Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  “Thirty November. Look out the right side of your airplane and you should see another airplane right beside you. That’s an airplane from the Army Guard unit and we’re going to go ahead and let them check in with you.”

  “Thirty November? This is Army Guard 403. We’re going to get you down safe and sound. We’ll be able to tell you what to do, and we’ll be able to tell you if your nose is too high or too low. We’ll bring you down at the proper speed.”

  There is a short pause while you think about the rest of your life.

  “Hey, Thirty November,” Army 403 says, “relax. We’re from the United States government. We’re here to help you.”

  “You’re from the government and you’re here to help?”

  “Thirty November, I’ve been in two wars and believe in the power of laughter.”

  “Well, uh, thanks Army 403.”

  You can actually see the pilot of Army 403. He’s a man in his forties, some colonel probably, and he’s smiling and waving. Just now, he’s back on the radio.

  “Thirty November, we’re going down to two thousand feet. Just pull back on the black T-bar, the throttle. Very, very gently now.”

  And slightly later: “Thirty November, your nose is only slightly down. Do you see the vertical speed indicator right under the altimeter? It says VSI on it. Is the needle position just a bit under the big five?”

  It is.

  “That’s good. You’re descending at about four hundred feet a minute. Which means your power setting is just about right.”

  And then there’s a lot of chatter between the controller and Army 403 about leveling off at two thousand; about flying past the airport and approaching from the south. You look down and notice that you are flying right by the airport.

  “Thirty November, we’re in good shape here. I want you to take the control yoke and very gently move it to the left. Good.”

  You are making a 180-degree turn. “Stay with it,” says Army 403. “Very good. Okay, you’ve almost come around. And … perfect. Now, just a slight pressure to the right. That’ll level your wings.” And you are looking down at a runway, very far away.

  The controller says, “Army Guard, you’re five miles southeast of Dulles, heading one hundred. Descend and maintain twelve hundred. Looks real good. We’re going to sequence you for one right. Thirty November? Good luck.”

  You seem to be lined up with the runway just right. The altimeter reads 1100 feet. There is no traffic at all, just a row of ambulances and fire trucks revving up next to the terminal.

  “Thirty November,” your personal colonel says. “We’re going to go down again. Reduce power a little. We’ll descend at four hundred feet a minute. You have the runway on your nose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looking good. Looking good.”

  It occurs to you that everyone has forgotten something very important. “Are my wheels down? Do I have to put the sons of bitches down?”

  “Negative, Thirty November. You have fixed landing gear and everything looks very good. Uh, Thirty November, have you ever used landing flaps?”

  “What are landing flaps?”

  “Nothing important. What is your speed now?”

  “Looks like just under ninety.”

  “Okay, Thirty November, we’ve got about two miles of runway down there for you and we don’t need flaps.”

  As the ground approaches, Army 403 advises you to get your feet on the rudders. He says that if the nose turns right, you push gently on the left rudder. If it turns left, hit the right. He says this will compensate for ground winds, but all of this is a little academic because the runway is rising up to meet you and you are going ninety miles an hour and everything is beginning to happen way too fast. Rudders? Ground winds?

  Army 403 says, “Keep descending, Thirty November. You see the lip of the runway? It’s just under you now. You’re only sixty feet in the air and leveled out real good. Okay. Your nose is a little right. Give me a gentle push on the left rudder. A little more. Yesssss. You’ve straightened out. Real good. Now, in a few seconds I’m going to tell you to chop the power: Just pull that black T-bar, the throttle, pull it all the way back. Not yet. Get ready. You’re almost ready to hear those tires squeak. Little bit of right rudder now. Yes. Okay, aaaaaand chop the power.”

  The engine virtually stops and the plane keeps gliding along on its own inertia, gliding level, parallel to the runway, but it is dropping gradually, very gradually, and you realize that you could, in fact, walk away from this one.

  “Thirty November, you’re only about fifteen feet in the air. Pull gently back on the yoke to put your nose in the air. Good. Hey, did you hear those tires? Thirty November, you’re on the ground, pal.”

