Flight of Passage: A True Story (30 page)

“Really?” Kern exclaimed. “That would be great.”

“It’s nothing. Go get yourselves some pop.”

The duster chief gave the underside of 71-Hotel what he called a “hot patch.” His Pawnees were hitting sage brush and hopper trucks all the time, ripping tears in the fabric, and the operation lost too much money if they kept a plane out of the air all day just to patch some fabric and let the dope dry. So he “hot-patched” fabric all the time.

Slapping a length of linen tape over the tear in the fabric and painting on some dope, he gingerly flamed it dry and hard with the blowtorch. Two coats of nitrate, torch it, two coats of butyrate, torch it. He even produced a spray can of official Piper white paint and touched up the patch and the scrapes on the landing gear. When he was done, we couldn’t even tell that the plane had been damaged.

“Okeydokey,” the duster chief said. “That patch ain’t never comin’ off. My Pawnees? The hot patches are the strongest part.”

That duster chief liked Kern. I could tell from the way the corners of his mouth trembled when he smiled that he got a big charge out of my brother. He couldn’t resist a boy this earnest, all sunburn and freckles, the penny loafers and the man’s cowboy hat on a boy’s head, sticking out like a burro’s ears.

“Son,” the duster chief said, “Anything else bothering you?”

Kern took off his cowboy hat.

“Well, the engine, sir. We’ve just really pushed it hard across the desert—all those vibrations and everything. We’re going to fly the mountains this afternoon. What do you think?”

“Stand by,” the duster chief said. “I’m giving this Cub an annual inspection, right now. Go inside in the shade and relax. I said an hour and I meant it.”

Kern was fiddling with the cowboy hat in his hands.

“Ah, well see. I don’t think we have enough money for an annual.”

“Ah, frig your money son. This is nothing for me. I can do an annual faster than a skunk can piss scent.”

We knew a good mechanic when we saw one. If there was anything wrong with the Continental, we were confident that the duster chief would find it.

The duster chief brought his toolbox over from the Cessna and threw open our engine cowling. He pulled all the rocker arm covers, the plugs, and the filters, checking carefully for metal filings and other telltale signs of trouble. He ran compression checks on the cylinders, and went over the magneto ignitions, the wiring, the manifolds, and the carburetor. He didn’t like the way the Continental was idling up at these high altitudes, so he propped the engine himself and adjusted the mixture and timing.

We used that time to plan our flight across the pass. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and there weren’t any local pilots or geezers around Carlsbad that afternoon. They would have told us that there was one major fault in our plans. We were planning on launching toward a 9,000-foot mountain at the height of density altitude conditions. It was two in the afternoon, when the heat, turbulence, and headwinds were at their worst. We should have waited until evening, or better, the next morning, when a lower sun and cooling temperatures might have given us another 500 or 600 feet of service ceiling. But we didn’t think of this ourselves and we were determined to fly as soon as the mechanic was done. It was the worst time of day to do it, a foolhardy moment to attempt our ascent.

Our route of flight was obvious. We could see that we’d pick up the bottom of the Rockies as soon as we took off from Carlsbad. A southwest-running spine of peaks lay just a few miles from the field, and it climbed steeply up toward Guadalupe Peak. As the airport owner back in Sweetwater had told us, the ridge line of the peaks would protect us from the worst winds during our long climb. On the map, the terrain-colorings changed as dramatically as we would have to fly, from the soft beiges and grays of the 4,000-foot desert floor to the ugly smudge of orange and black peaks that rapidly swept up to 9,000 feet. But we would need more than that to safely cross the Pass—10,000, 11,000, even 12,000 feet, whatever we could coax out of 71-Hotel. We knew that we faced a difficult hour of flying, but we weren’t raising any objections against ourselves. We’d flown too hard all day to turn away from the mountains now.

The duster chief called us out to the Cub. Everything was fine, he said. The compression on the cylinders was strong and he’d only found one plug that was fouled with oil, ordinary enough on an old Continental engine, and he’d cleaned that and regapped the spark. As we took off and climbed, he said, we’d be surprised by the extra noise. Without the cowl gasket, the engine would roar. But it was only noise and we’d get used to it after fifteen or twenty minutes. In fact, the engine would run a little cooler and better without the cowl-gasket, because more air could get through now.

