Flight of Passage: A True Story (14 page)

Our only remaining obstacle was quitting our jobs. Neither of us had told our employers that we were skipping out early to fly to California, because we wouldn’t have been hired in the first place if we weren’t planning to work the whole summer. Exiting my job was a cakewalk. The farm manager didn’t seem to understand what I was telling him and thought that my brother and I were flying out to L.A. on a commercial airliner, to visit Disneyland and go surfing for a couple of weeks. But he wasn’t upset. He liked the way I ran his breeding stock and he told me that my job would be waiting for me when we got back.

Kern, meanwhile, was terrified about breaking the news to Mussolini over at the Acme. During our last week at home, Monday and Tuesday went by, and Kern still hadn’t talked to Mussolini. We were planning on taking off at the crack of dawn on Saturday. When Kern came in from his shift Wednesday night, he didn’t have the dejected look on his face that always followed a good battle with Mussolini. I was beginning to get worried.

“Hey Kern,” I said. “Would you please quit this fucking job? We’re taking off for California in less than seventy-two hours.”

“Rink, I’m going to do it. Tomorrow,” Kern said. “I’m just going to walk right in there, find that snot-nosed jerk, and give him a piece of my mind. He can take the Acme and shove it. Screw you Mussolini! I’m blowing this joint for L.A.!”

“Good Kern. That should do it.”

Two more nights went by, but Kern never did talk to Mussolini. At the end of his shift on Friday evening, his last, Kern simply cleared his register, hung up his red Acme apron, punched out his time card, quietly left the store and drove home in the Jeep.

I asked him about it when he got in.

“Hey Kern,” I said. “How did it go with Mussolini?”

“Oh! Jeez! My job at the Acme! Gosh darn it all anyway Rink, I mean, God, holy mackerel, shit. Shit! I forgot to tell the Acme! We’re taking off for California in the morning and I’ve got so many things on my mind I completely forget to tell the Acme. Hilarious, huh Rink?”

“Yeah. It’s a fucking stitch.”

It didn’t take us very long to pack for the trip. The Piper Aircraft Company never imagined that anyone would fly very far in one of its Cubs and the baggage compartment was the size of a milk crate. Once our sleeping bags were stowed in the bottom, there would only be about three inches left for luggage. Kern wanted this to be light—suitcases, even knapsacks, would be too heavy. So we stuffed everything we needed for the coast to coast flight—combs, toothbrushes, a change of Levi’s, and some fresh underwear and shirts—into our pillowcases. Our flying maps finished off the load. These we carried in an Acme shopping bag.

As we finished packing, my father yelled up the back stairs and called us down to his library. I knew this was coming and expected the full treatment from him that night: no fights, no buzz jobs, no flying in bad weather and, boys, find that waterbag.

“Ah shit, Kern,” I said. “Here we go. The big lecture.”

But it wasn’t that way at all. My father was very relaxed and gentle that night. He had this avuncular, dreamy-eyed demeanor, intense yet remote, the way the priests up at school got when they were saying goodbye to a favorite senior. There wasn’t a thing left to teach us or go over, and he knew it. Kern and I had pored over the maps and our routes a dozen times. Everything it was mechanically possible to do to an aircraft, Kern had done to 71-Hotel. My father had a lot of confidence in us, and he showed it. For years I would remember and miss him for the way he was that night.

Kern and I sat on the couch facing my father in his rocker, drinking Cokes. We talked for a while and my father fed us some pretty good barnstorming blarney about the places we’d see, the Ozarks and Texas mostly. Then he paused, lit his pipe, and pulled a brown paper bag out from behind his typewriter.

He had bought us gifts for the trip. He had even gone to the trouble of wrapping them—actually, I could see from the way they were wrapped that a woman had done it, probably his secretary in New York.

“Boys,” he said. “I got you a couple of presents. You know. It’s stuff you can use on your flight.”

Kern and I both got new Ray-Ban sunglasses. They were the top of the line, Aviator Special model, with the best smoked glass and the pearl-white sweatband running between the lenses. Ray-Ban only made them in adult sizes and they were way too large for us, but my father showed us how to crimp back the holders near the ears with pliers, so they fit snugly. We tried them on and looked at ourselves in the mirror over the fireplace. We looked ridiculous in those big dark shades, like Rocky Raccoon. But the sunlight out west was supposed to be quite harsh and we were glad to have the new eyewear.

