by Buck, Rinker
Wildlife observation gets quite boring, however, and it was a lot more fun to terrorize the bastards. Kern developed our prairie-dog aerial assault tactics, but after a couple of colonies I took over the controls myself and perfected the technique.
Coming in with the sun behind us, we’d shut down the throttle and quietly glide in over the middle of a colony. The trick was to get about fifty prairie dogs all in one place, and then inch over with the rudders so that the Cub’s shadow made a direct hit on the crowd. The plane’s shadow was generally about three seconds ahead of us. As soon as it hit a big concentration of prairie dogs, they all dove at once for the nearest holes. At that instant we firewalled the throttle to give the fur-balls an extra shot of adrenaline from the noise. It was better than yelling “Fire!” in a movie theater. As we passed over and looked straight down, a dozen or more of the gophers were stuck headfirst in each hole, garroted at the neck, with a frantic circle of hind legs desperately kicking up a ring of dust. It worked every time, as good as a stun-grenade. Scare the bejesus out of fifty dense-packed prairie dogs, and they’ll all dive at once for the same hole.
At the third or fourth colony, I remembered the Lance Moon Pies that we had purchased back in Oklahoma. As Easterners, we were not familiar with the Moon Pie, but apparently it was a popular food staple out west. Moon Pies consisted of two giant saucers of chocolate cake, held together like an Oreo with a caloric wad of sweet white cream in the middle. They looked filling, and we had a long flight ahead, so I bought a few and stuffed them in the baggage compartment. Now I wondered how a prairie dog colony would react to a Moon Pie dropped in its midst.
When the next colony came up, I took out the first Moon Pie, unwrapped it and resisted the temptation to try a bite, and opened up the side door. I shook the stick and took the plane from Kern.
I set up a nice, gentle glide toward the colony, with the sun on the tail. I figured that, with the forward momentum of the plane behind it, the Moon Pie would hit just about where our shadow was. So, I would release just as the prairie dogs all dove for cover. After we passed over, the prairie dogs would all extricate themselves from the holes, shake the kinks out of their necks, and discover that Moon Pie.
Bombs away, and it looked like a good drop. I powered up, but not too much, so I could turn sharper in a slower plane, and came back over the colony.
The Texas prairie dog, I can report, definitely goes for Moon Pies. It was like a single bucket of slop thrown to fifty starving hogs.
In one madass tangle of fur, tumbleweed bits, and trampled-over youngins, the whole damn colony declared war on itself. With all those craters around, theoretically it should have been difficult to see which one of them had been my Moon Pie drop zone. But in practice, it was easy. There was this writhing, slithering, gyrating pyramid of mammals down there, sixty or seventy furious little beasts scrambling over each other, clawing each other’s eyes out and snapping shiny teeth to get to the prize, the Moon Pie at the bottom of the seismic heap.
The prairie dog must be related to the lemming. As the scrummage piled higher, more gophers ran in from the suburbs and jumped on, just because everybody else was doing it. How many prairie dogs can fit on top of a Moon Pie? At least a hundred. And it was all just a Hobbesian farce by now, because some big ole dominant male, burrowed in at the bottom, had probably snapped up that Moon Pie in six furious bites. But it was only a partial victory for him. With the weight of the whole colony upon him, that sucker had to be hurting, with complications from asphyxiation and sucrose shock.
I circled the colony a few times to see what happened next. After a while, the prairie dogs just got tired of being on top of each other, and they gradually slid off the pile and staggered home to their craters. I felt sorry for the ones on the bottom. It was obvious that they had been squished. After the others left, the critters from the bottom just lay there for a while, shellshocked and listless under the hot sun, and then they started scratching off on their bellies. I prayed for their survival. There were a lot of heavy-duty vultures and hawks circling those colonies all the time, and if one of those flattened critters dawdled getting back to his hole, he would be somebody’s dinner before long.
