The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  At Littleton, New Hampshire, I pick up the four-lane headed northwest. This quickly peters out at St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and I am left with a two-lane ribbon of asphalt going the way I want to go, southwest toward Barre and Montpelier. Occasionally I have to weave my way around wisps of cloud. Off to my right the mountains are wreathed in mist and heavy clouds. Same on the left.

  Darn! These would be great mountains if I could just see them. These are the Green Mountains of Vermont, where Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys hailed from. I read Allen’s biography in the fourth grade, that winter during arithmetic class. Ever since I have had an itch to own a flintlock rifle.

  When the Knapp State Airport on top of a hill between Barre and Montpelier comes into view, I am tempted. I am flying in rain, not seeing all the nifty things I wanted to see, the mountains are topped with crud. I call Unicom and land.

  Ta da! I have now been to every state in the union except Alaska! I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go anyplace where you have to eat your whiskey and cook your motor oil. Noel Wein was a better man than I. I admit it.

  The FBO offered me a spot in his hangar to get the Queen out of the rain. I took him up on it. I taxied her straight in. He helped me fuel her there, but he didn’t have any 50-weight oil either. Luckily I had two quarts in the baggage bin that I’d been saving for a rainy day, like this one turned out to be.

  Later I visited the National Weather Service meteorological observer in his little office in the terminal. His name was Roger Hill and he looked genuinely glad that I stopped by. In addition to all his weather gear, he had the Unicom radio—this was why the answers to my transmissions were so prompt—and a large black mongrel dog that was asleep on his couch.

  I asked Roger when this front was going to be out of here. He said it should be clearing nicely by noon tomorrow. I told him I wanted to go west through the Adirondacks and then southwest along the southern shore of Lake Erie.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “But there is another front over Wisconsin and Lake Michigan and it’ll be slowly moving this way. Tomorrow afternoon and maybe the next day you’ll be between fronts. It’ll be hazier on the back side of this front than it’s been here the last few days.”

  Roger grew up in Los Angeles, he told me, but married a Vermont girl and came out here. It’s for the best, he thought. “Being a meteorologist in L.A. is like drinking only milk—they don’t have weather there.” He said he likes places with four seasons and he can tolerate snow. Several times as we talked he glanced out the window at the sky.

  I like weathermen who look out the window. More of them should.

  I thanked him and thought about patting the sleeping dog, but decided against it. Let sleeping dogs lie, the wise man once said, though I’ve forgotten which wise man that was. Either Confucius or W. C. Fields.

  That evening I went down to Montpelier for dinner and a look around. The state capitol is a building in the tradition of American state capitols, but it is modest in size and the lines are clean. It has a shiny golden dome on it that I saw from the air just before I landed. I’ve seen a couple dozen capitol buildings, and this is far and away the nicest. Across State Street from the capitol are some four-or-five-story turn-of-the-century brick and stone buildings that are used by state government. The scale is a human one.

  Wonder of wonders, downtown Montpelier is a thriving place, full of people and stores that are still open on a Friday night. How these Vermonters avoided the mall plague that devastated most American downtowns is a secret they should share.

  But Montpelier is just a small town, maybe twelve thousand people. Fifteen at the outside. I suspect it’s the smallest capital city of any state. Of course that means the politician per capita ratio is extraordinarily high. The politician density in Denver is much, much less. In Denver you can go weeks without running into a politician if you stay out of the cheap saloons.

  I had a pizza at Angelo’s, which offered peanut butter as a topping for real gourmets. I elected to go with more traditional fare, then drove over to Barre for ice cream. Barre is smaller than Montpelier—people make U-turns in the streets on a regular basis. The residential districts I drove through are filled with trim, well-maintained frame houses on quiet, tree-lined streets.

  Still trying to imagine what a peanut butter pizza would taste like, I ordered a peanut butter sundae topped with whipped cream and a cherry at a trailer-emporium on the north end of town. It was delicious.

  On the way back to my motel I found myself thinking about tomorrow’s flight. The rain had stopped. I hoped the transplanted L.A. meteorologist’s prediction would come true.

