Flight of Passage: A True Story (20 page)

“Well Hank, we’re going to do the Guadalupe Pass near El Paso. It’s just a little over 9,000 feet.”

“What’s your surface ceiling on this Cub?”

“10,000.”

“Shit. Okay. I’m not saying nothing, all right? But I mean, you won’t make your service ceiling on a hot day. Nobody makes their service ceiling period.”

“No. Hank. That’s what the book says. But we’ve got a climb prop, and the cylinders are bored out. The mechanics back home say this Cub delivers over 100-horsepower, as good as the Continental 108.”

Hank scratched his head and crushed his cigarette on the ramp under his scuffed boot.

“The climb prop, huh? I’m not saying. Maybe you can try it, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve done all kinds of shit in airplanes, myself.”

“Everybody’s done stuff in airplanes.”

“Exactly! That’s what I’m saying . . . try it. It could just happen.”

“Okay,” Kern said. “But listen, we owe you for gas from last night. We filled up.”

“No you don’t! No way,” Hank said. “The fuel’s on me boys. I’m into this thing now, okay? Coast to coast in a stock Cub? Shit. I’m into it. You guys are all right. Now look, I’m ferrying Stearmans down to Texas all the time. Come on into the shack, let’s call weather, and, Ferdinand, I’ll show you all the routes.”

“Kern.”

“Kern! You bet. Whatever, Kern, Fern, Schmern, it’s just a problem you got with that name. But let’s do it.”

Kern was smiling now. It wasn’t light enough to fly anyway, and we could use the help.

“Thanks!” Kern said. “Great.”

I pulled our bag of maps out of the baggage compartment.

Hank motioned with an outstretched arm toward his rundown shack.

“We’ll give you some coffee too. You like coffee?”

“Oh yeah. We’ll have some coffee.”

“I mean, you know, hot chocolate or some shit for Rinkler here. Whatever we got.”

The pilots’ shack was dingy and cluttered, with old airplane parts and welding rods spilling off the shelves and a Stearman center section wedged up in the rafters. The other pilots and the hopper-crew were in there, smoking, warming their hands over a kerosene stove. A Coleman lantern hissed from the ceiling.

Hank handed us some coffee in tin cups, a dark, crude-oil brew fortified by a thick bottom of rounds. It was the first coffee of our lives, and probably the worst. We stood there in the smoky room pretending we liked it and bravely sipped it down, taming it as best we could with sugar and powdered milk.

Hank and Kern stepped over to the phone and called the FAA weather station in Indianapolis. The situation was similar to the one we faced the day before. Another large, moist warm front, the remnants of a Gulf Coast storm, was moving north up the Mississippi River Valley, and it would spill clouds down low over the Cumberland Plateau of Kentucky and Tennessee and the Ozarks to the west. Our route across Indiana and southern Illinois would be clear, but we’d probably hit the weather around noon, after we made our planned turn southwest to head through Arkansas and Oklahoma to reach Texas. The bad weather would probably meet us down near Cairo, Illinois.

Hank took the phone away from Kern and meticulously queried the weather briefer about the conditions forecast for western Kentucky and Tennessee. He lit another cigarette and took a long, thoughtful drag.

Hank swiped away the oil cans and wrenches from a workbench and laid down our maps. He showed us the best route across to Indianapolis and then south to Vincennes, after which we could follow the great river valleys opening up to the south—the meandering Wabash River to the Ohio, then the Ohio to the Mississippi. That’s where we’d run into trouble, but Hank had flown that country dozens of times against the Gulf fronts and he was confident that one route would remain clear.

The weather front, Hank explained, would probably remain high, bunching up along the Ozarks and the Cumberlands on either side of the northern Mississippi River Valley. The high ground on the outer rim of the valley would be obscured. But he’d found that he could usually get through if he stayed down low through the middle area, flying something he called the Kentucky Swale. This was a section of low, interconnected ravines west of the Cumberland Plateau, a natural basin of creek beds and tributaries falling toward the Mississippi. The low ground began just south of the confluence of the Wabash and the Ohio rivers and ran down through Paducah, Kentucky. On days like this there was usually a clear tunnel of air down through the swale.