Kern went for his wallet.

“Look, maybe I should just try and pay you what I can afford. I want to be fair about this.”

“Put that away son,” the duster chief said. “What you owe me is that mountain. Get across. This trip of yours is gettin’ kinda famous. There’s people waitin’ in El Paso.”

It was a wonderful feeling I had for people, the afternoon we launched for the pass. All day, all week in fact, strangers were buying us meals, giving us free tanks of gas, fixing up our plane, and cheering us on west. I was afraid of that peak ahead, and I admit it. But I wanted that mountain now—not for myself, not even for Kern and me together. Everybody had been good to us and expected us to get across, so now we had to pay them back and do this thing.

There’s one last memory I have of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Under the baking sun, with the desert wind pasting my hair to my perspiring forehead, I stood underneath the tail of 71-Hotel and held it level to the ground on my shoulders. Kern was up in front of the wing on a ladder, fueling the tank himself. He wanted the plane level so that he could squeeze in every last ounce of fuel. It was only sixty miles to the pass. But we’d be climbing at full throttle all the way.

Guadalupe.

Looking south from the Carlsbad ramp, I could see the purple-black rim of mountains towering up toward the peak. I wasn’t going to like it up there one bit, I knew, but then Kern yelled from the cockpit and it was time to go.

“Contact!”

Kern. Somehow he always got us through. My only choice now was to grit my teeth and fly, so I threw the prop, ran around to the back, and strapped myself in.

The runway elevation at Carlsbad was 3,293 feet above sea level. We could see right away what the high altitude conditions and the scorching heat did to 71-Hotel’s performance. Wallowing down the sticky macadam, we ate up nearly a third of the runway before we labored into the air. This was not a good omen for our assault on Guadalupe.

The sun at its zenith burned through our glareshield and the engine roared louder than ever through the opening created by the missing gasket. Kern gingerly climbed us up to a safe height above the desert plateau. At 1,000 feet, once he could see that the engine was running smoothly, he hauled back on the stick and hung the plane on its prop. We would need a very high “angle of attack” to climb in this thin, hot air. Uncomfortably nose-high, throbbing with the vibrations of the straining Continental, we would not see over the nose again for more than an hour.

The black wall of the Rockies rose on our right, climbing higher and higher as the range slewed southwest. It presented a tantalizing, maddening barrier. Each time the altimeter bobbled up another few hundred feet, up past 4,000, 6,000, then 8,000 feet, we looked directly out the side and found ourselves nearly level with a conical summit, or a jagged, naked pinnacle of rock. Over the mountain, there was a slice of clear air and we could see to the west. But the sensation of space opening up and the joy of seeing over to the other side was always short-lived. There was always more wall rising ahead of us to the right, black-gray and sandy, with spectacular rockslides and grotesque outcrops and false ridges that made my mind race. The Rockies were a quandary, both beautiful and cruel. How could mountains be so endlessly enticing to the eye, yet so impassable?

As we climbed we were rifled by the westerlies, which lifted up the right wing and resounded over the fabric like a drum roll. The wind slammed against the far side of the mountain, rocketed straight up and over the peaks and then roiled up thousands of feet more in a magnificent, invisible volcano, depositing down on us its leeward turbulence. We were ascending into a furious eddy of air that stretched all the way down the range. The pounding from the west was so continuous that my brother flew with the right aileron pushed up to keep the wing down, keeping the plane straight with the opposite rudder, so that we climbed in a queasy-feeling slip. The high angle of climb we were forced to maintain against the steadily thinning air was disorienting. Now I was attacked by the worst kind of vertigo, one of my own mental creation. From his position up front, my brother could still see the peaks out of a portion of his windshield. But my view was almost completely blocked by the pitched-up nose and the downed wing, and I hated the agonizing feeling of a mountain that I couldn’t see rising to my side. I was sitting at the bottom of an obtuse triangle that had been turned awkwardly on its side. At the apex, up over my brother’s head, there was only clear sky, burned white by the sun. Over my right knee, I looked straight down to the rocks.

