Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  I was beginning to understand all this, but it wasn’t as if my head was swelled by what the producer said. We still had a long stretch of desert to fly before we reached California, and then maybe we could worry about fame. But I wasn’t ready for it. It wasn’t why we made the trip. I could see that our flight was already beyond just Kern and me. People took an adventure like this, and breathed into it their own dreams and thoughts, imagining all kinds of things that weren’t there and ignoring things that were, and then a force takes over and it’s not your trip anymore. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. The fuss and bother of media coverage, the jumble of events since we landed in El Paso, were beginning to unnerve me. I missed the desert, the isolated country we had just crossed. I just wanted to be up in the throbbing cockpit again with Kern, anonymously banging along in turbulence, out in lonely airspace where nobody could find us.

  After the interview, we helped the camera crew break down their equipment and shuttled them back to the commercial air terminal in Pate’s rental car. We decided to leave the Cub at the international airport. In the morning, Pate could radio the tower from his own plane and get us clearance to take off.

  On the way back to the motel, Pate bought a six-pack of cold beer and offered us one. Kern declined, because he had to fly in the morning, but all I had to do was navigate, so I took one. It was my first can of beer, and I liked the taste of that cold, foamy brew going down. It was like an injection of spring water, sending invigorating pins and needles into my burned face and arms. The can dripped a cool ring of perspiration onto my lap. What was the big deal about alcohol, anyway? This beer, not to mention the margarita I had wolfed down at lunch, didn’t affect me in the least.

  In the car, Pate prattled on about Montezuma, who had fought a brave but hopeless war against the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century. Finally, after Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortés had chased most of the Aztec forces up to the Rio Grande, Montezuma dispatched a small band north of the river to bury the Aztecs’ fortune of silver and gold in the mountains. The mystery of where Montezuma had buried his gold died with him, in 1520, and for centuries pre-Columbian scholars and archeologists had speculated on the site of his lost treasure, even whether it really existed. Among the small international coterie of treasure-hunters, it was known as Montezuma’s Tomb. Pate was convinced that he could find the treasure, which was probably worth billions. In fact, he told us again, he’d already seen the site.

  He would tell us all about it tonight, Pate said. Ellen and Elsa wanted to cross the river into Mexico and go for dinner in old Juarez, and they wanted us to come along. The change of scenery, Pate thought, would do us good.

  “Hey Rink, Mexico!” Kern said back in the room. “This Pate guy wins the Bullshitter of the Year Award, but at least he’s taking us to a foreign country.”

  Kern didn’t like Pate as much as I did. I didn’t think he was grateful enough for the way Pate had bailed us out of trouble with the FAA, and I was annoyed about it.

  “Hey Kern. Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.”

  “Okay, Rinker, okay. Sorry. You’re right. The Bullshitter of the Year Award goes to Daddy.”

  Toward sunset we crossed the bridge on the Rio Grande, stopping briefly at the Border Patrol checkpoint, and then Pate drove down through the narrow, twisting streets to Old Juarez. Kern and I were both excited to be traveling “south of the border.” It didn’t seem possible that a place so confusing and exotic could be right over the river from Texas. Teenage girls in skimpy, skin-tight tank tops propositioned us from the street corners, and vendors hawking T-shirts and bags of fruit leaned over from the filthy gutters. The Pates seemed to know their way around. Robert kept honking the horn and shooing away the people shoving jewelry and cheap leather belts up against the windows of the car.

  We went to a place called Taxico. In the front, there was a crowded bar with flamenco dancers and a loud Mexican band up on a stage, where we stayed for an hour and watched the show. I was quite impressed with my ability to consume margaritas, on top of the second beer that I drank in the shower back at the motel room, without feeling any negative effects. I wasn’t getting drunk, I told myself. The only thing that seemed to happen to me under the influence of alcohol was that Elsa, dressed in culottes and a sleeveless blouse, was even more seductive and beautiful than she had been in a bathing suit earlier in the day. There were other positive developments, I thought, once a boy became a drinker. I discovered for the first time, for example, that my powers of conversation were wickedly brilliant. Even Elsa seemed to appreciate this. The more margaritas I drank, the more obvious it became that she was coming down with a ferocious crush on me. Of course, she was sitting with Kern right now, but that was just for show. Back at the motel, she was going to ditch him and then secret me off to one of the chaise longues on the dark edges of the pool. By my third margarita, I was absolutely convinced of this. Elsa was in love, with me. Drinking just wasn’t the evil that my father and all of his friends in Alcoholics Anonymous cracked it up to be.

