Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  “Kern’s fine Dad. Just leave Kern to me.”

  “All right. But I don’t want him upset.”

  “Dad, he’s always upset when you put pressure on him like this. Why can’t you just back off sometimes, leave him alone?”

  “Ahh God, Rinker. I’m just so upset with myself over this. It’s my project now—leaving Kern alone. Jimmy’s been kicking my ass about it all week. I’ve gotta let go and stop upsetting Kern.”

  “And me Dad. Me.”

  “You? What do you mean, you?”

  “Me, Dad. Me. Everything’s always Kern. Kern, Kern, Kern. What if I’m upset? You only care about Kern.”

  “Oh boy,” my father sighed. “How was I supposed to know you felt that way?”

  “You never asked.”

  “You never told me.”

  “You never listened. You only care about Kern.”

  “Rinker that’s not true. Dammit-all, that’s not true! Kern’s the one I worried about, and there’s a difference. Hell, I didn’t have to worry about you. You’re running track all the time, getting straight As, and all the priests up at school know damn well they should be kicking your ass for something, but they’ll never do it because they like you too much. Shit, I happen to admire that. But Kern wasn’t that way. He was shy. He didn’t take to people like you did. Until I got him up into an airplane, I didn’t know what the hell we’d do. Mother was worried about him. I was worried about him. I’ve always felt close to him and knew I had to do something. But I knew you’d be fine. Don’t you get it? That’s a compliment, son.”

  “Sure, I get it. Thanks for the compliment.”

  “Ah Jeez. What are you telling me? You feel slighted? Left out?”

  “No, I don’t feel slighted! I don’t feel left out,” I said. “I mean, you know, well, okay, yeah, maybe, so I do feel left out, sometimes. I guess. Whatever Dad. But if you’re going to be upset because Kern’s upset, then you have to be upset because I’m upset. Dad, I busted my ass on this trip. I delivered for Kern. But I’m not his gopher, running around being the second son all the time. I’m tired of that stuff. I’m just as important as him.”

  “Rinker, I know that. And if I’ve made you feel differently, then I’m sorry and I mean it. But there’s reasons for all this. You don’t know the half of it sometimes.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s the half?”

  “Ah c’mon Rinker. You’re running late now. Everybody’s waiting. We can get into that later, back home.”

  “No. I want to hear it now. What’s the half?”

  “All right! Okay, since you want to get into this and everything. Rinker, don’t be afraid to take a look at yourself either. You’re half the problem that I’ve had with Kern, always calling him a square for being who he is, making him jealous all the time because you make such a big splash with everybody up at school. It hasn’t been easy for him having a younger brother like you. I was absolutely shocked when he said he wanted to take you on this flight. I mean, why didn’t he just leave you home? Now, you’re out here, and you didn’t get the waterbag, and you’re both making me feel like some kind of fifth wheel in this operation. Jimmy says Kern doesn’t need me anymore and I should leave him alone, and he’s probably right. Now you’re saying the same thing. I’m practically out of this equation.”

  “Dad, you’re not out of the equation. You just have to stop butting in, that’s all. Whatever problems Kern and I had, we dealt with them. Just leave us alone. Stop bugging us.”

  “Yeah, I have to work on that,” my father sighed. “God, this is as bad as an AA meeting. Look, just have some mercy on me, wil’ya? This is hard for me. Kern’s leaving for college in a month and I’ll hardly see him once we get home. That’s the reason I came out here.”

  “Dad. You’ve got ten other kids. Why don’t you worry about somebody else for a change?”

  “I know that, Christ I know! I just had to make sure everything was straight with Kern, that’s all.”

  “Yeah. Well look, don’t do the same thing to me. I want some space Dad. I’m not going to solo sixteen airplanes on my birthday for you and all that other stuff. I need some breathing room.”

  “Well good. You want some space. I’m burned out on all this anyway. Maybe we both need some space.”

  It was time to go, and we were both talked out. Then Kern came around to the side of the Cub and stared up at us with his hands on his hips.

