Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  Then, for Kern, my father pulled out of the bag one of his most prized possessions—his old Hamilton aviator’s chronograph. The Hamilton was a beautiful, expensive timepiece, with extra sweephands and stop-buttons for timing flight legs, calculating fuel burns and the like. My father had owned it since his Air Corps days during World War II and for years kept it up in the top drawer of his bureau. Now he had had it immaculately restored by a jeweler in New York. The chronograph, with its new leather band, beige face, and luminescent-green sweephands, looked brand new. Kern was thrilled to have it. He strapped it on and it looked great on his tanned arm.

  “Gee Dad. Thanks. I never expected you to part with this.”

  “Ah, it’s nothing son,” my father said. “You’re going to be a big wheel when you finish this flight. I want you to look the part.”

  My father had another gift for me too. I could tell right away by the way it looked—the thing had been hastily wrapped up in a ball of newspaper—what had happened. At the last minute, my father realized that it would be a terrible display of favoritism to give only Kern a watch, so he’d stopped by a candy store on his way home from work and picked up some total piece of junk for me. He pulled it out of the bag with a flourish.

  “And Rinker, good buddy, this is for you.”

  It was a $3.95 Timex. The imitation-alligator wrist-band was plastic, the clunky round body was fake gold, and the hour-numerals on the face were as large and as goofy-looking as the type in a Dr. Seuss book.

  In those days Timex was what we called a “dipshit brand.” It was on a moral par with Thom McAn shoes, Robert Hall suits, and the Plymouth Valiant sedan. Men who bought anniversary presents for their wives at Sears Roebuck, or neckties at Tie City on Route 46, wore Timex watches.

  Everything associated with Timex, in fact, was a profound cultural embarrassment. The tone was set by these klutzy ads that Timex ran on national television, narrated by John Cameron Swayze. In the ads, Acapulco cliff-divers and lunatics in motor boats deliberately beat the living daylights out of their Timex watches, and then handed them over to Swayze for inspection. The watch never failed and Swayze always ended the ad with the same punchline.

  “Timex. It takes a lickin’, and keeps on tickin’!”

  That’s the model I got. It was the ugliest watch I had ever seen. I strapped it on and it looked like crap on my tanned arm.

  “Gee Dad, thanks,” I said. “I never expected you to part with something like this.”

  “Ah c’mon Rinky,” Kern laughed. “That’s not fair! Daddy was just trying to be good to both of us. I mean, he forgot about you, but then he remembered and he went right out and got you a watch too.”

  “Ah shut up Kern,” my father said, tears of mirth in his eyes. “You got my Hamilton chronograph. Rinker here, he got shit.”

  This disparity in gifts was pathetically funny, and we all started to laugh about it, and then we couldn’t stop laughing. Just when everybody was recovering I would hold up the Timex on my wrist and we’d all fall off into peals of laughter again. As he roared with laughter my father’s eyes welled up with moisture and he kept trying to get his pipe lit but he couldn’t, and there was a wonderful self-mockery about him at such moments.

  “Ah balls Rinker,” my father said. “I’m sorry. Listen, do me a favor tomorrow and deep-six that thing into the Delaware River.”

  I wasn’t upset and I wasn’t going to dwell on it. This was the way my father, my brother, and I were, and we could understand and even enjoy it about ourselves, and anyway I was laughing too hard to care.

  Tomorrow I would be crossing America with my brother. I was fifteen years old and impatient for experience, annoyed with myself for knowing about life only from books, and now that would change. I’d never been west of the Alleghenies and a whole continent was waiting for me. And it was a beautiful night outside, with crickets screeching, wind swirling through the trees, and the scent of lilac wafting in through the window screens while we laughed and talked in my father’s library. We were quiet in the room together for a while and the feelings between my father and my brother overflowed, and that was enough love in one family for me. All I wanted to do was wake in the morning and light out for the Rockies.