Each pair of Ray-Ban aviator goggles came inside a polished leather case, the way they were issued to World War II Air Corps cadets. The case had perforated lines on the back, so it could be attached to a belt and worn military-style on the waist. I didn’t like the idea of wearing my Ray-Ban case on my belt, because it made me feel like some dork Eagle Scout running around the Jamboree with a Bowie knife on his hip, but I didn’t want to disappoint Kern or my father so I strapped it on. While Kern was putting on his Ray-Ban case, I noticed that he was wearing this godawful purple paisley belt, which looked like something Guy Lombardo would own, and I was hoping like hell that Kern wouldn’t wear that thing tomorrow. But then he admired himself in the mirror, hitched up his waist and swiveled around to face us in the room with this proud smile on his face, and I knew that I was screwed in the morning for a flying buddy. Ray-Bans on the purple paisley belt. To Kern, this was tip-top flight gear, the way to travel.

Then, for Kern, my father pulled out of the bag one of his most prized possessions—his old Hamilton aviator’s chronograph. The Hamilton was a beautiful, expensive timepiece, with extra sweephands and stop-buttons for timing flight legs, calculating fuel burns and the like. My father had owned it since his Air Corps days during World War II and for years kept it up in the top drawer of his bureau. Now he had had it immaculately restored by a jeweler in New York. The chronograph, with its new leather band, beige face, and luminescent-green sweephands, looked brand new. Kern was thrilled to have it. He strapped it on and it looked great on his tanned arm.

“Gee Dad. Thanks. I never expected you to part with this.”

“Ah, it’s nothing son,” my father said. “You’re going to be a big wheel when you finish this flight. I want you to look the part.”

My father had another gift for me too. I could tell right away by the way it looked—the thing had been hastily wrapped up in a ball of newspaper—what had happened. At the last minute, my father realized that it would be a terrible display of favoritism to give only Kern a watch, so he’d stopped by a candy store on his way home from work and picked up some total piece of junk for me. He pulled it out of the bag with a flourish.

“And Rinker, good buddy,
this
is for you.”

It was a $3.95 Timex. The imitation-alligator wrist-band was plastic, the clunky round body was fake gold, and the hour-numerals on the face were as large and as goofy-looking as the type in a Dr. Seuss book.

In those days Timex was what we called a “dipshit brand.” It was on a moral par with Thom McAn shoes, Robert Hall suits, and the Plymouth Valiant sedan. Men who bought anniversary presents for their wives at Sears Roebuck, or neckties at Tie City on Route 46, wore Timex watches.

Everything associated with Timex, in fact, was a profound cultural embarrassment. The tone was set by these klutzy ads that Timex ran on national television, narrated by John Cameron Swayze. In the ads, Acapulco cliff-divers and lunatics in motor boats deliberately beat the living daylights out of their Timex watches, and then handed them over to Swayze for inspection. The watch never failed and Swayze always ended the ad with the same punchline.

“Timex. It takes a lickin’, and keeps on tickin’!”

That’s the model I got. It was the ugliest watch I had ever seen. I strapped it on and it looked like crap on my tanned arm.

“Gee Dad, thanks,” I said. “I never expected you to part with something like this.”

“Ah c’mon Rinky,” Kern laughed. “That’s not fair! Daddy was just trying to be good to both of us. I mean, he forgot about you, but then he remembered and he went right out and got you a watch too.”

“Ah shut up Kern,” my father said, tears of mirth in his eyes. “You got my Hamilton chronograph. Rinker here, he got shit.”

This disparity in gifts was pathetically funny, and we all started to laugh about it, and then we couldn’t stop laughing. Just when everybody was recovering I would hold up the Timex on my wrist and we’d all fall off into peals of laughter again. As he roared with laughter my father’s eyes welled up with moisture and he kept trying to get his pipe lit but he couldn’t, and there was a wonderful self-mockery about him at such moments.

“Ah balls Rinker,” my father said. “I’m sorry. Listen, do me a favor tomorrow and deep-six that thing into the Delaware River.”

I wasn’t upset and I wasn’t going to dwell on it. This was the way my father, my brother, and I were, and we could understand and even enjoy it about ourselves, and anyway I was laughing too hard to care.