  “Smile Rinker,” my father said. “Laugh or something. Kern’s looking over at us. See me? I’m smiling. Look at me smile! I’m laughing my ass off about this, right? That’s what you tell Kern. Everything’s fine and Daddy is laughing his ass off about the waterbag. Jesus Rinker, I need my head examined for this one.”

  Before he left, my father and I cooked up a cover story. He was desperate to have an excuse about the waterbag for everyone back on the ramp. So, we came up with this: Two weeks ago, I was refilling the waterbag in the men’s room at the Yuma airport. Then I forgot it before we took off. But we were going to retrieve the waterbag at Yuma this very afternoon, on our way back east.

  “All right then,” my father said. “The men’s room in Yuma. I’m going back up there to give Aunt Joan the biggest bullshit job of her life.”

  My father turned to go, then wheeled back to face me.

  “Look, I’m glad we talked. Nobody ever does it at the right time. And I am proud of you two. You obviously don’t need me backseating you anymore, so don’t even bother calling home every night, not for me. Just let Mother know where you are. And screw the waterbag. I’m sorry about it. The waterbag is history.”

  I watched my father hike up past the line of parked planes. It had been too long a walk for him, and now his bad leg was twisting out at the knee, scraping up dust. It was a moment of supreme conflict for me. I felt sorry for him, but satisfied for myself. Probably we understood each other a lot better now and he would try and leave me alone. But it was pathetic too. It had all happened over the waterbag.

  I turned back to Kern and the Cub.

  “What did he say, Rink?”

  “It’s fine, Kern. He’s going to tell everybody we left the waterbag in the men’s room at Yuma.”

  “Ah, Jeez. More bull. Look, I don’t ever want to hear about that damn thing again.”

  Old Harold Buck arrived as we taxied up with the plane. His chauffeur had driven him down to San Juan Capistrano in a big stretch limousine. He sat on a folding chair out on the ramp, appearing very interested and asking a lot of questions while Kern and I showed him the plane. Then the chauffeur came around from the parking lot carrying an immense vegetable crate.

  “Boys, these are your avocados,” Harold beamed. “There’s enough here to last you all the way back east.”

  It was the largest vegetable crate that I had ever seen, larger, even, than the one Henry Fonda had to lug around in Grapes of Wrath. There was no way it was going to fit into the tiny baggage compartment of the Cub, but nobody wanted to disappoint old Harold so we just left it there by the wheels.

  My father was chastened now and treading gingerly around Kern. But he did have a favor to ask—just one more favor, he said. After we took off, could we give everybody a flyby and then climb for altitude circling the field? We had to climb high before we flew east over the Santa Rosa Mountains anyway, and everyone here on the ramp would enjoy watching us go for air before we disappeared over the hills. Kern agreed.

  We shook hands all around, kissed Aunt Joan, and squeezed into the Cub. My father came over and lifted the crate of avocados onto my lap. The crate was heavy, as heavy as having a grown person sitting on me, and when Kern tried moving the controls, my stick in the back seat butted up against the avocado crate. He would have only about half of the normal play on his elevator controls.

  “Ah Jeez Dad,” I said.

  “Ah Rinker now just screw it and behave here for a minute,” my father said softly. “Let’s not upset old Harold. As soon as you get out over the desert, you can toss
’em over the side.”

  My father propped us. Everyone on the ramp enjoyed the way he could get four or five rotations out of the propeller with each throw while Kern fed in the primer fuel.

  “Contact!”

  “Contact!”

  We took off, did the flyby, and then circled the field while everybody on the ramp below craned their necks and watched us climb.

  It was a bitch, being sandwiched into the backseat of a Piper Cub underneath a full commercial crate of avocados. The bottom of the crate dug into my thighs, and as we circled higher over the airport Kern kept frowning back and yelling at me to suck in my “big ass” so the crate could get out of the way of his stick. But it was no good. When we reached 5,000 feet, we needed to raise the nose higher in the thin air, but it just wasn’t working. The stick kept jamming up against the avocado crate.

  Old Harold Buck showed up at San Juan Capistrano to wave us off, and brought us a present of avocados.

  “Rink!”

  “Yo!”

