Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  “Dad, if you want, I’ll go and get him.”

  “Nah, nah, nah. Let him swim. But have him call me when he gets back. I’ve talked to Uncle Jim and there’s some details about your arrival in L.A. tomorrow. I need to talk to Kern about that. But do have him call me, you hear?”

  “Sure thing Pop. He’ll call.”

  That was easy, I thought, hanging up. The Yuma gam was the big one for me. Why couldn’t I always be polite like that, and just take his shit? It didn’t matter in the end. It took nearly two thousand miles of country, six hard days of flying and six phone gams, to reach this point, but I was there. When he wanted to be, my father was the world’s biggest pain in the ass. But it didn’t have anything to do with me, because I could always ignore it.

  So, I went out to the pool for a swim myself, and told Kern to call my father.

  Everything was arranged for our arrival in California the next day. Kern and I would follow the southern route from Yuma to San Diego, rest and refuel, then follow the coast up to the little paved strip at San Juan Capistrano in Orange County, the nearest airport to Uncle Jimmy’s without a radio tower. My father expected lots of media—the three networks, Associated Press, United Press International, all the L.A. stations, with more still logging in at his New Jersey command post. He would call Uncle Jimmy himself and tell him to expect us at one p.m.

  Before we went to sleep a reporter from the Yuma paper called. He wanted to interview us at the airport in the morning. Neither of us really wanted to do another interview, but we were planning on leaving early for the airport anyway. Kern was concerned because the new paint job on 71-Hotel looked dull after fifty hours of flying. He wanted it to look neat and clean for our arrival in California, so Aunt Joan would be impressed with our plane. The reporter could interview us while we were washing the Cub.

  That night, at two or three a.m., we were awakened by the loudest thunderstorm I had ever heard. In the desert, there weren’t any trees or lakes to absorb the rolling claps of thunder, and the walls of the motel and the mattresses on our beds shook. We were excited about flying into California the next day, and neither of us could sleep after that.

  Ducking the rain outside, I ran down the motel alley to the Coke machine. Kern and I sat up on our beds, talking with our Cokes in our laps and the light on, listening to the rain pounding down on the tile roof.

  “Rink, Daddy’s real excited now. I think he’s getting more out of this trip than we are.”

  “Yeah. He’s real happy now Kern. He bugs the hell out of me, but he’s happy.”

  “Rink, you know what you oughta do?”

  “No, what?”

  “Make an agreement with yourself. That’s what I do. No matter what Daddy says, how much he riles you, blow it off. Never show your feelings to the guy.”

  “Kern, I know. I realized that tonight. But thanks. You always need to have your thinking double-checked.”

  “Okay, but there’s one other thing. It’s like Daddy and all those AA meetings.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Whenever you make an agreement with yourself, you have to stick to it.”

  In the morning, at the Yuma airport, we were delighted to see that we didn’t have to wash the plane. The thunderstorm had scrubbed 71-Hotel clean. We waited for the reporter out on the bench at the gas pumps, enjoying the open views out to the desert. It was a beautiful Friday morning and several pilots had showed up early to get a head start on their weekend flying. The airport manager and a couple of geezers came out and sat with us on the bench. Yuma was a friendly strip and everybody wanted to hear about our coast to coast flight.

  One of the geezers had made tea. He was pouring out a cup for everyone from a large thermos when the detail from the United States Border Patrol showed up. Three green and white pickups with flashing cherry lights pulled in through the airport gates, drove across the ramp, and took positions around our Cub.

  Kern and I ran over to the plane. I could see right away that this was a serious group of lawmen, or at least they considered themselves serious lawmen, but mentally they looked pretty far down the evolutionary chain. Their uniforms bristled with insignia and badges and their belts were heavy with guns, walkie-talkies, and mace. On top of sullen, porcine faces, the border patrolmen wore these ridiculous-looking shellacked straw hats, too small for their heads. Instead of the shellac, the officer in charge wore a gray felt Stetson.

