Flight of Passage: A True Story (17 page)

The airport manager strolled out and said he was making a run down the road for hamburgers. I was suddenly hungry and I rode off with him. Kern and Wilbur went into the pilots’ shack to phone the FAA weather station at Allentown.

When I got back, they were bent over a table in the shack, looking at the Detroit sectional map. The weather situation was still complicated and unfavorable for us. The front we were worried about wasn’t due to arrive in Pittsburgh until three-thirty or four in the afternoon, and we could probably beat it there. But ahead of the storm, directly along our route, there were reports of moderate to severe turbulence and scattered rain showers. We had just flown through the advance squall line of that system. It was clearing now around Carlisle, but that didn’t mean much. The mountains were only a few miles away and there would be plenty of stratocumulus bangers behind them.

Wilbur had us cased out pretty well. He could see that Kern was determined to get to Pittsburgh, but that I was more tentative, maybe even afraid. A good geezer never tells a transient pilot what to do, especially young ones, because for sure they’ll take right off and do the opposite. Instead, geezers anticipate the inevitable fuckup and provide a backup plan. Wilbur suggested that we take off, fly west for fifteen minutes, and see what it was like. In a firm voice he told Kern to turn back if the visibility was poor, the air too rough. Carlisle wasn’t going anywhere.

Considering the conditions—a lot of low clouds and poor visibility—following a compass course was unrealistic. Wilbur suggested that we follow the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which ran right by the airport. It wasn’t the most direct route over the mountains, but we couldn’t get lost if we stayed over the Pike. The windward side turbulence, on the west face of the peaks, would be quite bad. After Shippensburg we would begin passing over the tunnels in the mountains and we’d lose sight of the road for a while, but he told us to just pick a landmark or rock formation up on the high ridge, fly for it, and then we could pick up the Pike again as we came down the other side.

Wilbur advised us to turn southwest after we passed Latrobe. In this kind of weather, with all the pollution from the steel mills ringing Pittsburgh, we wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway. Just past the town of Mount Pleasant, the Turnpike would split off for Route 70. Wilbur recommended that we avoid the smog and air traffic around Pittsburgh by following Route 70 into the airport in Washington, Pennsylvania.

It was sparkling and clear outside when we stepped out of the shack. The mowed grass runway was a watery, bright green. The airport sat on a high, broad plateau, commanding a breathtaking prospect of Cumberland County. But it was a deceptive, killer beauty. As I polished off my second hamburger, I felt like the condemned with his last meal. It was going to be a hell of a ride over the mountains.

Wilbur helped us fuel the Cub, checked the oil, and gave us a prop. He acted as if he expected to see us back in Carlisle in twenty minutes, and even offered us a room that night at his house. “The Mrs.” would make us a real Pennsylvania Dutch dinner. As we climbed out past the pumps Kern rocked the wings and Wilbur waved.

It was the most murderous corridor of turbulence I have ever experienced. For the next hour and a half I detested my brother. I hated him for catapulting so hard over the mountains, hated my father for letting us make this trip, hated that society of hard, cynical pilots into which we were born and which now obligated me, more or less, to earn my manhood by proving that I could take this abuse. After an hour my knees and my shins, hammered by the turbulence and the shuddering stick against the cockpit walls, ached like scavenged meat.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, across the wretched, washerboard peaks of the Alleghenies we hauled. Kern peered out through the windshield with his chin just above the instrument panel and then looked back, smiling, actually smiling back at me, as our butts and stomachs got walloped by the updrafts and downdrafts. It was maddening, the way he kept flashing me that earnest
Leave It to Beaver
grin of his. It was his way of communicating his apologies for making me sit through all this turbulence, and also showing me that there wasn’t anything to worry about, a kind of aerial twenty-third Psalm. Yea though we were flying through the shadow of death, that frigging smile on my brother’s face was supposed to comfort me.

He was too good a pilot to pick up a downed wing every time we keeled over in the turbulence. Three seconds later, the back side of the buffet would hit us again and knock us down the other way. I had nothing to do, no task to perform or to distract me, because all we were doing was following the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We couldn’t climb and get away from the worst ground effects, because an overcast was starting to drop low. We couldn’t descend, and fly the valleys to get some relief from the ridge effect near the peaks, because then we would lose contact with the Turnpike. As it was, we were skirting over the tops of the ridges with just a few hundred feet of clearance, and every one of those damn ridge lines packed a ferocious wallop for us.

Turnpike, tunnel, Turnpike, tunnel, bounce-jolt-bounce. The Alleghenies are bleak, featureless terrain, and there wasn’t a single farm or a town to break the monotony of the range. The mountains were flinty and hard, gray and black as they ran to the narrow horizons, with endless hardwood stands and pine barrens on top. Perhaps seven or eight seconds passed between turbulent buffets, and it was very rough turbulence, enough to jiggle the throttle and force Kern to constantly adjust it. I shook all over, trembling from the cold blasts of air coming in through the windows, which made my perspiring hands and chest shiver. But Kern wouldn’t throttle back and slow the plane down to make the ride a little easier. He was determined to make it to Washington County Airport and refuel before the front came through. Indiana. If this was the price I had to pay to get there, I wanted out. It was the worst spell of flying in my life.

After the town of Ligonier the mountains thinned out and the turbulence was milder. But the storm seemed to resent our progress over the mountains and pushed forward new artillery. Mean, snarling black clouds were popping up everywhere, and we were just flying in a maze, poking around for white patches of sky ahead. The headwinds were even stronger than before, a good sign, in a way. We were getting close to the center of the front and it was obvious that it was blowing through quite hard and wasn’t going to get stalled. Behind it there would be clear skies and beautiful conditions across Ohio and Indiana.

