Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  Neither of us liked that bonehead gas jockey very much. He was a short, fussy man with a pencil-point moustache, a starched Texaco uniform, and all of these ridiculous little three-in-one tools attached to his belt. Pumping gas at the Indianapolis airport was a very important job, maybe one of the most important jobs in all of Indiana, he wanted us to know. Sooner or later, everybody had to pass through an airport, and you wouldn’t believe the people he met, the gas jockey said. Rock stars and movie actresses, visiting politicians, famous trial attorneys who flew their own planes—they were always dropping into “Indy” unannounced and he was the first to know. Newspaper reporters, who the gas jockey seemed to feel had the second most important job in Indiana, relied on him for a steady stream of “hot tips.” Now, we were the hot tip.

  The gas jockey begged us to wait on the ground for a few minutes so he could call one of his “closest friends,” a reporter from the The Indianapolis Star. In return, he’d give us our gas for free.

  Kern wasn’t agreeable at first. He wanted to push on south immediately and beat the storms to the Mississippi. Newspaper publicity had never been a part of our plan, and Kern didn’t want any delays this early in the trip. Kern didn’t like to confront strangers with bad news, and he tried to be polite about it.

  “Sir, that’s a very generous offer,” he said. “We’d really enjoy a newspaper interview. But we’ve got to push on.”

  The gas jockey held up a $5 bill.

  “Look, let me just call my friend,” he pleaded. “Breakfast? You want breakfast? I’ll throw that in too. There’s a coffee shop right across the ramp.”

  Now we had a real problem on our hands, because I was starving. This was a major division between Kern and me, our vastly different metabolisms. At fifteen I required a minimum of five square meals a day, at least two of them with steaks, and I still went to bed every night feeling famished. Kern ate like a camel and could subsist from dawn to dusk on a single candy bar. I started to cave right away. I could rationalize stopping for breakfast not simply because I was hungry, but it was still quite early in our trip, and we didn’t really know whether our $300 could get us to California and back. On that score, we seemed to be on a roll, and I felt greedy about it. In East Richmond, Hank had given us a free tank of gas, now we were inching up on our second, with breakfast thrown in to boot. At this rate the whole state of Indiana was going by virtually gratis. Considering everything, it would be downright irresponsible, unsafe even, to tackle the weather ahead on an empty stomach.

  “Ah, Kern,” I said. “Can I just say one thing? Money. Don’t forget money. This guy’s talking a free breakfast.”

  “Ah Jeez Rink. It’s only seven in the morning. How can you be hungry already?”

  “Kern, I’m not hungry. Who says I’m hungry? But look, for five bucks, we can both get steaks.”

  “See?” The gas jockey said, waving his $5 bill around. “Your brother’s hungry. Just what I thought. We’re talking twenty minutes here. My friend will run right out.”

  “Ah Jeez Rink,” Kern said.

  I flashed my new Timex up in front of Kern’s face, with those big, goofy Dr. Seuss numbers all over the watch face.

  “Kern. It’s seven-thirty in the morning. We’ve got bags of time.”

  “See? Your brother wants to do it!” the gas jockey said.

  Kern was annoyed now, and that usually made him more assertive.

  “All right!” he snapped, taking the $5 and pointing his finger at the gas jockey. “But we’re taking the free tank of gas and the breakfast no matter what. That reporter better be here in twenty minutes, as soon as we’re finished eating, or we’re taking off.”

  “Deal! I’m calling him right now.”

  Great. I was getting breakfast after all, but the best part about it was listening to Kern dig his spurs into that asinine gas jockey. Now that we’d made Indiana in a day and flown formation with those Stearmans, his ground-borne ego had come up a notch.

  By the time the reporter arrived, with an Indianapolis Star photographer in tow, we were more relaxed. Over breakfast we went over our maps. We saw that we could easily get across the Mississippi in just four or five hours of flying, even if we did have to sit out some storms at noon. Reaching the Mississippi was an important milestone for us, and we hadn’t realized that the river was so close to the bottom of Indiana. We didn’t care if we made it all the way down to the Stearman strip at Brinkley that night. Anywhere in Arkansas would be fine, because it was across the Mississippi. “Making Indiana” our first day had had a profound psychological effect on us. We weren’t judging distances by miles any longer, but instead by sound—how a state rolled off the tongue. Indiana to Arkansas sounded like a great distance to fly on our second day, an impressive amount of territory to report.