But once in a while the wind pounded us hard enough to lift the wing again, and then I could steal a quick glance left into the tepid slipstream. We were inching along the little blacktop highway that paralleled the east face of the mountains, down through Carlsbad Caverns, Whites City, and Pine Springs. With the steep climb, the engine developing only two-thirds of its power in the thin air, and the wind pushing us back from the range, our progress was excruciating. At best we made only fifty miles per hour over the ground. And we were alone, completely alone. Everything below us was lifeless—hardbed desert on one side, colorless rock on the other. There wasn’t even a passing car that I could judge our progress by. We were punishing ourselves and our plane fruitlessly, it seemed. Our fuel would be exhausted by the climb, leaving nothing for the pass.

Kern didn’t seem to notice. As we clawed up in that queer climb, I looked forward to him, perched high above me, almost over my head. His cowboy hat, nonchalantly pushed back on his head, bumped up against the cockpit struts whenever we hit turbulence. With his left hand he held the throttle all the way forward in a lock-grip, and with his right hand he kept up the nose with the stick firmly in his lap. I begged him with my racing heart and trembling limbs to feel my agony and discomfort. Then he might level the wings and lower the nose. We could turn back now, before we were inside the mountains and it was too late. My brother did look back several times, quickly, so that he didn’t lose control of the plane, flashing that determined half-smile of his. But I didn’t want to show him how I felt so I smiled gamely and gave him two thumbs up.

It wasn’t simply bravado, or reluctance to betray my cowardice to my brother. The sun and the throbbing plane, the mountains rising unseen over my right shoulder, surrounded me in a kind of hallucinogenic chamber, carrying me beyond myself. This was fear becoming spiritual. I wanted that mountain badly, and the pulsating cockpit and the sun were lulling me into a senseless, anesthetized state that blurred out fright.

During that climb, I thought a lot about Saint-Ex and Ernest Gann again. Nothing in particular in their writings came back to me, and in any case I was too dulled by the throbbing engine and airframe to recall their books clearly. I just thought of Saint-Ex and Gann, the men. They were always scaring the hell out of themselves in airplanes, then coming back down and transforming the experience into metaphysical poetry. They were very candid about their fears in the air. Saint-Ex was even candid about his own death, which he expected at any time. In his last book,
Flight to Arras
, written while he was a fighter pilot during World War II, Saint-Ex analyzed his chances of surviving the war and concluded that they were nil. He prepared himself and his reading public for his inevitable demise by creating the impression that he was indifferent to his fate—no one should even search for him once he was downed. The only purpose in his life had been the existential search for meaning in the air. Dead, there was no point to Saint-Ex anymore. This was prescient enough. Returning from a mission over North Africa in 1943, Saint Ex was jumped from behind by German fighters, who filled his P-38 full of holes before he could lose them. He fell to a watery, unknown grave somewhere in the Mediterranean, and no trace of him or his plane was ever found. Saint-Ex appeared to have willed the ultimate existential act. He had vanished, and the only part of him that was left was his writings. Would he know fear during his last moments? He didn’t know. He only knew that he felt resigned to death, thinking about it on the ground.

These were the kind of dreamy, melancholy thoughts I had, inching up to the peak. The effects of the heat, the throbbing of the plane, and the lack of oxygen brought a lot of this on, I suppose, but the worst part was not being able to see out the side. Once we cleared 9,500 feet though, and I could see a clear patch of air for a while, I felt better. The important thing, I told myself, was keeping my head and making myself available if Kern needed any help.

It was chilly, up at 10,000 feet. Neither of us had ever flown a plane that high. Judging the distance from an intersection on the road below, I guessed that we were now approaching Pine Springs and the cut through the mountains. Without asking my brother I reached forward on both sides and pulled shut the windows. It was a shock, closing off that slipstream. The absence of wind blowing over my face only made my vertigo worse, and my arms and legs trembled involuntarily.

At 10,500 feet my brother leveled the wings and the Guadalupe Pass came into view. The pass was an immense V, opening up between the twin Guadalupe peaks, more than a mile across at the top. At the summits, black, vertically crenellated sides guarded the opening, but lower down the slopes rounded out and softened to a soothing beige. Rockslides and windblown sand collected in the crevices and overflowed to the valley floor. The ferocious headwinds ripping through the cut blew up a hazy inferno of vapor and dust. We could already feel the first ripples from the wind tunnel ahead—sharp, choppy buffets and powerful, elongated downdrafts.