  “Mornin’ boys,” said the gray hat. “We’re here to inspect this plane. There was an illegal crossing from Mexico last night by air, and we believe this to be the aircraft. Everything’s gotta be stripped—floorboards, seats, engine covers, all the inspection plates.”

  My brother protested, explaining that we had landed yesterday afternoon, before three o’clock. We could prove it. There were plenty of witnesses who saw us land, and we even had a fuel receipt.

  The gray hat snapped back.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass when you say you landed. This is a standard airport check. Routine.”

  “Routine?” Kern asked.

  “Yeah. Routine. Where are you boys from?”

  “New Jersey.”

  “Well, good. A long way from home, I guess. This is the way we do things out here.”

  I didn’t like this dipshit gray hat one bit, which was a dangerous mood for me to get into. I was the kind of kid that cops took one look at and decided to pick on, because I displayed such a “rotten attitude.” They were always nabbing me for blowing up mailboxes, or mooning old ladies, and once this local primate in uniform actually issued me a summons for passing a stopped school bus, on my bike. But I didn’t mind, because I was used to it. They could pick on me all they wanted. But now my brother looked upset, which infuriated me.

  This was one thing, actually, that I had swallowed right up to the pole from my father, his healthy loathing for cops. He had a good bickering manner to him around the law, denuding officers of authority by peppering them with a lot of difficult questions, taunting them with heavy verbal dosages of “My Ass.”

  And I was sick of the perils of this trip. There was always more peril. Thunderstorms, malevolent morons, rattler snakes, Pocket-protector FAA men—I’d had enough of that shit. I wasn’t in the mood for this ersatz Wyatt Earp in the gray hat.

  “Routine, my ass,” I said to the gray hat. “We’re not from Mexico. My brother just told you. We’re from New Jersey.”

  The gray hat bristled and clutched both hands on his belt.

  “Son, I don’t know who the hell you think you are. I’m an officer of the law. A federal officer of the law. I have a right to inspect this plane and any other plane on this airport. Now, I’ve given you a lawful order to strip this aircraft. Are you going to obey?”

  No, I wasn’t. They weren’t getting near 71-Hotel without a fight. My father’s lawyer told me once that the best way around a cop was to throw out a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo, demands for warrants or probable cause. This stalled a lot of cops, because they could never remember whether the instructor back at the police academy told them they had to have a warrant for this situation or, shit, maybe the guy said we didn’t.

  What the hell. Give it a throw.

  “My ass,” I said to the gray hat. “Where’s your warrant?”

  “Now listen here son. Do you want me to call for help?”

  “Help my ass! Where’s your warrant?”

  It bothered me a lot that my voice cracked every time I screamed “My ass!” I should have been able to deliver that in a calm, masculine tone, the way Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen did it in the movies.

  But it was working. The spectacle of the coast to coast kids getting busted by the Border Patrol was too much for the Yuma flyers. The whole airport exploded with rage.

  While I screamed into one ear of the gray hat, the airport manager came over and screamed into the other. The geezer ambled over with his thermos of tea and called the gray hat a “flamin’ jackass.”

  Apparently the Border
Patrol was not well liked in Arizona. While the illegals streamed across the line down there, the Border Patrol was always up here, harassing the naturalized population. The border lawmen were especially detested at airports, where they were famous for pulling ramp checks on the wrong planes.

  It got to be madness out there. Everybody was screaming at the gray hat, who by now could see that he had another Dodge City on his hands. Because it seemed to be working, and it felt so good, I kept yelling “My ass,” even when nobody was listening.

  “Listen here,” the gray hat screamed, pointing his finger at my nose, “You stop saying 'my ass’ to me, or I will have your ass.”

  “Oh my ass!” I said.

  “Hey, officer, my ass too!” the geezer screamed at the gray hat. “Nobody’s violatin’ the law saying 'my ass.’”

  “My ass! Golly, I like that,” said the airport manager. “My ass! You boys from Nu Jursa are all right. Officer, what are you going to do? Call headquarters and tell ’em this boy’s upsettin’ you, saying 'my ass’?”

