Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  After the third pass, Kern got mad. The blood vessels on his temples bulged and he cinched his seatbelt tight. He coiled up his body and moved his shoulders back and forth, the way my father and Eddie Mahler did, approaching an airshow field, transiting in muscle tone and mood from cross-country to acrobatic flight.

  “Rink, I am going to lose these goddam choppers!” Kern yelled back. “Watch! Just watch me do this.”

  It was a very slick piece of flying Kern did right then. Ramming the throttle forward and going around, he faked right with the wings so the helicopters followed around downwind. Then he dove for speed and drew sharply back with the stick and we shot straight up through the hazy smog. Just before the stall he threw in all of his left aileron and plowed the rudder to bring the tail around. We snapped half-inverted 180 degrees into a wingover reverse, falling back onto our own propwash. Full stick down and we screamed for the far side of the ditch. All of this was done so briskly the helicopters above didn’t even know they weren’t on our tail anymore. This time Kern flew the inside of the irrigation wall, really smoking the plane around the turn. God, watch the accelerated stall, I thought. But Kern was aware of that too, and he kept pouring on more power and jabbing at the air with his outside rudder to make sure the Cub still had something left. All of this he did as one long and graceful sweep of the controls, so that each maneuver flowed smoothly into the next and I couldn’t even discern that much was happening to the plane. There’s no accounting for a young pilot as good as Kern was that morning in California. He was my father and Big Eddie Mahler, and all of the instructors and barnstormers back at our home strip, giving back all at once everything they had put into him over the years. Bonk he pulled out of the turn. Wham he crossed the controls, flying us sideways to bleed off speed. Slam he closed the throttle and then kicked in the last of his rudder and aileron to keep us in the sideways slip. All the while he was playing way over on the left side of the cockpit with the stick to hold us flat and nose-high in the slip, so the plane would be expended and have nothing left when we got over the runway. Mushing, we porpoised down over the canal. From the wingover up top to the slow-flight down here, a matter of thirty seconds or less, the plane had been stretched to every attitude and extremity of speed. Screech he planted the wheels on the first ten feet of the runway. But there was no stopping him now, because the helicopters had finally seen us and they were peeling back for the runway. Powering back up, Kern fast-taxied the length of the strip with the tail raised, took the corner at the taxiway on one wheel and made directly for the crowd with the Cub weather-cocked up on its main gear. When we were twenty yards out he reached for the magnetos and pulled the mixture control to shut down the engine and stood on the right brake, wheeling us around in front of everybody with the prop still clicking and dirt devils blowing off the wheels. Kern could really fly an airplane when he needed to and it was a very stylish arrival.

  The crowd was cheering. There was a group of pilots from the San Juan Capistrano short field course standing up front, and they had enjoyed watching Kern work that tight little strip. The flight school director, who was also the airport manager, was the first to the plane, and he pumped our hands. Uncle Jimmy pushed through the crowd with his arm around Aunt Joan. Tall and tanned, with that gracious, broad smile that I remembered, he was dressed in one of those white, Mexican-style shirts that hung down over his waist, and these geeky, black hightop sneakers, very “California” I thought. Aunt Joan was dressed to the nines, in a white rayon skirt and blouse. My cousins, Kevin, Tom, and Kelly, came behind with a group of Jimmy and Joan’s Orange County friends. It was obvious that Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Joan’s friends didn’t know anything about the small airport culture, because they were dressed for the country club instead, with lots of costume jewelry and pink golf pants. The print reporters started shouting questions and the photographers shot a lot of pictures. As soon as I got the door open Jimmy had his big arms around us and Aunt Joan kissed Kern, getting her bracelets and rings tangled in his hair.

  “Oh Kern!” Aunt Joan said. “You look so handsome and tan! Just look at you!”

  That was the thing about Aunt Joan that was great. She treated Kern as if he were Cary Grant.

  “Real fine Kern. Real fine,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Wow, what a landing you made. Wait’ll I tell your dad.”

  “Uncle Jimmy, don’t you dare tell my father about that landing.”

  “Real fine Kern, real fine. I am not telling your father about that landing.”