  Off to the side, connected by a hallway lined with pictures of celebrities, was a quaint old Spanish-style restaurant, one of the best in Mexico, Ellen said, where they gave us a nice booth. I wobbled over there behind the rest, unsteady on my feet, and proud of it. A certain loss of balance was inevitable the first time you drank. As a dinner host, Pate was generous and grand.

  “Boys,” he said, waving the menu in the air, “Order whatever you want. Tonight, we’re celebrating your big flight.”

  Elsa sat across the table with Kern again, and I was wedged in between Robert and Ellen, but I wasn’t upset. Elsa would make her big move for me back at the motel.

  Besides, I liked Ellen a lot. She was very nurturing and considerate, and put her arm around me and stroked my shoulders while we talked, which no grown, married woman back on the east coast would ever do. I’d heard about this. Ellen, I decided, was very “California.” Aunt Joan, Uncle Jim’s wife, was the same kind of person, very affectionate and warm and not afraid to touch people while she talked. And feelings. Feelings! Jesus, California people were really big on that. When we sat down, Ellen told me straight off that Kern and I were doing “wonders” for Robert. In fact, we’d even helped Robert and Ellen’s “relationship.” Last night, they had stayed up late, talking about us. For Ellen, the conversation had filled in a lot of gaps about Robert. Our trip, she said, reminded him of his own youthful barnstorms across the country, and she’d heard a lot of details he’d never mentioned before.

  We ordered dinner and had a good time. Pate kept trying to limit me to “just one more” margarita, and Ellen and Elsa kept slipping me refills from their glasses. Finally Pate got annoyed, banished all alcohol from the table, and ordered me a cup of coffee.

  All the while, Pate entertained us with barnstorming blarney as grand as any I’d ever heard. He was a marvellous yarner, with good pace and rhythm and excellent arm and legwork on the imaginary controls.

  In a booze-induced flash, I suddenly realized something important. If Pate was my father, I would resent his ceaseless string of tall tales. But Pate wasn’t my father and I was enjoying every minute of him. Maybe I was being too ornery about this. I should be able to appreciate what others saw in my father. Everybody else loved being around him, listening to his grand talk, the same way I loved listening to Pate. Pangs of loneliness for my father, as bad as back in Arkansas, hit me again. But then the coffee came and I drank a cup and felt better.

  Pate said one other thing that night that helped me understand and resolve a huge misgiving I had about my father. I never would have realized it without him.

  Like my father, Pate has escaped the Depression by learning to fly. Initially, the Air Corps would take him only as a radar operator, and he didn’t qualify for flight training until the end of World War II. He trained in Stearmans about the same time my father was instructing in Texas, and didn’t see combat until the 1950s,
in Korea.

  “I bet your father’s still bitter about not seeing combat in the war,” Pate said.

  It was true. My father never had seen combat, and he was self-conscious about it. It was something of a dark secret in our family, a subject we weren’t supposed to bring up. When we were younger, and my uncles visited every summer for the big family reunions that were held at our farm, they all sat under the large shade oak on our back lawn and entertained us with their war stories. My father sat off to the side, uncharacteristically quiet, steering the conversation back to the Depression, or the barnstorming era of the 1930s, as soon as he could. He was horrified about his lack of war experience, and even lied about it to cover up. Indeed, that was happening right as we sat in the restaurant in Old Juarez. In one article about our flight that we caught up with in Arizona, my father identified himself as a former pilot with the famous Eighth Bomber Command in Europe. He told another reporter that he flew torpedo-bombers in the Pacific.

  Kern was fascinated by it too. His face lit up with wonder when Pate said that.