  “I can’t climb the plane. Deep-six the avocados. Now!”

  I threw open the windows on both sides and perched the crate up high on my knees, so I had a proper platform for release.

  Avocados away. Visually it was a very interesting experience, watching avocados go over the side and disappear quickly into the smog. Sticking my head out in the slipstream, I could follow them down for about three seconds. But I wanted to watch the avocados longer than that so I started jettisoning them in large pods of four or five, which allowed me to track them an extra five hundred feet.

  Avocados-smog. Avocados-smog. It was fascinating, watching avocados vanish into hazy southern California. Then Kern got into the act too and really enjoyed it, reaching back with his throttle hand for an avocado and tossing it out the left window. We were Piper Aircraft’s first bomber, with ordnance going out both sides.

  When we could see the bottom of the crate Kern suggested that I hold back a reserve of three or four avocados in the baggage compartment, just in case we ran into another Greyhound in Arizona. That done, I up-ended the crate on my lap and Kern gratefully drew all the way back on the stick. What a relief—we had an airplane that could climb again.

  We were worried about safely releasing the crate, because it could easily get hung up on the tail or the wheels. Back home, Kern knew a couple of pilots who flew parachute-jumpers, and he decided to handle it the same way. He pulled the Cub nose-high into slow flight, carried a little power, and made a shallow bank to the left, so all I had below me from the open door was a big space of air and a gentle slipstream blowing by. With both hands I heaved the crate straight down.

  It was beautiful, watching that crate fall into the abyss. Spinning crazily and flipping end over end, it disappeared below at about 2,000 feet.

  We completely forgot that gravity works all the way to the ground. We were still circling the airport and at a certain point I did notice Harold Buck’s limousine depart, but he was probably just tired and needed to get home for his nap. These were just avocados going overboard. Who cared what happened to them after we couldn’t see them anymore?

  We didn’t even think about it until we called my mother from Arizona that night. My father had rushed back to Los Angeles to catch his airline flight for New York and had called her from the airport.

  “Gee, Rinky, what happened out there today?” my mother asked. “Daddy kept talking about these avocados.”

  “Uh oh. Is he angry?”

  “No. He thought it was hilarious. I’ve never heard him laugh so hard.”

  I hung up and immediately called Uncle Jim. He was laughing too. The scene at that airport, he said, was better than the Battle of the Bulge. The first big pod of avocados, Uncle Jimmy said, had landed on the taxiway, only about fifty feet from the crowd. Splat-splat-splat-splat. Guacamole on the tarmac. It was a continuous volley after that. Pods and individual avocados landed on the runway, on the hangar, and splashed into the irrigation canal. Hildegard Richter dove for cover in the cab of the gas truck. The avocado pod that squashed down on the parking lot coated Harold Buck’s limousine with green slime, and the chauffeur wiped it off with one of those little towels attached to a golf bag. But Harold Buck wasn’t that upset. In the middle of the bombardment my father rushed over and calmly explained that the Cub was probably experiencing “center of gravity” problems. Harold was okay after that. Considering his background, all the fine engineering work he’d done for Howard Hughes, he said, he should have known that this might be a problem for the boys. Even the airport manager was laughing about it.

  Oh! And the crate, Jimmy said. Jesus, the crate. The crate made a real fine touchdown. It came screaming down at a ferocious velocity, vibrating and whining like a flying saucer. Crack! It landed about ten feet from the windsock and splintered into a hundred pieces.

  But we didn’t know any of that right away. As we cleared the Santa Rosa range, the air pressure changed and the California smog disappeared, and we dropped down low to enjoy the desert vistas of Thermal and Blythe. Over the chalky wastelands of western Arizona, we diverted around a couple of thunderstorms and then cruised down Highway 10 toward Phoenix.

  Circling into refuel at Litchfield Park, we chucked the last of the avocados out the window, splashing them onto a hotel parking lot. California had been a real fine time, at least until my father got there, and for two weeks it was fun being the coast to coast kids. But now we just wanted to wander the country for a while and explore some new routes toward home, anonymous again, enjoying the throb of the Continental and the ceaselessly changing terrain.