  “Rink, when we call home tonight, Daddy’s just going to shit,” Kern said. “'Hey Dad, we’re across the Mississippi already.’ He won’t believe it.”

  The reporter from the Star was a roly-poly man with a pressed, open-neck blue shirt, tousled gray hair and an easy, familiar manner. Like most of the reporters we had met over the years, he didn’t know a thing about aviation, and he couldn’t understand how we could find our way around the country without radios and an autopilot. But he seemed genuinely interested in us and made us feel as if we were important. His face turned bright and he furiously began taking notes when Kern answered his question about what my father thought about this trip.

  “My father?” Kern said. “Well, he’s the one who taught us to fly. When he was our age, he did the same thing, flying out across the country and working his way through the Depression as a pilot. So, my father knows what it’s like to do this. He’s excited for us.”

  “Kinda like reliving your father’s youth, in other words,” the reporter said.

  Kern shrugged his shoulders and said yeah.

  This part of our story, the reporter said, was “great color.” Everybody would enjoy reading about two boys barnstorming across the country, reliving their father’s Depression-era youth.

  Neither of us had considered this angle before. As far as we were concerned, we were flying to California to get away from my father for a few weeks. But as soon as the reporter said it, we both recognized that there was an element of truth to it, perhaps more than we even wanted to admit to ourselves. The irony of this surprised us both. For years we had sat up late at night, listening to my father’s fabulous barnstorming blarney, and this had virtually defined our image of him. It never occurred to us that those tales had also formed the expectations we had for ourselves, but that seemed patently obvious as soon as the reporter said it. Now that we were old enough to get away ourselves, we had reconstructed virtually an identical adventure. But of course we hadn’t perceived that about ourselves earlier because a father’s influence is taken for granted, it takes years to surface and, besides, the last person a teenager will admit to emulating is a parent.

  But we didn’t give a second thought to the interview with The Star. Probably the newspaper would bury the article back in the features section, and this would just be another zany human interest story for the readers of Indianapolis. Who cared about two kids from New Jersey flying coast to coast in a Piper Cub?

  We finished the interview with the reporter out by the plane, and the photographer posed us for pictures up by the propeller. The gas jockey came back out and seemed quite pleased with himself, proud of his association with the reporter. He made a great show of propping the Cub for us, so the reporter could see that he was an experienced hand around airplanes.

  Cheerfully we waved goodbye and roared down the macadam at Indianapolis, flying south over the luminous, green farmlands of central Indiana, down past Martinsville, Bloomfield, and Vincennes. Two hours later we crossed into southern Illinois and picked up the Wabash. Storm clouds were gathering to the south and we tightened our safety belts against the first belts of turbulence of the advancing front.

  I was a little heartsic
k, watching Indiana recede off the left wing. We had dreamed about the state for weeks and flown hard to get there, and now Indiana, romantic, far-off Indiana, was behind us already, before noon on the second day.

  But I wasn’t completely sentimental about it. As we followed the twisting, muddy oxbows of the Wabash into southern Illinois, I checked the notebook I was keeping on our fuel and living expenses. Despite consuming almost $20 worth of food and fuel in Indiana, there was only one entry for the entire state—$4.02 for dinner in East Richmond last night. And we’d pulled a fast one on that dumbass gas jockey too. The Star reporter picked up our breakfast tab, so we just pocketed the $5 the gas jockey had given us and never told him about it. Crossing Indiana, we’d made a profit of 98 cents.

  These Hoosiers were outstanding. All you had to do in Indiana was land somewhere and spoon-feed everybody a bunch of bullshit about flying coast to coast, and then they actually paid you to cross their state.

  Hank had opened up for us a magic stretch of land.