  “Robert, why?” Kern asked, leaning across the table. “I mean, my father’s a great pilot. You should see him do aerobatics in his Texan. With a wooden leg! So what if he didn’t fight in the war? He helped in the war, and he’s a great flyer.”

  “Well,” Pate said, “There are thousands of guys like that. I had the same problem myself after World War II, and I didn’t get over it until I finally got a Mig in my sights in Korea. The Pentagon way overestimated the number of pilots it needed for World War II. Most of them ended up doing thankless work—training, ferrying, test-flying. That kind of flying was every bit as hazardous as combat. Shit. Training in Stearmans? We lost pilots every day. But nobody ever made God Is My Co-pilot for a frigging flight instructor. You felt excluded, a failure. Everybody else was getting their asses blown off on Iwo, being heroes, and you were back at the Officer’s Club in Florida, drunk as a skunk. Some guys couldn’t get over it. That’s why we all call ourselves 'Stearman men.’ The Boeing Stearman was the most glorious aircraft ever made, boys, and we flew the bejesus out of that wonderful whore. It’s all we’ve got from those years.”

  Jesus. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me, in a restaurant down in Old Juarez. I was actually beginning to feel normal about myself. And if nobody would ever accuse my father of being quite normal, at least his personality was beginning to make some sense to me. Barnstorming blarney. The great Stearman men of the west. Why was that any different than Mr. Feakins across the street, the ex-Marine with great war tales, or for that matter the Black-Irish Prince, Jack, and his PT-109? Everybody had a past that they couldn’t escape, a past to embellish for the young, and they could only talk about what they knew.

  “But look, enough of this,” Pate said. “I want to tell you my big one. Would you like to hear my big one?”

  I’d had a second coffee by now and I was feeling a lot better.

  “Sure Robert.”

  Pate ordered a double-brandy from the bar, belted it back, and then he lit a fresh cigar and launched into his tale.

  Every good old Stearman man has a “big one.” Pate’s started according to form, with a routine flight during World War II.

  In 1944 Airman Robert Pate was assigned to ferry a Stearman from Lakeland, Florida, to Fresno, California, as part of a formation wing of 25 planes. It was September, the height of the squall season, and he didn’t have a radio. It was supposed to be a routine game of follow the leader. For navigation, the only thing the Air Corps gave him was a large-scale chart of the continental United States.

  I could tell right away that Pate’s big one came right out of the Stearman man’s bible. My father told a variant of the same tale, and so did all the old Stearman men. During World War II the Air Corps didn’t have enough hangars to house all of its trainers. When the fall hurricanes swept up through Stearman Alley, every pilot and cadet on the field was dragooned into service, to fly huge formation-wings of Stearmans north, to get the planes out of harm’s way. Those flights, invariably, were disasters. The storms frequently overtook the stragglers and forced them down. Twenty years later rice farmers and loggers were still discovering crashed Stearmans in remote Louisiana bayous and Cumberland ravines, the skeletons of the pilots still strapped into their cockpit harnesses. The most famous of these flights, a kind of Exodus of Stearman lore, was the “Lost Flyers of Biloxi.” In September 1943, more than one hundred Stearmans took off from Biloxi, Mississippi, in the face of a raging hurricane, and fewer than eighty of them safely reached a field up north. Many of the downed planes still haven’t been found. As boys, Kern and I had a macabre fascination for those lost Biloxi pilots. They had disappeared into something as mysterious and suspenseful as the Bermuda Triangle. Reader’s Digest published articles about the “Lost Flyers of Biloxi,” and so did many of the aviation magazines.

  God, we had trouble all along, [Pate began] the weather all the way out was crap, even past the desert dryline in Texas, and the wing commander they gave us couldn’t fly his ass out of a chute sack. He was always getting lost. But I had to follow him and stay with the formation. Those were the orders.

  It was a wild trip, and all kinds of weirdass stuff happened. In Arkansas, the first night, the base commander wasn’t expecting us and all they had to feed us in the mess was pickled pig’s feet—awful stuff, which most of us heaved over the side the next day. We buzzed a lot of trains and had dog-fights up above the clouds. Even that idiot leader joined in that. But planes kept dropping out. Some had engine trouble, others lost the formation in the clouds. One guy, who was a friend of mine, had a whore that he liked to fuck in Wichita Falls. He wiggled his wings when we got out over the Red River, see, like he was having engine trouble, and that was the last we ever saw of him. By the time we got to west Texas there were only ten or twelve Stearmans left.

