Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  My God, what’s that? My Motherless Lord. What in the name of God is that? Craning my neck out, looking straight down over my banked wings, I’m looking at the most beautiful, magical sight of my life.

  Ah Jesus boys, I wish I could describe it just right for you, I wish there were words. I only saw it for five or six seconds, while my wings were over. There, in a deep, deep hole hidden by these kind of needlelike pinnacles, just below that big intersection of rocks, was the most beautiful castle man has ever built. Two perfectly carved pillars rose straight into the air. They were symmetrical, perfectly matched, maybe a hundred feet tall apiece. They were connected by a long, curving wall, with windows cut out and flat platforms behind, as if armaments were planned. The sun was catching it just right, back-lighting it from the hole I’d just come through—in fact, that’s the only guidance I’ve got now. It was about ten-thirty in the morning, see, I know that from my logbook, and I’m still trying to figure that angle of light from the sun that day. Anyway, I knew as soon as I saw that castle that it wasn’t something that occurred in nature. Deep, deep in a hole in the Rocky Mountains, somewhere near the Guadalupe Peaks, somebody had built this beautiful structure. They had carved those pillars perfectly in stone. And it wasn’t accidental. It was there for a reason.

  Okay, I am crazy now, see? I have got a dead airplane in the Rocky Mountains. I am aeroembolism nuts. But I’m desperate, wild with curiosity and desire. I have just seen the Eighth Wonder of the World or something. I want to fly the plane back up there and see that castle again, mark the spot, so I can come back and explore. Get the airplane back around Robert, get it back around. You’ve got to be able to find that thing again. But I’m falling, falling, see, I’ve got to keep falling with the ravine and let that castle disappear behind me, or I’m dead.

  I wasn’t paying any attention to the airplane, looking at the instruments or anything. All I could do was fly with my head out in the slipstream, see, this side and that, slithering with the rudder pedals around the rocks, diving down through the ravines. It all happened so fast. Bang, the big intersection comes along, wonk, over hard with the wings, Jesus Motherless Christ, what’s that castle down there, gotta find it, gotta find it again, quick, try and mark it on the map, no, that’s crazy, gotta try and save myself, and then the next thing I know I’m falling through the ravine and looking for clear space and up front the engine is rumbling and the airframe is shaking hard all over, whamp, whamp, whamp, whamp, smoke’s belching from the stacks, the prop’s windmilling hard, and every goddamn orifice on that Continental is spitting steam and ice and screaming a furious shock-heat. My stick was shaking real hard, the instrument panel was vibrating, and the flying wires were jumping up and down, like a guy being electrocuted, and I’m red-lined now on the speed, I had that gorgeous whore red-lined and more, but the wings are staying on. God, that’s the thing about Stearmans, that magnificent airplane, there isn’t a bastard yet who’s pulled one apart in the air. It just held, that Stearman just held. Rumbling and rattling and banging the bejesus out of herself, that mother Stearman held. The whole frigging thing over the mountains had just happened so fast, and I was oxygen-starved mad. I had never shut off the magnetos. I hadn’t closed the mixture or fuel—why do that anyway, when you’re planning on cratering into a wall?

  Now, what the hell’s going on here? Steam and smoke are exploding off that engine, whamp, whamp, whamp my stacks roar. And you know, my damn stick and rudders are coming back on me now too. They’ve got some wash going over them now. I looked quickly to the manifold gauge and the bitch is showing me eighteen inches. Well Jesus Christ. I had my airplane back. Coming out of the clouds, down now below 8,000 feet, the carburetor had cleared. In a few seconds I was showing twenty inches and maybe 2,100 rpm. Hell, I could almost fly those ravines normal now. There was no reason to climb, and I couldn’t have anyway. But I was level now, when I wanted to be, with lots of air coming over the controls. I was almost over to the other side and I could see it was clear to the west. All the clouds had been bunched up on the east side of the mountains.

  God, the feeling of coming off those mountains, with my engine running again. I was planning on dying, see. But shit, Robert Warren Pate has fucked that one up too, he can’t even kill himself, and damn I’m coming off the far side of Guadalupe with an airplane that still flies and my pants all full of piss, so I figured I was still alive.

