Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  The nonexistent waterbag was another royal pain in the ass. My father had told everyone about the waterbag, but of course he forgot to update them when we couldn’t find one. Curious onlookers kept coming over to the plane, dipping their head down between the wheels, where the waterbag was supposed to be lashed, and coming back up disappointed. I was civil to the first seven or eight people who asked about the waterbag—maybe it was even a dozen. Then I blew my stack.

  “Hey, Rinker, Kern!” my little brother Nicky howled. “Where’s the waterbag? Daddy said you can’t take off without the waterbag.”

  “Shut up Nicky,” I said. “It’s none of your business.”

  “It is too! Daddy says you have to have a waterbag!”

  “Nicky, we don’t have it yet. But I’ll tell you what. If I do find a waterbag, I’m going to shove it straight up your butt. Now scram!”

  Nicky ran off to inform my father that I was threatening to shove a waterbag up his butt.

  “Screw this Kern,” I said. “Let’s fly.”

  “Yeah. This is a train wreck. Where’s Dad?”

  Finally, my father bounded over to the plane with an exasperated look on his face, as if this was all our fault.

  “Hey, boys, c’mon now! You can’t get to California sitting here on the ramp. Hop in. I’ll prop you.”

  Kern strapped himself into the front seat, I took the rear. With a raised hand and a growl, my father cleared the area of kids. Then he leaned into the cockpit for a final chat.

  “All right boys,” my father said. “Now I’m not going to give you the big lecture or anything. Just pace yourselves, that’s all. Six or seven hours of flying a day is plenty. Nobody cares how long it takes you to get out to the coast.”

  Kern was impatient to go.

  “Got it Dad.”

  “Now another thing,” my father said. “We’ve got a nice crowd here. Everybody came out to watch you take off. Once you get in the air, circle the pattern once, and then come back down the runway for a flyby. A flyby, I said, not a buzz job. There’s a difference. Don’t get too low. Then just wiggle the wings a little for Mother. Okay?”

  Kern wasn’t even listening.

  “Dad, I think I can get this airplane off this strip, okay? My switches are off, and I’m priming.”

  I always liked the way my father turned a prop. He had this graceful, muscular way with a propeller in his hands, a jaunty confidence that bespoke years of flying. Embarrassed as I was, sitting there with a crowd watching us, I enjoyed watching him throw the blades.

  “All right boys,” my father called out. “Make us proud now, and have a great trip. Brakes, Throttle, Contact!”

  “Contact!”

  The cylinders fired on my father’s first throw, blurt-blurting and coughing through the stack, blowing back an aromatic puff of smoke. We waved goodbye to my mother, taxied down to the end of Runway 28, ran up the engine and cleared the controls.

  As soon as Kern ruddered onto the strip and firewalled the throttle, I loved that Cub. Despite two passengers, baggage, and a full load of fuel, we only traveled a hundred feet or so down the runway before 71-Hotel popped off the ground and clawed for air. Kern immediately trimmed for some down elevator, to get the nose lower.

  He and Lee had rigged the plane well. As we passed the windsock I wiggled my stick in the rear to signal Kern that I wanted to feel the controls, and he wiggled back and gave me the plane. I did a gentle aileron bank to either side, and tapped the rudders. The controls were firm and responsive, not at all like the other old taildraggers we flew, where you moved the controls and then waited a second or two for a response. There was no doubt about it. 71-Hotel was our best restoration yet.

  We leveled off downwind of the runway and then Kern banked and dove the Cub to come back in over the crowd. He yelled back to me over the roar of the engine.

  “Hey Rink. Did he say a flyby, or a buzz job?”

  “Buzz job!”

  It was a lie, but I’d had enough of my father at that moment. We were up here, he was down there, and for the next few weeks there would be 2,400 miles of open country between us. Fuck ’im. A buzz job it would be.

  Kern gave the runway a close shave. He dove for the grass from 800 feet, pushed the throttle to the stop, and roared past the gas-pump crowd at 120 miles per hour. As we were passing the windsock I looked out the side. My father was kangarooing across the ramp to the edge of the runway in his crazy wooden-legged gait.

