by Buck, Rinker
“Rink! Pull your harness tight!”
“It’s tight!”
“Well pull it harder. Here we go!”
Perhaps we waited three seconds for the first belt of turbulence to hit us. Perhaps it was thirty seconds. But time soon meant nothing. Once it hit, all time ceased.
Whong!
It happened very quickly and violently. One second we were level and facing the pass, squinting down out the sides to see the clear patch of V ahead of us, the next second we were down so hard on the left wing that the tip was pointed straight onto the desert, 90 degrees over. Sky, desert, and mountain wall gyrated around as in a centrifuge. From the force of the blast, our shoulders banged up against the throttle casement and our feet momentarily went weightless off the rudder pedals.
It was a physically arduous thing, getting out of it. My brother lunged forward with the stick to arrest a stall, pushed hard over on the ailerons and rudder, and waited for something to happen. There was no determined half-smile now. He was scrambling up there, fighting G-forces with his arms and legs, to get the plane upright again. But we were now so high, over 11,000 feet on the altimeter, and the force of the blast was so strong, that the controls simply wouldn’t answer. In that high, thin air, there literally weren’t enough molecules passing over the controls to receive our commands. Our Cub just wasn’t meant to be that high. Unbelievably, the wing tucked under even farther, and we hung there motionless and weightless for a few seconds more, suspended on one side and almost inverted, before the plane slowly righted itself.
Damn. We’d lost 300 feet. Kern felt the stick for flying speed and hauled back again on the nose to regain the lost altitude. We had just enough time to catch our breath before the next blast hit.
We were just a fisherman’s cork bobber, severed from the line, careening over white water and rocks. The next two miles to the pass were like that, our wings rocking violently over, against which our flimsy controls seemed almost powerless. But by skittering and jockeying the stick sideways in a kind of mad wiggle and dance, my brother kept us tracking straight toward the middle of the pass.
This area just outside the pass was the notorious back quadrant, where the wind racing through the cut had already boiled over itself many times, churning up a wake turbulence on itself. The wind and the air disturbances here are generally worse than within the pass itself. As we got closer to the mountain wall, about a mile off, we began to probe a calmer patch of air. Now the wings were slamming over only 20 or 30 degrees.
I still didn’t see how we’d make it. The peaks looming on either side, just ahead, were still above us. The winds and the downdrafts kept beating us back. Passing 11,500 feet, Kern dipped the nose a bit to penetrate the headwind and make some forward progress. Then he hauled back again to regain the altitude. But as soon as he lifted the nose we got beaten back once more. We were just crawling to the pass, motionless in the headwind, like crabs scrambling up a beach in the intervals of waves, then spinning backward again in the receding surf.
The deserts, a hard beige and black, stretched monotonously to the horizons until the walled massif of the Rockies came into view.
Now the steep sides of the V were clearly visible just ahead of us, a fractured and veined massif of rock sloping up to meet us. In the turbulence, we were often pitched sideways, nose down. The aperture of the pass was quite narrow down below and didn’t fill the windshield, so that it didn’t seem possible that we could fit through. From these strange, uncontrolled attitudes, immense boulders and broken-toothed pillars of rock came into view, as if they were spinning up sideways to meet us. Individual rocks boldly stood out from the mass—I felt that I could see every pit mark and sandy abrasion. From a distance the pass had a harsh beauty. Closer in, it was ugly and gritty.
Hypoxia, or aeroembolism as the old pilots called it, is oxygen starvation. We had now been flying at 10,000 feet or above for over half an hour, the period of time it normally takes for pilots to feel the effects of oxygen denial. We had been concerned enough about hypoxia while crossing the mountains to discuss it several times before the trip, but it is typical of hypoxia that pilots forget all that they have learned once they are suffering from it. Hypoxia can work oppositely on different pilots. Some pilots become euphoric, swell with a sense of well-being and want to climb their plane even higher. Others turn morose and lethargic and are flooded with panic. As a flying team we were suffering both effects. I was definitely of the darker persuasion. Frightened and claustrophobic in the glassed-in interior of the plane, desperate to see again over the nose, I was boiling and shivering all over at once. Kern up front seemed content, and his smile had returned. He was happy to finally be in the mountains and a calmer patch of air.
