The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  For years the institute’s most famous faculty member was Allen Ginsberg, the gay antiwar guru poet. He achieved fame not because of his poetry, which not one person in ten thousand ever read, but because when his turn came to speak at an antiwar rally at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, he took the microphone and said, “Oooommmm,” and kept saying it for seven straight hours, pausing only to inhale.

  Ginsberg the Profound “co-founded” something called “The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics” at Naropa way back in the dark ages of 1974. He still teaches there summers. Perhaps we should be thankful he didn’t give us the Ginsberg Institute of Public Speaking. Oooommmm.

  For $7,500 a year you can enroll in the Naropa Institute and take courses like “Discovering Your Personal Clown,” taught by David Godsey and one Janet McAlpin, whom the catalog advertises as “an enthusiastic wiggler.” Or Joanne Kyger’s course on “Beats and Other Rebel Angels.”

  If you are ready for a graduate-level challenge, try “Ethnopoe-tics,” where students scribble “brief scholarly papers” and work on “poetic projects founded on the bedrock of the archaic art.” Think I’m lying? Send for the course catalog and see for yourself. But even if you enroll here and get so educated you need a custom-made hat, don’t expect a degree. They don’t give degrees or do commencements.

  Yet you don’t have to enroll in college to participate in the Boulder experience. There’s all kinds of weird stuff going on all the time. Some of it costs a lot less than $7,500. This past May they only wanted $65 from everyone who wanted to hear Betty Dodson, an “expert on women’s sexuality.” You know she’s an expert—she came from out of town and talked for five straight hours on one subject. The flier announcing this event said:

  For the past 17 years she has taught thousands of women how to increase erotic pleasures. In this presentation, Betty will discuss a variety of rituals that enhance sexual self-knowledge. This presentation is for all women who are committed to their sexual growth. From those wanting techniques to achieve their first orgasm to those wanting to enhance their present experience of sexual pleasure.

  If you missed this presentation Ms. Dodson will probably be back next year, although that’s a hell of a long time to wait for an orgasm if you need one now. (I haven’t mentioned this before, but I too am something of an expert on women’s sexuality, and if … But no! I probably shouldn’t use this forum to advertise. Still, I wish I had a list of the names and telephone numbers of the women who attended Ms. Dodson’s presento.)

  While you’re suffering you might take in the Biokinesiology Institute’s “Holistic Health, Nutrition, and Biokinesiology Intensive” the first week of August. The institute says, “Biokinesiology is a highly sensitive system of muscle testing, used to test and balance the organs of the physical body, determine and correct allergies, discover the emotional causes of physical illness, and determine individualized nutritional needs.”

  God knows my organs are out of balance, but I’m going to be flying during this intensive. I’ll try to hold on until next year. Yet if I weren’t having orgasms I’d probably forget the flying. First things first.

  When they’re not going to intensives of one sort or another, the natives of Boulder do political things. The more unpopular the cause, the more they like it. These people worshiped Daniel Ortega, the self-anointed Sandinista saint of Nicaragua, sent him money and invitations and speechified endlessly about his virtues; then the jerk had the audacity to let himself be voted out of office in a free election. That was a somber, black day in this little city where the plains meet the mountains. They haven’t yet forgiven him. Mention Ortega at a party and conversation stops dead.

  Every left-wing cause I’ve ever heard of has a fund-raising political action group here in Boulder. On any given night there is a rally about something you would be outraged about if you had only given it a thought. The poor devil I pity is the congressman who has to read and answer mail from this crowd.

  But the right-wingers have found Boulder too. Soldier of Fortune magazine has its editorial offices here. Trees die so that you can read articles on obscure wars in Africa, how to survive in guerrilla-infested jungles, cooking for the combat gourmet, reviews of nifty new weapons, and so on. If you’ve missed this slick monthly in your dentist’s waiting room you might ask him to subscribe.