  Going by the gas pumps, Kern put the right wing over, pulled the sticks back into our laps, and turned up and over the crowd, Eddie Mahler style. Below us, everyone’s necks were craned straight up. There was a decent quartering wind on our nose when Kern leveled the wings and hung 71-Hotel on her prop.

  We climbed almost vertically over the crowd. As we passed through 700 feet I opened the right window and leaned out into the slipstream, looking back over the tail to my father. When he saw me hanging out the side of the plane my father started waving both of his hands over his head. I took the stick and wiggled the wings in reply and then I washed the rudders back and forth with my feet to fishtail the plane and my father waved some more. He kept waving, waving both arms over his head, growing smaller and smaller as we climbed the plane, and he was waving still as we disappeared over the hills.

  I looked back several times at my father as he waved, wiggling the wings for him a couple of more times. Behind and below me, he was framed by the tail section of the plane, as if in a picture. I remember the way the sunlight turned the grass around him a hard green, and the way the image of him was blurred and kept going double from the slipstream beating my hair into my face and whipping up tears in the corners of my eyes. I was filled with an immense sadness and happiness for him at once, and afterward I couldn’t understand why that particular vision of him moved me so much, or why it returned so often in my dreams. After a while I just accepted it as a portrait of contentment between us. Maybe we would never say it that way but the truth was that we were happiest watching each other recede in the distance.

  There wasn’t a lot of time to dwell on that right away. As we climbed through 3,000 feet I could just barely make out through the haze our first navigation checkpoint, the big man-made reservoir at Clinton. The air was choppy already, a bad sign so early in the day, because the turbulence would only build as the sun rose higher. Kern climbed and descended several times, up above 5,000 feet and then back down to 2,500, trying to find a scud-level altitude where the haze thinned out. But it was useless. At any height we were assaulted by the same blinding white glare and low visibility, with the amber sun on our nose burning through the windshield.

  Momentarily I lapsed into an old habit, my first navigation chore when we flew west, and decided to tune in the radio frequency for the Flight Service Station at Allentown, Pennsylvania, to check the weather ahead of us. Then I had to laugh at myself. There was no Allentown FSS for us, and there would be no FSS all the way across the country. We didn’t have a radio in this plane.

  I pulled my seatbelt tight against the turbulence and squinted ahead into the glare. The old Continental roared, the cockpit smelled of burnt oil, and the slipstream rushing in through the open window rifled my shirt and my hair. I was glad to be launched at last. In the seat ahead of me Kern looked back, smiled, and gave me a thumbs-up. I knew that he would push hard to beat the storms ahead, which frightened me, but we were still several hours away from the worst of the weather and there wasn’t much point in worrying about what I couldn’t yet see. Probably we could find a way through. I knew all along that we’d have to fly like the blazes to make Indiana by nightfall.

  CHAPTER 8

  As soon as we got out over the Delaware River, barely fifty miles from home, we could see what kind of trouble we were in. Menacing and black anvil-head clouds, their tops silver-bright in the sun, towered up on our right, blocking our planned route to the northwest. To the south, vapory sheets of rain fell to the green fields. In between there was still a
n open patch of sky. Kern hunched forward over the instrument panel and peered intently through the windshield. Pushing over the rudder and the stick, he steered southwest over the picturesque farmlands of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

  We hadn’t expected the weather to develop this quickly. The flight-briefer at Teterboro had forecast these conditions for later in the day, and much further west. But weather is weather and obviously the warring masses of air were pushing trouble eastward faster than predicted.

  From the backseat, I leaned over sideways and looked at my brother’s face. His mouth was turned up into a grim half-smile. I had never flown alone with him in bad weather but I knew what this expression meant. We were now in a race. He was determined to outfox the advancing edges of the storm and beat the front to Pittsburgh.