  But now you’re going ninety miles an hour across the tarmac in an awkward vehicle that you have no idea how to steer. Or stop.

  “Just let her roll out, Thirty November. Give me a little right rudder. Good. And pull that red handle all the way back. It’ll make the prop stop. Okay.”

  And you are sitting on the runway, not moving at all and entirely alive.

  This is the way it would go in the best of all possible worlds. It would turn out that Freddy survives, and that when Geraldo Rivera calls to ask you to be on his show, you get to turn him down flat. Joe writes a best-selling book on stress management and passes out on Geraldo’s show.’ At Lake Mishikobi, you catch a muskie on the first cast, return home to discover that you are, in fact, married to Sharon Stone and that you’ve won millions of dollars in a multistate lottery you forgot entering.

  This is your fantasy.

  Either that, or you could crash and burn.

  Buford’s Revenge

  “Hey,” my companion said, “look at that spider’s nest.”

  I turned to where he was pointing and saw a beehive. There were no bees in evidence, only a spider—a daddy longlegs—crawling over the hive.

  My companion and I were both thirteen. He was a city kid, very smooth, and knew how to smoke cigarettes in an extremely sophisticated manner, by which I mean he could do it without coughing. He beat me at pool every afternoon and we both liked the same girl, whose name was Cherry B. He often made her laugh, mostly at my expense.

  At this point, however, it was just me and him, walking through the woods at a Virginia resort that catered to vacationing families: mine; his; Cherry B’s.

  “Watch this,” the guy said. He picked up a stick. “I’m going to bust the hell out of that spider’s nest.”

  “Don’t do that,” I shouted.

  “What’s the matter? You scared of spiders, Buford?”

  He called me Buford. I was a country kid, and kids from the country were all named Gomer or Buford in this guy’s experience. We were slow and stupid. I longed to invent a retaliatory nickname for him, something clever and annoying, if not actually humiliating. Something to make Cherry B laugh.

  “You know what’s going to happen when I bust this nest?” He smiled in a bullying manner. “About a million spiders are going to come out and crawl all over your butt, Buford.”

  He shouldered the stick and made as if to whack the hive.

  There was time. I could have told him. I have, over the years, been entirely unable to justify this moral failure to myself. What I learned in my fourteenth year on my summer vacation is that I will not always do the right thing and that women, remorseless creatures, will not only forgive but sometimes actually reward such character flaws.

  The beehive hung from a tree on a steep hillside. I figured that the guy would run downhill when it happened, and that he’d take the bees with him. So … I’d run uphill.

  What I did next could probably be described as a full Buford: I gibbered in fear and ran uphill as fast as I could, my hands in the air, screaming about spiders.

  I never saw him whack the hive. I could hear his derisive laughter, and I believe I may have even heard the sound the stick made when it hit.

  Thirty seconds passed. I was still running
, sprinting hard, when the screams started. They were more or less continuous and seemed to be moving downhill, diminishing in volume, like the wail of a retreating police siren.

  That afternoon, I played pool with Cherry B in the common room, and told her the story of the spider’s nest, which made her laugh.

  The next day, he was back. Same swagger, same superior manner. But no one looks very cool with lumpy bee stings all over his face and neck.

  “Run into some bees, did you?” I asked.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me, Buford?”

  “Geez,” I said, in a kind of slow, brain-damaged drawl, “I thought you was just funnin’ me there … Spiderman.” Cherry B laughed out loud.

  That night I kissed her, and she kissed me back.

  It was a summer vacation on the dark side.

  Glacier Bay

  You know how guys in beer ads are always pictured doing stuff you wouldn’t do—or shouldn’t do—when you’ve been drinking beer? In the Beer Ad Universe, guys continually engage in potentially dangerous activities like bungee-jumping or roofing their houses or talking to women.

  Recently I discovered that last year, I was a beer ad guy.

  It was a print-ad campaign, and apparently there was a poster, along with a lot of those little cardboard tents they put on tables encouraging people to buy beer. The picture on the poster and on the cardboard tent was of me. I am a small speck of a guy in a kayak, surrounded by floating icebergs and dwarfed before an enormous tidewater glacier looming two hundred feet above me.