I kept the plane well stocked on pastries after that, and this was one of the great pleasures of our coast to coast flight, feeding the prairie dogs. If an airport didn’t have a vending machine with Moon Pies, I bought doughnuts or peanut-butter crackers. We could even throw out a bag of potato chips, unopened, and the prairie dogs would tear through the wrapping paper and greedily consume the potato chips in a matter of seconds. Those bastards were really starving down there. The big scrummage over the Moon Pie wasn’t fair to the animals on the bottom, so I started altering my technique, to protect lives. Instead of releasing one, solitary Moon Pie or cracker, I threw out a bunch at high speed, so the baked goods were dispersed over a wide area by our slipstream. It was a lot better that way because then only ten or twelve critters jumped onto a single pile, and nobody got hurt.
In the afternoon, the headwinds had picked up, and circling to feed the prairie dogs had consumed extra gas, and we were forced to refuel before we reached Abilene. As we passed Breckenridge in the central prairie, I calculated our time aloft and fuel burn, concluding that we should land as quickly as possible. Our only choice was the airport at Albany, a ranch hamlet thirty miles ahead. The airport lay right on the north edge of town, so that the runway looked like a continuation of the street grid, and we whistled in just over the roofs as we made our landing.
From the air, Albany looked quaint and ideally western, a no-frills cowtown. As we descended to land we saw a dusty, wide main street, wooden sidewalks, porches, and false-front roofs. There were even hitching posts and a watering trough for horses. It was the end of the Independence Day weekend and the annual barrel races at the municipal arena were just breaking up. Several groups of riders on horses were loping through town, four and five abreast, manes and tails curved up in the breeze.
I never forgot the view I had of one of them. A cowgirl on a big Appaloosa was galloping up the street from the arena to catch the other riders. As we turned for the airport, right over her head, she neck-reined the horse around and I looked straight down. The horse was prancing and whipping around in circles, and the girl’s blond hair and the fringes on her shirt sleeves whirled like a dervish, and she waved up at us and smiled, a pretty picture from the air.
The other riders raised their hats and waved too.
“Kern! Get a load of this, wil’ya? These people are just riding their horses right into town.”
“Darn it all Rink. I’ve been trying to tell you this all day. Everybody rides their horse into town out here. This is Texas!”
Still, I couldn’t get over it. It never occurred to me that Texas would be this old-fashioned, so close to its frontier roots.
It was only four in the afternoon and we could have done some more flying. But we liked the look and feel of Albany so much we decided to skip Abilene and stay here for the night. The airport owner gave us a ride into town in his pickup.
The hotel in Albany was a grand old-fashioned affair with a white adobe front, Mexican tile floors, and a big front desk made of ornately carved wood. Our room upstairs was large and tall, with a ceiling fan and immense, whorehouse-style beds. A set of tall vertical windows opened onto a railed balcony. The view was north, out over the board sidewalks and false-front roofs. The prairie beyond, dappled with sagebrush, glowed pink in the late afternoon sun.
We were hungry when we got in, and the hotel coffee shop had a special going—two “Texas-size” hamburgers and a large RC Cola, for ninety-nine cents. We brought the burgers up to our room, but they were inedible. It’s an abomination, what Texans do to a piece of meat. Slopped on to both sides of the burger was a sauce, thick as swamp mud, that appeared to consist of mustard, pickle relish, jalapeño peppers, chopped onions, Tabasco sauce, and some other material that I can only guess at, but it looked awfully close to week-
old, refried beans. We flushed the burgers down the toilet and decided to take a stroll through town.
The air smelled sweetly of sagebrush in bloom and manure piled at the hitching posts. All the horses were gone now, but there were still cowboys running up and down Main Street in their pickups, lots of pretty girls with sugary Texas accents, and, in the barbershop, men getting haircuts and a shave at six o’clock at night. In the window of the drug store, there was a stack of shiny straw cowboy hats, with thin, black string bands and metal grommets for air-holes, real, western-style headgear. Kern began to salivate. He didn’t want one of these big heavy Stetsons anyway—it would be too hot inside the plane. But these straw jobs looked perfect, and we went in.
Kern bought himself one of these immense, ten-gallon jobs, which made him look perfectly ridiculous, but he was happier than shit with that big cowboy hat on so I made an agreement with myself not to be embarrassed standing next to him. I settled on a black ball-cap emblazoned with a state map and a logo in yellow lettering, DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS, which I thought looked just right with my Ray-Bans. Thus attired for the wide open west, we swaggered out to the street.
