Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  I blasted off through the drifts and circuited the airport, euphoric to be flying alone, amazed at the lightness of the plane and the controls without my father in the rear seat. I was shivering from the cold, but I was awed by the beauty of the white, snowy landscape all around me, mounded hills and naked stands of trees rolling off to the horizon in Pennsylvania on one side and over to the Atlantic on the other, with the sun glinting off the black ice on the nearby lakes. The Continental roared, the floorboards throbbed, and the cockpit smelled of burnt oil, and I loved being alone in the Cub.

  My father warned me that I might overshoot my first approach—without his weight in the rear, the plane wouldn’t want to descend and mush to a stall in all that wind. I overshot just as he predicted, but I didn’t let it rattle me. Fire-walling the throttle, I flew around again, and on the second try I did a decent job shoehorning the Cub into the short space, deliberately scraping the wheels onto the first drift to help stall the plane. Plowing through the snow and throwing up great white plumes with the prop, I taxied over toward the hangar.

  My father stepped out and kangarooed over, shivering and walking sideways in the wind with his pipe billowing out cinders and smoke.

  “Good, Rinker. I always said you could handle a plane just as well as Kern, once you settled down. Now go ahead. Take off again and fly around for a while in 71-Hotel.”

  The wind was really kicking up now and blowing in crossways, surrounding the plane with vortices of snow. But the windsock was pointed directly at me, so I just powered up right there and went off the ramp, Eddie Mahler style. As soon as I broke ground I cross-controlled against the drift, cranked in all of my trim and hung the Cub on its prop. With the plane steeply angled up, I kept my eye on the flagpole down in front of the high school to remain perfectly aligned with the runway. I enjoyed that, climbing almost vertically in the crab and never giving an inch to the drift while my father watched from below. When I looked down to him he waved a couple of times and smoke was blowing all over the place from his pipe. I felt good about it and the strong winds rifling the wings from the side reminded me of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Carlsbad, New Mexico, and then I realized something important about myself. In one respect I was just like Kern. The rougher the conditions, the better I flew.

  My father told me to fly around for a while and enjoy myself, so that’s how I handled it. As soon as I got up to altitude and had the Cub leveled and trimmed I was joyful all over again to be soloed in a plane, and that just made me very hungry for a hamburger. The Walker family over at Somerset airport ran a very good snack bar so I flew over there. The crosswind was pretty bad there too and cranky old George Walker wasn’t happy to see me landing in it, but I got down okay and let him yell at me for a couple of minutes before I went in for my burger. Then I decided to take in Princeton—maybe Larry Tokash, or Big Eddie, would be down there. As soon as I got into the air I remembered that I didn’t have a map, but that was another nice moment. I was one of the coast to coast kids. I didn’t need a map to find Princeton. Route 206 ran right by the airport down there and the road was practically underneath my wing already, at the Flemington Circle. When I got into Princeton Big Eddie wasn’t around, but Larry was, and he bought me a hot chocolate from the vending machine and we talked for a while. Larry was an FAA flight examiner by now, but also a friend.

  “Shit Rinker. You shouldn’t be flying around in these winds. On your first solo no less. But hell. You got the Cub down here. I imagine you can get her back.”

  On the way back I remembered that I’d promised the priests up at school to fly over the monastery as soon as I was soloed, so I went over and did that, and then winding my way back over the low hills I became transfixed by the skaters and iceboats on the lakes in Gladstone and Peapack, and I circled for a while to watch them. By the time I got back to the strip it was almost dark and the Cub was low on gas. My father had left hours ago. I tied down the Cub and hitchhiked home in the cold.

  When I got in, my father was typing in his library beside the fire.

  “How’d you make out?”

  “Fine Dad. I did Somerset and then Princeton. Sorry. I should have called and told you where I was.”

  “Nah Rinker. It’s okay. I told you to fly around for a while. I wasn’t worried.”

