Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  The realization slowly dawned on me after that. My father wasn’t going to be with us forever. Maybe, his years were already numbered. But I wasn’t ready to face that yet so I tried to think of other things.

  Out along the Little River, while Kern flew the plane, I enjoyed the agrarian scenery going by. Red and black splashed on green where the cattle herded, the sun glinted off metal barn roofs, and gang-harrows, pulled by mammoth tractors, churned up dust. And I missed my father. Arkansas meant a lot of things to me but that is what I remembered most.

  At noon that day we reached the Red River and dashed across the hard, beige plains along the southeastern corner of Oklahoma.

  It was our first view of the “real west.” Kern and I were awed by the absence of trees and fence lines, and the endless, breathtaking expanse of prairie vista. The colors were very different here. The sky ran horizon-to-horizon a hard azure blue, and from the recent rains wildflowers and scrub heather bloomed yellow and terracotta. We refueled at Durant, Oklahoma, wolfed down some lunch, and climbed back out into the scorching heat, pointing 71-Hotel due southwest. The first turbulent buffets of the day were boiling up off the prairie floor, but we were glad to have put so much terrain behind us and to have entered such new land.

  Texas, mythic Texas, the Shangri-la of barnstorming blarney, was just an hour away. Up front, Kern was grinning again, dreaming up something.

  “Rink!”

  “Yo!”

  “First thing in Texas, you know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “Hats. Tonight, we’re buying cowboy hats.”

  CHAPTER 13

  We entered Texas over Lake Texoma, a large inland body of water along the Oklahoma border where the Red River was dammed, just north of Denison. On the Dallas–Fort Worth sectional map, I could see that we would cross the state border in the middle of the lake. I leaned forward and yelled over the roar of the engine.

  “Kern. We’re here. It’s Texas.”

  “Ah Jeez Rink. Texas. We’ve made Texas.”

  From the southern edge of the lake the vast tabletop prairie opened out before us. The plains were an irregular quilt-work of beige and red clay, with occasional clumps of green where the grasses and cottonwood trees congregated at the watery draws. To the west the Red River snaked through a maze of deep canyons toward Wichita Falls. The rivers here were preternaturally blue for inland water, a brilliant green-blue, more aquamarine than an artist would ever paint an ocean. The water got that color by flowing through cliffs that were a sandy mosaic of hard beiges, grays and quarry-tile red, so that the river contrasted sharply with its banks and threw up a more concentrated pigment. The expanse of the prairie, and the more dramatic canyon country to the west, was intensified by low-lying clouds. Banks of broken cumulus raked underneath our wings, their bases no more than 2,000 feet, stretching out over the prairie as far as we could see.

  Kern dropped the Cub beneath the clouds and the visibility in every direction was flawless. The low ceiling forced the eye to take in an immense horizon of land, the way a long, low porch ceiling stretches the depth of field out a window. We had heard about this kind of cloud formation, from my father’s barnstorming blarney, in fact. It was the fabled Texas sky. The clouds were formed by concentric flows of moist air pushing up from the Gulf of Mexico, then running out of steam when the winds died in the middle of the day. The heat scorching up from the surface of the prairie condensed the stalled moisture into low, cottony puffs.

  Geography became spiritual. The panorama of cloud, prairie, and river was transcendent, and it seemed to me that we had entered entirely new light. Horizons as open as this were a visual baptism for an eastern boy. Even more powerfully than before I felt the distance we had traveled, and Texas was the real Continental Divide for me. Texas was different. Unshackled from the fence-lines and confining horizons of the east, we were free, completely free, perpetually united and animated in an element of sky that seemed to stretch forever.

  Out over the prairie, Kern “flew the cotton,” an old barnstorming term that we had heard and now, of course, being in Texas, we just had to try. He picked a narrow space between two clouds and honked back on the stick. We climbed vertically up through the wispy edges of cloud, passed the tops, and then went weightless as the Cub stalled with a sigh of sprung control cables and flexed fabric. Kern put the wing over for a hammerhead and we dove back down through the same hole. He found another hole, and then another.

