Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  Further along, east of Columbus, a farmer had driven his tractor out across the fields to a spillway dam. He was running a pump off his power-takeoff to feed his cattle. He sat on his tractor seat, smoking a cigarette, taking in his fields and the falling light. His two boys, shirtless, lounged on the orange wheel fenders. They wore red ball caps. As we droned by they calmly reached up and waved, big, neighborly, mid-western farmers’ waves. They were expecting us, it seemed, as if we passed by that way every night.

  I liked the midwest. The roads ran straight to the horizon, easy to follow, winding here and there around creek beds and stands of trees. The towns were orderly and compact, with clusters of white churches, spotless Greek Revival façades along Main Street, and listless clouds of dust rising from the Dairy Queen parking lots out along the edges. You could see life down there, just as it was lived, and the flat geography of the plains was open and explicit. Every town along our way announced itself with large block letters painted on top of the water tower or the grain elevators. HEBRON. Good. Just another forty miles to Columbus. Who needed a radio, or a gyro compass, in a land as sensible as this?

  But all of this sightseeing was done in a hurry. Kern had the engine opened up to 2,400 rpm to make extra speed, but that was also consuming more fuel. Ohio is more than two hundred miles across, just about the range of our Cub, and we would have to stop for fuel. As we passed Newark I measured the distance we had flown from Pittsburgh with my route-plotter and leaned up over my brother’s shoulder to show him my calculations. Columbus, almost exactly in the middle of the state, was a logical refueling stop, and the smaller airport southwest of town was uncontrolled and we could get in there without a radio.

  As soon as we found Columbus Southwest, Kern firewalled for the airport and steeply banked the Cub around to land. He wheeled onto the runway with the tail raised, fast-taxied to the pumps, and called back as he threw off the ignition switches.

  “Rink, it’s almost eight o’clock. This is just a pit stop.”

  “Affirmative.”

  I raced for the ladder, he went for the fuel hose. We only needed ten gallons in the wing tank to make it to Indiana. A geezer came out and offered to check the oil and clean the windshield, but we told him not to bother. We pumped the fuel as quickly as we could, and the tab came to $3.96. Sorry Geezer, no time for you tonight, here’s $5 for the gas, forget the change. Skip the Brakes, Throttle, Contact! jive and just throw the prop. I dove into the backseat on the run as Kern dashed for the runway.

  I felt sorry for the geezer, who seemed like a nice fellow. We left him standing in a cloud of dust thrown back by our prop, scratching his head and feeling quite useless. Kern opened up the throttle 30 feet from the runway. We skidded onto the centerline, popped into the air and turned west at 200 feet, hauling ass for Indiana. It was the swiftest aircraft refueling in history. We were in and out of Columbus in eight minutes.

  We leveled off relatively high, at 5,000 feet, to get as long a view of the country beneath us as we could in the receding light. Maybe, just barely, we could make Indiana.

  Indiana. It was a completely fabricated goal and, considering everything, especially the weather we had battled all day, quite pointless. We’d already made impressive progress for one day and passed our original target, Columbus. But to Kern a personal goal was a commandment, and I knew that he wasn’t going to spare an ounce of horsepower until we were hard down on Indiana soil. All I could do was laugh about it, chortling in the rear seat as I watched the pretty Ohio towns go by.

  From the front seat, with those immense sunglasses still on, Kern looked back with that earnest grin of his. Beaver Cleaver in Ray-Bans. He knew what I was laughing about.

  “Rink, you can shit on me all you want, but we’re making Indiana tonight.”

  “Kern. Why don’t we just land at the next airport, call home, and tell them its Indiana? Nobody will know the difference.”

  “Nope. It’s gotta be Indiana. I’m not going to lie about this.”

  I was having too much fun to worry about it. Ohio is a flyer’s paradise, with a grass landing strip every twenty miles or so, alongside nearly every town. Some of them were just long fairways that the airport operator shared with the local golf course, but we’d been into a lot worse and Kern could put us down almost anywhere. When it got too dark to see ahead of us, we could swing around and land at one of those.

