by Buck, Rinker
The airport mechanic arrived in his pickup a few minutes later. He was a tanned, gentle fellow in a greasy ball-cap, and he smiled knowingly when we explained what happened. He reached into his pocket for a key and unlocked the fuel pumps.
“You may as well gas up now,” he said. “Let me get a couple of thangs from the hangar. You’ll be outta here in ten minutes.”
When the mechanic returned he was carrying a flashlight, needle-nose pliers, and a shiny galvanized-steel spring, slightly larger than the ones used on screen doors, fresh out of its box. He reached inside the tail inspection plate up to his elbow, grappled and winced, and came back out with two broken pieces of a rusty spring.
“It’s what I figured,” he said. “Busted elevator spring.”
“Goddamn it,” Kern said, angry at himself. “It’s the one part I didn’t fix.”
“Ah, go easy on yourself young fella,” the mechanic said. “Nobody replaces an elevator spring. You fix ’em when they break. You’re just lucky that I got a new one that fits.”
“What would break a spring in flight like that?” my brother asked.
“Well, where you flyin’ from?” the mechanic said.
“New Jersey.”
“Nu Jursa! Whoa here. Are you them boys on the radio?”
“We don’t have a radio in this Cub.”
“No! The AM band boys. You’re all over it. Evrabaddy’s lookin’ for you boys. They’re saying you’re the youngest aviators ever to fly coast to coast.”
We were astonished. It was the first indication we had that there was press interest in our flight, and it had never occurred to us that we might be the youngest aviators to fly the continent. It seemed bizarre to us, too. Here we were out in this lonely, remote stretch of Texas, which felt like the end of the world, and we were enjoying the isolation and the complete freedom from everything we knew. Meanwhile, newscasters were talking about our flight on the radio. Both of us instinctively suspected that my father was behind it. He was probably trying to build as much interest as he could, so there’d be a big splash once we got to California. Neither of us minded very much. We just hadn’t expected my father to pull a fast one like that on us in the middle of the country, and we hadn’t expected newscasters to be interested either. What did everybody see in this trip?
“Anyways, that’s what did it to you,” the mechanic said. “You been flying in a lot of turbulence?”
“Yeah, lots,” my brother said. “Straight, almost, for three days.”
“Well, it’s too much for an old spring like that,” the mechanic said. “She just gave out in the stress, that’s all.”
The new spring that the mechanic had wasn’t designed for a Piper Cub. It was for a Piper Pawnee cropduster. But by crimping back the ends of the spring and making adjustments on the armature of the elevator, the mechanic adapted it for the Cub. As he set the new spring in place, the mechanic explained that the controls would be lighter now.
“The thang’ll be kinda loosey-goosey on you now, know what I mean?” the mechanic said. “But it’ll be better. Real responsive-like.”
The airport owner and his wife arrived and opened up the pilots’ shack. We went in and bought some crackers and soda. The mechanic came in for his morning coffee, and we all sat outside on the porch and talked.
The air was pungent with the dry, woody smell of the high plains early in the morning. There was a thick coating of dew on the macadam ramp and the gas pumps, and glistening on the sagebrush beyond—surprising, I thought, for this dry terrain. The biggest jackrabbits I had ever seen were bounding across the ramp, running circles around each other.
The woman walked out to the pumps to empty the waste barrels. Returning, she called to her husband.
“Dear,” she said. “Look at that pretty little Cub on the ramp. It’s perfect. Perfect! I’ve never seen a plane so beautifully restored.”
Kern beamed, took off his cowboy hat, and ran his hand through his sweaty, flaxen hair. I was laughing my ass off for him that morning. Kern saw me doing it, looked over and smiled, and started laughing at himself too. He looked ridiculous in that big ten-gallon hat he’d bought for himself. But he was happy and self-confident out here in the far reaches of Texas. I could see him changing and growing, it seemed, with every leg we completed, and he was a lot more fun to be with when he was relaxed on the ground like this. I couldn’t get over how much I enjoyed being with him now.
“Ah, lookey here,” the airport owner said. “Are you them boys from Nu Jursa? It’s on the radio. Everybody’s trying to find you two.”