  Near the bottom of Illinois the Wabash emptied into the Ohio and we followed that for an hour, crossing south over the banks when we reached Paducah, Kentucky. The rail line that Hank had circled in red grease pencil was easy enough to find, we picked it up, and the country below us changed quickly after that. For the next hour and a half the twin rails, alternately shimmering in the sun or bathed in deep shadows, hypnotically drew us down through the craggy hill country of western Kentucky and Tennessee.

  The weather pushing up from the Gulf had developed more or less as predicted. To the east, a thick wall of gray cloud draped the foothills of the Cumberlands, and to the west the sky over the Mississippi Valley was an opaque black. But it was still clear down through Hank’s swale, underneath a low overcast pressing us down to the iron ridges. We were amazed that he could divine, just from early-morning weather reports, this narrow tunnel of clear visibility—the only one for a hundred miles in either direction. But we were forced to fly quite low to remain within it, and after the open, green fields of the midwest, the elimination of color and spatial distance was disorienting. The landscape skirting beneath our wheels was harshly beautiful, lonely and rugged, with occasional clumps of log cabins and small crop fields hacked atop the narrow plateaus. Whitewater creeks flashed in the shadowy ravines.

  Frequently, low clouds forced us down to just a few hundred feet above the ridge lines. My field of vision was restricted in the backseat, and often I could see only straight down. My vertical view had a disorienting Alice in Wonderland quality to it, as if I were tumbling head over heels down onto the land instead of flying over it. As Kern followed the serpentine terrain, the rail line, the river rapids, and the two sides of the ravine merged together and sped by underneath, one image at the bottom of a funnel. Rails, water, and ravine dizzily swirled sideways as Kern turned to follow the tracks around the next bend.

  Then he’d find a patch of clear air above and climb, skimming the ridge-tops. Traces of habitation suddenly appeared up on the plateaus. Beside dilapidated log cabins and sheds, women in bright bandanas and men in straw hats leaned on hoes in their gardens, or sat in groups on their broken down porches, gaping up at us as we swept over their heads. They were the only signs of life we saw in more than two hours of flying. The eerie, primitive landscape racing by intensified my romantic excitement about the time we were making and the distance we had already traveled.

  Just north of Wingo, Kentucky, the tracks disappeared into a mountain tunnel. We climbed over the summit and wedged in under the clouds. As we dove back down the other side of the mountain in turbulence and picked up the tracks, a diesel locomotive, silvery and sleek, was exiting the southern portal of the tunnel. A long string of freight cars snaked out of the tunnel behind it.

  We raced the train to the state line at Fulton. While we battled stiff headwinds above, the locomotive and cars gathered momentum downslope and slowly outdistanced us. Kern powered up and dove as hard as he could for the railed platform on the back of the caboose.

  At the big bends in the track, where the train had to slow to make the turns, we caught up again, billowing 500 feet above the caboose in the brisk headwind. A railroader in bib overalls came out on the platform, lit his pipe and looked up, doffing his cap and waving. Two more trainmen stepped out to the platform and waved their caps, urging us on. When the ravines opened up and it was safe to go low, we dove below the mountain walls and out of the headwind, roaring at full power just above our waving audience on the caboose. The trainmen laughed and elbowed each other as they looked up. Then the ravines narrowed again and we were forced back up, ballooning motionless in the headwind. Once more the train pulled away.

  The race with the train was maddening and hilarious at once. We were deep into Kentucky already, bobbing up and down through this moody, Appalachian swale of Hank’s, within striking distance of the Mississippi. We were making great time, a lot farther along than we expected to be by the middle of the second day, and the throb of the engine and the smell of burnt oil was strangely soothing as the exotic, hardtack beauty of Kentucky flashed by beneath our struts. I felt very far away from home now. Still, in a race with a train, a long, fifty-car freighter at that, we were losing.

  At Fulton the rail lines descended on a long, downhill straightaway. Kern poured on the coals and goosed the stick forward to give the Cub everything she had. The airspeed indicator was showing almost the red line of 120 miles per hour, but we still couldn’t make much headway over the ground and catch the train—the headwinds were that fierce. The wings were bucking and kicking in the turbulence and even with the nose pointed almost straight down we were ballooned up by the winds and the Cub wanted to climb. Finally Kern had to throttle way back to keep us from billowing up into the clouds.