  So, we were relaxed and laughing in our small cockpit, soothed by the pastel twilight. I loosened my seatbelt and leaned forward from the rear seat, holding the map on my brother’s knee. If we still had half-an-hour’s light when we got abeam of the big air base at Dayton, I told him, Indiana was ours. The paved municipal field just over the Indiana line at Richmond was probably already out of reach, but I’d found on the map a small grass strip at East Richmond, fifteen miles closer.

  At dusk, we passed out of Ohio along the forested, western edge of Preble County, just beyond the hamlet of New Paris. The sky was slate-gray as we crossed the state line into Indiana. But we could make out the rotating beacon at Richmond off to the south and, navigating off that, we found the little field at East Richmond. As Kern descended and banked for the runway, the last of the sun fell behind the horizon and it was almost pitch-black. But there was a full moon that night, a great, merciful disc of light planted midway above the horizon right where we needed it. Kern expertly nursed the Cub down through the dark, probing for the grass with the stick.

  As we taxied in over the rutted grass, we noticed a long line of ragged yellow biplanes parked by the hangar.

  “Rink,” Kern called back, “those are Stearmans. This is a duster strip.”

  We were excited about that, and couldn’t believe our good luck in choosing a place to remain overnight. My father and all of the old barnstormer types that we knew at Basking Ridge had always referred to this part of the country as Stearman Land. They were very sentimental about it, and to pilots of their generation the cropdusting region west of the Ohio River was revered as a flyer’s nirvana. During World War II, more than ten thousand open-cockpit Boeing Stearmans had been produced for the Air Corps training fields out west, and tailwheel pilots like us regarded the Stearman as the most majestic, noble plane ever built. After the war ex-military pilots, or just farmers with a love of flying, had snapped the Yellow Perils up at government auctions and converted them for cropdusting use, installing huge, 450-horsepower and even 600-horsepower Pratt & Whitney radial engines, gutting the front cockpit for a one-ton hopper, and welding sprayer bars to the wings. Many pilots of the postwar generation had built up their time as cropdusters before they joined the military or the airlines. There were still huge fleets of yellow Stearmans roaming the west, following the crops all summer the same way that the big wheat-combine crews moved north across the plains with the national grain harvest.

  The lore of Stearmans, the wild flying and living that the young duster crews enjoy, acted powerfully on pilots. All flyers are wanderers at heart and harbor Walter Mitty fantasies. If they could only shuck their jobs and the lives they know, they would leave the local airport far behind and spend a season flying bush planes in Alaska, or get a job dropping mail along the sheep-station routes of Queensland and New South Wales. Of course, they never did it, but that just made the dream more alluring. No flying fantasy, however, quite surpassed a long summer tour of the cropdusting strips of the American west. That’s where barnstorming still lived. My father was very excited about this aspect of our trip, and he thought that we were leaving at just the right time—early July is the height of the dusting season. We would love the “Stearman men of the west,” he said, and find them very hospitable and entertaining. In Arkansas or Oklahoma, when it was time to find the waterbag, all we would have to do is ask a good old Stearman man about it.

  As we taxied in, the dusting operation was still busy. The hangar was lit, and a mechanic with a helmet on was welding inside, throwing off a nimbus of orange and blue sparks. The place was a classic Am
erican dump, with the stench of pesticides and nitrogen fertilizer hanging along the taxiways and rusting one hundred-gallon drums holding up the pilots’ shack. This didn’t seem like an airport that handled a lot of transient traffic, and no one came out and directed us to a parking spot. So we just wheeled around behind a large gathering of parked Stearmans and shut the engine down.