  But I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. That was driving me wild. I came out about two miles north of the Salt Flats. I figure that I crossed about six miles north of the Pass. It was just this spiritual experience for me. I was gulping for air and diving for the desert to get more, and was sort of laughing and crying at once. I was just twenty-one and didn’t know how to handle all that emotion, a brush with death like that. And I was in awe of what had just happened to me. I had violated orders and broken off from the pack, going for air over the Rockies, alone, the whore Continental dies on me, and then I had come right through the most dangerous part of the mountains in this spectacular way.

  Something was protecting me, guiding me to that spot, this hidden castle, see, right near Guadalupe. I was directed there by a spiritual force. It took me years of research to figure out what it was. The literature out of Mexico says: “The Emperor’s delegation placed the treasure deep inside the mountains, marking the spot with battlements and two stone pillars reaching for the sky.” I know what I saw was Montezuma’s Tomb. Now, every year, I come back. I am going to find it too, the spot where I came through the mountains. It’s my mission, my religion. If I can just recreate that flight, my path through the mountains in the Stearman, I will find Montezuma’s Tomb.

  Well, you don’t say a whole lot after listening to a big one like that. For sure, it was one of the best Stearman tales I’d ever heard. We all just sat there at the table staring at our coffee cups, brooding in the heavy, pregnant silence, and maybe Ellen and Elsa had already heard that one a dozen times, but even they were moved.

  Somewhere in the middle of Pate’s soliloquy, I just followed him right over the mountain and over the top of my father. It was my second trip through the pass. It was just a moment, a flash, but when I was past it I was past it forever. I didn’t care any longer about what happened between my father and me. He was a talker, a bullshitter, an exhibitionist. He couldn’t sit in a plane without looping or rolling it and he couldn’t enter a room without dominating everyone in it. So what? Here was Pate, rich and successful, retired at forty-three, spending the summer in El Paso with these beautiful women half his age. He was a bullshitter too, a grand, grand bullshitter, perhaps beyond even my father’s powers. There were just talkers in this world, that’s all. There was Pate, and there was Tom Buck. Suddenly I saw myself more clearly. Nobody blamed my father for who he was, and nobody blamed me for being his son either. He was, that’s all. And I was, too. And I could exist in a separate space from him and be whatever I wanted.

  I was exhausted by dinner and drink, and by Pate’s yarning. We left the restaurant and walked for a while around Old Juarez. On the ride back to El Paso, Kern rode up front with Pate, listening to him yap more blarney all the way up over the border.

  I fell asleep between Ellen and Elsa in the backseat. I can’t remember who it was, Ellen or Elsa, but one of them put their arm around my shoulder and nuzzled me off to sleep. I was satisfied with myself and the night. We were over the mountains now and safe, in El Paso. A woman’s body comforted me. I can’t say that I knew it right away, that night, but eventually I did understand what had happened. Pate’s wild Stearman ride over Guadalupe liberated me. I wasn’t quite past being angry and embarrassed about my father. But I could see my way through to it now.

  In the morning, Pate woke us an hour before dawn, and we found coffee and doughnuts at an all-night diner on the way to the airport. I was still hungover and woozy, and would battle sleep all day. But the coffee and the prospect of an easy day of flying across the southwest revived me. In the pilots�
�� lounge, Pate went over the maps with us. The southern route was easy—a straight shot. All we had to do was pick up Highway 10 north of El Paso and follow it up through Deming, Lordsburg, Cochise County, and Tucson. After that, Highway 8 took us right into Yuma.

  Pate got us off the international field by calling the tower on the radio in his Cessna and telling them we were departing in formation, as a “party of two.” All we had to do, he said, was follow him down the taxiway, then firewall right behind him on the runway. On the ramp, he gave us a thumbs up and wiggled his wing ailerons to signal that the tower approved.

  It was a beautiful sunrise, the most beautiful of the trip. High, wispy cirrus clouds, deep purple and black, collided with pink and orange fringes from the sun poking over the horizon. When Pate advanced his throttle, Kern stayed with him, and we climbed out briskly in the smooth air, wing-to-wing. Pate lingered with us a bit, flying us west to the Rio Grande. Then, cigar clamped between his fingers, he saluted us and banked east, disappearing off toward Guadalupe.

