Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  “This was good today, Rink,” Kern said. “Junction to Austin. You flew it all by yourself. For me, it’s the high point of the trip.”

  My earnest brother. He was always overflowing with enthusiasm about something, making some event from an hour ago the high point of the trip, the sort of thing about him that I was never able to understand. Obviously, there were many more legitimate high points of the flight—Hank, back in Indiana, Pate in El Paso, and crossing the big pass. But if Junction to Austin was the high point for Kern, even though tomorrow he’d have a new one, it was good enough for me. I lay under the wing with my hands clasped behind my head, staring up at the stars, at peace with myself and with Kern. I wasn’t uncomfortable around him anymore. Everything between us seemed easier, practically effortless, now that I wasn’t wasting all my energy hoping he would change.

  The next night, Tuesday, we were already in Florida. A geezer at the Pensacola airport told us about a cleared right of way for a gas pipeline that we could pick up about ten miles away and follow all the way up to New York. We practically threw away our maps. On Wednesday we reached North Carolina, and after four hours of easy flying up the Shenandoah Valley we crossed into Pennsylvania before noon on Thursday. My father had a reception at the airport and a party at home planned for Saturday afternoon, and we didn’t want to disappoint him by storming into our home strip two days early. So we dropped down low over the familiar Pennsylvania Dutch countryside and swung into our old Lancaster County haunt, the immaculately kept grass strip at New Holland. We spent the next two days in Ephrata, at the home of Ivan Martin, an Old Order Mennonite farmer from whom my father had bought horses over the years. We helped Ivan and his boys bring in their wheat and chased around the country roads at night in a horse and buggy.

  On Friday evening, after dinner, Kern and I drove a buggy into Blue Ball for haircuts, because my father wanted us to “look nice for Mother” when we stepped out of the plane the next day. Kern was excited about getting back; he couldn’t wait to dive right into preparations for his commercial pilot’s flight test. I was a lot more reluctant for the trip to end, but there was one outcome of our flight about which I was confident. My father had listened to me back in California, after I told him about the waterbag. We’d grown closer and we understood each other better now. I had proven myself on this flight, and really stood behind Kern. My father would trust me now, and treat me with more deference. Certainly that’s what I felt I deserved.

  Disappointment, however, was waiting for me when I stepped out of the barbershop in that pretty little town. I called home from the phone booth out in front of Goode’s general store.

  “Lancaster? What the hell are you still doing there?” my father growled into the phone. “That’s south. You’re supposed to be approaching the field tomorrow from the west. Christ, do I have to tell you guys everything? Everybody expects a Cub out of the west.”

  I was crestfallen. A huge gray pit opened in my chest. Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. I’d been flying hard all week thinking everything was romantic, that my life would now be transformed for the better, but in fact I was just winging east toward situation normal. But I must have learned something on that trip because I thought about what was happening and deliberately waited several seconds before I replied. Anger and snide remarks just weren’t the way to handle him anymore.

  “Okay Dad, I’m sorry,” I said. “We made a mistake. But I think we can recover. We’ll fly north to the Delaware and turn right from there. Don’t worry. Everybody will see us coming out of the west.”

  “All right then. Noon. Noon sharp. Jack Elliott will be there, and a lot of other press. Make sure you both give your mother a big hug. And Rinker, none of this backtalking and awful language you’ve picked up on this trip.”

  When I got back to the buggy, Kern was just coming out from his haircut.

  “Everything okay Rink?”

  “Yup. Fine and dandy. The old man is really happy tonight.”

  In the morning, our last day of flying, we experienced one of those real high points that Kern was always crowing about. In truth, it was something for us both to crow about.

  We were off the grass at New Holland before eight and had plenty of time to make central New Jersey by noon, so we decided to drop in and see some friends at Princeton. The airport operators we had grown up with at Basking Ridge had moved their business south to Princeton the year before, and many of the old Basking Ridge flyers had moved with them and taken their planes down there. Probably, they had all heard about our coast to coast romp by now and would be glad to see us.