  After you’ve had your orgasm, gotten all your organs in holistic balance and are politically correct, if you still need to clean out the pipes Boulder has just the thing. This is world headquarters for Adrenaline Adventures, a collection of seriously disturbed wackos who will introduce you to the joys of bungee jumping, “the ultimate test of the human mind vs. a universally held fear of heights. The freefall sensation followed by the first gravity-defying recoil to the point of total weightlessness produces an adrenaline rush that will have you wired for days.”

  The lunatics of Adrenaline Adventures claim they have jumped from over twenty-five bridges across America, including a 590-foot leap from the 650-foot-high Rio Grande Bridge near Taos, New Mexico.

  For neophytes, an Adrenaline Adventures jump of 110 feet with an 84-foot recoil will set you back only $89 plus tax, but be advised, “Advance reservations and payment required.” You’d think they’d wait for their money until afterward, when you might be so adrenaline-drenched you’d throw in a tip, but no.

  The 110-foot drop comes with a money-back guarantee. I’m not sure about the recoil. Better ask before you leap if recoil is important to you.

  In the midst of all this craziness are 20,000-plus basically normal college students who call the University of Colorado home. They enjoy football, sweaty sex, skiing at nearby resorts and traditional college activities like beer busts, co-ed dorms, and frat parties that keep the brothers in more-or-less permanent hot water with the powers that be. They try to sandwich in a little studying. It’s a good school. I even have a law degree from the place.

  One of the things I like best about Boulder is the way the free spirits here use language. Use of adjectives like “intensive” as a noun is one delightful example, but that is only the beginning. Tell me, if you can, the meaning of some of these typical Boulder expressions:

  “Disembodied poetics”? I’d like to hear Jack Kerouac’s definition. Oh, now I get it! This is poetry that Jack whispers into your ear from wherever it is he is. Maybe.

  “Biokinesiology”? According to my dictionary kinesiology is the study of the principles of mechanics and anatomy in relation to human movement, so what does the bio add?

  Astrologers here like to say things like “raise the spiritual vibration.” Do you have a clue?

  “Holotropic Breathwork”? That’s the title of a seminar offered here this summer. The ad says that individual sessions and psychotherapy are also available. If you paid real money to attend this seminar you probably need psychotherapy.

  “Deep Ecology”? I like this phrase and plan to use it as often as possible even though I have no idea what it means.

  Here is an announcement from the July-August 1991 issue of Nexus, a free newspaper distributed hereabouts. Savor the words, even if you don’t understand them:

  Dr. Farida Sharan, Naturopath, Master Herbalist, Iridologist, Founder of the School of Natural Medicine in England and America, international educator, author … is opening a holistic practice in Boulder.

  Preventive health education * body/mind/spirit karmic iris print readings * eliminative activation * harmonize your interior ecology * strengthen your weaknesses, make the most of your strengths * relieve stress. Learn to nourish the adrenals & the nervous system * gain higher levels of health, energy and well-being * fertility counseling * herbs, naturopathy, nutrition * bodywork support * purification, regeneration, transformation programs * wellness retreats.

  One of those karmic iris print readings would be a great gift. And you probably have a loved one whose interior ecology needs harmonizing. Eliminative activation? Use Ex-Lax for that.

  Always on the l
ookout for a new way to make a buck, I have designed and patented a board game called How Boulder Can You Get?™ This is a parlor game for groups tired of wife swapping. Each person in turn draws a card and reads a Boulder phrase, such as “etheric founts.” The first person who provides the correct definition of the word or phrase rolls a die and advances his piece upon the board, which is a map of Boulder. The players race their pieces through the downtown, past the Boulderado Hotel and along the Pearl Street Mall to City Hall. The first person to City Hall becomes mayor of Boulder.

  Etheric founts? Those are the portals of energy through which your soul-body aura emanates. Or is that the chakras? My research staff’s report is unclear. Whatever.

  Boulder isn’t for everyone although I call it home. It’s flaky, weird, skewed slightly off-center and a lot of the women don’t shave their legs. After they read this the Boulderites may ride me out on a rail. I’ll have to chance it.