  Whooping and yelling to each other, we hammerheaded up some more. That is how we arrived in Texas. Prairie, cloud, the weightless sigh of our wings, and then the prairie racing up at us again as we dove through the holes of a perfect Texas sky.

  I liked the isolation of Texas. After Denison we didn’t see a town for more than an hour, and the terrain below was just one, long scrub prairie, mile after indistinguishable mile, with the shadowy badlands of the gulch country rising off our right wing. We weren’t in the hard desert yet so there was no reason to remain over highways and, besides, there weren’t any roads going our way. We struck out southwest over open country.

  As soon as Denison disappeared I realized that I faced a new navigational challenge. With no landmarks to steer by, and hundreds of square miles of featureless country separating the towns, we could easily bypass or miss our destination airport with a compass error of just a few degrees. Our single tank of gas gave us too limited a range to search for alternates. I would have to dead-reckon carefully, establishing our position by precisely timing our flight legs and keeping an exact record of our compass heading. I took out a pencil and pad and went to work. Every ten minutes I recorded compass readings and then, with my route-plotter, hazarded a guess on our position.

  At least once an hour, we’d cross a two-lane road or a particularly dramatic canyon draw marked on the map, and maybe we’d get lucky and there was a power line or a creek intersecting at the same place, and then we had a reliable fix to supplement my dead reckoning. But most of the way across Texas all we had was a compass course and my time-elapsed calculations. The prairie winds were fickle and constantly changing direction—at the low altitudes we were flying, winds-aloft reports weren’t very reliable—and I had to correct a lot for drift. After an hour or two of flying we’d see the sun glinting off rooftops on the horizon, steer for it, and hope that when we got there that it was Sweetwater or Lamesa. Most of the time I was right, and sometimes I was off by a town or two, but we never wandered off course more than twenty or thirty miles.

  Several times, in the distance off our beam, we saw a windmill and fences, beckoning us with reflections of the sun. We flew over for a look. They were ranches, and it was branding season. We circled low and waved to the cowboys on their horses.

  Those branding paddocks were a nice moment for us, especially for Kern. Over the winter, while we worked on the Cub in the barn, he had spoken in breathless terms of reaching the wide open west.

  “Rink, wait’ll we hit Texas. There’s still real live cowboys out there. They have cattle-drives and roundups, just like you see on Bonanza and Rawhide.”

  “Ah Kern, come off it,” I would say. “Why do you believe that shit on TV? They herd cattle today with helicopters and pickups.”

  “No way Rink. I’m telling you. They do it still with quarter horses. Purebred quarter horses, with a little mustang thrown in.”

  That was another problem with Kern, I thought. He was a sucker for quarter horses, and western-style riding. When we were young, my father had built us a rodeo corral in our lower field, replete with audience bleachers, a steer chute, and a barrel-course. Then he went overboard and bought us a quarter horse gelding trained for roping. On Sunday afternoons, we’d all go down to the “Buck Corral” and my father would pull these mangy Black Angus calves that he was raising out of the barn, whip them through the chute, and Kern and I would take turns racing around the corral on the roping horse, lassoing the calves, and then jumping off and wrestling those bawling, farting runts to th
e ground. It was a lot of crap, I thought. Usually it took us a full ten minutes to rope a calf, and by then the miserable little bovine was so tired it laid down on the ground and practically begged us to tie it up. But Kern loved this stuff. During our “Rodeo Days,” he wore a cowboy hat and imitation-leather chaps all afternoon. Our roping horse was named, of all things, Texas. As far as I was concerned, Kern was living in the past, and he was expecting far too much from our trip.

  Well, shit. I had to be wrong about something. We were both excited as we circled the paddocks in the Cub. Below, reallive cow-punchers, on quarter horses, were chasing Hereford and longhorn crosses around a dusty corral. My knees felt weak, just watching them, and I was humming “Home on the Range.”

  “Rink! Get a load of that guy, right there! Doesn’t he look just like Michael Landon in Bonanza?”

