Flight of Passage: A True Story (28 page)

When I got on, my father launched into a long reverie about Texas, making me sit through this ridiculously extended chat about all the great Stearman men he once knew out here, the ranches he had seen from the air, the whole nine yards of Lone Star blarney. I wasn’t in the mood.

“Hey Dad,” I snapped. “Thanks for telling me all about Texas. But I’m
in
Texas right now. I don’t have to hear about Texas from you.”

My father sounded hurt, and I immediately regretted what I had said. I couldn’t understand myself. In the morning, crossing the Little River country, I missed him. Now that I had a moment or two to share with him, I was acting up. It was almost as if I could tolerate him theoretically but not in person. Kern was a lot more patient that way and could put up with the bullshit, a major difference between us, but I didn’t have very long to dwell on this because my father had already changed the subject.

“Listen here,” my father said, “How’s the waterbag doing?”

Shit. Now I had to revert to that mode.

“Dad, the waterbag’s just great. That old Stearman guy in Arkansas showed us how to rig the bag flat on the landing gear, so there’s less drag. The cap faces backwards.”

“Good. Good. Any problems?”

“Well, just one thing Dad. The bag loses water in flight. Every time I check it, it’s down a gallon or two.”

“Yup. It figures. Same thing use to happen to me. Now, to fix a problem, son, you have to understand it. Tell me, what’s happening here?”

“Ah, let’s see. Engine vibrations. The engine vibrations are forcing water out through the cap.”

“Nope. Think son, think.”

“All right. The seams are bad. Water’s leaking out through the seams at the bottom.”

“Nope. Try again.”

“Dad, c’mon. I’ve been flying all day. I’m tired. Couldn’t you just tell me?”

“All right. Look, it’s evaporation. That waterbag is sitting out there in the sun all day, and you’ve got engine exhaust blowing over it too. All that heat evaporates the water right through the canvas. In the old days, I used to lose a quart an hour out of one of those bags.”

Evaporation. Of course. How could I overlook a development that basic? I was lying so fast I couldn’t keep track of all the scientific ramifications.

“Right Dad. Evaporation. So, what do I do?”

“Well c’mon son, that’s simple. Every time you land to top off the gas?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, fill the waterbag too.”

For five hundred miles east of the Continental Divide, the high plains of Texas and New Mexico sweep up as a long, imperceptible incline, rising steeply at the end as the stately massif of the Rockies comes into view. From our dawn takeoff at Albany to our afternoon arrival at Carlsbad, New Mexico, where we launched for the Guadalupe Pass, we climbed more than 2,000 feet in land elevation, to almost 4,000 feet above sea level. We flew west through Sweetwater, Lamesa, and Seminole, the fabled “southern route” of the early airmail flyers, but a pilot must fly that stretch at least once to understand what the land is doing to him. Usually we were looking only five or ten miles ahead, not enough to sense the corrections for height we should have been making. All morning, the ground seemed to be stealthily rising up and trying to swallow the plane. Every hour or so we realized our land error and climbed to avoid obstructions and terrain.

The country, too, changed. After Midland, Texas, the beige and red prairie, with its occasional clumps of green draws, rapidly gave way to sandy desert littered with boulders and rocks, the earth all dirty yellow and black, with spectacular mesas and ravines forming the serrated foothills of the Rockies. There were bizarre, disc-shaped cirrus clouds that day, screening the sunlight into weak shadows. The featureless terrain obliterated into featureless sky, erasing the horizon. Deprived of clear ground reference, Kern occasionally experienced problems with vertigo, or spatial disorientation, and was forced to fly by peering constantly at his turn-and-bank indicator and altimeter. I had my hands full navigating by the compass and my time-elapsed calculations. We were flying through an extra-planetary abyss. Even the towns we passed along the way, many of which we never actually saw, had a far-off ring. Big Spring, Odessa, Pecos.

Farther along the clouds broke up and the sun scalded down. Oil fields, the first that we saw, popped out of the empty landscape. Dozens of black and orange derricks methodically pumped away, and the dirt tracks leading up to them radiated off into the desert like the spokes of a sundial. But the oil installations must have been unattended most of the time because there was virtually no sign of human activity below.