  For my forty-fifth birthday David and I went to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II. Naturally David and the girls saw it when it first came out, and Nancy couldn’t have been dragged there by wild horses, but David had this itch to see it again. From hints he’s been dropping, I think he’s joined the Arnold Schwarzenegger fan club. He sent away for some “literature.”

  If you haven’t seen it, you should treat yourself to Terminator II. Your adrenals will need nourishment after you see this flick. But first see Terminator I.

  Whenever I hear someone sniff about the low quality of Hollywood movies these days, I just shake my head. Hollywood is still making great entertainment, just as they had been doing for seventy years. Terminator, Predator, the Indiana Jones movies and a dozen other recent movies I could name are entertainment in its purest form, worth every cent of the six bucks they charge you to get inside and the $1.50 they clip you for a little box of Milk Duds. I never liked Milk Duds that well anyhow.

  Movies are the second-best entertainment bargain in town. The best, of course, is books. Six bucks will still buy you ten or twelve hours of entertainment, depending on how fast you read, at any bookstore, convenience store, grocery store or newsstand. As an intellectual and an expert on women’s sexuality, I assure you this is true.

  The night after my birthday Nancy and the kids treated me to a Chinese dinner at the Double Happy Restaurant. Somehow I bit into a red-hot pepper and whew! Two glasses of water later I was still burning.

  Steve Hall and his assistants gave the Cannibal Queen a good lookover and fixed a few problems. They had a machine shop make a new cowl latch from billet aluminum. They changed the engine oil, lubed everything, found that the ring that the cowling attaches to was broken and fixed it. The most serious problem they discovered was a broken primer line to the top cylinder. Every time I primed the engine I was squirting fuel through this broken line onto the exhaust system. But I didn’t have an engine fire and it’s fixed now.

  They tell me the Queen’s ready to fly. I am too. I’ve polished my journal while they worked on the Queen, washed my underwear and replenished my wallet.

  I’ve sat on my deck and stared at the blue mountains to the west. The last four days storms have come down off those mountains every afternoon. I’ve also done some squinting at some charts.

  Flying the American West in an 84-knot biplane will be a bit different than aviating back east. The deserts are hot and vast, the mountains huge, the canyons straight up and down, the storms more severe, the distances from anywhere to anyplace a whole lot longer. By God, this is big country! I love it as I do no other place on earth.

  I’m ready. Come with me, won’t you? Together we’ll see it from the Cannibal Queen.

  PART TWO

  Thou liftest me up to the wind;

  thou causest me to ride upon it …

  Job 30:22

  20

  MY DEPARTURE FOR WHIDBEY ISLAND IN WASHINGTON STATE was planned for Tuesday, July 23. It didn’t happen that way. Which didn’t surprise me much.

  Summers on the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies define the season for everyone else. The days are cloudless with low humidity and not much wind, and about every other afternoon a thunderstorm will be born over the Rockies and come drifting eastward as it grows. It usually passes over Boulder and Denver without doing much of anything and continues eastward to grow to maturity in the thermals over the high plains.

  We had four days of that, then on Monday, July 22, the wind shifted and blew from the northeast. This condition is known as an upslope. Warm, moist air circulating around a low over Kansas and Nebraska rose as it crossed the high plains and became saturated, then turned to rain and mist and cloud when it hit the steep slopes of the Rockies. This weather pattern is common on the Front Range in the spring and late autumn, when it often brings blizzards; it’s rare as hen’s teeth in summer.

  The upslope brought rain early Monday afternoon, a gentle soaker. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. A drizzle developed. Unheard of this time of year!

  Monday night the rain was still falling. Tuesday morning at 5 A.M. as I packed my bags, it was still coming down. Out on my deck I surveyed the sky in the moments before a gray dawn and contemplated my luck. Whatever I mumbled out there didn’t set well with the weather angel. Back inside I turned on my laptop computer to update my journal only to find the computer was as dead as Julius Caesar. It refused to boot.

  Last week in West Virginia, on the morning I left, the computer fell out of the back of Mom and Dad’s Jeep as they were driving to the airport. Apparently I hadn’t closed the rear door properly. The impact of a fall from a moving vehicle onto a concrete street broke the screen. In Colorado my computer doctor, a wizard named Fred Kleinberg, replaced the screen and ran the computer through its diagnostics program, then gave it a clean bill of health.