  By gum, it was Little Joe. The painted pony galloped ahead of the rest, all silver saddle buckles and foamy breast collar. The rider was classically handsome and lithe, with brown leather chaps, matching vest, spurs, and a curled-up Stetson.

  “Jesus Kern. Look at this! You think it’s fake maybe? A dude ranch or something?”

  “Nah, nah, nah Rink. Dude ranches are in Montana. This is real! These are cowboys. Would you please get this into your thick skull? We’re in Texas!”

  We just couldn’t get over it. Real live cowboys, in real live Texas. Life had never seemed as direct and as romantic as this.

  From 500 feet, it was like viewing a performance, a thing of equestrian beauty. The cutting horses, leaning over hard and digging in their hindquarters, piled into the herd of cows. Then we’d see a pretty chestnut or a buckskin with a black mane cut a calf out from its mother, and the rider threw his rope. The calf flipped over in a cloud of dust. The horses were excellently trained. While the calf was still in mid-air, the horse lunged back to bring tight the rope, looking back to the saddle to make sure the cowboy was ready for his back-trot. Swirling the rope home on the pommel, the cowboy spurred the pony and they galloped off, dragging the calf by its leg or neck. At the branding fire, when they put the hot iron to the steer’s rump, we could see a puff of smoke curl up from the sizzling flesh.

  Could the country really be like this, just as my brother imagined it? Sometimes it didn’t feel as if we were flying at all, or navigating, or worrying about fuel. We were crossing a dream space. Up ahead, we’d see another cloud of dust, which meant another branding corral, and we’d fly for it. We crossed the prairie that way, lighting from paddock to paddock.

  Denton went by, then Decatur, Paradise, and Perrin. We decided that we would try and make Abilene that night. Abilene, we knew, was a mythic cowtown, the kind of place where we belonged right now. On Rawhide, Clint Eastwood was always telling the boys to “Head ’em up, and move ’em out,” so they could make Abilene before the gulches ran dry. Country and western music wasn’t popular on the east coast then, but there was one hit tune that we knew, “Abilene.” “Abilene, Oh Abilene,” the singer wailed. So, we would fly for Abilene and stay there for the night.

  It wasn’t all beauty and barnstorming rhapsody though. In our feathery Cub, the turbulence was brutal. This was different, hard stuff out here. The buffets were long, powerful drafts that hauled the plane up and down, sometimes at more than 1,000 feet a minute on our vertical speed indicator. The wallops hit us a lot of times in clear air; they were not associated with mountainous terrain or clouds. It was too much, even for Kern. He throttled back to under 2,000 rpm, to slow the plane through the rough air, picking the speed back up by diving a little when an updraft finally gave up on us and dropped us weightless under a cloud. But, mostly, it was just a game of waiting for the next malevolent monster to hit.

  All that rough flying through Texas—for that matter, throughout the west—was really our own fault, a product of our naïveté and inexperience. Kern and I had both studied the aviation bible, William K. Kershner’s The Private Pilot’s Flight Manual, but we’d never bothered to prepare for our flight by reading Kershner’s Instrument Flight Manual, or the many volumes available on aviation weather and desert and mountain flying. If we had, we would have known the cardinal rule of western flying: never take off in the heat of midday. As it climbs toward its meridian the sun generates huge, bone-rattling thermals directly off the prairie floor. The thermals remain active until four or five in the afternoon. Nobody ever bothered to tell us this either, and no flyer we knew would have thought to, because we were surrounded by romantics, not scientific pilots.

  Kern and I both managed to survive the hellish turbulence of the west, for quite different reasons. It was another study in our divergent personalities. He was virtually immune to discomfort in the air, and in any case was too determined to reach California to sit out the rough air on the ground. I was miserable a lot of the time but felt intellectually committed to bearing up in the turbulence.