“It’s right here,” Hank said, jabbing his finger on a spot near the middle of the St. Louis sectional, near Morganfield, Kentucky. “This is the Kentucky Swale.”

He pointed to a rail line that we could pick up at Paducah and follow south as far as Dyersburg, Tennessee, and marked it with my red grease pencil.

“It’s real pretty country too,” Hank said. “The hill country to the east might be obscured but you just keep down in that swale, over the rail line, and you’ll get through. You can turn for the Mississippi as soon as the weather clears to the west, at either Blytheville or Memphis.”

We would be flying quite low, and Hank told us to expect a lot of turbulence and ground effect until we hit the river. But the weather system should pass by mid-afternoon and our reward would be a nice evening run through the pine barrens of Arkansas. Navigating across that featureless timber country was difficult, and Hank suggested that we follow a freight line that began at Osceola, Arkansas and would eventually deliver us into Brinkley. He marked that on the map for us too. There was a big Stearman strip at Brinkley where he had often spent the night. We’d like all the duster crews in there, Hank said. The government issued big forestry spraying contracts out of Brinkley all summer, and the strip teemed with itinerant cropdusting crews. It was a wild place.

A brick-colored sun rose on the horizon. The pilots began filing out to their rumbling Stearmans, pulling on their white crash helmets and goggles. They were annoyed with Hank for dawdling with us in the shack and they started racing their engines and inching up on the ramp. We were anxious to get off too, now that we had a route through the weather and across the Mississippi.

But Hank seemed to want to linger and we dawdled in the shack with him for a while longer. Finally, he pulled on his crash helmet and stood at the door. We folded our maps, thanked him, and turned to go.

“Ah, say there Ferdinand,” Hank said. “Have you ever flown that Cub in formation?”

“Oh sure Hank,” Kern lied.

“Good.”

Hank and his pilots were dusting that morning over by Spring Grove. It was along our way. He told Kern just to taxi out and line up on the runway behind the Number Three Stearman. When he saw the prop in front of him whirl to full power, Kern was to stay with that plane. Hank would slide in behind us in Number Four. We could tag along with the Stearman formation as long as we liked, and Hank thought that we might enjoy watching them spray the fields.

We raced out to the Cub, propped, and fell in line behind the Number Three plane. Hank strapped into his Stearman and crossed the ramp behind us. We bounced out the taxiway with a noisy Stearman fore and aft of us, gunning our engine with the formation over the bumps.

Nobody else used the strip so we just braked in formation out on the grass runway and ran up our engines. As the pilot in the first plane advanced his throttle, the trembling Pratt & Whitneys roared, and we raced down the strip.

Whahhh-Whahhhh-Whahhh-Whahhh. It was a magnificent climbout surrounded by those gargantuan props and yellow wings, an ovation of noise and lift. Two thousand horses thundered around us. Kern did a nice job of flying, jockeying the throttle back and forth on takeoff to stay in line with the heavily loaded biplanes, fish-tailing with the rudders to stay out of their heavy propwash. And he flew it tight, too, just 30 feet off the rudder and slightly to the left of Number Three, with Hank sidling in to us in the same position.

Climbing away from the field, we hit a little early-morning turbulence—it wasn’t much, just a few bubbles in the air where the first rays of the sun hit the cool air over the ponds—and the wings of all the Stearmans around us rocked and swayed out, and I was worried at first that we’d slide into another plane. But formation work was another trick of flying that Kern seemed to be able to get right the first time. We’d flown tight formations before, with the Basking Ridge flyers back home on the way to air shows, but usually with my father flying our plane. A lot of the pilots from our home strip were crazy and they were always looping and rolling right beside us, and then my father would join them in aerobatics, and I was scared most of the time and this had always made me leery of formation work. But it just felt right that morning over Indiana, surrounded by the steady, throaty roar that the Stearmans threw off, with Hank on our side grinning and giving us the thumbs up from his open-cockpit. Everything I’d been though with Kern yesterday seemed to prepare me for this. We were just meant to be up there, climbing out with all those Stearmans.

The formation leveled off and throttled back at 400 feet. Pristine farmlands, shimmering with morning dew, stretched out beneath us. The air was crisp and cool and cottony patches of ground fog coiled up from the ponds and the creeks. We hedgehopped over some tree lines and corn fields, swinging wide around the farmhouses. But everything was heard and seen as if in a dream. The thunderous Stearman formation enveloped us in white noise.