Adding to our feelings of flying into a lunar cosmos, it was to be a day of mishaps and freak events. The big mountain pass ahead, which we knew we would brave by midafternoon, seemed to be pushing us back, warning us off by a series of aberrant mechanical and natural frights.

As we turned in for our first refueling stop of the morning, at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, the tail suddenly rattled and shook as violently as a truck hitting a pothole. The airframe resounded with a bang! The sticks sagged, heavy and hard, the nose dropped, and I had to grab the controls myself to help my brother pull the plane away from the ground. He lunged with both hands for his stick and yelled back.

“I’ve got the stick! You work the throttle and rudders! Just get me down Rink, work me down.”

It was a pretty decent spot of flying we did that morning, but we couldn’t appreciate it right away. We didn’t know what had happened to the plane. All the possibilities ran through my mind. Had we collided with another plane? Maybe we’d lost our elevator struts and the tail was about to vibrate off. Or a bird-strike—we’d seen low-flying vultures all morning. They were awfully big birds, and if one of them was hung up on our rudder, the plane might act like this.

It only took us a half-minute or so to reach the ground, but that’s a long time when your heart is pounding like a pile driver. Kern was holding up the plane all right, but with little jerks and bumps, because two hands cannot be as coordinated as one. All the way down he kept yelling for me to work the throttle and rudders better for him, which wasn’t an easy thing. A single mind flying alone gracefully choreographs the body—stick hand, throttle hand, the feet on the rudders—into a coordinated landing approach. Two minds doing it together, especially two frightened minds, are an uncoordinated jumble.

“Power, Rink!”

“Not that much! C’mon!”

“Trim. Give me some nose up.”

“Wind drift! Jesus, could you watch that? Left rudder, Rink.”

But gradually I got into my brother’s head and got the hang of that strange descent. We mushed into a soft cushion of air over the runway. To help stall the plane, I furiously cranked in all the nose-up trim I could get, scraping some skin off my knuckles against the metal flange on the carburetor-heat knob as I flew the handle around. I didn’t notice the blood on my pants until we stepped out of the plane.

At the gas pumps, which were deserted at seven in the morning, we couldn’t find anything wrong with the plane. There were no dents or breaks in the fabric, everything was in place, and when we took off the inspection plates on the tail and peered inside, everything seemed to be in order. But the stick was completely dead on us and we could never fly the plane as it was. It was a mystery. My brother sat on the wheel of the Cub with his chin in his hands, miserable with himself. Our plans for reaching the mountains that day seemed dashed.

The airport mechanic arrived in his pickup a few minutes later. He was a tanned, gentle fellow in a greasy ball-cap, and he smiled knowingly when we explained what happened. He reached into his pocket for a key and unlocked the fuel pumps.

“You may as well gas up now,” he said. “Let me get a couple of thangs from the hangar. You’ll be outta here in ten minutes.”

When the mechanic returned he was carrying a flashlight, needle-nose pliers, and a shiny galvanized-steel spring, slightly larger than the ones used on screen doors, fresh out of its box. He reached inside the tail inspection plate up to his elbow, grappled and winced, and came back out with two broken pieces of a rusty spring.

“It’s what I figured,” he said. “Busted elevator spring.”

“Goddamn it,” Kern said, angry at himself. “It’s the one part I didn’t fix.”

“Ah, go easy on yourself young fella,” the mechanic said. “Nobody replaces an elevator spring. You fix ’em when they break. You’re just lucky that I got a new one that fits.”

“What would break a spring in flight like that?” my brother asked.

“Well, where you flyin’ from?” the mechanic said.

“New Jersey.”

“Nu Jursa! Whoa here. Are you them boys on the radio?”

“We don’t have a radio in this Cub.”

“No! The AM band boys. You’re all over it. Evrabaddy’s lookin’ for you boys. They’re saying you’re the youngest aviators ever to fly coast to coast.”

We were astonished. It was the first indication we had that there was press interest in our flight, and it had never occurred to us that we might be the youngest aviators to fly the continent. It seemed bizarre to us, too. Here we were out in this lonely, remote stretch of Texas, which felt like the end of the world, and we were enjoying the isolation and the complete freedom from everything we knew. Meanwhile, newscasters were talking about our flight on the radio. Both of us instinctively suspected that my father was behind it. He was probably trying to build as much interest as he could, so there’d be a big splash once we got to California. Neither of us minded very much. We just hadn’t expected my father to pull a fast one like that on us in the middle of the country, and we hadn’t expected newscasters to be interested either. What did everybody see in this trip?