  The crowd surged forward. Everybody was poking the fabric and reaching inside to touch us and the throttle and stick, anything they could get their hands on really, and I liked all the excitement, the emotion and joy swelling off the crowd into us. It was the first moment that I felt that there was anything remarkable about our trip. But my feelings about that reception were curiously detached, as if all the excitement were directed at someone else. Everyone there was thrilled about our flight, their imagination of what a transcontinental crossing in a Piper Cub must have been like. But I was exhausted, tired of flying, and all I could remember was five days of nonstop turbulence and a blurry scramble through a mountain pass. I was stunned by the spectacle of it all, the queer logic of what excited people. Kern and I were oddballs, aviation nerds, sons of an eccentric, one-legged ex-barnstormer. One Saturday we took off and flew west for the mountains and the Saturday after that we hit the next ocean, and now we had this personal monkey off our backs. But nobody else saw it that way. This was America, where everything had to be exaggerated and hyped to the max. All of a sudden it was patriotic, what we had done. We were great American boys. I could practically hear the “Star-Spangled Banner” wailing away in the background. But that wasn’t us. That’s what everybody else was bringing to our flight. But I figured I could learn to milk this dog and enjoy our fifteen minutes of fame. Then the reporters started calling out questions all at once, elbowing each other, and snarling about who got to interview us first, and everything got back to normal. People kept pushing up through the crowd and asking for our autographs. Before I was even out of the plane, I had signed a dozen autographs on postcards and scraps of paper shoved into the cockpit. Some little brat even ran off with two of our maps.

  The TV helicopters came clattering back down, and it was just a media brawl after that. My father had asked Jimmy to “supervise” the press coverage, but he was no good at it, not being the aggressive newshound and efficient greeter that his older brother was. The television producers kept getting angry at him for letting a competing newsman interview us first. One of the reporters got wind of the fact that Kern had dated the girl across the street from Jimmy’s when he visited California in 1963. It wasn’t exactly a hot romance. She and Kern played Ping-Pong in the cellar, and held hands at Disneyland. But somebody—Kern swears it was Aunt Joan, Aunt Joan says, nope, it was Kern—blurted out her name, Carol Brantley.

  It was hot out on the tarmac and everybody got all bollixed up over that, dragging poor, sweet Carol, the proverbial girl next door, into the media shindig. As far as Jimmy was concerned, the story of our coast to coast adventure was now contaminated by a love angle. We all knew that the papers would print Carol Brantley’s name, which committed Kern to calling her up for a date. But seeing Carol again had never been a part of Kern’s plans for the California trip, and he was surprised at the way her name had popped out of the blue.

  We were just the dose of innocence that the country needed before the tumult of the late 1960s began.

  And the waterbag, the freaking waterbag just wouldn’t die. All week, my father had been regaling Jimmy over the phone about the waterbag, and Jimmy in turn had regaled Aunt Joan. On the way out to the airport that morning, in her Cadillac, Aunt Joan had told all her Orange County friends about the waterbag. So, there was sort of a waterbag coterie now—people in the know, people “close to the trip,” a VIP list of insiders privy to information about the waterbag.

  So, Aunt Joan and her friends decided to
stroll over to the Cub to check out the waterbag. In the excitement of all this, however, Aunt Joan’s internal gyros failed and she slipped backward into the Cub, right at the oiliest spot. Now she had the reverse image of a Piper Cub landing gear, in 40-weight oil, indelibly printed on her white rayon derriere. She forgot all about the waterbag.

  “Jim! My skirt,” Aunt Joan moaned across the tarmac. “It’s ruined!”

  “Ah Joan, relax,” Uncle Jimmy said. “I’m trying to manage all these reporters here.”

  “But my skirt, Jimmy. It’s ruined!”

  “Dear, just buy yourself another one,” Jimmy said. “You own a dress shop. You own five dress shops, for God’s sake.”

  I felt terrible about it—not about the skirt, but about Jimmy and Joan. In our family, they were legendary for the warmth of their relationship. At our family reunions, all the aunts sat around talking about how rough it was being married to these Buck men. But Aunt Joan out in California, they all agreed, had it made. Jimmy was such a peach, and he and Joan never exchanged a harsh word. Now, just because we had landed, they were arguing for the first time in years.