  When the reporter from the paper arrived, he jumped in too. He shoved a pile of clips about us in front of the gray hat. He was real shrewd about what he said too.

  “Hey, fella, go ahead and bust these kids. The whole country is following their trip. Now the Border Patrol wants to strip their plane. It’s a great story for me.”

  The Border Patrol crumbled. While the shellac hats stepped back into their pickups and lit cigarettes, the gray hat attempted to save face, asking to see Kern’s license. Yup, T. Kernahan Buck, out of Nu Jursa. Tons of witnesses here, saying you landed yesterday afternoon at three. Guess we’ll be leaving then. Have a safe trip.

  Departing, the Border Patrol pickups flashed their lights and spun gravel and dust all over the airport with their wheels.

  It was a victory, but Kern and I were upset. The Yuma flyers, however, clapped us on the back and laughed. They told us not to worry about it. This kind of thing happened a lot in Arizona, they said. The Border Patrol hated aviation, and aviation hated the Border Patrol.

  After we were done with the newspaper interview, we shook a lot of hands and turned for the Cub. Just before we propped the engine, a bus load of Indian children arrived. They were all in a summer camp, and this was their annual excursion out to the airport. They were five-and six-year olds, round-faced and dark, with lovely black hair. As we taxied past them, they all started to cheer, really going wild for us for some reason, hooting so loud from behind the chain link fence we could hear them over the noise of the idling engine. Kern wheeled the plane around nearby and ran up the engine so they could watch.

  The runway was right there. As he firewalled and raised the tail Kern called back.

  “Rink, those are beautiful children. I’m giving them a flyby.”

  We turned at the windsock and banked back hard for the children, painting the sunbursts on our wings over their heads. From above, we could see them cheering and clapping, shiny black hair and brown faces jumping up and down in swells in the airport parking lot, beautiful Indian school-children, dancing Arizona for us. Out over the desert we swept around low, dove for the strip and poured on the coals. As we went by the pumps, all the pilots, the geezers, and the children were waving, and the reporter was standing on top of the benches, both arms crossing over his head, and as Kern hammerheaded up there were hard blue horizons in the sky all around us, sparkling dew on the desert floor and a purple-black rim of foothills beckoning us west. I loved our trip, everyone we’d met and everything that had happened to us, the ceaseless unfolding of faces and terrain, swale to river to mountains, all of it joined and made intense by the thunderous Continental and the smell of burnt oil.

  And so we flew west over the Colorado River and into California, past endless, undulating formations of sand dunes as fresh and as clean as beaches. Then the lush, irrigated lands of the Imperial Valley opened green for us, and El Centro and the Superstition Mountains went by. That leg was one of the longest of the trip, a little over three hours, and it was three hours of peaceful, carefree flying, when we owned the sky and everything in it.

  Kern and I were silent in the cockpit, barely exchanging a word. It was a beautiful morning, with pristine desert scenery floating by under the wings, and we were almost there. We didn’t want the trip to end, and it seemed too sacred a moment to spoil with talk.

  Over the last range of mountains before San Diego, we got caught on top of the clouds. The Pacific Ocean had poured its morning surplus of fog onto the brown hills, and the moisture couldn’t get past the high pressure on the eastern side. But there would be a break in the clouds for us, there always was. We held our compass course for ten minutes until it appeared, a hole just big enough for our wings. Spiraling down, we saw California all at once. We came out over suburban red tile roofs and water sprinklers making miniature rainbows over meticulously bordered green lawns. Every square foot of southern California seemed occupied by man, but it was a bright, ordered, and prosperous occupation. Just ahead of us lay Brown Field, and we flew over and entered the traffic pattern.

  Screech-screech. Two tires down, in California.

  Through heat mirages shimmering off the tarmac we could see another horde of reporters waiting for us by the operations building, jumping the gun on the Los Angeles media. But I couldn’t have cared less about those reporters just then. It had been six days of hard flying and hell, and our waists and our stick hands were sore as roadkill. We were tired, we were burnt to a crisp, and our ears were ringing from the constant din of the Continental. But we were there. A sea breeze was blowing, and I could smell salt air from the Pacific ocean.