On our right, Hank skidded in closer, grinning wide beneath his goggles. He kept nudging us closer and closer to the Number Three plane on our left, cocking his head with encouragement and giving Kern a thumbs-up. Older, high-time pilots can tell things right away about another pilot. Kern was flying well with the formation. Hank nudged us in again.

At Spring Grove, the Number One plane peeled away and dove for a soy bean field. The field was long and had a line of phone wires on the near end and a tree line on the other. The pilots would have their hands full covering the ends. Number Two waited about ten seconds and began his run, then Number Three. We looked over to Hank. He was pointing down, motioning for Kern to follow Number Three. Kern closed the throttle and banked over so hard that we were pulled down in our seats.

Kern followed the formation down to the field, pushing past one hundred miles per hour as we screamed over the telephone wires. Ahead of us three Stearmans were diagonally spread across the soy bean rows, wingtip-to-wingtip, and flying so low that their props spit up a juicy green blur from the crop leaves. The sprayer bars churned out a chalky cloud of pesticide. It was a wonderful sensation, buzzing with our wheels right down in the furrows with three Stearmans roaring ahead of us, Hank diving down over the wires behind us, and the field, the sky, and the tree line ahead blurred by the misty, putrid vortices of crop spray.

At the trees, the forward planes zoomed back up. Hammerheading over, they dove back in from the opposite direction for another run. Kern ruddered right to avoid them, firewalled and climbed straight up. We turned and crossed the field diagonally, watching the formation make another run.

Kern pointed the Cub west for Indianapolis. Hank left the other Stearmans and flew with us for a few miles, pulling in tight on our left wing. He was grinning again, waving both arms over his head like a boxer saluting a crowd, a happy, playful Stearman man, clowning around in his open cockpit. He was reluctant to let us go.

Then he waved once more and turned away, wagging his wings as he plunged back down for his fields.

For the next ten miles we could see plumes of dust rising as Hank and his pilots worked that field. Another duster crew was operating immediately to the south and indeed all morning, until we left the agricultural plains behind for the narrow ravines of Kentucky, we saw white clouds of pesticide rising below us in every direction as the big yellow Stearmans and white Piper Pawnees worked the fields.

As we pushed on to Indianapolis, strange emotions gripped me. I was often overwhelmed by loneliness early in the morning in the air, especially when the weather was as clear as this and the navigation was easy. Even counting the air time, we hadn’t spent more than an hour with Hank, but I liked him and I missed him already. I guess this would be a trip of instant friendships and quick partings. I didn’t realize yet how fortunate we were to have met him. We faced another rough patch of flying at noon, when we met the next storm front. Without Hank’s help we never would have made it past the Wabash.

“Two Kids Flying to California in a Piper Cub?” the gas jockey in Indianapolis asked. “You bet. That’s a story, see, a
story.
I can smell a hot tip as good as the next guy.”

Now that we had shared the details of our flight with Hank back in East Richmond, and received such fulsome encouragement from a real live Stearman man, Kern felt that we could tell almost everyone. When we stopped to refuel at the Sky Harbor Airport in Indianapolis at a little past seven that morning, the gas jockey pumping fuel up on the wing asked where we were headed. Kern spilled everything in his best eager-beaver style. The man nearly fell off his ladder with excitement. I was beginning to understand that a lot of people saw in this flight things that we had not seen ourselves.

Neither of us liked that bonehead gas jockey very much. He was a short, fussy man with a pencil-point moustache, a starched Texaco uniform, and all of these ridiculous little three-in-one tools attached to his belt. Pumping gas at the Indianapolis airport was a very important job, maybe one of the most important jobs in all of Indiana, he wanted us to know. Sooner or later, everybody had to pass through an airport, and you wouldn’t believe the people he met, the gas jockey said. Rock stars and movie actresses, visiting politicians, famous trial attorneys who flew their own planes—they were always dropping into “Indy” unannounced and he was the first to know. Newspaper reporters, who the gas jockey seemed to feel had the second most important job in Indiana, relied on him for a steady stream of “hot tips.” Now,
we
were the hot tip.