  A couple of the cropdusting pilots had been working late, readying their loads for the next day. They wandered over as we climbed out of the Cub. They were wondrous specimens of the breed, big, tall hulking guys with brown pegs for teeth, western drawls, and sunburnt scars on their arms and hands. They certainly weren’t geezers, but they were helpful. They had watched us land in the dark and told us we were honorary dusters now, young fuckups, they said, who could snatch a landing from the jaws of a crash. They helped us tie down and fuel the Cub and we would launch with them at dawn.

  There was an old Pullman-style diner on the other side of the interstate, out across a railroad line. We had to climb a wire fence on either side of the railroad tracks to get there. Before we went into the restaurant we called my father collect from the phone booth outside, cupping our ears together on the receiver. No way, we agreed, would we tell him about the Pennsylvania weather, or about landing at an unlit strip after dark.

  My father must have been sitting all evening with the phone in his lap. We didn’t even get off a full ring before he picked it up. When he heard it was us, we could hear the tension and worry going out of his voice.

  “Boys! How are you?”

  “Fine, Dad. Just fine.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Indiana. East Richmond, Indiana.”

  “Oh Jesus boys that’s just great. Jesus, Indiana. Mom, they made Indiana.”

  My older sisters were there. I could hear them talking in the background. I guess they were now excited about our trip. Years later they would still talk about that week in July, when everyone would sit around the large family room adjacent to our kitchen every night, waiting for us to call.

  In 1966, a gallon of aviation fuel cost just thirty-nine cents. But we were worried about running out of money and kept meticulous records.

  “Indiana! Wow. Indiana. Isn’t that far? Dad, how many miles is that?”

  My younger brothers and sisters had stayed awake in all the excitement. Now, as we spoke with my father, they were marching around the kitchen table together in their pajamas, letting out banshee whoops and singing a chorus of “Indiana, Indiana, Indiana.” My mother got on and we lied to her about what a great day we’d had, the beautiful weather all the way out and what a swell country America was, how well the plane flew. Before we hung up, we promised to call again the next night.

  I was surprised by how relaxed my father was during that first call home. We didn’t say another word to him that night. For months, he had been secretly obsessed with this trip, painstakingly examining our maps, discussing the difficult desert and mountain crossings, egging us to finish the plane on time and hectoring us about the waterbag. Now the details of our flight didn’t seem to interest him at all. I suppose he just figured that he had worked us well all those years, and now we were down and safe in Indiana on the first night and that proved to all the skeptics, friends of his who had wondered why he was letting us make this trip, that his boys could do it. The details were now out of his hands.

  Several years later, when he was struck with a bad phantom pain attack, I drove my father to the hospital for his Demerol shots. On the ride home in the car, before he fell asleep, he droned on and on about the night that Kern and I called from Indiana. He was so happy for us that night, he said, happy and relieved, that after we hung up he climbed the stairs to his room, took off his wooden leg, and cried in bed.

  The waitresses at the diner were bright-faced and coltish, with long shiny legs, hairnets, and lacey bras showing up beneath the transparent restaurant uniforms girls wore in those days. The place wasn’t busy at all and we must have blown in at just the right time, relieving the Edward Hopper loneliness along the counter. The waitresses dawdled and flirted with us and I liked them a lot. They wore more makeup than eastern girls and moved between the tables and the kitchen with languid sexuality, and they didn’t have any pretensions. The special that night was all-you-can-eat Southern-fried chicken for $1.99. We wolfed it down with mashed potatoes, green beans, and iced tea. While we were eating our dessert the waitresses asked us where we were from, and we told them New Jersey. Boy, they said, that’s a lot of flying for one day. They made it sound as if New Jersey was a whole continent away, and actually I felt that way myself. Already, it felt as if we’d been gone for weeks. We swaggered out of there a foot taller, with toothpicks angled out of our mouths and our Ray-Bans sticking out of the top of our shirt pockets, the way we’d seen the big-time airshow pilots do it at home.

  It was a cool, clear night, with an immense panorama of stars overhead, and we couldn’t believe how open the sky was out here. We walked the long way back to the airport, to avoid climbing over the fences. The air smelled of new-cut hay and manure spread on the fields. We didn’t say much as we walked along but Kern did thank me for one thing.