  I didn’t mean for that flight to be symbolic, but it was. Probably my growing estrangement from my father was inevitable—many of my friends and their fathers were going through the same thing—but the turbulent events of the 1960s also had a lot to do with it. My father had always been a public man, changing with the times, and he couldn’t resist the siren call of activism sweeping the country. Even before we returned from our coast to coast flight, he was girding himself for his last great crusade.

  It began innocently enough, with weekend excursions to civil rights marches down south, then the marches on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam, and before long he had joined groups like Clergy and Laity Concerned and was holding strategy sessions for local demonstrations in our living room at home. He got arrested a lot at peace demonstrations. Other men of his stature and age—writers, ministers, university professors—were doing the same thing by the late 1960s, but they usually had enough sense not to deck the cops. When he was manhandled by officers at demonstrations in New Jersey, and then again at Foley Square in New York, my father fought back. The police and the district attorneys, bringing him up on assault charges, never seemed to understand that there wasn’t a judge in the country who was going to throw this one-legged father of eleven into jail, so he always beat the rap. But his trials attracted a lot of attention and were covered in the press, and he soon gained a reputation within the “movement” as a kind of aging firebrand who had made a rather classic transition from establishment politics to radical causes. Invitations for him to speak poured in from all over the country. Defense attorney William Kunstler, pacifist David Dellinger, and the antiwar priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan were now his friends.

  Of course, he could never do just one thing at a time. To his delight, he had also emerged as an author. He had finished writing But Daddy!, a humorous and anecdotal account of his experiences raising eleven children, the year after we made our coast to coast flight. It was modestly successful as a hardcover book but took off in paperback, and soon he was in demand before women’s and church groups on this subject too. To help define and package him, his lecture agent in Washington called him the Catholic Dr. Spock. In 1968 he quit his job at Look and lived off his proceeds from lecturing and writing.

  I spent my last three years at home in the throes of a most curious role reversal. While my father was radicalized by the sixties, I was the smug conservative, mainly interested in girls, expensive foreign cars, and accumulating enough advanced placement credits to shave a year off college. Occasionally I joined my father at peace demonstrations, and because it was expected of me, I was active in social causes myself, organizing food drives for indigent families down south and tutoring underprivileged children up in town. But I was too numb inside and distracted by something else to know if my heart was really in it.

  My father’s health had visibly begun to slide, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. There had always been something inadvertently suicidal about his behavior—not just the way he flew, but the sheer variety of his activities, the killer pace he set. His doctors had warned him for years that phantom pains generally grew worse with age, and that his only protection from them was leading a more leisurely life and reducing stress. But my father was never going to do that. The harder he drove himself, the worse the phantoms became, and that only made him feel old and angry at himself for spending too much time in bed. After each successive attack, it took him longer and longer to recuperate. But as soon as he felt better again he accepted another speaking engagement and jumped onto another airliner, almost as if he was deliberately running away so he wouldn’t have to face himself. He was a burnout case who didn’t know it.

  And t
hose phantoms were monsters by now—hard, extended attacks that throttled him into deliriousness at the height of the pain and afterward left him listless for days. Several times during high school, and even after I left for college in 1969, I drove him alone to the hospital for his shots. He needed increasingly large doses of Demerol now—dangerous amounts, as it turned out—and when that didn’t work the doctors sent him home with bags full of methadone pills, as “chasers.” The medical men had more or less thrown up their hands. There wasn’t much to be done for phantoms anyway, and my father was bringing on attacks by overwork.

  Those rides with my father were awful. I wouldn’t fully understand what was happening until years later, when I finally read some literature on phantom pains. In severe cases, like my father’s, phantom-pain attacks trigger deeply buried and even forgotten details of the original accident or trauma, as the patient literally hallucinates the event that caused their loss of limb. Slumped over in the backseat, pallid and sweating, my father mumbled a lot deliriously and then started shouting. Month after month, he was reliving his 1946 crash.