  CHAPTER 7

  The admirable restraint my father had displayed all winter, leaving us alone to build our plane and plan our trip, evaporated in stages as our time of departure drew near. It vanished altogether the day we took off. Later I would think of that morning as my entire boyhood dispensed in concentrated form. My father’s ambitions for us, and the inevitable bedlam of getting anything done in a large family, combusted powerfully that day. To begin with, there were delays, maddening delays. Kern and I had resolved to launch as early in the morning as possible, but sensible planning like this became the first casualty of our trip. We would pay for it dearly that afternoon.

  One night in May, while we were out in the barn painting the plane, Kern had said to me, “Rink, Day One, we’re making Indiana. I can feel Indiana in my bones.”

  Indiana. Normally I would resist a dreamy notion like that from Kern. It epitomized his tendency to pluck arbitrary goals out of thin air and then live for them like someone possessed. But as soon as he said it I could feel Indiana in my bones too. Indiana had always seemed vaguely mysterious to us, probably because we didn’t even know where it was before we began our flight planning. When we checked our maps, we could see that the Indiana state line was just beyond comfortable range for one day’s flying in a Cub—Columbus, Ohio, one hundred miles shy of Indiana, was a much more realistic goal, and thus Indiana was alluring precisely because it was unobtainable. More than anything else, I just liked the way that old frontier state rolled off the tongue, with a romantic, far-off ring. We promised to keep it a secret. Kern was looking forward to calling home when we got there, surprising my father with the news that we’d “made Indiana” on the first day.

  On our big day, Kern and I were both awake at dawn, and Kern immediately went down to the kitchen to call the FAA Flight Service Center at Teterboro for a weather briefing. The outlook was not favorable for us. A classic summer low was stalled over much of the east coast and the midwest, and we could expect poor visibility, turbulence, and stratocumulus cloud formations over most of our route as the convection effect built through the day. Worse, the remnants of a Gulf Coast storm, pushing up through the Ohio River Valley, would meet late in the afternoon with a drier, stationary front hanging over the Great Lakes. The systems would collide along the western Pennsylvania border near Pittsburgh and then explode eastward, generating an impenetrable wall of thunderstorms and heavy rain directly in our path. There was one possible advantage in all this. The storm fronts would rocket the muggy low pressure system out to sea, and once they rumbled over, the skies to the west would be clear. To reach Indiana by nightfall, we would have to put in several hours of flying by noon and beat the fronts to western Pennsylvania, then sit out the storms for an hour or two before proceeding on through the midwest.

  Chastened, but determined, Kern and I stepped upstairs to wake my parents.

  My mother never forgot the scene in their bedroom that morning. “You and Kern just appeared at the foot of our bed at dawn,” she recalls. “You stood there quietly with these determined smiles on your faces and those pillowcases filled with your clothes thrown over your shoulders, like hobos waiting for a train. You were both wearing those silly little sunglass cases on your belts. I shook your father and woke him up. 'Daddy,’ I said, 'the boys are ready to go.’”

  My father, however, wasn’t having anything to do with a dawn departure. He pulled on his bathrobe and hopped one-legged over to the window.

  “Boys, let’s hold off a bit. Look—there’s ground fog out there. You need to wait for it to clear. Besides, I told some of the pilots from the strip to meet us out there for your takeoff. Nobody will be there until nine-thirty or ten. Mom, let’s get the boys some breakfast.”

  “Dad, no,” Kern said. �
��We’re ready to fly. Now.”

  “Kern, I’m talking now,” my father said. “Mother wants to feed you. Then we’ll go.”

  Kern and I were furious at my father for holding us up, butterflies raged in our stomachs, and the last thing we needed was food. But we knew that we had to humor my father and avoid a fight. Kern’s biggest fear all year had been that my father would use some absurd, last-minute pretext to delay or call off the trip, and now he had the best reason of all—bad weather. We were worried all morning that he would ask about it, but it never crossed his mind.