“Yeah. That’s us,” Kern said, but he felt a little sheepish about it. “Look. I’m just doing this to build time for my commercial license. We didn’t do this for publicity.”
“Oh it’s okay!” the fellow said. “This’ll be good for aviation, you know? They’ll be a pack of people waiting for you once you get over the mountains this afternoon.”
The airport owner was a licensed pilot who flew the Rockies all the time, mostly in big Cessnas and twin-engine planes. He went over the maps with Kern and me and showed us how to fly the Guadalupe Pass. From west Texas, it was better to cross northwest into New Mexico and launch for Guadalupe Peak from the north. Then we could head almost due south for the twin Guadalupe Peaks, flying a parallel course with the mountain range until we reached the pass. That way, the Guadalupe Range would protect us from the prevailing wind from the west until we were up above 9,000 feet. Facing the pass straight on for fifty miles would just expose us to heavy winds and leeward turbulence.
The owner at Sweetwater didn’t discourage us from taking on the pass, but he didn’t make it sound easy either. There were a couple of planes on the strip with 85-horse engines, a Luscombe and a Cessna 140, that had been through the pass, so it could be done. The big thing to watch, he said, was altitude loss. We should turn and face the pass about three or four miles out. If, during the first mile toward the pass, we could hold our altitude and course against the wind and the turbulence, we’d probably be okay. But if we started losing height and couldn’t regain it, we should turn back right away.
He said one other thing that cheered us.
“It’ll actually get better for you inside the pass. It’s like the eye of a storm in there, a lot calmer. So, the last mile going in, when it’s hell, just know it’ll actually be better inside.”
As we turned to go, Kern pulled out his wallet. We owed them for a new elevator spring, labor, a tank of gas, crackers and soda. The three of them just stared at us and smiled. They wouldn’t take our money.
Kern tried to insist, but it was no use.
The owner removed his tattered ball-cap and ran his hand through his hair.
“Boys,” he said, “Just go. Evrabaddy’s real excited for you two. Fly hard, and you’ll make the mountains by noon.”
We refueled again at Wink, Texas, a tiny desert hamlet just south of the New Mexico border. The gas jockey there was a gaunt, unshaven ranchhand type with holes in his boots, filthy jeans, and a hideously sweat-stained straw hat. While I supervised the fueling, Kern walked across the ramp to stretch his legs.
“Ah, listen here fella,” the gas jockey called out. “Check out the hangar.”
Kern doubled back for the hangar, figuring that there must be some kind of nice airplane in there, a restored biplane or something, that the gas jockey wanted him to see.
As he filled the wing tank, the gas jockey kept looking over his shoulder toward my brother and the hangar, and he spilled gas on the fabric.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re spilling gas. Watch that wing.”
“Frig the wing. Watch your brother.”
“I said, watch that wing! You’re spilling gas.”
“And I said, watch your brother.”
A sound like a hundred snare drums and cymbals going off all at once resounded from the hangar, echoing off the corrugated tin walls.
Kern came running out of that hangar almost airborne. His cowboy hat
blew off, and his big brown eyes were as wide open with terror as the Gettysburg dead.
Crashing into the Cub’s wing strut, Kern leaned on it for support. He was panting and heaving, trying to catch his breath. Meanwhile, the hangar in front of us was rattling and heaving with a deafening roar, like it was about to come loose from its foundation.
“Jesus Christ, Rinker. Jesus. Lord.”
The gas jockey fell off the wing, laughing hard, a mad dervish of gas hose, 80-octane fuel and clattering ladder. Haw, haw, haw, haw! He hadn’t laughed this hard in months, since he sent the last jackass in penny loafers into the same hangar.
“Snakes,” my brother expelled. “Snakes. Hundreds of them, thousands. Rattler snakes.”
It was true. Still bending over with laughter, the gas jockey led us over to the hangar and we crept up to the shadowy interior by the door. He threw the door wide, and the roar of rattlers went off again, so loud I held my ears. There were thousands of rattlers in there, in wire cages stacked all along the walls, with a large, open pit near the far end crawling with a hundred or more snakes all twisted around and slithering over each other. Smaller, wooden cages, stacked in the middle of the floor, held a huge colony of breeding rats—rattler food. A few of the snakes from the open pit began slithering over for the door as soon as they saw the light poking in, and Kern and I jumped back.