  I was moody about it, watching Pate and his plane fade toward the mountains off our wing. I never laid eyes on him again, but I never forgot him either. He was a great old Stearman man and I don’t see how we could have done El Paso without him.

  CHAPTER 18

  We didn’t really mean to run the bus off the road in Arizona. It was just one of those things that happened along the way, like Elsa in El Paso or the rattler snakes at Wink.

  We were running along Highway 8 between Gila Bend and Yuma, having made great time across the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona all day. The highways ran straight as an arrow, torpid and flat, and the navigation was easy. Between Deming, New Mexico, and Cochise County, Arizona, Kern let me sleep off my hangover for a couple of hours. I awoke to the breathtaking mesa country of southern Arizona. Immense outcrops of black and gray, some of them pinnacled and some of them flat, mounded up from the painted deserts, and the corridors in between them were softened by the shadows of passing clouds. The beauty of Arizona was almost too extensive to take in, and the steady throbbing of the Continental made us drowsy. I guess that’s why we did in the Greyhound. We’d been flying hard for five days and now we were bored as snails.

  It was one of those long shiny land yachts, running east on the highway. From twelve or fifteen miles out all we could make out was a large incoming object. Closer in, we could see that it was a Greyhound bus, with the red and gray dog leaping through the logo painted on the side and a large green sundeck on the roof glaring under the sun.

  Kern insisted on buying a cowboy hat in Texas, and he was jaunty and self-confident after we crossed the Rockies.

  We went down for a look. Kern had been flying the yellow centerline of a highway all day, so it was just a matter of thinking the stick forward a bit. When we passed through 500 feet and kept going down, I looked forward to Kern. He had this beguiled smile, and was staring at the yellow line. When we were boys, Kern and I used to hypnotize the roosters down in our barn, flipping them over on their backs and drawing a chalk line on the floor out from their eyes. The rooster stared inverted at the line, mesmerized and perfectly still. We’d go in for dinner and return in an hour. The rooster was still there, inverted, staring at the line. That’s what my brother looked like right now. He was fixated on the bus and the yellow line.

  I suppose Kern would have leveled off at some point, but the bus driver was a buffoon. About a mile off, he started flashing his lights at us, as if we were some overloaded family station wagon wobbling into the passing lane, too slow to get back in time onto our side. I disliked bus drivers on principle and now this jackass was flashing his lights.

  “Yo, Kern!” I yelled over the noise of the engine.

  “Yeah Rink.”

  “Chicken?”

  “Chicken, coming up!”

  While the bus lights ahead frantically blinked “Give Way,” Kern firewalled and put the Cub five feet above the yellow line on the blacktop. Jesus, I thought, these closing speeds really pick up at the last minute. Downshifting now, and starting to brake, the bus was still doing 45 or 50 miles per hour. Full throttle, in a headwind, maybe we were doing 65 or 70 over the ground. From there everything happened very fast.

  A half mile out, the bus driver swerved lane-to-lane a few times, as if the sight of a Greyhound on two wheels was going to make us pull up. Then, briefly, he tried the frontal approach, burrowing straight for us with his lights on high beam. But he could see that this wasn’t going to work either. One-hundred yards out the driver yanked over his steering wheel, which threw out his front tires at angles, and the bus rotated and slid sideways. The painted hound on the side appeared to be skittering ass-first onto the dusty shoulder, like a burro going over the Grand Canyon. Tire smoke, black exhaust, and sand sprayed up over the sundeck.

  As we hauled up over the bus, sand blasted the prop and the cockpit smelled of diesel and burnt rubber. Down through the mushroom cloud I got a pretty good view of the terrified occupants of the bus. The driver wore a tan uniform with gray epaulets and a Greyhound cap, and was violently shaking up at us with his fist. The tourists in the sundeck were staring up through the tinted glass with their hands clutched to the seat railings—several rows of cheap cowboy hats attached to gaping mouths.