  Big Eddie Mahler had led the move of the old Basking Ridge flyers down to Princeton, and we hadn’t seen him in a long time. When we landed at Princeton that morning and taxied around the corner of the hangar, he was pulling his open-cockpit biplane out of the hangar, getting ready to fly off for his Saturday afternoon show. Eddie Mahler was a regal man. He rarely showed emotion about anything and when he crossed a ramp he ambled, imperturbable and majestic as a big African cat.

  But as soon as he saw the Cub with the red sunbursts come around the corner, Eddie broke in a run for us. It was all we could do to stand on the brakes and get the prop stopped before he got to us. He reached in and pulled open the door and pumped my hand. Then he wrapped one of those big tanned arms of his around Kern’s shoulder and hugged him like a child.

  “Kern Buck, I am so proud of you,” Eddie said. “You have done this thing. Everybody followed you all the way across in the papers. Everybody thinks this is just great for aviation. All the old Basking Ridge flyers just can’t get over you, Kern.”

  For Big Eddie, that was a lot of syllables at once, practically all the emotion he had in him for a full year.

  What Eddie said that morning built a marker inside Kern that never left. Over the years, whenever we sat out on a porch somewhere and talked about that summer, reaching out with imaginary sticks and kicking at the rudders, Kern would repeat Big Eddie’s words like a mantra.

  “And Rink, the day we got back, Eddie Mahler said he was proud of me. He hugged me that day. I’ll never forget it.”

  A number of other pilots, some of whom we knew and many that we didn’t, started piling out of the hangars and the pilots’ lounge and surged around the plane. Before we could even get out of the Cub, Eddie stepped back, hoisted the tail up to his waist and started pulling us back toward a tiedown spot on the grass. The other pilots joined in and pushed on the wings and the struts, and it was a wonderful moment for Kern and me, flowing backward in our cockpit seats as all of our old barnstorming buddies—Larry “No Cash” Tokash, John O’Johnny, and “Bird-Dog” Nelson—pushed us along in a crowd and called out questions. It was one thing to have earned the adulation of the news media and the public. But these were pilots, heroes of our childhood, buzz-job artists and famous airshow performers and airline captains, and they marveled at our journey.

  “Damn it all, Kern, this is great! Why didn’t I think of this?”

  “Whoa. Let me just get my head inside that cockpit. No radio! Kern, you’re frigging nuts. But I love this.”

  Eddie wanted to hear all about our trip—the deserts and the mountains, the Stearman men, whether we had any breakdowns, or got lost. We all sat around on the grass in front of the gas pumps drinking Cokes as Kern waggled his hands in the air telling everyone how he flew the Kentucky swale, or smoked 71-Hotel onto those big long runways out west in the density-altitude air.

  I felt joyful for Kern. Everybody kept clapping him on the back and telling him what a “hot shit” pilot he was now, and then somebody else we knew would pull into the parking lot and burst out of their car. “Jesus! Is that the Cub? It’s Kern Buck!” He was no longer that scrawny teenager running around the airport all day, wondering about what everyone thought of him. Larry Tokash, who ran the airport operation, told Kern that morning that as soon as he got his commercial and instructor ratings, he had a summer job flying for Princeton Aviation.<
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  Then we all enjoyed our old Saturday morning routine—watching the great Eddie Mahler take off for his show. Eddie said goodbye, shook our hands and then wrapped his arm around Kern’s shoulder one last time before he stepped over to his plane.

  It was the standard Mahler departure. Full show smoke on takeoff, rotate off the ground into a climbing chandel turn, two snap rolls over the windsock and then a hammerhead stall over to the intended route of flight. He was an awesome flyer that Eddie, like a big old stud horse coming out of the barn in the morning. He liked to kick over a few doors as he went by, just to make sure he was awake.

  We took off ourselves a few minutes later, and just because it felt right, we gave the crowd of pilots a buzz job low enough to make them duck and then we hammerheaded up and over to our route of flight.