My father had told us a story once from his Texas days, about a young air cadet returning late at night from a drunk in town. Against all standing orders he took a shortcut through the prairie and walked across a runway. From the barracks they heard his screams, and everyone scrambled into Jeeps and drove out there. The airman was already dead, scarred by more than a dozen rattler bites. To me, it was just more barnstorming blarney, typical of my father’s need to concoct stranger, more macabre tales as his standard fare of tailspins and midair collisions wore thin over the years. Turns out, though, the one about the rattlers was true.
“Oh yeah, haven’t you heard about this?” the gas jockey asked. “Don’t you ever, ever cross a runway at night in Texas. Them rat’lers will get you before you ever see them.”
Rattlers are heat-seeking reptiles. From the frequent deaths of their mates, most of them knew to keep off heavily trafficked roads at night. But small airport runways are generally deserted, and after sunset, when the desert cools quickly, the rattlers crawl by the hundreds onto the warm macadam strips. At Wink, and a number of other airports around, the owners had developed a lucrative second income, harvesting the snakes at night with ten-foot snake poles and selling them live by the pound to meat-packing plants in Dallas and San Antonio. In some parts of Texas, fresh snake meat was still considered a delicacy. But most of it was packed like tuna into cans and shipped to Asia. Once a month, a big semi rolled into Wink and hauled off the rattlers.
The chucklehead gas jockey had a fine time describing to everyone in the pilots’ shack how he had scared the balls off another out-of-town pilot. But he had a fraction of decency left. One of the people inside told him that he’d heard about us on the radio, so he too wouldn’t let us pay for our fuel either. We were on the freebie roll again, and everyone seemed to be behind our flight now, cheering us toward the mountains. As a makeup gift, the gas jockey gave us several tins of rattler meat.
“Coast to coast, huh?” the gas jockey said. “Well, good luck. Evrabaddy’s rootin’ for ya.”
The heat was up, our height above sea level was now almost 3,000 feet, and it took us forever to get off the runway at Wink. The Cub dismally wallowed in the climb. We were just one hop away from launching for the pass, and we didn’t want any extra weight. As soon as we were out of sight, mushing up over the gray-beige desert, we threw the tins of rattler meat out the window.
Now that we had reached the hard desert, we knew that we were supposed to follow one cardinal rule: remain over highways in case the engine acted up. But from Wink we would have to fly all the way back to Pecos to pick up a road. We looked at the map and decided to take a shortcut, flying northwest until we picked up the Pecos River, which we could follow up toward Loving and then into Carlsbad, New Mexico. The midday heat had churned up some low cumulus clouds, which clung to the foothills of the Rockies in the distance, so we would have a decent horizon. We struck out over open desert for Carlsbad.
Kern let me fly, and I was enjoying it, skimming the bottom of the clouds in a Texas sky and ruddering over now and then to look for the Pecos River.
Whabang, Whabang, Whabang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! Shit.
What was happening? Violent, irregular vibrations were shaking the plane.
The stick and rudder pedals trembled. The engine cowling up front leapt so violently on its mounts I was afraid that it was going to cut loose and cartwheel into the windshield. The airframe and fabric shook. We were finished, done for, fifty miles from the nearest airport over uninhabited desert, without so much as a dirt road underneath us. It was exactly the situation we had vowed to avoid. Instinctively I throttled back and slowed the plane.
Kern took the controls right away.
“Don’t panic Rinker! We’ve still got an airplane here. Navigate. I want to know our exact position.”
He inched the throttle forward and set up a slow flight at about sixty-five miles per hour, and we limped across the desert like that, saving every inch of height for as long as we could, with the front of the Cub banging violently and the floorboards trembling and vibrating underneath us.