  “Rink, this is great!” Kern yelled back.

  I wondered what was great about it. Any moment now my stomach was going to hurl the steak and eggs I had for breakfast.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah! These are trailing edge winds. We’ve passed the center of the front.”

  Up ahead, the caboose raced off and slowly disappeared. One of the trainmen fetched a signal lantern from inside and pointed it back at us from the platform, flashing goodbye. DASH. DASH. DASH. Kern wiggled our wings in reply.

  After that roller-coaster race with the train, I was desperate to get my hands on the controls. The ground effect here in the Kentucky swale was almost as bad as the turbulence over the Alleghenies, and I decided that I just wasn’t going to be uncomfortable like that again. I didn’t care what Kern thought about me now. It was a compulsion for me. I had to fly the plane for a spell.

  Until I read about it nearly twenty years later, in a book about instrument flying, I didn’t realize that I suffered throughout our flight from something called copilot vertigo. The phenomenon is especially severe in tandem-seat designs like Cubs, where visibility over the pilot in front is limited. Bounced around by the gusts, unable to see a clear horizon because of the clouds, the pilot in the backseat suffers from the loss of eye coordination with the movement of the plane over land. The sensation and panic of spatial disorientation can occur after just a few minutes of flying, and the copilot longs to battle the turbulence himself and restore his sense of control.

  And I was panicked. The harrowing, nauseating effects of vertigo were overwhelming me. The nose cowling and the instruments on the panel in front of Kern were spinning wildly around in a circle before my eyes and I was shivering all over. It didn’t help to close my eyes. As soon as I opened them again, the plane seemed inverted. Finally I couldn’t take it any longer and I threw the map forward and shook my stick in the rear.

  “Kern! I’m going to puke if you don’t give me this airplane. She’s mine!”

  Kern immediately threw his hands in the air.

  “It’s your airplane Rink. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  The relief was almost instantaneous. I felt restored to balance, with a clear left and righ
t and the ground where it should be, as soon as I could feel the plane through the stick.

  Shortly after I took the controls we were hit by a hard buffet from the right, and I stepped on the rudder all the way to the stop, cross-controlled hard with the stick and even goosed the throttle some to bore through the patch of rough air. This wasn’t the way to do it—I was overcontrolling the plane—but I didn’t care how many Gs I had to pull to keep the Cub straight and level. The body movement and the adrenaline rush of throwing the plane around the sky helped restore my senses.

  Kern grabbed the crash strut over his head with one hand and reached over and retarded the throttle with the other. Flying that hard in turbulence risked overstressing the plane, and he wanted to slow us down. But he was laughing as he turned to face me and yell back.

  “Rink! Whoa! You’re overcontrolling the plane. Take it easy.”

  “I hate this fucking turbulence, Kern. You sit there and take it for a while.”

  “It’s okay! I understand. Just watch your airspeed.”

  I was glad to reach that moment. I didn’t have to hide my fears and my turbulence jitters any longer and apparently Kern didn’t care. I had been foolish to worry about it in the first place.

  During that leg of the trip I contrived another small fix which made my position in the rear seat a lot more bearable. Grabbing one of the sleeping bags from the baggage compartment, I folded it flat on top of my seat cushion so that I could see out over Kern’s shoulders and past the windshield. My forward visibility was greatly improved and I had extra cushioning against the nonstop turbulence. There wasn’t enough head clearance from the crash struts in the front seat for Kern to do this, and by the end of the trip his ass was so sore from flying through turbulence that he walked stiffly and had to sleep on his stomach every night.

  We flew that way for the rest of the day, switching off and trading the map and the stick, and I could see that Kern was enjoying himself. Once in a while he shook the stick or reached back and squeezed my knee, giving me a hand signal to fly the tracks or the terrain differently. But most of the time while I was flying he sat contentedly up front, following along on the map and staring out to the sky, brooding about the weather and how we could outfox it to speed our progress.