  I was surprised by Kern’s decision to push ahead in the face of such early signs of adverse weather, and I had to deliberately work at resisting the urge to panic. Kern and I still didn’t know each other very well in the air. His dauntless, supremely confident attitude in a plane, so different from his uptight personality on the ground, was a mystery to me. I couldn’t understand where it came from or how one person could be transformed so dramatically by environment. Kern, likewise, had no idea of just how frightened I was by turbulence and poor visibility. Fear in the air was something my father simply wouldn’t tolerate, and over the years I had devised a variety of physical and mental stratagems to hide this weakness—closing my eyes during spins, breaking up cross-country trips in marginal weather into ten-minute segments, which made them easier to bear. This was the price I had paid for inclusion in our weekend flying excursions, and now I would have to do the same with Kern. I didn’t want to disappoint him this early in the trip, and I vowed not to complain or reveal my fears no matter how much this leg across Pennsylvania rattled me.

  Hitching my seatbelt up another notch, I stuck my head out into the slipstream for some fresh air, and closed my eyes for a while and pretended that we weren’t surrounded by angry, jagged walls of clouds and rain falling in several directions.

  After Quakertown the air turned rough and the visibility was constantly changing. Suddenly the clouds on either side of us would drop low and wedge in sideways, forcing us down against smudgy barn silos and power-line pylons, and then we’d come around the gauzy corners of the cloud into open skies dazzling with rainbows, sparkling fields and tidy, white-washed Pennsylvania Dutch farms. We were “scud-running,” trying to get below and between the clouds, and I couldn’t believe we were violating all the lessons of our training during literally the first hour of our trip.

  Kern anxiously looked from side to side as he flew the plane, jabbing his finger against the map on the magenta symbol of an airport. I could see what he was doing, flying us from airport to airport in case the weather forced us down. But after Pottstown there weren’t any strips for a long stretch. As the turbulence became stronger, the compass spun crazily and the plane plunged up and down like a cork bobber. Kern threw back the map and yelled.

  “Rink! I’ve got to concentrate on flying this airplane. Get me to Harrisburg.”

  Harrisburg. I focused hard on the map, determined to deliver for Kern. I was actually quite prepared for this assignment, but didn’t appreciate that about myself yet. The summer before my father had spent nearly two months giving me cross-country flying lessons. I was only fourteen that year and hadn’t spent much time in planes equipped with sophisticated radios and instruments, and he could see that I was only comfortable with straight “pilotage” navigation, flying point-to-point by reference to landmarks. But that was fine with an old barnstormer like him, in fact it was preferable. Anybody could scream around in an expensive Bonanza stuffed with all the latest radio-navigation equipment. But what happened when the radio broke or the electrical system failed? Too many pilots couldn’t navigate merely by direct reference to the ground. So I had spent several Saturdays and Sundays in a row navigating by rivers, roads, and gravel quarries marked on sectional maps, learning how to pick up a compass course and correct for wind drift when the landmarks ran out. Mapreading and pilotage the old-fashioned way were my father’s gift to me, a very simple gift. But that’s all that Kern and I needed in 71-Hotel. Simplicity was the only asset we had.

  Our original plan called for skirting the north edge of the Allegheny Mountains, where the peaks are lower and there would be less turbulence, following the gently rolling valleys of central Pennsylvania into Youngstown, Ohio. But that course was now obstructed by clouds and the weather had formed a narrow, irregular chute forcing us to divert south through Harrisburg and the lower Susquehanna Valley. This would mean facing the Alleghenies head-on in rough air, but we would have to worry about that when we got there.

  On the map I found a rail line just south of Pottstown that meandered west to the Susquehanna, up through Reading and Hershey. If clouds blocked our way there were several intersecting power lines that we could pick up. Wiggling the stick to signal Kern, I ruddered over for the tracks and pointed them out on the map. Throwing open the side windows, I kept my head out in the slipstream to look for landmarks. The ceiling was dropping again and we didn’t have a lot of airports in front of us. I didn’t have the luxury of guessing at our position and I focused like a gnome on the land and then back to the map.