Next door, there was an old western cafe, and we sat down for some chicken-fried steak.
Nobody was fooled by our hats. Because of our penny loafers and paisley shirts, which were difficult for people not to stare at, everybody could see that we were from out of town, way out of town. But these Texans were very sweet-natured and kind, not at all like those yahoos cropdusters back in Arkansas. They all wore broad Stetsons, pointed boots, and ornate belt buckles, and they kept stepping over to our table and introducing themselves. Nu Jursa! I could have listened to that nasal twang all night. Everything was a “thang,” everybody was an “ole boy” or a “gal,” and if the folks in Albany, Texas, liked something a lot, it was a “humdinger” or an “all-day horse.” They couldn’t get over the fact that we had flown all the way from the East Coast, just to land in little ole Albany.
“Piper Cub, hunh? Ain’t that kinder like a Model T or sumthang? Hot-diggety-damn. You boys is all bidness.”
We felt like a pair of real cowpokes, back in the room, dialing home for the first Texas gam. We carried the phone and two chairs out to the balcony and Kern kept his cowboy hat on while he spoke with my father. The moon rose over the prairie as they talked. Kern told him all about our day, and described our routes. My father was worried that we were flying too hard, and thought we should take a rest once we got over the Rockies. He wanted us to plan a one-day layover in El Paso, which Kern was resisting by being noncommittal.
When I got on, my father launched into a long reverie about Texas, making me sit through this ridiculously extended chat about all the great Stearman men he once knew out here, the ranches he had seen from the air, the whole nine yards of Lone Star blarney. I wasn’t in the mood.
“Hey Dad,” I snapped. “Thanks for telling me all about Texas. But I’m in Texas right now. I don’t have to hear about Texas from you.”
My father sounded hurt, and I immediately regretted what I had said. I couldn’t understand myself. In the morning, crossing the Little River country, I missed him. Now that I had a moment or two to share with him, I was acting up. It was almost as if I could tolerate him theoretically but not in person. Kern was a lot more patient that way and could put up with the bullshit, a major difference between us, but I didn’t have very long to dwell on this because my father had already changed the subject.
“Listen here,” my father said, “How’s the waterbag doing?”
Shit. Now I had to revert to that mode.
“Dad, the waterbag’s just great. That old Stearman guy in Arkansas showed us how to rig the bag flat on the landing gear, so there’s less drag. The cap faces backwards.”
“Good. Good. Any problems?”
“Well, just one thing Dad. The bag loses water in flight. Every time I check it, it’s down a gallon or two.”
“Yup. It figures. Same thing use to happen to me. Now, to fix a problem, son, you have to understand it. Tell me, what’s happening here?”
“Ah, let’s see. Engine vibrations. The engine vibrations are forcing water out through the cap.”
“Nope. Think son, think.”
“All right. The seams are bad. Water’s leaking out through the seams at the bottom.”
“Nope. Try again.”
“Dad, c’mon. I’ve been flying all day. I’m tired. Couldn’t you just tell me?”
“All right. Look, it’s evaporation. That waterbag is sitting out there in the sun all day, and you’ve got engine exhaust blowing over it too. All that heat evaporates the water right through the canvas. In the old days, I used to lose a quart an hour out of one of those bags.”
Evaporation. Of course. How could I overlook a development that basic? I was lying so fast I couldn’t keep track of all the scientific ramifications.
“Right Dad. Evaporation. So, what do I do?”
“Well c’mon son, that’s simple. Every time you land to top off the gas?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, fill the waterbag too.”