  Yesterday morning, the Fourth of July, I saw an article in the Portland, Maine, paper on patriotism. The gist of the article was that a lot of folks think patriotism’s bad. That’s okay with me—I don’t really care what they think.

  The reason I’m still thinking about the article is because it contained a quote from a professor of political science at some little college here in New England. It went like this: “As an intellectual, I believe that American imperialism is a knife at the world’s throat.”

  Now I ask you, do you ever start sentences with the phrase, “As an intellectual …”? Nor do I. And I know why. Most people automatically translate this phrase as they hear it into something like this: “As an overeducated, impractical fathead, I believe blah blah blah.”

  But I have been thinking about this off and on all day yesterday and today, maybe fifteen minutes total, and I’d like to give it a whirl. So here goes: As an intellectual, I think that skinny girls are cuter than fat ones.

  That phrase makes any sentence a grabber, doesn’t it? So far so good. I’ll try it a few more times.

  As an intellectual, I believe that masturbation is the leading cause of acne.

  As an intellectual who has done a lot of pondering on the state of the universe and mankind’s position in it, I have come to firmly believe that the world will end tomorrow.

  As an intellectual, I am convinced that people who like anchovies on their pizza shouldn’t order peanut butter too.

  As an intellectual, I have found that thick books cost more than thin ones and take longer to read.

  I think I’m getting the hang of this. You should consider adding this phrase to your lexicon—you’ll really impress your friends. One more, then as an intellectual, I’ll call it a night.

  As an intellectual, I think patriotism is like beer—a judicious quantity is great and too much isn’t good for you.

  15

  THE RAIN WAS SHOWERING DOWN IN MONTPELIER, VERMONT, ON Saturday morning at 8:30 A.M. The window of my motel room actually opened and I rested my elbows on the sill and watched the rain pound the cars in the parking lot and make little rivulets where it ran along the asphalt. The rain came down hard for a while, then slacked off, then came hard again.

  As usual, this morning there were deadlines. I had to be out of the motel by 11 A.M. or pay for another night. The car was from a dealership across the street, and it had to be back by 5 P.M. today, regardless. The dealership was closed on Sundays. So if the weather stayed yucky, I was going to be afoot in a motel two miles from the airport, five miles from Barre, and eight miles from downtown Montpelier. And the motel didn’t have a restaurant. If I could get a room for another night.

  I watched the rain fall and pondered my luck. Everyone has luck most of the time. The only time they think about it is when their luck takes a day off; then they think they are unlucky. Take yourself, for instance—how often do you get run over by a car while you are crossing a street? But the day you do you will curse your luck, if you are conscious at the hospital. I know that I am one of the luckiest men alive, but apparently my charm lady was temporarily indisposed today.

  At 9 A.M. I checked out of the hotel. I had to do it sooner or later, so why not now? I drove down to Barre and found a laundromat. The rain quit while I was loading the washer.

  At 11 I went
out to the airport, which is on a hilltop, and looked in all directions. The mountains to the south and west were obscured, but the view northward was pretty good. East was only fair. Ceiling maybe 800 or a thousand feet, five miles visibility in haze, wind out of the south at about twelve knots. I went in to see Roger Hill, the L.A. meteorologist.

  “It’ll get better,” he said, laughing. “You wait and see.”

  I ate lunch in the airport restaurant, which is pretty nice, and tried to nap in the front seat of the car. At 12:45 the glare of sun on my face brought me alert.

  It was breaking up. I could see the tops of the mountains! Sunshine! Bless you, Roger, you bald-headed weather guesser!

  By 1:30 I had taken the car back to the dealer and hitched a ride back to the airport with one of the salesmen. When I saw the Queen in the hangar I got a jolt. Fuel was leaking from the gas sight-gauge, the glass pipe that sticks down below the fuel tank in the center of the top wing. The blue coloring in the fuel had smeared the left side of the aircraft. It was leaking even as the FBO man and I stood there watching.