  “Ah Jeez Rink,” Kern said. “Look at Aunt Joan’s skirt. I knew we should have cleaned the gear off back in Yuma.”

  “Yeah. This is a zoo. Let’s get out of here.”

  It was a relief when the last news-chopper finally lifted off. We made arrangements for tying the Cub down at the airport for two weeks and piled into Jimmy and Joan’s matching Cadillacs. I rode the lead Caddie with Uncle Jim and my cousins, and Kern and Aunt Joan followed behind as we twisted down the canyon road.

  As soon as we hit the San Diego Freeway, Uncle Jimmy asked about the waterbag. He hadn’t noticed it on the landing gear. I wasn’t alarmed. Kern had always told me that Uncle Jim was somebody you could be honest with, like one of the “cool priests” up at school or one of our older cousins. He wouldn’t sit on a boy for something, like my father would. Uncle Jimmy had already told me just to call him Jimmy.

  “Jimmy,” I said. “Can I tell you this?”

  Jimmy has a way of talking. He explodes on words, one at a time.

  “It’s bullshit, right? The waterbag is bull. I just knew it. Knew it. Oh, that father of yours.”

  “Total bull, Jimmy,” I said. “We never even looked for the thing.”

  Jimmy roared. He adored my father. As boys, they had shared the same room and Jimmy never stopped being grateful for the way my father had chipped in and helped support the family during the Depression. But he understood his older brother quite well and had a good sense of humor about him, and he loved it when my father’s tall talk got him into trouble like this.

  “Real fine,” Jimmy said, still laughing. “The waterbag is bogus. But look, don’t tell Aunt Joan about this. Her friends were really looking forward to seeing the waterbag and I don’t want everybody to be disappointed.”

  Out on the freeway, the first thing I noticed was the traffic. Clearly, the automobile was a very serious preoccupation in southern California. Every vehicle on I-5, a dozen lanes across, glowed with wax and looked as though it was worn by its occupants as a piece of clothing or jewelry. Immaculately tanned and coifed men in long-nosed Jaguar XKEs glided by at eighty miles per hour, noiselessly darting across the lanes. There were surfers and lots of pretty girls in yellow Jeeps. Even the bikers and the cops looked spotless and neat, as if they were impostors, headed for a costume ball.

  The car just seemed to be everything in California. At Anaheim, we pulled off the freeway and headed in toward Jimmy’s house in Tustin, gliding down sunny boulevards lined with palm trees, carpets of flowers and faux-Mediterranean façades. As we turned in for Jimmy’s neighborhood, every garage door was thrown open and men and boys inside leaned over the hoods of cars, classic cars, a ’51 Chevy pickup at the house on the corner, a T-Bird next door, lots of ’57 Chevys and early-model Corvettes after that. While the men Simonized their Deuce Coupes in the shade, their wives and daughters were outside on the hot lawn, mowing the grass in bikinis.

  We hardly had a chance to settle into the house, which was tastefully decorated by Aunt Joan in beige and earth tones, with lots of nubbly fabrics and African and Mexican masks, before Jimmy called us out to the garage. In California, as soon as a house guest arrived, the car relationship had to be established.

  “Boys,” Jimmy said, ushering us into his spotless two-bay garage, “First things first. Here’s your vehicle.”

  There, in the bay next to Aunt Joan’s Cadillac, was a Ford Falcon station wagon, their “spare car.” It was several years old, but the red paint was like new and the grille and chrome trim gleamed like the brightwork on a yacht.

  “Real fine,” Uncle Jimmy said. “This is your car, boys. You can use it for as long as you’re here. I don’t care what you do with it, I don’t care what time you get in at night. In fact, I don’t care period. You’re grown, mature boys—hell, you just flew an airplane all the way out here! Just don’t get me in trouble with your father. Aunt Joan just loves you, and she wants you to have a good time.”

  Jesus. I always thought that this pie-eyed brother of mine was too extravagant in his praise of California. Aunt Joan and Uncle Jim couldn’t be as great as he said they were. But Jimmy really seemed to mean this stuff. It was paradise out here.