  That’s how we flew the first leg, like a pair of old airmailers. While Kern manned the plane and kept us straight and level from the front seat, I hung out the side from the rear, battered by the rain and the slipstream as I concentrated on the terrain. Kern and I seamlessly adjusted to flying this way and barely exchanged a word about it. When the Cub strayed from the rail line I would look ahead to find the tracks again, and then step on the rudder to steer us over and hold our course on the rails while Kern held the plane steady with the stick. In the rougher air we flew like that for three or four minutes at a stretch, sharing the plane and speaking to each other through the feel of the controls. This was immensely comforting to me because I’d always found that my turbulence jitters eased when I could control the plane. Occasionally, the turbulence blowing in through the windows kited the map off my lap, and the map was hard to hang on to because it was slippery with sweat from my hands. Still, I could almost enjoy this adventure now, hanging out the side and peering forward as I ruddered us along the rails.

  As we bobbed over the Pennsylvania farmlands, sometimes we could see ahead of us for a good seven or eight miles and sometimes we could barely see a mile or two. But the Continental roared and the floorboards throbbed and the cockpit was filled with the soothing ether of burnt oil. I liked the thunderous, intense propinquity of the two-seat Cub, flying through this black purgatory with my brother. Right there, on the first leg of the trip, I discovered something important about us. Kern’s determination and self-confidence were contagious. All I had to do was look forward at his face. He was grinning, enjoying the chase against the weather. He handled the controls maturely, gently managing the stick with just a couple of fingers and softly cupping his left palm over the throttle, not overcontrolling, as most pilots do in rough air. Up here, I was very committed to him; I yearned to please him. Kern was preternaturally gifted as a pilot and so intent on outwitting those clouds that I could almost feel his skill as a physical sensation, and it would have shattered me to disappoint him.

  And so, under increasingly inclement skies, we followed the rails into Hershey, crossed the Susquehanna south of Harrisburg, and flew on to the small grass strip at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was the last airport where we could refuel before we faced the Alleghenies. The weather was always closing in behind us. We would get past a nice stretch of farms, or over the big Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces along the Susquehanna, and a few minutes later I’d look back over the tail. It was raining where we just had been.

  But we’d beat the weather so far, barely. As we entered the traffic pattern at Carlisle, clouds closed in on us from all sides, swirling around and narrowing the clear space of air in f
ront of us like a funnel of water churning down a tub drain. To dodge the clouds, Kern swung the Cub around in a dive and cut off the edge of the pattern, and then quickly cross-controlled, throwing us into a steep, shuddering sideslip to make the field. As we were rolling out on the spongy grass runway, a light rain began pattering onto the windshield and the wing fabric.

  We called them the “geezers,” the airport geezers. Every little airport in America had one or two, and still does. They’re the old-timers in the Dickie pants, the matching Dickie shirt and the broad leather belt, sitting on the gas pump bench. They might be seventy or seventy-five now, not flying much anymore, but geezers aren’t envious of the younger pilots, just solicitous. Geezers pour a lot of oil into hot engines and know how to squeak bugs off the windshield without wasting any cleaner. Student pilots on their first solo cross-countrys get to know the geezers quite well. It’s the geezer who tells them that they have just landed at the wrong airport, and then talks to them for a while about how easy a mistake that is—all of these little airports look the same from the air—and he steers the young pilot to the right strip. Then the geezer takes the student’s logbook, makes an entry for the flight and signs his name. According to him, the kid landed at the correct field.

  The airport geezer at Carlisle was a jowl-faced, big-bellied fellow named Wilbur—you never get more than a first name. When he saw us taxi in with the Cub he pulled on a rain slicker and a ball-cap and jogged out to meet us. There was an empty T-hangar by the fuel pumps. We shut down the engine and Wilbur helped us push 71-Hotel out of the rain.

  Wilbur was surprised that we were flying around in this kind of weather, in a Cub without a radio no less. But geezers become geezers because they’ve survived many mistakes themselves and they are not dogmatic in their old age. As we stood in the T-hangar, in gentle tones, Wilbur was slowly backing into the standard lecture on the perils of “Get-There-Itis” when the rain stopped and the skies all around Carlisle cleared. He asked us where we were headed. Kern and I weren’t ready yet to tell a stranger that we were flying all the way to California in a Piper Cub so we told him Pittsburgh instead.