  But it apparently expired last night while I was sleeping! Imagine the scene—there I was at 6 A.M., the world’s most patient man, drizzle falling from endless low clouds on the morning I was to fly, staring at a dead computer and listening to Fred’s wife’s cheerful voice on her answering machine. No fools they, the Kleinbergs rig up their answering machine when they go to bed so that they won’t be disturbed by the Steve Coontses of the world, people who are constitutionally incapable of waiting until normal business hours to inflict their woes upon others.

  Fred arrived at 8:30. He would have to ship my laptop away for repairs, so I borrowed my daughter Rachael’s.

  The computer crisis resolved, I went to the airport and hung out.

  I called the folks at Flight Service every few hours. They weren’t hopeful. This upslope was going to be around awhile. By noon the rain stopped but the visibility improved only a little and the clouds were as low as ever. That night the rain began again.

  Wednesday was more of the same. At 10 A.M. I called a taxi and started out the door with my bags, only to pause in the driveway and grope wildly for the ignition key to the Cannibal Queen. A mad search ensued. It was lost. Luckily the guys at the hangar had another, but dang nab it!

  I crawled into the taxi with Rachael’s computer and my soft bag filled with underwear. At the airport John Weisbart and I went to breakfast while the Cannibal Queen got a wash from the Hotsy machine and rain continued to mist down.

  The weather problem was only here on the Front Range, the briefer told me yet again. Cheyenne, Wyoming, was 2,500 broken, 10 miles visibility; Billings, Montana, was clear and 50. Yet the Rockies and the Snowy Range west of Cheyenne were obscured by clouds. If I could just get east to the interstate and fly north to Cheyenne, I could continue north until the mountains peter out, then turn west. I could fly around the northern end of this entire weather system.

  As the guys were wiping the Queen down the misty rain ceased, so we broke out the touch-up paint and John polished the prop and hub. These are a neat bunch of guys, sensing my frustration and helping me carry it by fussing over the plane with me.

  By noon I guessed the visibility was four or five miles and the clouds looke
d to be a thousand feet up, so I loaded the plane and shook hands all around.

  “Don’t fly into any granite clouds,” John says.

  The big Lycoming catches immediately. Even the oil cloud from the exhaust stack is modest and ladylike.

  On the roll the tail takes at least fifteen seconds to come off the ground. At 5,300 feet above sea level the engine only has 23 inches of manifold pressure to use, so the takeoff run is leisurely and the breaking of contact with the ground a graceful good-bye caress.

  The Queen rises slowly into the gray sky, climbing at about 300 feet a minute at her best climb speed, 70 MPH indicated. At this altitude everything happens slowly, sedately, as befits the dignity of a lady of forty-nine years. And this regal lady has dignity, even if she is a Cannibal and wears only a smile.

  I have no trouble flying under the overcast. As I fly northward the weather immediately improves. Cheyenne is 3,000 scattered, at least a dozen miles visibility, with a broken layer well above. As I fly through the airport traffic area the man in the tower is telling someone that the field will close in twenty minutes for an airshow. Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming— ten wonderful July days of rodeo and airshows and horses and cowgirls, an annual celebration of summer called “The Daddy of ’Em All.”

  I can see the crowd on the ramp and several dozen different types of military planes, all Air Force and National Guard by the look of them. The Navy rarely sends planes to these things, and those they do send are forbidden to fly—the only Navy airplanes that can fly at civilian airshows are the Blue Angels. I think the admirals are missing the best chance they’ll ever get to sell naval aviation to the American public. The Air Force types figured this out long ago.

  North of Cheyenne the clouds break up enough so that splotches of sunlight reach the prairie. To the west the hazy mountains still wreathed in clouds appear blue and mysterious. In contrast the prairie below is a wonderland of greens and browns as the sunlight and shadow play upon it in a surreal way. All this and a modest tailwind too!