  Kern and I immediately settled into a routine, and most nights in Tustin we paired off with Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Joan. The California neighborhoods never seemed to shut down, and my cousins, who were younger than us, were always running off somewhere, driving go-carts with their friends or helping the man next door repaint one of his cars. Aunt Joan, who was a great cook and enjoyed company in the kitchen, sat at the table inside with Kern, slicing vegetables for a Mexican-style dinner and talking. She’d always told everyone that Tom’s “darling Kern” was her favorite nephew. She was excited about him leaving home for college in the fall and wanted to know everything that had happened to him since he visited three years before, and all about his dates. Joan was very protective of Kern and determined to see him become a success, and she knew just how to make that happen. Dates. Kern, Aunt Joan thought, needed lots of dates with girls.

  I sat outside in the garden with Uncle Jim. God, did I love California and Jimmy’s garden. Back in New Jersey, at Easter, my father was always careful to buy my mother a couple of these bird-of-paradise flowers, and this special kind of pink orchid that she liked, and the damn things cost about $15 a petal. In the east, these plants were considered rare. But Jimmy had at least a dozen bird-of-paradise plants back there, as thick as overgrown lilac back home, and the orchids were a dime a dozen. Ringing the patio, in neatly manicured beds, were all kinds of mimosas and bonsai trees, flowering ginkgos and all the rest, with a carpet of grass so green and plush a baby could fall right off a swing and not get hurt. The fragrance of all these plants together was otherworldly, and there was always a gentle breeze blowing in from the Santa Ana mountains.

  I had never spent much time with Jimmy, and it was a relief to dawdle away my evenings with somebody in the family who was so like me, but then again, so normal. We were both interested in the same things—politics and history—and read a lot, and Jimmy often felt intellectually lonely in Orange County, being the only registered Democrat for miles around. We gorged ourselves on talk. Jimmy’s stories were expansive and grand and he reminded me a lot of my father, except that he seemed less insistent on proving a point, and more satisfied with himself.

  Jimmy didn’t mind if I had a beer once in a while. In fact, I had many beers in the garden with Jim. But we knew that Kern might be concerned about this so Jimmy would sneak the beers out of the refrigerator for me and pour them into a glass with a big 7-Up logo. From the kitchen, Kern and Aunt Joan would look out to the garden, and think I was drinking 7-Up.

  Jimmy wanted to hear all about our trip, and he had already gotten wind of the shit-shit-shit El Paso gam and other problems I was having with my father, because my father had complained
about it. Jimmy was seven years younger than my father, and after the Depression hit, my father helped raise him. He understood what was happening, and anyway, Jimmy was a just good egg, somebody I knew I could talk to. Even without the beers I would have opened up to him.

  “Jimmy, I just don’t know what to do sometimes. We flew all the way out here without getting lost, but every time I talk to my father I get the ninth degree. I’m bugged about it.”

  “Don’t fight a problem, Rinker,” Jimmy said. “Understand it. Look, your father is a total kick-ass man. God, you should have seen him scrap his way out of the Depression. He’s got to dominate everything, because that’s all he knows. That approach might have worked with Kern. But then you come along, thinking you have all the answers, and Tom Buck doesn’t know what to do.”

  “Yeah. Great. So where does that leave me?”

  “Rinker, you don’t have to do a thing. Dodge the guy. Avoid him! Your father is so busy now with civil rights and politics, and God knows what else he’s up to, he’s not even going to notice if you just keep your head low.”

  Kern had said the same thing. This was the agreement with myself I was supposed to make back in Yuma. I was trying hard to listen. Kern and Jimmy couldn’t both be wrong about the same thing.

  California had its own light and smells. In the morning, fragrances of mimosa and birds-of-paradise wafted in through the bedroom curtains, and we woke refreshed. We ranged out in the red Falcon every day, spending long afternoons taking surfing lessons from the teenagers down the street, or visiting Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. Carol Brantley took us to Newport Beach a couple of times, and we got terrible sunburns. More reporters called for interviews, and Kern particularly liked a very thorough and accurate story on our coast to coast flight in The Los Angeles Times. When we flew the Cub up to the Orange County airport for a fifty-hour check, Frank Tallman, a famous Hollywood stunt pilot, strolled out of his hangar and made a big fuss over us. Kern took our cousins and the neighborhood kids for rides in 71-Hotel.