  I was a lot more bookish than Kern, and I had read and reread all the aviation greats—Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Ernest K. Gann, Nevil Shute. (Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient, I thought, was the best flying memoir of all.) This self-education in aviation literature had steeled me for our flight. To adventurers like St. Ex and Gann, physical discomfort and hazard weren’t an unfortunate byproduct of flying, but instead an existential challenge, practically the whole point. My favorite essay, and one I had practically memorized, was Exupéry’s brilliant ode to turbulence in Wind, Sand and Stars, “The Elements,” a description of his encounter with the tail end of a typhoon while flying the mails in Patagonia. In Fate is the Hunter, Gann battles killer turbulence from Presque Isle to Natal. They wrote about the hell of rough-air flying the same way Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville wrote about rough seas. These were perils to be reflected on later, experiences that they turned into finely wrought homilies on courage, perseverance and faith. They never pretended to be fearless, but they weren’t deterred either. There was always another range, the next Andean or Himalayan peak, to conquer. Flying was like that, I thought. The seatbelt was already as tight as it could be, and still you gave it one more yank against the murderous chop and flew on. I finally appreciated all the reading I had done once we got out over Texas and were bounced all over the prairie sky. St. Ex and Gann had given me strength. I never stopped hating turbulence and I was frightened by it, but I did find a way simply to endure.

  As the day wore on, I became more physically hardened. Actually, it was the accumulation of days that helped. The night before, undressing at the MOTEL CHEAP, Kern and I were both surprised by the black and blue marks on our bellies and hips. Flying the rough air of Kentucky, the constant jostling of our bodies against the seat belts had bruised and opened up our blood capillaries. As we continued west in turbulence, the black and blue marks merged into a continuous ring around our waists, so that in bathing suits we looked liked zebras with a single stripe. The bruises didn’t hurt that much, except at the beginning and the end of the day, and we found that we could relieve the pain by taking a hot shower or jumping into a motel pool.

  Kern didn’t seem to mind his own rough-air welts that much. But he was taken aback when he saw mine. He knew how much I hated flying in turbulence. As soon as we hit the first patch of bad air in Texas, he shook the controls so I could fly awhile myself, and we also elected to fly shorter hops, remaining in the air for two hours or less. This only helped a little, but Kern’s sympathetic attitude made it easier to bear the hours until the turbulence abated in the late afternoon.

  Nobody told us about prairie dogs either. We didn’t even know what they were at first, and had to ask at the next airport. We encountered our first colony about fifteen minutes out of Decatur. I was navigating from the rear seat, peering out through the open window for landmarks. There, off our left beam, was a rectilinear lunar landscape, pocked by neatly spaced craters.

  “Hey, Kern, what the hell is that?”

  Kern authoritatively called back that we were now in the heart of “Stearman Alley,”
and reminded me that we had passed a couple of large, abandoned World War II military training strips. Those craters up ahead, he said, were the remnants of an old Army Air Corps bombing range.

  I didn’t think so. Nobody could drop bombs in neat rows like that. I had my own theory.

  “No way Kern,” I called forward. “That’s an oil field up ahead.”

  “An oil field?”

  “Oh yeah Kern. We’re in Texas! Those are test bores for a big old oil field.”

  We flew over for a look.

  As we came in low hundreds of furry, Mad-Hatter creatures scurried in every direction, tumbling head-over-ass for their holes. We scratched our heads. Minks, maybe? Or chinchillas—yeah, wild, Texas chinchillas. Nah. We were in Texas. Out here, chinchillas and minks would be immense, as big as German shepherds back home. Probably they were some kind of western woodchuck. Whatever. These critters were apparently quite private, and smart as hell about passing aircraft. In the few seconds it took us to cross their cratered community, the place was instantly deserted, empty as a ghost town, as everybody dove for their holes. Except for a few stragglers racing in pellmell from the prairie, and some tumbleweed blowing across the edges, nothing moved.

  There were dozens of those colonies across Texas, out as far as Midland, where the desert begins. We learned to play them just right. If we approached downwind with the sun in front of us, so the gophers weren’t spooked by our engine noise or shadow, we could gradually sneak in with gentle turns and observe their habits. They were lovable little devils, scampering about and bumping into each other in furry collisions, coming out of their holes on the fly, standing upright and inquisitively peering up at us with their babylike paws wedged against their cheeks.