Kern never seemed to lose his flying sense either. Fishtailing with the rudders, dipping the nose a bit and then goosing back with the stick, he worked to squeeze out of the plane and the wind every last foot of air.
Now it didn’t matter how either of us felt. We were inside the pass, and the edge of the mountain range on either side of us had disappeared. Ahead we could only see burned white sky, ugly walls of sand, and black veined rock. North and south had ceased to exist; there was just an east-west hole in the rock. We couldn’t turn back now, because the walls looming up on either side of us were too close, denying us a turning radius. And if we’d given up the wind on our nose, we would immediately have plunged to the rocks.
That final entry into the pass was a hallucinogenic blur for me. There was so much heat and noise in the cockpit, the glareshield above my head looked too hot to touch, and now the walls on either side of the pass tumbled up, quite close. There were moments when I looked out and the twin peaks were more or less level with us, and other moments when we were in a downdraft and they disappeared above the top of the wing. I felt exhausted, wanting to cry, but not wanting to, overwhelmed by a desire to escape into sleep.
I’d read about this, too, in war books, and Robert L. Scott in God Is My Co-pilot had written about it. In the middle of the worst combat mission he’d ever flown, or struggling to hoist an overloaded DC-3 over the Himalayas, suddenly he would be overwhelmed by the urge just to give up and fall off to sleep.
Yet with panic arrived a great inner calm and resignation. My father and my brother had been too cavalier about this. It wasn’t safe taking on the Rocky Mountains in an 85-horse Cub. So what? Cratering into the walls would be immensely pleasurable right now. I wouldn’t fight it, and the experience would be interesting, extrasensory, even. In a hurry, it would end this misery of light-headed, claustrophobic flight.
I was startled awake from this torpid fatalism by my brother calling back.
“Rinker! Take the controls.”
“What?”
“Take the stick! It’s your airplane! My arms have given out. I can’t hold it up anymore.”
My heart must have doubled its output just then, because I was instantly awake. Kern needed me to fly, and I was overjoyed to be able to do so, as if I been thrown a life-rope. Gaining control of the plane, I knew, would revive me.
I grabbed the stick in my lap, wiggling it and the rudders a bit to show him that I had the plane. He immediately stretched out his arms and cracked his knuckles, then began massaging his muscles. Clutching the struts over his head, he leaned forward over the instrument panel and peered out to the walls of the pass.
“I’m going to keep a real careful eye on these peaks,” Kern yelled back. “You fly.”
I was shocked by what I found. I caressed the controls forward and back to feel the play of air over the wings. There was almost nothing there. In that high air, we were flying just a few miles an hour above the stall. The great wind on our nose was the only thing holding us up.
We flew that way through the rest of the pass. It could have been six minutes, or twelve, or twenty. It doesn’t matter. Time had disappeared. I fought the turbulence and the downdrafts and kept the wings level, and didn’t give up an inch of height. I was fixated on
altitude, an antidote for my hypoxia, or maybe a symptom of it. When my brother handed me the plane, the altimeter read 11,600 feet, and I was determined not to lose a foot.
“Eleven-six.”
That was my mantra. Eleven-six. I wasn’t going to give an inch back to this mountain.
“Eleven-Six,” I kept repeating to myself, drunk on those numbers.
I constantly peered forward to the altimeter on the instrument panel up front, whacking my brother on his shoulder when he let it get in the way. The little hand on the dial couldn’t move off that 6, and when it did, I wiggled and fishtailed and nudged the stick to move the nose into better wind, to get us back up.
“Eleven-Six. Eleven-Six. Eleven-Six.”
My other fixation was my throttle hand. There was only one place for the throttle to be—all the way forward. I braced my arm in a lock-grip against it and never once relaxed the pressure.