  I suspect the ad campaign was designed to suggest that this beer is as cool and refreshing as a couple million pounds of ice grinding down a mountainside.

  The picture was taken in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, located about seventy miles north and west of Juneau, Alaska. A guidebook I read before my visit encouraged folks to book midsummer trips, but it was late September and snowing moronically when I arrived at Park Headquarters, at Bartlett Cove, near the mouth of the bay.

  The next day I rented a kayak. The concessionaire said there was only one other kayak rented out: some crazy guy paddling around all alone in the snow. That was my partner, photographer Paul Dix, the future beer photo entrepreneur.

  I was a day late—several flights had been canceled due to snow—but Paul had said he’d meet me about fifty miles north, up Muir Inlet, near the “snout” of McBride Glacier. Despite the delay, I suspected he’d still be there waiting, because Paul takes his commitments seriously. Also, I was bringing the food.

  I lugged my kayak through ankle-deep snow down to the tour boat, which, for a small fee, would drop me at a gravel bar near McBride Glacier, a place, I learned later, Paul had renamed Hungry Point. It was a five-hour trip up the inlet, and, of course, it snowed. You really couldn’t see anything. Then the wind picked up. I figured it was a katabatic wind, the kind that comes howling down off mountains of ice because of the simple physics of gravity: Cold air is heavier than warm air, so it sinks to flatland and squirts out horizontally. Sometimes at fifty or sixty miles an hour.

  The tour boat dropped me off at the gravel bar. Here, predictably, the snow was being driven horizontally by the wind. Worse, it was falling as corn snow, which consists entirely of exceedingly hard little white pellets, so the situation as a whole was rather like being sandblasted with crushed ice.

  The few tourists on the boat regarded me with that somber homage our society pays to the visibly deranged, which is to say they were pretty much doubled over laughing in the snow on the deck. So the boat pulled away, and I was left standing alone on a gravel bank, unable to see more than fifteen feet in any direction and feeling quite sorry for myself, when Paul Dix came paddling out of the ice storm, and greeted me with a hearty “Where in hell’s the food?”

  We sat in a tent for most of the rest of the day, and Paul filled me in on his adventures to date. There were black bears and Alaskan Brown bears all over. The Browns were like the grizzlys we were familiar with in Yellowstone Park, only bigger. Yesterday Paul had paddled into a sandy cove, looking for a place to camp. A bear had recently padded across the beach, and Paul was measuring his own foot (diminutive and pitiable) against one of the prints (colossal and appalling) when he noticed the bear had left something else on the beach. What it had left wouldn’t fit in a gallon pail and was still steaming. Paul decided to paddle on.

  “Good thing you weren’t carrying any food,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Paul replied pointedly, “I sure was lucky.”

  In fact, we were lucky. The next day dawned clear. The sky was cobalt-blue, there was not a breath of wind, and the sea was like glass, a mirror to the sky and the mountains on either side of the inlet, which was about a mile wide in that spot. We paddled over the reflections of snowcapped peaks, on our way to Muir Glacier, as the sun shone and the temperature rose to a little over 70 degrees, which is about as warm as it ever gets in Glacier Bay.

  And then, there in front of us was the glacier, pouring off the mountain and into the sea. The enormous wall of ice, the terminus of the glacier, is called the snout, and this one looked to be about two hundred feet high and maybe a mile across.

  The whole of Glacier Bay is shaped a little like a horseshoe, open end to the ocean, with the inland section surrounded by mountains that rise from sea level to ten-, eleven-, and fifteen-thousand-foot-high peaks. Snow falls in the upper elevations, never melts, is compressed by the next year’s snow—and the next decade’s—until it turns into heavy, dense ice, which flows downhill, as all water must. The ice makes pretty good time, too, sweeping down to the sea at the rate of four to seven feet a day.

  The terminus, that great wall of ice with its foot in the sea, is subject to tides that rise and fall up to twenty feet, and these tides eat away at the base of the glacier so that great slabs of it “calf” off the main body and crash into the ocean in an explosion of spray. The sound of the glacier calving can be heard for miles, and the mountain across the inlet from Muir Glacier is called White Thunder Ridge.

