed to be morally indignant about social causes and exploring activism as a weekend hobby. But that’s what my father was doing and he felt unappreciated and lonely. His five oldest children were now all teenagers and developing lives of their own—my oldest sister, Dempsey, had already left home for her first year of college—and we didn’t want to join him at protest marches on Saturday afternoons. We were all surprised by the intensity of his focus now—outward to the world, no longer inward to the family—which seemed to be alienating him from everyone. There had always been an undercurrent of unpredictability and instability about him, but now it seemed like a tide.

  Over the winter that we built our plane, my father turned fifty, a big milestone for a man of his youthful outlook, and he seemed to have mellowed a lot.

  The changes were evident in the man kangarooing toward us down the drive. He turned fifty that year, a big milestone for a man of his youthful outlook, and as if deliberately anticipating the aging process he had mellowed a lot over the winter. He wasn’t rakish any more, just dapper. He dressed the part of a distinguished magazine executive in New York who was emerging in middle age as a writer and social activist. He wore a Dublin-tailored sports jacket, immaculately pressed wool slacks, and he had a cane, a briar pipe, and a tweed cap.

  My father’s eyes opened wide and danced brightly as he stood lopsided beside the Cub.

  “My, my, my, Kernahan,” he said, looking at Kern. “This is really sharp. A clean, clean Cub. I’m proud of you. I am just so proud of you.”

  I was rushed with my old fondness for the man. I could see what the sight of a superbly restored plane was doing for him and it reminded me of the winters we had spent together rebuilding other planes. My father breathed in hard a few times. He was refreshed to be within olfactory range of new zinc paint, hydraulic oil, and rubber bungees.

  I loved my father that morning, too, because he was saying just the right thing for Kern. In the past, they had argued a lot over our planes. Kern was fastidious about every repair and my father was an old barnstormer type, impatient and slapdash as a mechanic—”fly ’em and fix ’em again” was his motto—and he and Kern had conducted monumental battles in the barn over how long a project should take. This only made Kern more apprehensive about 71-Hotel; he was terribly dependent on my father’s opinion of his work. My father seemed to understand this and he knew what his job was that day. This was Kern’s plane, Kern’s rebuild. He would lavish praise on his son.

  We got some Yoo-Hoo sodas from the refrigerator in the tack room and sat there by the plane doing a post-op on the winter. My father wanted to hear every detail. The control cables, the throttle couplings, the new magnetos.

  Sitting in his rocker, my father ran his hands down over the zinc-chromated tubes and ponged the new baggage compartment. Several times he let out a long, low whistle. It was obvious that the workmanship on 71-Hotel was flawless.

  “Jeez Kern,” he said. “You really went overboard. New bungees.”

  He reminded Kern that he still owed us $500 for parts. How could we afford to buy all this stuff?

  When Kern told him that we still had $400 left over from snow-plowing, and that included paying cash-on-delivery for the fabric and buckets of dope stacked in the corner of the barn, my father was incredulous.

  “Well, can’t I do something?”

  “Just hang on Dad,” Kern said. “When we get to planning the routes, you can help us with the maps.”

  “All right,” my father said. “You boys are really something. I guess I’m just ground crew now.”

  My father’s eyes were misty when he said that, but not because he was sad to have reached an age when he was just “ground crew.” He was immensely gratified by that mint-condition Piper Cub. It must have been the same kind of melancholy that overtakes parents at graduations and weddings, the feeling of time immutably passing and children moving on. Kern and I didn’t need him any more to work on a plane.

  My father stood up to leave. He ran his hands down over the airframe once more and ponged the new baggage compartment with his index finger.

  “Ah, Dad,” Kern said. “Rinker. Rinker did a lot of work on this plane. Fifty percent. Even more than fifty percent.”

  My father was very glib, recovering from a lapse like that.

  “Well, Kern, exactly,” he said. “That’s what I said, 'You boys.’ You did this together. As brothers. Do you know how happy that makes me feel?”

  I wished Kern hadn’t said that. I stood there red-faced, my heart racing, unable to say anything.

  I was inching toward an understanding of my father and I completely sympathized with him at that moment. He was a man engulfed by distractions and the changes of middle age. (And later on, sitting in a lawyer’s office in Manhattan, poring over his medical records so my mother could collect his life insurance, I understood a lot more about this period in his life. A great deal of the time, he was so doped up on Demerol and other painkillers it was a miracle he could function at all.) He could only concentrate on one thing at a time, and what he was concentra
ting on that morning was Kern, Kern’s masterful supervision of the Cub rebuild. It was a moment of pleasure for him, a time to get past his preoccupation and worry about his oldest son. Compared to that, I simply didn’t rate. I wasn’t a factor at all. This was supposed to be Kern’s moment.

  Besides, I didn’t want attention and compliments from my father. It was a lot easier to be ignored, which made it that much easier for me to ignore him, a strategy that was working for both of us right now. My father and I needed a vacation from each other and we both knew it. I couldn’t explain this to Kern. He would never understand how, for me, loving my father meant creating as much distance from him as possible. Now Kern had embarrassed me, taking what should have been a carefree, pleasant moment and making it awkward.

  My father was chastened by that, and now he seemed intent on addressing us as a pair. Halfway up the drive, he spun on his good leg and leaned on his cane.

  “It’s a damn fine airplane boys. I’m proud as the blazes of you two.”

  Whistling some more, he turned and went up the drive, limping with that peculiar gait of his, swinging the cane in his hand like Charlie Chaplin.

  In early April, just as we were beginning the laborious, dizzying job of spraying butyrate dope onto the Cub fabric, my sister Macky poked her head through the barn door one night.

  “Hi Kern! Hi Rinky! Can I help?”

  It was an epic event in our family. A sister had not only ventured into our plane shop, she had offered to help. After adolescence, we had lived completely separate lives from our sisters, a family practice so ordained and seemingly natural that we never thought to question it. The boys and the girls lived in separate wings of the house, attended different high schools, and on weekends my father, Kern, and I religiously disappeared for the airport. I couldn’t tell you what my sisters were doing with their lives during those years because I practically never saw them. This was just the way families lived, I thought.