It was an odd, wondrous experience, flying like that. Kern had handed the plane over to me, so matter of factly. Now we were so nose-high that he was perched almost directly on top of me, as if I were following him up a ladder. I didn’t worry at all about our position against the peaks because I could see him peering attentively from side to side. He was alert, in control, and I was gratified every time he showed the slightest movement, because it showed that he wasn’t keeling over from hypoxia, which would have left me all alone with the plane. He gave me hand signals from the instrument panel, or reached back and squeezed my legs, steering me left or right as we crawled past the outcrops inside the pass. He was the eyes, and I was the flying arms and legs. With him riding above me like that, and the throbbing, pulsating plane and the winds, I was an Atlas holding the whole works up, hoisting us over the pass.
I was very confident too, and all dangerous, indolent thoughts of cratering into the sides left me. We could easily make the rest of the pass, flying this way. There was still a lot of flying to do, and turbulence to fight, but I was euphoric about our progress so far and the rest of the challenge, now that there was some adrenaline flowing from me to the plane.
I was still deprived of vision and couldn’t see much. All I was doing, really, was staring straight up over Kern’s head to polarized sky, and fixating on the altimeter and Eleven-Six. I coordinated the stick entirely by seat-of-the-pants feel and the altimeter and airspeed indicator. I couldn’t see the sides of the pass anymore because the angle of the wings was too high, blocking my view out the side. But I trusted Kern up front to correctly judge our distance from the walls. With transcendent happiness and belief, I just hung on and flew Eleven-and-Six.
Eleven-and-six. Eleven-and-six. I held it for as long as I thought I could stand it, but still we weren’t through the pass yet and I held it some more. My arms were starting to hurt but I didn’t want to give up the plane until I absolutely had to. The far-side turbulence was supposed to be awfully bad too, and I wanted Kern fresh and rested for that. That cheered me some too, because I realized I was suffering the effects of hypoxia but I still had enough left to think.
Buffet-jolt, buffet-jolt, wham-wham-wham. This was very different turbulence now, unique, very choppy and quick, with violent sideways movement that shook the stick. Good. I never welcomed a spot of bad air so much, because this meant that we were beginning to hit the rotor turbulence on the far side.
I could do this for another minute, I thought. Summoning that last ounce of strength beyond all strength, I flexed my muscles against the throttle and the stick and counted to sixty.
“Kern! Are we through?”
“Just about! Just about.”
“All right! Listen, take back the plane.”
“It’s my airplane!”
My body cracked with relief. My throttle arm was as hard as cast iron and there were spasms and coils in my shoulders and hips, from the mental and physical tension of holding up the plane. But there wasn’t any room in that tiny cockpit to stretch myself out, so I just sat there like a scarecrow in the wind, bobbing and jerking on a stick.
We had enough presence of mind to remain high for another ten minutes. If we tried to descend through the hellgate of air on the windward side, the violent downdrafts would suction us back into the mountain. So we just hung up there as long as we could stand it, bong, bong, bong, bong in that awful air, Eleven-Six, Eleven-Six, hating with every bone in our bodies the God who made mountains. But I was mentally at rest, now that I knew we were past the peaks and that my brother had the plane. I closed my eyes and leaned my head on the window railing, exhausted and physically drained but satisfied with myself. I waited for the calm air to return and the sound of the engine idling as my brother let us down.
Finally, gulping in air as we fell, we dove for oxygen and the desert floor on the far side. It was a visual relief to finally be able to see out through the windshield and the side windows, and I realized that I must have dozed off for a few minutes as Kern held us up through the rotors. We were clear of the mountains now.
In the desert just beyond the pass there were shallow salt flats filled with water, a blue meringue shining under the sun, stretching north and south. Tiny white caps and gently swirling pools lapped up against sand, an exotic, bizarre marine display after so much time staring at desert and hard rock. The air above the liquid flats was cool, and it cleared our heads. Over desolate mesquite country, we steered due west for El Paso, seventy miles away.