  My brother was at rest. He was quiet and contemplative up front, a monk in his cell. He wiggled the rudders for me to taxi in. Resting his stick hand on the crash struts, he reached back with the other and squeezed my knee.

  “Rink. We have done this thing. We made it, coast to coast.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The first television-news helicopter intercepted us over Oceanside. We were flying north up the Pacific coast in heavy smog, admiring the rat-packs of surfers on the waves below and southern California’s vast acreage of swimming pools, when the chopper suddenly appeared out of the haze and hovered obnoxiously at our two o’clock. A long camera lens pushed out through the open window in the rear. Kern kept motioning them away, to get their rotor-wash off our wings. But every time Kern waved them off, this goofball television correspondent in the backseat unfastened his seatbelt and reached out his window, excitedly waving back. He was wearing a large rubber headset and talking into a microphone, as if he was broadcasting live. Of course I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it wasn’t hard to imagine by watching his asinine jowls and happy, chattering teeth.

  “Folks, they are now waving at us. The Buck boys are waving. Obviously, they’re real happy to be in southern California.”

  What I would have been happy with, right then, was a wing-rack full of air-to-air missiles. Continuously raking us with its rotor turbulence, the copter wheeled and panned its camera at us from every angle, and then it dove at us from twelve o’clock high for the long head-on shot. Finally they tired of harassing us and settled into a safe position off our left wing.

  Opposite Dana Point a large green exit sign hung over the San Diego Freeway. SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO. We followed the twisting two-lane road up to the top of the ridge. It took us a while to pick the airport out of the smog. We knew that the strip was tiny and difficult, because in San Diego a pilot had told us that San Juan Capistrano was legendary for its short-takeoff-and-landing flight school, where flyers about to ship off to Alaska as bush pilots were trained. But then the chopper clattered by and peeled off to the left, and we followed its rotor wash down to the airport.

  It looked like a Hollywood movie set down there. The tiny airport and hangar were built into a bowl-shaped depression wedged in between two dusty canyons, surrounded by a serpentine irrigation canal. On the tarmac, a crowd of people waiting
for us was ringed by the glinting rotors of more news helicopters and the blue waters of the canal. Everyone started to wave as we dropped into the traffic pattern and the whole airport looked excited and alert, the kind of place we were meant to fly hard for all week. I could even pick out Uncle Jim. Raven-haired and smiling, a foot taller than everybody else in the crowd, he was waving both arms over his head, like my father back home.

  Turning downwind, Kern sized up the strip. The irrigation canal, with sloping cement walls, surrounded the airport like a moat. The runway was actually lower than the canal, paved into a basin. The strip was too short to glide down over the obstruction in the usual way. We would have to get low and slow over the canal and then side-slip briskly down over the wall. Our destination landing in California would be the most difficult one of all.

  Kern always took a challenge like that and made it look easy. He got right down on top of the canal and kept us slow by holding the nose high and gradually adding power. Following the irrigation ditch around to the runway, he turned 90 degrees, slipped sideways down over the wall and leveled the wings just as we mushed into the stall. It was perfect, the first time. The runway was right there.

  “Ah shit Rinker. Look at this.”

  All four helicopters on the ground had launched in a frenzy and darted over to the runway to photograph our arrival. They were completely blocking the runway and throwing up a dust storm that covered the whole airport. The only thing we could do was throttle back up and go around, praying that the choppers didn’t climb underneath us and slice us up from below.

  As we climbed and turned downwind, the helicopters rose in force and rat-tailed around in a crazyass formation behind us. They were real bronco-riders, those chopper pilots. When we descended again for the ditch, they all broke together and made a beeline for the runway to film our landing. But they were hovering so low on the runway, and throwing up so much dust, that it wasn’t safe to land. Three times we flew San Juan Capistrano like that. Go around, fly the ditch, turn for the strip. Each time, down on the runway, it was Vietnam, snarling with Hueys.