Tomorrow I would be crossing America with my brother. I was fifteen years old and impatient for experience, annoyed with myself for knowing about life only from books, and now that would change. I’d never been west of the Alleghenies and a whole continent was waiting for me. And it was a beautiful night outside, with crickets screeching, wind swirling through the trees, and the scent of lilac wafting in through the window screens while we laughed and talked in my father’s library. We were quiet in the room together for a while and the feelings between my father and my brother overflowed, and that was enough love in one family for me. All I wanted to do was wake in the morning and light out for the Rockies.

The admirable restraint my father had displayed all winter, leaving us alone to build our plane and plan our trip, evaporated in stages as our time of departure drew near. It vanished altogether the day we took off. Later I would think of that morning as my entire boyhood dispensed in concentrated form. My father’s ambitions for us, and the inevitable bedlam of getting anything done in a large family, combusted powerfully that day. To begin with, there were delays, maddening delays. Kern and I had resolved to launch as early in the morning as possible, but sensible planning like this became the first casualty of our trip. We would pay for it dearly that afternoon.

One night in May, while we were out in the barn painting the plane, Kern had said to me, “Rink, Day One, we’re making Indiana. I can feel Indiana in my bones.”

Indiana. Normally I would resist a dreamy notion like that from Kern. It epitomized his tendency to pluck arbitrary goals out of thin air and then live for them like someone possessed. But as soon as he said it I could feel Indiana in my bones too. Indiana had always seemed vaguely mysterious to us, probably because we didn’t even know where it was before we began our flight planning. When we checked our maps, we could see that the Indiana state line was just beyond comfortable range for one day’s flying in a Cub—Columbus, Ohio, one hundred miles shy of Indiana, was a much more realistic goal, and thus Indiana was alluring precisely because it was unobtainable. More than anything else, I just liked the way that old frontier state rolled off the tongue, with a romantic, far-off ring. We promised to keep it a secret. Kern was looking forward to calling home when we got there, surprising my father with the news that we’d “made Indiana” on the first day.

On our big day, Kern and I were both awake at dawn, and Kern immediately went down to the kitchen to call the FAA Flight Service Center at Teterboro for a weather briefing. The outlook was not favorable for us. A classic summer low was stalled over much of the east coast and the midwest, and we could expect poor visibility, turbulence, and stratocumulus cloud formations over most of our route as the convection effect built through the day. Worse, the remnants of a Gulf Coast storm, pushing up through the Ohio River Valley, would meet late in the afternoon with a drier, stationary front hanging over the Great Lakes. The systems would collide along the western Pennsylvania border near Pittsburgh and then explode eastward, generating an impenetrable wall of thunderstorms and heavy rain directly in our path. There was one possible advantage in all this. The storm fronts would rocket the muggy low pressure system out to sea, and once they rumbled over, the skies to the west would be clear. To reach Indiana by nightfall, we would have to put in several hours of flying by noon and beat the fronts to western Pennsylvania, then sit out the storms for an hour or two before proceeding on through the midwest.

Chastened, but determined, Kern and I stepped upstairs to wake my parents.

My mother never forgot the scene in their bedroom that morning. “You and Kern just appeared at the foot of our bed at dawn,” she recalls. “You stood there quietly with these determined smiles on your faces and those pillowcases filled with your clothes thrown over your shoulders, like hobos waiting for a train. You were both wearing those silly little sunglass cases on your belts. I shook your father and woke him up. 'Daddy,’ I said, 'the boys are ready to go.’”

My father, however, wasn’t having anything to do with a dawn departure. He pulled on his bathrobe and hopped one-legged over to the window.

“Boys, let’s hold off a bit. Look—there’s ground fog out there. You need to wait for it to clear. Besides, I told some of the pilots from the strip to meet us out there for your takeoff. Nobody will be there until nine-thirty or ten. Mom, let’s get the boys some breakfast.”

“Dad, no,” Kern said. “We’re ready to fly. Now.”

“Kern, I’m talking now,” my father said. “Mother wants to feed you. Then we’ll go.”

Kern and I were furious at my father for holding us up, butterflies raged in our stomachs, and the last thing we needed was food. But we knew that we had to humor my father and avoid a fight. Kern’s biggest fear all year had been that my father would use some absurd, last-minute pretext to delay or call off the trip, and now he had the best reason of all—bad weather. We were worried all morning that he would ask about it, but it never crossed his mind.