  “My God! Get him out of there! He’s dying! Get the man in the plane damnit! God, God, God, oh my Lord, he’s burning to death.”

  As I said, it was awful, the most awful part being I didn’t know what to do. Many nights, when we got back, my father still couldn’t walk very well, and Kern wasn’t around to help me lift him up the stairs, so my mother and I made him as comfortable as possible on his library couch, lit a fire, and let him sleep there.

  The next morning, my father was curt about what had happened. Either because he really didn’t remember too well, or because he was embarrassed, he didn’t want to talk about his hallucinations and what he had shouted out the night before. I started facing the truth. My father’s big crash, which I’d always believed he handled stoically, was in fact emotionally crippling, haunting him in his premature old age. But we couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it. It’s a hard thing to admit, but sickness like that in someone you love does drive you away.

  In the spring of 1969, during my senior year in high school, my father collapsed from heart failure while delivering a speech at the University of Arizona. Facing the inevitable, he finally retired, though he remained active in politics and various causes as long as he could. My parents sold our place in New Jersey, packing up the possessions and memories of their fruitful, dense-packed marriage, and moved up to Susquehanna County in Pennsylvania, where the five younger children finished school. The old Cub, 71-Hotel, had already been sold, in 1968. The engine needed an overhaul but we had to spend the money to pay my father’s hospital bills instead.

  During college, and after I graduated and started working as a newspaper reporter in western Massachusetts, I tried to get down to Pennsylvania to see my father every few months. When I arrived, I usually found him up on the second floor of the barn, in the capacious, book-lined study that he had built for himself as soon as he moved up from New Jersey. My father’s old flying pictures and mementos from political campaigns lined the walls, and the framed aeronautical chart of the country, with our 1966 coast to coast route marked in red, still hung in its favored place, over his typewriter. Our old Franklin stove from New Jersey was installed on an immense slab of gray slate. In the cold weather we lit a fire, sat on rockers, and talked all afternoon while the shadows from the trees outside grew long on the walls.

  My father was quite thin now, his barrel chest concave. One winter he grew a long, snowy-white beard, which actually made him look younger, or at least livelier, the way the older Walt Whitman looked more animated than the younger, shaven man. Conversation with my father was still mostly a business of listening, and I sat as patiently as I could, taking in his long, familiar monologues. Sometimes he talked about his childhood during the Depression, or his barnstorming days, and if there was something in the news—the Watergate hearings were on the radio every day—he launched into politics. He kept forgetting that he had told me during my last visit about the novel he was planning on writing. It would be a roman noire with a World War II aviation motif. The Spitfire pilot takes off from England. The Messerschmitt pilot ascends from Germany. They meet over the English Channel and simultaneously open their guns, killing each other instantly and falling together to the water. The mutual sacrifice, my father said, would symbolize the futility of war. I wasn’t sure that he was ever going to write this book, or get it published, but I knew what it meant. He was a good old Stearman man, and now he was thinking about dying a lot.

  My father was quite thin now, prematurely aged, and sometimes he would doze off in front of the fire in the middle of his own story. All I could do was stare into the flames and remember happier times.

  Sometimes, my father dozed off in the middle of his own story. I sat quietly in my rocker as he snored, drinking coffee, and smoking my pipe, staring into the flames. My mind naturally wandered, and that old black Franklin in front of me seemed to anchor our past. Here, by the flames of this stove, I had sat as a boy and heard my father’s wonderful barnstorming blarney. Later, the stove was moved into our barn, and Kern and I had sat in front of it every night, racing through my homework before we went to work on 71-Hotel. What I did for my father now seemed passive, even mournful. While he snored in his chair, I stared at the flames in our old stove and remembered.

  The ride back to New England, up through the dairy country of New York State, was moody. I was very aware of the need to prepare myself for my father’s death. I felt terribly guilty about that, guilty that I wasn’t trying to do more for him. But I had my own life to lead and my father, most of all, had always encouraged me to be ambitious. With each passing year it became easier and easier to stretch out the months between visits.