  We flew out over the desert and kept our tail to the rear of the bus, so they couldn’t get our registration numbers. Looking back over the rudder, we watched the driver destroy his transmission getting back onto the road. Wha-bump, wha-bump, wha-bump, he rocked that heavy ten-wheeler back and forth on the shoulder, digging furrows with the rear wheels and throwing up magnificent geysers of sand. The scene reminded me of the annual spectacle at school back home, during the first big snow, when everybody stood around the parking lot and cheered as that crazyass Father Lucien, our science teacher, smoked his Buick Wildcat out of the drifts.

  “C’mon buddy!” Kern yelled. “Rock that mother! Rock ’er.”

  Jesus, I thought. When that Greyhound pulls into the terminal in Tucson, the mechanics are going to be shitting bricks.

  Finally the Greyhound found some traction on a lower level of sand. Rear end jumping, the exhaust pipe digging into the desert so deep it threw back jets of ignited sand, the heavy galleon bucked and kicked onto the highway. Puffs of white smoke shot up when the rubber hit the road, and the bus sped off.

  We cheered and flew on toward Yuma. Momentarily, however, the Beaver Cleaver in him got the better of Kern. He was worried that the bus driver, once he got to Tucson or Phoenix, would report us. It was the kind of thing that would occur to Kern and not to me, and he was still rattled by that brush with the FAA back in El Paso. I thought about that for a moment. Then I leaned forward and yelled over the roar of the engine.

  “Hey Kern,” I said. “You’re the driver of a one-hundred-passenger bus, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you pull into that terminal in Phoenix and tell the boss: 'Hey, I just got run off Highway 8 by a Piper Cub!’”

  “Got it Rink. We’re in the clear.”

  Yuma was the west, the old, far west, and we spent the rest of the afternoon strolling the town. The older section had several prewar cafes, Indian craft shops, and hardware stores featuring items like saddle blankets and canteens. Cowboys and Navaho ranchers pulled up in pickups loaded down with bales of hay and sheep. We bought new wallets at a leather shop and dawdled in an art gallery featuring color photographs from Arizona Highways magazine, trying to identify some of the mesas and painted deserts we had just crossed.

  Next door, there was a Mexican restaurant fragrant with cooked spices, and we decided to eat there because we liked the way the tables were arrayed around an open-air court with live cactus and wild flowers growing in the sand. We couldn’t read the menu, which was handwritten in Spanish. A large, smiling woman came out of the kitchen and told us to just sit there and relax. For $5 apiece, she said, she was going to feed us. For more than an hour the dishes kept coming out—a cold fish
cerviche, enchiladas, a salad with warm dressing, side plates of rice and beans, and a liqueur-flavored custard for dessert. Except for chicken-fried steak in Arkansas, it was the best meal of the trip.

  When we got back to the motel, Kern changed into swimming trunks and disappeared for the pool. I called my father again. Despite the disastrous shit-shit-shit El Paso gam, Kern and I didn’t even discuss this division of labor any longer. We accepted this as routine. The calls home were stressful, with my father quizzing us about our routes, asking about the waterbag, and now directing the press. The fiasco at El Paso International had left a residue of anger in both of us. Kern wasn’t making a big show of avoiding my father, but he’d get away with it if he could. Whenever we landed at an airport, it was my job to squeak all the bugs off the windshield and make sure that all of our maps for the next flight leg were in order. When we got to a motel for the night, I called my father.

  This sixth and last call home, the Yuma gam, could have been another disaster, but I seemed to be learning how to handle my father better. When I reached him collect, he was annoyed because we had failed to watch television for the past two nights, and thus missed ourselves on the news. He couldn’t understand why we weren’t more interested in that. And every time I called, it seemed, Kern was conveniently taking a shower or swimming in the motel pool.

  “Rinker, where’s Kern?” my father asked. “I want to talk with Kern.”

  “Dad. He’s swimming. He asked me to call because he wants to take a swim.”

  “Swimming. He’s always swimming. What are you guys up to anyway? Is Kern dodging me for some reason?”

  “No Dad. He’s swimming.”

  “Swimming, jeez. You’re supposed to be flying an airplane coast to coast, but everytime you call, Kern’s in a goddamn swimming pool. I know you guys. You’re doing this for a reason. Why couldn’t Kern call?”