But where to go? We couldn’t turn southwest at Latrobe as Wilbur advised, because the city was socked in by rain. Diverting north instead, we lost the Pike for a while, then picked it back up later. But we had missed the turnoff for Route 70. Now we were almost upon Pittsburgh itself. In this weather, there was no way, legally or safely, to proceed due west over the city. Our destination at Washington was still fifty miles to the southwest, behind a solid wall of gray and black clouds.

Then I just had this lucky little run of memory and map reading.

Barnstorming blarney. I had reached the age of weariness concerning my father’s fabulous talk. He was an Olympic-class bullshitter and everyone loved him for it, but not me. By the age of ten I knew every one of his yarns by heart and after that they were maddening, starting to come around for the fourth or fifth time. It never occurred to me, however, that barnstorming blarney might someday prove useful to me, that it was in fact an education, a ground-school course in geography and aerial escape routes, another one of my father’s cryptic gifts to me.

But it occurred to me right there, because now we were in trouble over Pittsburgh. My father had always spoken affectionately of this city on the western frontier of Pennsylvania, which he regarded as an industrial Utopia. It was his kind of town, big-shouldered and loud, full of beefy, fun-loving steel-workers and insane millionaires. Toward the end of World War II, before his big crash, my father had a friend who flew military cargo out of the North Philadelphia Airport in twin-engine Lockheeds. My father was working for
Life
then, but he liked the Lockheed and he often flew along on weekends as a copilot, to get some free stick time. They landed at Pittsburgh a lot, at the old Allegheny County Airport on the western side of the Monongahela River, and loved to carouse at night in the waterfront bars. Pittsburgh had always been legendary among pilots for its miserable weather. The big weather systems pouring out of the Great Lakes condensed near the junction of the Ohio and the Monongahela rivers with the smoke from the giant U. S. Steel mills, smothering the terrain all the way to West Virginia with a dense blanket of smog.

“Pittsburgh,” my father used to say to us. “You know what they call it? 'Hell with the lid taken off.’ It’s awful there, but we always got through. What we did, see, was stay out over the rivers, between the mills, and then we’d fly the steel plants stack-to-stack.”

Stack-to-stack. Ahead of us, flashing pinkish red in the haze, was the beacon on a tall obstruction. I stared at the map. We were quite lost at the moment but I quickly scrolled through all the possibilities, eliminating other nearby obstructions by poking my head out into the air and squinting down at the obvious landmarks, the rail junctions and roads. The tower ahead of us was the first tall one east of the Monongahela, which had to be the big U.S. Steel blast furnace at Braddock, clearly marked on the sectional map as a “Stack” with a flashing red beacon.

I wanted to be positive—we couldn’t risk a navigation error at this point, because the weather behind us was closed off. I gave myself an extra fifteen seconds, peering around for other beacons, and then checking the location of the stack against the city below. I was as certain as I could be. That stack was Braddock.

“Kern!”

“Yo.”

“I want this airplane over that stack.”

“Done. Rink, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Whoa! Elevator going up. There was quite a strong updraft rocketing out of that stack. It hadn’t occurred to either of us that the blast furnace exhaust churning up through a U.S. Steel stack was just about the strongest thermal you could find. We launched straight up toward the clouds, with the altimeter winding around like a second hand.

As the smell of sulfur and molten steel swirled through the cockpit, Kern closed the throttle, downed the left wing and cross-controlled to slip sideways and spill off lift, and pointed the nose down. It was awesome and harshly beautiful, slipping sideways at a 45-degree bank in the effluent of a steel mill.

But I was jubilant and swelling with pride as we boomeranged through that blast furnace exhaust. There, on the immense roof of the mill, in white block letters, I could read: BRADDOCK.

Stack-to-stack, that’s how we flew it. From Braddock we crossed the Monongahela to Duquesne, from Duquesne we flew to McKeesport, from McKeesport to Clairton, and then we flew down over the glorious, giant oxbow in the mighty Mon and south to Monessen.

It was a lovely stretch of flying down through the American Ruhr. Now and then the sky opened up and the sun poked through, shimmering off the river and the ceramic-tile exterior of the stacks. Below us spread a busy industrial setting. The steel mills on either side of the river belched out smoke, the rail lines were full of cars, and barges eased under picturesque steel bridges, which glared softly in the haze. Down along the waterfront the buildings and mills were made of brick and hard granite. Up on the ridgelines, row upon row of white wooden houses perched on the slopes, with terraced gardens thrown out in every direction from the back yards. And the churches. There were so many churches in the Mon Valley. Every town hugging the river—McKeesport and Duquesne, Clairton, Dravosburg, Donora, and Charleroi—had a bright cluster of cathedrals and brick parishes in its midst, immaculate and brimming with wide green lawns in the back. Shiny onion domes and Cyrillic crosses from the church steeples reached up to us in the plane, jewels in the necklace formed by the course of the broad river.

I was very confident of our position now, and I could have flown those industrial landmarks forever. After the bleak, turbulent agony of the mountains, the Mon Valley was a joy to fly. Now we were approaching the last oxbow on the river and our first full state—Pennsylvania—would be behind us. My heart had always belonged to Pennsylvania anyway, because that is where my father’s family came from and those were the stories I loved best. Now Kern and I had flown it all and been delivered to this magical western edge.

But there wasn’t a lot of time for appreciating the beauty of the steel country after we picked up Route 70 at Monessen. The storm raging out of Ohio still meant to defeat us. The stretch of country west of the Mon Valley is wooded and lonely, and we flew on for fifteen minutes in nasty turbulence and spitting rain. Finally we could make out the hangars of the Washington County airport. The sky above them was twisting up a dragon’s tail of angry gray and black clouds. As we firewalled for the field everything ahead of us turned a solid wall of black. We weren’t beating the front any longer. We had met it.