We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. The rpm on the tachometer was smooth and consistent, the oil pressure and temperature normal. The engine was responding well to the throttle. It was a partial engine failure of some kind, we guessed. Four-cylinder Continentals were famous for their endurance, even with a cylinder out. We knew of pilots who had kept damaged engines running for half an hour or more. But it didn’t seem likely that we could make Carlsbad. The plane was shaking even more violently than before, and everything from the altimeter to the windows was rattling. And now the turbulence had picked up too, and it was very difficult to fly it properly in the slowed, vibrating plane. As the nose porpoised up and down, we were very uncomfortable, so drenched with sweat that our shirts were wet, and our hearts pounded along with the plane. While I looked for spots below where we might land, Kern struggled to keep the Cub straight and level and to maintain our altitude. He was extremely disciplined and levelheaded about that—he didn’t want to lose an inch of altitude until we had decided what to do.
But it was a nauseating sensation, wallowing along in a wounded plane like that, and it was hard to resist the urge to just ditch the plane. It would be a relief, going down in the desert, and I began to sweat and tremble from that horrible claustrophobia known to pilots and their passengers in a panic. At any cost, I wanted out of that plane.
“Kern! We can put her down. If we ditch sideways and wipe out the wheels, we’ll be fine.”
“No! No Rink. I’m not ditching 71-Hotel. I’ve got an airplane here. I think we can make Carlsbad.”
It was a hellish hour, getting to Carlsbad. But after about twenty minutes, by making minute adjustments to the throttle and trim, Kern found a kind of queasy, nose-up attitude that reduced the vibrations and the trembling of the controls. We were still being kited all over the place by turbulence but we could stand being in the plane.
But our trip was doomed. I knew that my brother was thinking the same thing. Every second that we ran the engine was only damaging it more. Even if we made it to an airport, we probably couldn’t afford the repairs or, more likely, the new engine we’d need. We’d have to leave the plane in New Mexico and take a Greyhound bus home. The indignity of that seemed pathetic. Everybody knew about our trip by now, and it was going to end just east of the Rockies with engine failure. And what fools we’d been. Without a radio, we couldn’t call in our position as we went down.
And the waterbag. The fucking waterbag. I looked down to the hardtack desert below us. I wasn’t the least bit worr
ied about walking out—we both could make the fifty or sixty miles to Loving, even in our penny loafers. But we probably wouldn’t last until evening without water. Suddenly it seemed incredibly imbecilic for us not to have a waterbag, and incredibly wise for my father to have suggested one. We had boxed ourselves into exactly the situation he warned against. Barnstorming blarney had provided for this contingency, but we hadn’t listened.
Whabang, Whabang, Whabang! Sticks and floorboard and baggage compartment thundering, we struggled over the desert.
Making agonizingly slow progress over the scorched and rocky wasteland below, we finally picked up the Pecos River and followed it north into Loving. But it was work, nasty, hot work, all the way. When the big strip at Carlsbad came into view, my brother pushed back his cowboy hat, rested his throttle hand on the instrument panel, and handed me back his Ray-Bans to wipe free of sweat.
“Rink! We’re going to make it. We’re fucked, but we’ve made it to an airport.”
Waffling onto the runway at Carlsbad, we shut down the engine and coasted into a pile of tumbleweed on the side of the runway. I threw open the door and jumped out to inspect the engine.
As soon as I could see the plane from the outside I started to laugh.
“Kern! It’s fine!”
“What?”
“It’s just the cowling gasket! It blew off in flight. It’s nothing! Just some ripped fabric.”
The rubber and asbestos gasket that ran along the underside of the engine cowling and two of its three metal fittings were hanging down to the ground. Those fittings were another casualty of all the turbulence we’d flown the Cub through. In flight, one of the fittings had sprung loose, fell out into the slipstream and sucked the rest of the gasket out. Only one fitting held, and the rest of the assembly dangled out underneath the plane like a kite tail. The banging and vibrations were caused by the heavy metal fittings striking the landing gear and the underside of the plane as we flew along at over sixty miles per hour. The cowling was jumping up and down from the kite-tail effect of the heavy gasket and fittings billowing in the slipstream. This in turn set up secondary vibrations along the rest of the airframe that shook the plane.