  I got out my wrench and climbed up on the wing to lean in and tighten the nut that holds the thing on. The FBO man beat me to it. “It’s coming out around the glass here. Let’s see if we can tighten it.”

  Using both hands and being careful not to break it, he twisted the tube half a turn. The leak slowed to a drip. Now I tried it. After one and a half turns, the leak stopped completely.

  “What happens,” my host asked, “if that thing breaks off in flight?”

  “I’ll have a major problem,” I said irritably. I didn’t need him telling me about getting burned alive in a flaming airplane. I went through all that last week.

  My host didn’t want to drop the subject. “Knew it to happen once on a biplane, not a Stearman, but a Great Lakes. Luckily the guy had eight gallons left in the fuselage tank or he wouldn’t have made it. You have a fuselage tank?”

  “Nope. But I can land this thing about anyplace.” That’s a lie. Exasperated, I made it a whopper. “I could put it in a tree if I have to.”

  He went back to his office while I diddled with the manual fuel primer. When we parked the plane in the hangar we unscrewed the push rod and examined the rubber gasket. It looked fine and the FBO didn’t have another anyway. So this morning I carefully inserted it back in its hole and tightened the nut as tight as I could get it with my fingers. Then I opened the fuel valve, shoved the mixture knob to full rich, and gave the primer handle a pull, then a push. No leak. Dry as a bone. It just needed to be tightened up.

  It seems like all this stuff is getting shook loose by the vibration. The engine seems to be leaking more oil, the primer, the fuel gauge tube …

  At 2:10 I cranked the engine. Roger wished me a good flight on the Unicom, and I thanked him. At 2:17 I was airborne.

  As usual, the weather looks worse from the air than it does on the ground. From 2,000 feet some of the ridge tops are invisible in this haze, which limits visibility to about seven miles.

  I fly northwest down the valley toward Burlington on Lake Champlain. The interstate runs from Montpelier to Burlington, so I check it occasionally and watch the mountains and clouds float by on either side. Short of Burlington I turn southwest to avoid the controlled airspace of the Burlington Airport Radar Service Area.

  I fly under the clouds and over the ridges comfortably, but off to the right a dark cloud is giving Burlington a bath. On Burlington Approach frequency the pilots and controllers are talking about turbulence and reduced visibility. Approach is trying to get some guy in a Cessna to climb to 3,500 feet and maintain VFR. Needless to say, the pilot is telling Approach that maintaining VFR at those altitudes today is just not in the cards.

  Twenty minutes after takeoff I am over the shore of Lake Champlain. It is a long, narrow, big lake, maybe a couple miles wide on the average. Today it is full of power boats and a few sailboats. From 2,000 feet the wakes in the dark water are very prominent as I fly south.

  Another dark cloud pouring rain looms on the right. I swing east slightly and drop to 1,700 feet, but rain starts to spatter on the windscreens and run over the wings. To my right the Adirondack Mountains are completely shrouded in cloud and rain, so thick that I can only catch an occasional glimpse of a high ridge up in there. This front is coming up from the southwest, and all this black rainy stuff results from the warm air being pushed up the slopes of those mountains. Lake Champlain and Lake George, to the south, are in the rain shadow of those mountains. I wish the weather were better!

  The shower is behind as I reach Chimney Point at 2:56 P.M., 39 minutes after takeoff from Montpelier. Crown Point goes by the left wing, then the Ticonderoga Airport at 3:04. I swing over the town and head south on Lake George. Below on my right I can see a sheer wall of granite rising at least five hundred feet above the lake. Forested ridges on both sides as high as the Queen, boats charging about the water at random—this country must be as spectacular from the ground as it is from this altitude. The show has a dark side, however—if the engine quits there is absolutely no place to put the Queen down except in the lake.

  Another storm is coming off the hills to the west as I approach the southern end of the lake. More raindrops slide across the skin of the Queen.

  I make a straight-in approach to runway 19 at Glens Falls, New York. The wind is out of the south at twelve knots. My look-look technique is working well and I make a nice landing, which helps loosen the tension. The landings are getting consistent. Something is going right, anyway.