  That leader was just a jackass. When we got to the New Mexico line, where I knew the mountains began, he couldn’t see anything under the clouds so he headed south. He was supposed to be climbing and flying us west, or steering us through the Guadalupe Pass. But he was taking the flight into Mexico. Frig the orders, I said to myself. I am getting this plane to Fresno. I let some clouds get between me and the formation and wandered off, pointing the Stearman west.

  Away from the pack, I firewalled and punched through the clouds. I broke out on top at 8,000 feet. God, it was a mess up there. I could see some of the peaks of the Guadalupe Range ahead of me, but others were obscured in the clouds. I was flying in and out of clouds all the time. The map wasn’t any use to me now, and I tossed it under the seat. All I could do was keep going for air—10,000, 11,000, 12,000 feet—and in the turbulence keep the compass locked on a due course of 270 degrees. Once the mountains disappeared underneath me, I figured I’d wait twenty minutes and let down, praying that El Paso was still in front of me.

  When I got right over the mountains, with a big, motherless peak just ahead of me, the engine started to run rough. All that moisture in the clouds was ganging up on me, and I was picking up carburetor ice. Oh it was just a pitiful feeling. Over the mountains. On top of clouds. I couldn’t turn back because the clouds behind me were just as bad as in front. And now my frigging manifold gauge is showing twenty-two inches of mercury, then eighteen. I tried everything to keep that engine going. When the gauge got down past fifteen, that old Continental just quit and I had myself a dead airplane. But I still had 800 feet or so on the peak ahead of me and I held the stick up as long as I could, coasting over the top. There was a hole in the clouds just past the summit, and I could see a system of ravines down below it. Just before I stalled, I made it to the hole and dove.

  As I went through that hole in the clouds I just said to myself, “Well Robert. You’re done for. It’s been a good, short life. You were poor and a nobody back in Missouri, but you got out, learned to fly, and made it into Stearmans.” Good. I was proud of myself, but now my time was up. Everybody else was getting killed
in the war over there, so why not me?

  I mean, you can’t let down into the middle of the goddamn Rocky Mountains and survive. But it was strange, a strange feeling. I didn’t give a shit. I was so tired from being in the Air Corps for two years, so sick of flying hard all week, I didn’t mind dying right then. Lots of my friends had died already. From the altitude, I was oxygen-starved too, and cold, very cold. It just does crazy things to you, aeroembolism. I accepted death at that moment—wanted to go, even. Lord, just give me a wall to crater into, and hurry up about it. I was ready to die.

  And, you know, I was just this young, hardass airman then. I was meant to die in these peaks, I said to myself. Shit, how many airmail pilots have crashed in the Guadalupes? Dozens. I’d just crater in with them and call it a life. In a minute or two, I promised myself, when there was nothing ahead of me but rocks, I would just push it into a wall as fast as the Stearman could go and get it over in a hurry.

  But there were these ravines under me now, twisting, winding ravines, a whole city of them, falling down the range and generally dropping in altitude. I just followed them, dead stick, where they took me. It wasn’t a straight downhill ride, the way they show mountains in movie pictures or anything. The mountains slope down, then back up, sideways even, but I just kept following clear space where I could. Sometimes the wheels were clearing the rocks by ten feet and sometimes four hundred.

  That’s when I saw Montezuma’s Tomb. I want to say it was thirty seconds after I came through the cloud hole—God, if I only knew exactly where it was today—but there’s just no reckoning time in a situation like that, dead stick in the Rocky Mountains. It could’ve been three fucking seconds.

  Whatever, see. I came to this huge, deep intersection of ravines, way down in the belly of Guadalupe, with these tall, massive walls of rock rising on three sides of me. The only way I could turn was right, and hard right. I just had those wings right over, almost snap-rolled, holding top rudder, you know, to keep the nose pointed through the hole in the rocks.