  We were accomplished arrival artists by now, and it wasn’t hard doing it right for my father and the crowd waiting for us at Basking Ridge. The bit about a “Cub coming out of the west” turned out to be a lot of wasted anxiety on my father’s part. It was so hazy over central New Jersey by noon nobody could see an airplane very far anyway. But we did that dumbass thing just to please him, diverting way out toward Somerville and approaching from the west.

  When we came over the little mountain in Mendham we could see there was a cloud right over the airport. Kern stayed on top of it until we were almost past the runway and then threw the stick over and down, so we came out over everybody’s head in a graceful diving bank. Back with the stick for the chandel turn, kick the rudders over for a short downwind, and we came out of the turn onto final approach with the Cub already sideways in the slip and fell steeply down over the telephone wires. We touched down right in front of the crowd in a puff of dust.

  It was mayhem all over again out there, and I had a completely different feeling about it than our reception in L.A. Kern and I had been so free for a month. We had seen everything two boys could see across America, flown the Mississippi, the prairies, the deserts, and then the big pass, and slept under the wings at night. Barnstorming together, there were only two people to worry about—him and me. Now we were swarmed with people, photographers, old family friends, and howling younger brothers and sisters spilling Coke all over the plane. My father directed the press traffic, assigning a pecking order according to the importance of the publication.

  Despite my fresh haircut, my mother was annoyed about my hair. It was unruly then and there was nothing I could do about it. I had just flown almost six thousand miles, half the time with my head out the side looking for landmarks or watching avocados disappear. Even Elvis Presley couldn’t do that and exit the plane with his hairdo intact. But my mother was upset. She took one look at me and couldn’t help herself. The reporters were all right there and they had their notebooks open, and everything she said made the newspapers the next day.

  “'You’re home, I see,’ sighed Mrs. Buck. 'Rinker, push that hair out of your eyes.’”

  Yeah, shit, we were home, freaking home sweet home.

  Afterward, there was a big party at the house with all these Roman Catholic priests my father always had around, friends from town, and my older sisters’ boyfriends. My father was in his element, and I was happy for him. He needed this, basking in the glory of our coast to coast flight. But after about an hour of the merriment, Kern and I could see that the party wasn’t about us any longer. It was just another excuse, like a birthday or a confirmation, to fill up the rooms. We had to get out of there. Our heads were still out in Texas.

  We slipped out of the house together and walked out to the barn. The blue Willys was parked in the main shop, in the same spot where we had rebuilt the plane. It had become coated with dust while we were away and we brushed it off with oil rags. Puttering softly out the drive in reverse, we rode over to the Minuteman restaurant on Route 202.

  We never planned to do this, to debrief our flight like a pair of NASA astronauts, but that’s what we did. It was one of our last long talks together before Kern left for college.

  Kern was very selfless about it. He insisted that I appreciate my contributions to the trip, and was surprised that I still underestimated my role. The trip might have originated with him, it might have been his dream, he said, but I had helped “push it over the top.” It was an unexpected pleasure for him, he said, getting out to Indiana that first day and seeing what I could do. It was a lot more than just my navigation, or Junction to Austin, or taking over the controls in the middle of the pass.

  “Rink, you know what the biggest thing I learned on this trip is?”

  “No, what?”

  “I’m smart and I don’t even know it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah! I mean, the minute I first thought about flying coast to coast, there was like this voice inside me. 'You gotta take Rinky. Rinky has to be in that plane.’ I was pissed too. I had an argument with myself about it. 'Why should I take Rinky? He’ll just be bugging my ass all the time.’ But I couldn’t overpower that little voice and I knew there had to be a reason. Now I know. I mean, Jeez, both of us had to take the heat on the waterbag together, which made all of the difference.”

  I didn’t say much about that, but I didn’t feel that I had to. There was knowledge and satisfaction for me in what Kern said. I’d done what I’d had to for my brother that summer and I was happy about it for the rest of my life.