We were immensely contented now, enjoying the kind of deep, peaceful sense of well-being that is nourished by delivery from danger and fatigue. The big barrier, the only real obstacle that stood between us and the Pacific, had been crossed. Since November, and more intensely since May, I had worried about the Rockies. I didn’t see how we could possibly cross them in a Piper Cub. Now we’d finally done it, even if I couldn’t account for the aerodynamics of it. We were done and through, and there was no further need to figure it carefully and subject our crossing to logical analysis. It wasn’t logical at all, in fact it was downright irrational, what we’d just accomplished. I would never know how close we came to killing ourselves getting through that pass, because my side vision wasn’t adequate enough to judge that. Maybe we flew the mountains perfectly, maybe not so well. But none of that really mattered now because we were whole, on the far side. The gateway to California had been breached. I was overjoyed that it was behind us.
The country was changing again. The blacks and hard yellows of the high desert were giving way to the tessellated ochers and painted sands of the low desert on the western side of the Rockies. The country was falling toward the ocean again. The flying was easy and Kern shook the stick when we came up on a ranch, and I took the plane and dropped down to buzz the cows.
El Paso rose out of the desert like an emerald. Glittering roofs, green lawns and yucca trees were framed by the graceful, sweeping oxbow of the purple Rio Grande. It was the first habitation of any size we’d seen since Pittsburgh.
Our fuel cork was riding on EMPTY again, but we felt inured to worry now. We had the windows open and all the way across the mesquite I kept glancing back over the tail to the fading wall of the Rockies and the two peaks guarding the pass, until they disappeared into the blue meringue of water on the salt flats.
Guadalupe. Before that day I always thought of Exupéry and Ernest Gann, and the early airmail pilots who flew the pass, as distant, heroic figures, brave men who conquered peaks. They seemed very aloof to me and I could never emulate them. Now I felt closer to them all, and I had learned something else. It wasn’t bravery. Bravery isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. They were just stubborn, that’s all, and afterward they were very tired.
CHAPTER 16
As we taxied in at the busy general aviation airport at El Paso, an anxious knot of reporters and cameramen jostled near the pumps. All across Texas, the geezers and the gas jockeys had said, “You’re on the radio.” But we didn’t expect a reception as big as this. As we shut down the engine, microphones on booms came orbiting in through our open w
indows and photographers were fighting for position up by the prop. There were a few newspaper reporters there, but these were mostly TV people, scrappy and full of elbows. They all shouted into the cockpit at once.
“How do you feel?”
“Boys! Yo! Can you tell us how you feel?”
That was the thing about broadcasters that we would learn. Facts? They were incidental. First, everyone wanted to know how we felt.
In fact, we felt terrible. Our faces and arms were burnt brick-red, our heads ached from hypoxia hangover, and our seatbelt welts chafed. I wasn’t happy to see this swarm of reporters, crowding around the plane and banging their cameras on the fabric. But Kern didn’t seem to mind. The trip so far had been a jumble of new landscapes and events. Swale to river, prairie to desert, rattlers to mountain pass, and all of it had worked a magic on his character. He was ready to meet the press.
Without really trying, Kern was a dreamboat for those reporters. Earnest as a novitiate, blushing all over when he flashed that broad smile of his, he was a natural for the cameras. (Later, my mother complained that I was always “scowling” in the news photos, while Kern, she thought, had “the nicest smile.”) Neither of us understood what the fuss was all about. As far as we were concerned, we were just two kids from New Jersey, pursuing our own private dream. But these reporters seemed determined to turn our flight into a national hullabaloo. We were genuinely surprised and caught off guard by all this attention, and that contributed a lot to the naïve, aw-shucks attitude we projected. The reporters loved it. America was a different place then and all the heroes had crew cuts, platinum-blond wives and drove Corvettes. The media was devoted to this cult of innocence and that is what they hoped to find in us.
“Rink, look at these guys out here,” Kern muttered under his breath as we climbed out of the plane. “They’re going nuts for us.”