“Anyways, that’s what did it to you,” the mechanic said. “You been flying in a lot of turbulence?”

“Yeah, lots,” my brother said. “Straight, almost, for three days.”

“Well, it’s too much for an old spring like that,” the mechanic said. “She just gave out in the stress, that’s all.”

The new spring that the mechanic had wasn’t designed for a Piper Cub. It was for a Piper Pawnee cropduster. But by crimping back the ends of the spring and making adjustments on the armature of the elevator, the mechanic adapted it for the Cub. As he set the new spring in place, the mechanic explained that the controls would be lighter now.

“The thang’ll be kinda loosey-goosey on you now, know what I mean?” the mechanic said. “But it’ll be better. Real responsive-like.”

The airport owner and his wife arrived and opened up the pilots’ shack. We went in and bought some crackers and soda. The mechanic came in for his morning coffee, and we all sat outside on the porch and talked.

The air was pungent with the dry, woody smell of the high plains early in the morning. There was a thick coating of dew on the macadam ramp and the gas pumps, and glistening on the sagebrush beyond—surprising, I thought, for this dry terrain. The biggest jackrabbits I had ever seen were bounding across the ramp, running circles around each other.

The woman walked out to the pumps to empty the waste barrels. Returning, she called to her husband.

“Dear,” she said. “Look at that pretty little Cub on the ramp. It’s perfect. Perfect! I’ve never seen a plane so beautifully restored.”

Kern beamed, took off his cowboy hat, and ran his hand through his sweaty, flaxen hair. I was laughing my ass off for him that morning. Kern saw me doing it, looked over and smiled, and started laughing at himself too. He looked ridiculous in that big ten-gallon hat he’d bought for himself. But he was happy and self-confident out here in the far reaches of Texas. I could see him changing and growing, it seemed, with every leg we completed, and he was a lot more fun to be with when he was relaxed on the ground like this. I couldn’t get over how much I enjoyed being with him now.

“Ah, lookey here,” the airport owner said. “Are you them boys from Nu Jursa? It’s on the radio. Everybody’s trying to find you two.”

“Yeah. That’s us,” Kern said, but he felt a little sheepish about it. “Look. I’m just doing this to build time for my commercial license. We didn’t do this for publicity.”

“Oh it’s okay!” the fellow said. “This’ll be good for aviation, you know? They’ll be a pack of people waiting for you once you get over the mountains this afternoon.”

The airport owner was a licensed pilot who flew the Rockies all the time, mostly in big Cessnas and twin-engine planes. He went over the maps with Kern and me and showed us how to fly the Guadalupe Pass. From west Texas, it was better to cross northwest into New Mexico and launch for Guadalupe Peak from the north. Then we could head almost due south for the twin Guadalupe Peaks, flying a parallel course with the mountain range until we reached the pass. That way, the Guadalupe Range would protect us from the prevailing wind from the west until we were up above 9,000 feet. Facing the pass straight on for fifty miles would just expose us to heavy winds and leeward turbulence.

The owner at Sweetwater didn’t discourage us from taking on the pass, but he didn’t make it sound easy either. There were a couple of planes on the strip with 85-horse engines, a Luscombe and a Cessna 140, that had been through the pass, so it could be done. The big thing to watch, he said, was altitude loss. We should turn and face the pass about three or four miles out. If, during the first mile toward the pass, we could hold our altitude and course against the wind and the turbulence, we’d probably be okay. But if we started losing height and couldn’t regain it, we should turn back right away.

He said one other thing that cheered us.

“It’ll actually get better for you
inside
the pass. It’s like the eye of a storm in there, a lot calmer. So, the last mile going in, when it’s hell, just know it’ll actually be better inside.”

As we turned to go, Kern pulled out his wallet. We owed them for a new elevator spring, labor, a tank of gas, crackers and soda. The three of them just stared at us and smiled. They wouldn’t take our money.

Kern tried to insist, but it was no use.