  I really don’t like to fly in this marginal weather. Flying should be relaxing and this flying isn’t. I’m tense as a spring.

  I shut the engine down an hour and a half after takeoff from Montpelier.

  “I want to go west, maybe Ithaca,” I tell the Flight Service briefer. He is cautious. “Marginal VFR,” he says in one breath; then after reviewing his reports, he changes it to “VFR not recommended.”

  Out in the parking lot I smoke my pipe and look at the sky. Ithaca, the briefer said, is 4,000 feet scattered, 8,000 feet scattered, with ten miles visibility, wind 310 at eight knots. Between here and there something good happens.

  I decide to give it a try. I tell myself that I can always return here if I run into clouds I can’t or don’t want to go under. If only that were always true!

  The sky to the north, the direction I flew in from, is a dark purple as I taxi out. Westward it just looks gray.

  After takeoff I climb to 1,500 feet and pull the throttle and prop back to cruise and lean the mixture. The ridge west of Glens Falls has a dark roll cloud about eight hundred feet above it. Visibility no more than five miles. Why me, Lord?

  I squirt between the cloud and the ridge and keep flying west, feeling my way, my finger tracing my progress on the chart, my pen uncapped and ready for time notations over landmarks. I pick up the northern finger of Great Sacandaga Lake and follow it. Wonder of wonder, the clouds lift and visibility starts to improve. The wind is still out of the south and I’m bucking it, so I don’t want to go too high or the Queen’s progress over the ground will be arrested by stronger winds. Still, I want to get high enough to see. I let her float upward to 2,500 feet. I fly over the city of Gloversville (Yuck, what a name! It has no style! Say London, Paris, Rome and Gloversville and you’ll see what I mean) and point the Queen toward Fort Plain on the Mohawk River.

  The Mohawk! Drums Along the Mohawk with Henry Fonda was on late-night TV a couple months ago, but I didn’t watch it. I should have.

  Crossing the Mohawk Valley the clouds open up extensively, except for one little rain squall just off to my right. The Queen gets another bath.

  Higher still, up to 3,000 feet. Ahead, south of the Mohawk, likes Lake Otsego, or the Glimmerglass as James Fenimore Cooper called it in his book The Deerslayer. That’s a book that kids don’t want to read anymore because of the archaic, tedious style, and adults don’t want to read anymore because Mark Twain slammed it hard and said, truthfully
, that Cooper wasn’t much of a writer. But I like it. It’s still a good tale.

  What Twain forgot to mention is that Cooper told a whale of a story. Cooper was one of the first novelists to write action-adventure plots as we know them today. It would be nice if every published work by every author was a masterpiece, but this is the real world. I think a book should be enjoyed for what the author did put in, not discarded because of what he didn’t. But nobody is ever going to hire me to do literary criticism.

  Otsego is not large in comparison with other lakes in this part of the world. Rather modest. Staring down from 3,500 feet, I see the roughness of surface chop and speedboats plowing wakes. Still, with only a little stretch I can imagine Deerslayer and his Indian pal gliding across the glassy-smooth surface in a birchbark canoe. That’s really a personality defect—I’ve a hyperactive imagination and I’m a hopeless romantic. Maybe a good shrink could help me.

  At the lower end of Lake Otsego is the town named after the Cooper family, Cooperstown. In this municipal memorial to the writer that couldn’t write, the power that rules the universe has placed the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’ve never been there but I’m going someday. I want to see the bat that Babe Ruth used to hit his 60th home run on September 30, 1927, and the ball that went soaring out over the fence as those fans chosen by fate to witness that blow screamed themselves hoarse.

  Leaving Cooperstown I point the Queen 260 degrees, then fudge a little to the south to allow for the prevailing southerly wind. The country west of here is small farms and woodlots in gently rolling terrain with few prominent features. There are a few crossroads villages, but I can’t tell one from the other. To my weary eye they all look alike with their few dozen houses clustered around a pointy church steeple. The weather is getting better and better. The sunlight makes the Queen’s yellow wings too bright to look at without squinting.