  That breakfast was agony. To date, my mother had not expressed the least concern about the wisdom and safety of two teenage boys tackling the Rocky Mountains in a Piper Cub, but she was very concerned about our nutritional intake. When she asked my father about it a couple of weeks before we left, she was horrified to learn that it might take us an entire week to reach California. She knew very well what we’d be up to for those seven days: skip breakfast, wolf down Lance crackers and Yoo-Hoos for lunch, chow down after dark at some awful barbecue joint in Tennessee. Like a lot of northern women, my mother harbored deep, irrational fears about dietary standards elsewhere in the country. It was a well-known fact, for example, that south of the Mason-Dixon line coffee was served to minors. So, she really loaded up the plates that morning. That breakfast had to last us seven days, until we were safely into the nutritional clutches of Aunt Joan in California. Handing us over plates heaped with scrambled eggs, bacon, potatoes, and cottage cheese, she poured herself a cup of tea and sat down to watch us eat. But Kern and I were too excited to eat very well and we picked aimlessly at the food.

  My father had the opposite temperament when he was excited. He ate like a horse. Greedily consuming his usual Saturday morning fare—coffee, burnt toast, and a giant bowl of oatmeal—he bantered away.

  “God, don’t you just love it boys? You stuff your belly full of food, gas up your ship, and fly the bejesus out of the thing until the sun falls at night. Then you sleep under the wings and watch the stars. Christ, when I was your age I would have killed for a trip like this.”

  Actually, my father was killing us, because he was up to another old stunt that morning. For important family occasions like this—christenings, confirmations, first solos—he loved to make a great show of the family elan. Everybody in America was infected with the Kennedy bug then. The country couldn’t get enough of those big, black-and-white spreads in Life and Look, showing Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, or Sargent and Eunice Shriver, with a dozen Kennedy children in tow, escorting Rose Kennedy to Mass at the little chapel up in Hyannis Port. The model American family was now a clan, doing things en masse. We would have been infected with that bug with or without the Kennedys, but the Kennedys legitimized our behavior. Anyway, that’s how my father decided to handle our takeoff for California—it would be managed as an Official Buck Family Event. Every one of our ten brothers and sisters, my father announced at breakfast, would travel out to the airport that morning to wave us off and lend their “moral support.”

  Shit, I thought. Kern and I didn’t want their moral support. Probably even the Kennedy kids were sick and tired of all that moral support by now. But there was no talking my father out of something like this once he was in the mood for chaos, and Kern and I were working hard at avoiding confrontation so he wouldn’t have an excuse to pull the plug on our flight.

  After breakfast, my father started bellowing up the stairs for my older sisters to put on their best clothes and help my mother get the younger children organized for the day. From the top of the stair landing, all we could hear was doors slamming and my sisters turning their radios on loud.

  It was a disaster. My sisters couldn’t have cared less, and they didn’t like being ambushed with an Official Buck Family Event at 8:30 on a Saturday morning—the beginning of the long July Fourth weekend no less. Dempsey had been away all year at college, and didn’t even know that Kern and I were planning on flying coast to coast. Macky was depressed that Kern and I weren’t taking her along and wouldn’t even get out of bed. Bridget spent her weekend riding horses and detested airplanes, and she wasn’t about to interrupt her schedule for this.

  Indeed, it seems unimaginable that my father wasn’t more sensitive to the immense family rift that had already developed over our flying. Over the past five years, all of my father’s time, and virtually all of his spare cash, had been devoted to flying, to Kern and me, and our planes. My sisters weren’t openly resentful about this—they were teenagers, and glad to be left alone—but they did feel excluded, ignored. My father never volunteered to blow all of his money on them. Actually, after our trip got underway, both Dempsey and Macky were quite supportive, genuinely excited for us. But they didn’t want to be pressured into going out to that “dirty, smelly old airport,” as Dempsey put it, to perform the Kennedy routine for us. They didn’t need to be reminded all over again how weighted the family was in favor of the two oldest boys.