  CHAPTER 21

  Our flight home was the dream journey we had hoped for all along. Through New Mexico and endless Texas the skies were flawless and entranced us into a relaxed state of flying. The prevailing westerlies that generated bracing headwinds on our trip west were now tailwinds briskly kiting us east. The press wasn’t bothering us anymore and the only breakdown we had was a snapped carburetor heat cable, which we fixed ourselves. We let the prairie dogs and buses roam free. Everything felt romantic and Kern and I camped out under the wings almost every night. We sat up late in the chilly deserts, talking about ourselves and our plans for life, laughing about my father and the waterbag. In the morning the airport geezers ran us into town for heaping, greasy breakfasts at the cafes, and in the evening they ran us into town for chicken-fried steaks. Our days were aimless, pleasurable, what travel should be. We didn’t want to fly the rocky Kentucky swale again and we pointed instead for the Gulf Coast, and so we saw New Orleans and Pensacola.

  We even aced the Guadalupe Pass. We deliberately flew hard the second afternoon to make El Paso by nightfall, so we could launch for the pass in calm air at dawn. But when we got in, at six o’clock, there was a pilot tying up his Beech-craft Bonanza. He had just come over the mountains. It was smooth that evening, he told us, without a bubble in the air. He recommended that we not attempt going over the top of Guadalupe Peak, where the air would be rougher, but instead just cruise right on through the pass at 8,000 feet. We fueled and flew like the dickens for the mountains.

  From 9,000 feet, a mile from the pass, Kern put the Cub in a shallow dive with the throttle wide open. He timed it perfectly, and there was a good tailwind behind us too. We were still running downhill and clocking over one hundred miles per hour as we whistled through the middle of the pass. There were some nasty turns to make toward the end, down low where the sides are closer together, and some turbulence too once our wings were exposed to the sidedrafts coming off the jagged walls on the far side. But it was definitely a wise decision to cross at low altitude in smooth night air. We were in and out of the pass in about six minutes.

  Oh you beautiful old mountain, I thought as we cleared the last wall, you gorgeous whore. You nearly got us that first time but now we have your number and so goodbye Guadalupe. We flew on across the high desert to Wink. That night, the airport manager and his hands took us on a rattler safari, and Kern and I each
bagged several snakes.

  I was always grateful about one thing Kern did when we reached central Texas. After we got into Junction, in the scrub prairie north of San Antonio, we were finishing up our RC Colas and Moon Pies when Kern flipped me the sectional map.

  “Here,” he said. “Plan me a cross-country to Austin. You’ll fly the whole leg yourself from the front seat, as pilot-in-command. I’m sitting in the back with my arms crossed.”

  I was jittery at first, taxiing out. I wasn’t used to handling 71-Hotel from the front seat. But then I got the throttle open and my tail raised, and I could always hold a centerline and break ground all right.

  I was euphoric, flying that Junction-to-Austin leg by myself from the front seat, spending two hours and five minutes as pilot-in-command. There was a large oil field out along the lonely Pedernales River which I had to hit midway, practically our only major landmark, and it was right where it was supposed to be after an hour. Kern kept his arms folded in the back the whole time, not offering a single suggestion, lost in thought and enjoying himself. The route we followed took us right past Lyndon Johnson’s ranch, and Kern was excited about the possibility that we might be able to pick out the president’s spread.

  When we got to Tim’s airport in Austin I dropped to pattern altitude and approached the field downwind.

  “Here’s Austin!” I proudly yelled back to Kern, happy about my navigation and flying. “It’s your airplane.”

  “Rink, I said the whole leg,” Kern yelled forward. “You can land this Cub.”

  And I could too. Carb heat, three cranks on the trim, chop the power and hold sixty-five miles per hour. Over the fence I eased back on the stick. As we touched down Kern deliberately stared out the side windows with his arms folded, as unconcerned as a passenger on United Airlines. He knew that I would grease it on.

  We flew on to Houston that evening. After dinner in town we rolled our sleeping bags out under the wings and lay there for a while, gazing up at the stars.