CHAPTER 14
For five hundred miles east of the Continental Divide, the high plains of Texas and New Mexico sweep up as a long, imperceptible incline, rising steeply at the end as the stately massif of the Rockies comes into view. From our dawn takeoff at Albany to our afternoon arrival at Carlsbad, New Mexico, where we launched for the Guadalupe Pass, we climbed more than 2,000 feet in land elevation, to almost 4,000 feet above sea level. We flew west through Sweetwater, Lamesa, and Seminole, the fabled “southern route” of the early airmail flyers, but a pilot must fly that stretch at least once to understand what the land is doing to him. Usually we were looking only five or ten miles ahead, not enough to sense the corrections for height we should have been making. All morning, the ground seemed to be stealthily rising up and trying to swallow the plane. Every hour or so we realized our land error and climbed to avoid obstructions and terrain.
The country, too, changed. After Midland, Texas, the beige and red prairie, with its occasional clumps of green draws, rapidly gave way to sandy desert littered with boulders and rocks, the earth all dirty yellow and black, with spectacular mesas and ravines forming the serrated foothills of the Rockies. There were bizarre, disc-shaped cirrus clouds that day, screening the sunlight into weak shadows. The featureless terrain obliterated into featureless sky, erasing the horizon. Deprived of clear ground reference, Kern occasionally experienced problems with vertigo, or spatial disorientation, and was forced to fly by peering constantly at his turn-and-bank indicator and altimeter. I had my hands full navigating by the compass and my time-elapsed calculations. We were flying through an extra-planetary abyss. Even the towns we passed along the way, many of which we never actually saw, had a far-off ring. Big Spring, Odessa, Pecos.
Farther along the clouds broke up and the sun scalded down. Oil fields, the first that we saw, popped out of the empty landscape. Dozens of black and orange derricks methodically pumped away, and the dirt tracks leading up to them radiated off into the desert like the spokes of a sundial. But the oil installations must have been unattended most of the time because there was virtually no sign of human activity below.
Adding to our feelings of flying into a lunar cosmos, it was to be a day of mishaps and freak events. The big mountain pass ahead, which we knew we would brave by midafternoon, seemed to be pushing us back, warning us off by a series of aberrant mechanical and natural frights.
As we turned in for our first refueling stop of the morning, at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, the tail suddenly rattled and shook as violently as a truck hitting a pothole. The airframe resounded with a bang! The sticks sagged, heavy and hard, the nose dropped, and I had to grab the controls myself to help my brother pull the plane away from the ground. He lunged with both hands for his stick and yelled back.
“I’ve got the stick! You work the throttle and rudders! Just get me down Rink, work me
down.”
It was a pretty decent spot of flying we did that morning, but we couldn’t appreciate it right away. We didn’t know what had happened to the plane. All the possibilities ran through my mind. Had we collided with another plane? Maybe we’d lost our elevator struts and the tail was about to vibrate off. Or a bird-strike—we’d seen low-flying vultures all morning. They were awfully big birds, and if one of them was hung up on our rudder, the plane might act like this.
It only took us a half-minute or so to reach the ground, but that’s a long time when your heart is pounding like a pile driver. Kern was holding up the plane all right, but with little jerks and bumps, because two hands cannot be as coordinated as one. All the way down he kept yelling for me to work the throttle and rudders better for him, which wasn’t an easy thing. A single mind flying alone gracefully choreographs the body—stick hand, throttle hand, the feet on the rudders—into a coordinated landing approach. Two minds doing it together, especially two frightened minds, are an uncoordinated jumble.
“Power, Rink!”
“Not that much! C’mon!”
“Trim. Give me some nose up.”
“Wind drift! Jesus, could you watch that? Left rudder, Rink.”
But gradually I got into my brother’s head and got the hang of that strange descent. We mushed into a soft cushion of air over the runway. To help stall the plane, I furiously cranked in all the nose-up trim I could get, scraping some skin off my knuckles against the metal flange on the carburetor-heat knob as I flew the handle around. I didn’t notice the blood on my pants until we stepped out of the plane.
At the gas pumps, which were deserted at seven in the morning, we couldn’t find anything wrong with the plane. There were no dents or breaks in the fabric, everything was in place, and when we took off the inspection plates on the tail and peered inside, everything seemed to be in order. But the stick was completely dead on us and we could never fly the plane as it was. It was a mystery. My brother sat on the wheel of the Cub with his chin in his hands, miserable with himself. Our plans for reaching the mountains that day seemed dashed.