  Paul and I camped on a gravel slope below White Thunder Ridge, and we might have gotten some sleep were it not for the damn northern lights, which arced across an ebony starfield like phosphorescent green smoke interspersed with dozens of red lightning bolts running in ultra-slow motion. All the while, the sound of calving ice rumbled off the ridge above. It was like having the whole damn philharmonic orchestra come over to play Beethoven for you at midnight: The mindless and ungrateful go to sleep so they can rise up in the morning fully rested and spiritually impoverished.

  For the next few days, Paul and I played chicken with the glacier. Kayakers are cautioned to stay at least half a mile from the snout, but distances were impossible to calculate. I’d get in there, way too close, and hear what sounded like the magnified cracking of automatic-gun fire. Then a great two-hundred-foot-high block of ice would separate itself from the glacier and fall, slowly it seemed, into the sea with a roar that echoed against the mountains for a full minute. And afterward, maybe five minutes later, a small ripple of a wave would roll past my kayak, and I figured I could maybe move in a little closer.

  It was at this point that I saw glaucous-winged gulls making for the glacier and diving for stunned fish brought up by the falling ice. They were tiny in my vision, like children’s drawings of birds, and I thought again that I might paddle up a little closer.

  I avoided the icebergs, big as mansions, and made my way through a watery field of “bergy” bits, smaller slabs of ice, that pretty much covered the surface of the sea. There was a strange sound all around, a crackling, like static electricity, and it was getting louder as I paddled toward the foot of the glacier before me. It took a while until I understood that it was the bergy bits that were crackling, in the manner of a very cold ice cube dropped into a glass of water.

  There were harbor seals basking in the sun on the larger slabs of ice, and some of them dropped into the water, disappeared for a time, then surfaced near my kayak.
They had heads like wet Labrador retrievers—that same friendly curiosity—and one came close enough for me to touch with my paddle had I wanted to. He tilted his head in a quizzical manner, dove, then surfaced again on the other side of the kayak. I thought he wanted to play tag, and I paddled toward him, at which point my kayak was rocked by a sound so loud it could actually be felt.

  I looked up to see a block of ice the size of a twenty-story building falling in my direction. Time slowed down, as it does in these situations, and I had the leisure to fully appreciate what an enormous horse’s ass I was. Eventually, about a month later it seemed, the ice thundered into the sea far in front of my kayak. It threw up a wave that rolled toward me in a ten-foot-high crest of dirty brown water, capped off with pieces of ice ranging in size from fist to Ford. I paddled forward, to take the wave at a run so that it wouldn’t crest over me. My kayak rolled easily over the top and slipped down the back side. The last rumble of the calving echoed off White Thunder Ridge, and I could hear the bergy bits snapping all around. Some insane person was beating a drum hysterically inside my chest.

  Which, I think, is when Paul—who was quite a ways behind me—snapped the picture that someone thought might sell beer.

  The weather held for a week, and we paddled back down the inlet toward Bartlett Cove and the mouth of the bay, a trip that is a time-lapse lesson in plant succession. Two hundred years ago, the explorer Captain George Vancouver mapped what was then Glacier Bay: a ten-mile inlet, capped off by a four-thousand-foot-high wall of ice. Over the past two hundred years, since the end of “the Little Ice Age,” that immense glacier has retreated almost sixty-five miles, and the land it exposed was all barren rock and sterile gravel.

  But the planet is modest and she quickly clothes herself with life.

  Even under White Thunder Ridge, on land that had been exposed perhaps ten years ago, Paul and I found “black crust,” an algal feltlike nap that retains water and stabilizes silt so that, eventually, mosses grow. They in turn support hardy pioneers, like fireweed and dryas. These plants are plentiful a few miles from the retreating glaciers. Further down the inlet, alder breaks spring out of thick beds of dryas. The alders drop nitrogen-rich leaves, building a soil that enables spruce to take hold and eventually shade out the alders. At Bartlett Cove, which was under four thousand feet of ice two hundred years ago, there is a hemlock and spruce climax forest.