  Dempsey was in a particularly testy mood anyway. She’d had a wonderful time being away at college that first year, learning how to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and getting away from all those noisy kids at home, and it was miserably depressing to be back in the bosom of her family again. Now my father was yelling up the stairs for her to get dressed and join the family mayhem out at the airport. When he called up the third time, she stormed out to the stair railing and shrieked back down.

  “Hey, Daddy,” Dempsey yelled. “Airport-Schmairport. I’m not going!”

  “Ah c’mon, Dempsey,” my father yelled. “You’re going to disappoint the boys now.”

  “Come off it, Daddy,” Dempsey yelled back. “They’ll be disappointed if I do come.”

  “Now listen here young lady!”

  “Daddy, don’t give me that listen-here-young-lady stuff. I’m not flying to California. Kern and Rinky are flying to California. What am I supposed to do? Go out there and wind up the rubber bands for their little motor?”

  My father couldn’t roll over my sisters unless my mother backed him up, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with it either. Official Buck Family Events were a trial for her, requiring hours of preparation, and this one was unannounced and she wasn’t ready for it. Besides, she could see that Kern and I were anxious to take off, and dragging my sisters along would just delay us by hours.

  “Dear,” my mother said to my father, “leave the girls alone. They don’t like the airport.”

  My father was absolutely brilliant in retreat, an instant victim. When my mother shot him down, he shrugged his shoulders and turned his face up into a scowl. It was the nobody-likes-me-everybody-hates-me-guess-I’ll-go-eat-worms approach.

  “Boys,” my father sighed. “We got skunked. You bust your ass all winter working on a plane, and your own family doesn’t even want to see you fly it. That’s gratitude for you.”

  Silently, with dejected looks on our faces, Kern and I pleaded with him to let us leave for the airport.

  Somehow, we all got out of the house that morning and departed the drive in Official Buck Family formation. My father led the way in his Oldsmobile with the younger boys, my mother carried the younger girls in her Volkswagen van, and Kern and I brought up the rear in the Willys. At the traffic light up in the village, Kern and I swerved left out of the motorcade and took the back roads through the Great Swamp. We didn’t want to be seen dead anywhere near these people.

  In the age of the Kennedys, the model American family was now a clan, doing things en masse. Kern and I were always posed on either side, the two oldest boys who framed my father’s ambitions for all of us.

  It was madness out at the airport. My father had invited a number of his friends to watch us take off, and some of the Basking Ridge pilots brought their wives out to see us off too, but they were the nonflying wives and none of them knew squat about aviation. While Kern and I were trying to ready the plane, there was a crowd milling around the Cub, and people kept banging their heads int
o the wing struts, pestering us with idiotic questions and changing babies’ diapers back on the tail section. Everybody was astounded by the simplicity of 71-Hotel. They kept sticking their heads into the cockpit, wiggling the stick for a second or two and then staring at us in disbelief, asking one of the pilots if this really was the plane the Buck boys were flying to California, or just a toy. On top of this, my father had arranged to have the soda machine opened up for everyone’s use, and my little brothers and sisters kept spilling root beer and Coke on Kern’s new paint job.

  While Kern preflighted and gassed the plane, I stowed our gear. The only way to wedge everything into the baggage compartment, I discovered, was to cram the pillowcases with our clothes at the very bottom, the shopping bag full of our maps in the middle, then the sleeping bags on top. Still, there wasn’t enough space. The sleeping bags on top overflowed up past the windows, which would block my view out the back, and we were concerned that the protruding gear would bang up against the fabric headliner and cause it to break apart in heavy turbulence. At the last minute we took everything out again and started jettisoning things from the pillowcases—duplicate tubes of toothpaste, paperback books, extra pants and sneakers. I handed the discarded items over to my mother in a big, messy armful, and stuffed everything back into the baggage compartment. More or less, all we had to wear now were the penny loafers and the Levi’s that we already had on.

  I jammed the sectional maps we would need that day, and my clipboard for keeping flight notations, into the leather pocket behind Kern’s front seat.