  A few weeks later, when Kern flew off to Red Bank to take his commercial flight test, nobody made a big fuss about it. He always got jittery before an event if people wished him good luck and, besides, this was just like any other morning. Every day that month, as soon as he was out of bed, Kern dashed off to the airport in the Willys to get ready for his test.

  I was back working at the horse farm and came home tired that night, and I lay down on the couch in my father’s library before dinner. I could tell just from the sound of the Willys entering the drive that Kern had passed the test. The tires squealed coming around the corner and the pickup screeched to a halt in the drive.

  “Rink!”

  He was calling out to me almost as an abstraction—anywhere I happened to be on the place, even if I wasn’t, he wanted me to know. But I was right there, underneath the open library window.

  “Yo! I guess you passed.”

  “Yeah. The examiner didn’t like my chandels and lazy-eights, but what does he know, Rink? I got the ticket. I’m a commercial pilot.”

  “Great. Now you can go off to college and relax.”

  “Exactly. Now look, here’s what I’m going to do. By Christmas, you’ll be sixteen and ready to solo. So, I’ll get my instructor’s rating over the winter for that, and then I’m going to go for my instrument and multiengine. I’ve got to be all set up by the summer for Princeton Aviation.”

  Exactly. The thing was, Kern did all this, right on schedule, and he had a pretty good little run of barnstorming blarney going for him by then. Up at Holy Cross, he started a flying club, and he even talked the Jesuits into buying a couple of planes for it. One afternoon, just for the hell of it, he landed one of them on the football field.

  CHAPTER 22

  The last time I flew with my father was the day after Christmas in 1966, five months after we returned from our coast to coast flight. It was last in many respects. My father never barnstormed again, and he rarely flew in private planes. But I was approaching my sixteenth birthday, and there was one more chore for him to perform. That morning, my father looked up at the breakfast table and examined my face as if we were strangers.

  In fact, we were practically strangers. After Kern left for college our old threesome had broken up, and my father and I had quickly grown apart. It wasn’t deliberate on his part or mine, it was just something we knew was wise to do. I was busy in school all week and led an active social life over the weekend, having reached the point where an outgoing boy doesn’t want to have much to do with his parents anymore. My father was preoccupied with work, finishing up a book, and his increasing fasc
ination with “alternative politics” and civil rights. We hardly saw each other anymore, but there was one last respite to enjoy, one more time together in the air.

  “Rinker,” my father said, “Let’s go out and solo you in the Cub. I always promised myself that I’d live to see the day both you and Kern were soloed. I just want to get it over with.”

  I will still three days shy of the legal flying age of sixteen, and no licensed instructor had signed my logbook for solo, but I didn’t see any reason to object. Kern would have his instructor’s rating soon and could finish me off for my private pilot’s test. I wanted to solo and there was no question that I could handle a Piper Cub. And certainly in this old Stearman man I had an able instructor.

  Snow had fallen over the past few days, and the runway was covered over in many spots by drifts. A sheet of white ice covered the low area in the middle. But there was six hundred feet of usable space at the north end of the field and a brisk wind was blowing straight down the strip.

  There wasn’t a heater in 71-Hotel, and my father was shivering in the backseat as we taxied out in the snow. Taking off, we used every inch of clear space and blasted into the air through a drift. Fresh powder swirled around the plane and crept into the cockpit through the cracks by the windows and the door. I remember that like a picture, because it caused a sudden and rapid deterioration of age in my father that I instantly knew to be prescient. He hadn’t shaved that morning and the snow blowing in stuck like confetti to his whiskers. I looked back, and the man who had taught me to fly was Rip Van Winkle.

  I hadn’t flown in a while but I found that being rusty didn’t hurt me much in the old Cub. Carb heat, three cranks on the trim, chop the power, and maintain 65. We circuited the wintery patch a couple of times and my landings were okay. Then my father got out and leaned into the front of the cockpit for some last words.

  “All right Rinker, go ahead,” he said. “There’s nothing more I can teach you in an airplane.”