  During the first week of April 1975, when my mother called from the hospital in Washington, D.C., and reached me in the newsroom, I could tell the news from the tone of her voice. The reporter who sat in the cubicle next to mine was incredulous over my reaction. While my mother talked I rolled a piece of copy paper into my typewriter and began taking down all the information. I knew that I would be busy organizing a lot of family, and I wanted to get everything down right. My father was dead and I was taking dictation just as if I were writing up another story.

  The last two years of my father’s life had been a medical odyssey. He and my mother, sometimes with the younger children along, had traveled to hospitals and pain clinics up and down the east coast in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to cure his phantoms. Recently, they had found a program in Washington that provided some temporary relief through acupuncture treatments. They were resting in their hotel room in Washington before my father reported the next morning for treatments, and had just ordered dinner. In the middle of a severe phantom pain, my father collapsed onto the floor. He had suffered a massive heart attack.

  The Karen Anne Quinlan case was the big national story that week, and suddenly nobody wanted to let people die naturally in hospitals anymore. Although it had taken an ambulance crew more then fifteen minutes to reach my father’s hotel, and their efforts at reviving him were unsuccessful, the hospital in Washington made Herculean efforts to bring him back. All the known procedures, from mechanical respiration to chemical heart stimulants, were administered, and a prominent heart surgeon was even called out of a Kennedy Center concert to implant a pacemaker. It was enough to make anybody a Lazarus. Once more my father’s chest heaved with induced breath, but a brain scan the next day turned up no signs of mental life. We all knew that the situation was hopeless, but the hospital was refusing to shut off the machines.

  Kern was working in Washington then as a congressional aide, and my first panicked thoughts were for him.

  “Mother, where’s Kern? What’s Kern doing?”

  “He’s right here, Rinker. And don’t worry. He’s fine and he knows what to do.”

  Kern did know what to do. Two days of chasing doctors down on golf courses and threatening legal action finally convinced the hospi
tal to adopt a policy of common sense. They agreed to turn off the vast apparatus of life-support machines attached to my father.

  When the doctors and nurses came in to shut everything off, my mother and Kern stood together in the room, holding hands.

  “Oh Kerny, don’t be sad,” my mother said. “Daddy’s suffering will finally be over.”

  And it was. With one last heave of that barrel chest, he exhaled sharply and gave up. He was fifty-nine years old. In the twenty-nine years since his big crash in ’46, he had fathered and raised eleven children, joined AA and founded an alcoholics hospital, saved a half-dozen major magazines, helped elect a president, been swept up by the sixties, and he had kicked our butts all the way to California and back too. It was a whale of a record for a man who hadn’t even graduated from high school.

  We had a nice funeral up in Pennsylvania, with lots of Buck family mayhem and reunions with old friends. Dozens of relatives from both sides of the family, and all of my father’s friends from the antiwar movement, descended on the town. One of my uncles got flat-ass drunk and collapsed on the porch, and a bunch of my sisters’ former boyfriends carried him upstairs to bed. Philip Berrigan came and entertained us with delightful stories about my father visiting him in prison. Practically everybody was smoking pot by then, even one of my cousins, who was a cop. The night before the funeral, after all of the older aunts and uncles had been escorted back to their motels, we all sat around upstairs in the barn until late talking over old times and Tom Buck. My father had wished to be cremated and his ashes had been sent up from Washington in a ceramic urn. Somebody brought the urn up and put it in the middle of my father’s library, and we lounged on the carpet and the chairs with all the old flying photos and mementos of my father’s career surrounding us, and passed the bong pipe around. It was a nice time, the way to do it. Everyone had great stories to tell and their own version of events, but we all agreed that this ornery, driven, unforgettable, crazyass man had inspired us a lot and he was impossible not to love.