  “Rink, you made a huge difference today. Really. I never would have made it to Indiana by myself.”

  “Yeah. Thanks. The funny thing is, I agree with you.”

  It was a moment of pure knowledge and pure satisfaction. I didn’t feel particularly elated about making a big difference all day, I just knew that it was true. I knew, as well, that I never would have believed this before we left home—I didn’t expect to contribute that much to the flying effort. During that walk in the dark a new welter of feelings that would build throughout the trip began overtaking me. First of all, time seemed unbelievably stretched—hours became days and days became weeks, even months. Distance, too, seemed implausibly and romantically grand. Here in Indiana, we were still close enough to Ohio to spit back across the state line. But the short distance we’d traveled to “make Indiana” and land in the state seemed oceanic, as if we’d flown all the way to Montana. And with the stretching of time and contentment every other muscle and pore in my body was relaxed. It seemed easy, all of a sudden, being at peace with Kern. All we had to do now was live moment to moment for this flight we were making together.

  Back at the airport, we rolled our sleeping bags out beneath the wing. We used the Cub’s seat cushions for pillows. We lay there for a while, lazy from our meal and drugged by the nitrogen pall of the duster strip, chatting, staring up at the stars. Kern was pleased with himself and our hard day of flying and I was happy about that. Except for the distant hum of the interstate, Indiana seemed real quiet. At a little before eleven a lone locomotive roared through on the tracks and then we dozed off, still laughing inside about the little ones back home, marching “Indiana” around the table.

  CHAPTER 10

  The coughing of four Stearman engines woke us at dawn the next morning. The sky was still all flinty gray, with a ribbon of cobalt and pink glowing on the eastern horizon. The duster pilots at East Richmond had arrived for their morning flying and were firing up the yellow biplanes parked in front of us, to warm the engines before they flew. Kern and I were cold and stiff from sleeping on the ground and our sleeping bags were wet with dew. Sand and pebbles thrown back by the props raked our faces, and the stack exhaust was a velvety bit of warmth.

  It was a morning ritual, and we grew used to it as we followed the cropdusting strips west. As the first streams of sun warmed the country, the Stearman pilots were the first to wake. The still hours just after dawn are the best time of day for cropdusting. Before it was light Kern and I would hear the sound of boots crossing gravel, the rattle of tie-down chains, the telltale whine of starter-clutches engaging. The pilots left the biplanes idling on the ramp while they went in for coffee. Kern and I would roll up our sleeping bags and follow them into the shack. In the half-light behind us, the big Pratt & Whitneys radials played a morning hymn. T
he gear boxes clicked, the throaty manifolds hummed, the air from the props whistled through the sprayer bars. The sound seemed to urge us west. In the baritone rumble I could hear the crescendo of a hundred more cropduster radials coughing to life down through Arkansas and Texas, a vast American symphony tracking the sun across the Rockies to Bakersfield and Salinas.

  We rolled out of our sleeping bags and stowed them in the baggage compartment. One of the pilots we had met the night before jumped off his wing and strolled over to the Cub. He was older than the other dusters, forty-five perhaps, tall and bony in a faded jumpsuit, with a face so burned and wrinkled by the sun that it looked like driftwood. He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, smiling as he watched us wiggle into our pants and pull on our shoes.

  His name was Hank, Hank the Stearman man. Hank was the chief pilot and owner of the duster operation at East Richmond. He introduced himself and seemed curious about us, amused that we had dropped in the night before and then camped under the wing. Raunchy duster-strips like East Richmond didn’t get a lot of transient traffic, certainly not a pair of scrawny kids in Levi’s and penny loafers who spent the night sleeping under the wing of their plane.

  Hank ran his hands over his face to wipe off some sleep, stretched his arms high and cracked his knuckles, and then ran the hand with the lit cigarette through his hair.