Flight of Passage: A True Story (32 page)

We had enough presence of mind to remain high for another ten minutes. If we tried to descend through the hellgate of air on the windward side, the violent downdrafts would suction us back into the mountain. So we just hung up there as long as we could stand it, bong, bong, bong, bong in that awful air, Eleven-Six, Eleven-Six, hating with every bone in our bodies the God who made mountains. But I was mentally at rest, now that I knew we were past the peaks and that my brother had the plane. I closed my eyes and leaned my head on the window railing, exhausted and physically drained but satisfied with myself. I waited for the calm air to return and the sound of the engine idling as my brother let us down.

Finally, gulping in air as we fell, we dove for oxygen and the desert floor on the far side. It was a visual relief to finally be able to see out through the windshield and the side windows, and I realized that I must have dozed off for a few minutes as Kern held us up through the rotors. We were clear of the mountains now.

In the desert just beyond the pass there were shallow salt flats filled with water, a blue meringue shining under the sun, stretching north and south. Tiny white caps and gently swirling pools lapped up against sand, an exotic, bizarre marine display after so much time staring at desert and hard rock. The air above the liquid flats was cool, and it cleared our heads. Over desolate mesquite country, we steered due west for El Paso, seventy miles away.

We were immensely contented now, enjoying the kind of deep, peaceful sense of well-being that is nourished by delivery from danger and fatigue. The big barrier, the only real obstacle that stood between us and the Pacific, had been crossed. Since November, and more intensely since May, I had worried about the Rockies. I didn’t see how we could possibly cross them in a Piper Cub. Now we’d finally done it, even if I couldn’t account for the aerodynamics of it. We were done and through, and there was no further need to figure it carefully and subject our crossing to logical analysis. It wasn’t logical at all, in fact it was downright irrational, what we’d just accomplished. I would never know how close we came to killing ourselves getting through that pass, because my side vision wasn’t adequate enough to judge that. Maybe we flew the mountains perfectly, maybe not so well. But none of that really mattered now because we were whole, on the far side. The gateway to California had been breached. I was overjoyed that it was behind us.

The country was changing again. The blacks and hard yellows of the high desert were giving way to the tessellated ochers and painted sands of the low desert on the western side of the Rockies. The country was falling toward the ocean again. The flying was easy and Kern shook the stick when we came up on a ranch, and I took the plane and dropped down to buzz the cows.

El Paso rose out of the desert like an emerald. Glittering roofs, green lawns and yucca trees were framed by the graceful, sweeping oxbow of the purple Rio Grande. It was the first habitation of any size we’d seen since Pittsburgh.

Our fuel cork was riding on EMPTY again, but we felt inured to worry now. We had the windows open and all the way across the mesquite I kept glancing back over the tail to the fading wall of the Rockies and the two peaks guarding the pass, until they disappeared into the blue meringue of water on the salt flats.

Guadalupe. Before that day I always thought of Exupéry and Ernest Gann, and the early airmail pilots who flew the pass, as distant, heroic figures, brave men who conquered peaks. They seemed very aloof to me and I could never emulate them. Now I felt closer to them all, and I had learned something else. It wasn’t bravery. Bravery isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. They were just stubborn, that’s all, and afterward they were very tired.

As we taxied in at the busy general aviation airport at El Paso, an anxious knot of reporters and cameramen jostled near the pumps. All across Texas, the geezers and the gas jockeys had said, “You’re on the radio.” But we didn’t expect a reception as big as this. As we shut down the engine, microphones on booms came orbiting in through our open windows and photographers were fighting for position up by the prop. There were a few newspaper reporters there, but these were mostly TV people, scrappy and full of elbows. They all shouted into the cockpit at once.

“How do you feel?”

“Boys! Yo! Can you tell us how you feel?”

That was the thing about broadcasters that we would learn. Facts? They were incidental. First, everyone wanted to know how we
felt.

In fact, we felt terrible. Our faces and arms were burnt brick-red, our heads ached from hypoxia hangover, and our seatbelt welts chafed. I wasn’t happy to see this swarm of reporters, crowding around the plane and banging their cameras on the fabric. But Kern didn’t seem to mind. The trip so far had been a jumble of new landscapes and events. Swale to river, prairie to desert, rattlers to mountain pass, and all of it had worked a magic on his character. He was ready to meet the press.

Without really trying, Kern was a dreamboat for those reporters. Earnest as a novitiate, blushing all over when he flashed that broad smile of his, he was a natural for the cameras. (Later, my mother complained that I was always “scowling” in the news photos, while Kern, she thought, had “the nicest smile.”) Neither of us understood what the fuss was all about. As far as we were concerned, we were just two kids from New Jersey, pursuing our own private dream. But these reporters seemed determined to turn our flight into a national hullabaloo. We were genuinely surprised and caught off guard by all this attention, and that contributed a lot to the naïve, aw-shucks attitude we projected. The reporters loved it. America was a different place then and all the heroes had crew cuts, platinum-blond wives and drove Corvettes. The media was devoted to this cult of innocence and that is what they hoped to find in us.

“Rink, look at these guys out here,” Kern muttered under his breath as we climbed out of the plane. “They’re going nuts for us.”

“Yeah. What are we supposed to be, the astronauts?”

“Are you Kernahan Buck?” one of the reporters yelled.

“That’s me.”

“Mr. Buck! How do you feel?”

“We’re fine fellas,” Kern said, pulling on his cowboy hat and shaking hands all around. “Real fine. Hi, I’m Kern Buck. I’m glad to meet you.”

The three network affiliates in El Paso, the ABC, CBS, and NBC local stations, had each sent a crew. They clutched wire service bulletins on our flight and an article from the
El Paso Times
announcing our expected arrival. One of the stations had brought along their anchorman, a tall, blond Adonis in a tan polyester suit, primping himself in a little mirror before he stepped up with his mike. The other stations had elected to narrate over their footage back at the studio. Even before we landed, the TV crews were fighting over us. The station that had brought its anchor thought that they were entitled to interview us first, which the other two stations didn’t think was fair.

Kern dove right in. Something had happened to him over that mountain back there. I was amazed by his easy familiarity with the press.

“Hey, guys, whoa, relax,” Kern said. “We just flew this little Cub over the mountains, and we’re tired. You can’t fight over us, okay? Everybody will get their interview, I promise. Right now, I have to go inside.”

“Wait!” several reporters yelled at once. “You can’t go inside yet. We have to do the interview!”

“Guys,” Kern said, “I gotta go inside. I need a toilet, bad.”

Haw! Everybody roared with laughter and started taking furious notes. No detail, apparently, was beyond their interest.

As we stepped inside the small airport terminal, one of the reporters handed us his pile of wire copy and clips. We locked ourselves in the men’s room, sat on the toilets in adjoining stalls, and read our press. When Kern was done with each clip, he handed it to me through the bottom of the toilet stall.

It was astonishing, confronting ourselves in print for the first time, reading all the palaver that had been published already, most of it lifted out of the original
Indianapolis Star
story and quotes from my father. Wire-service writers who had never even interviewed us perpetuated the Jack-and-Bobby motif, calling us a pair of “Kennedy knockoffs.” In another story, we were “air pioneers,” and “diffident about our exploits.” In the age of the Kennedys and the astronauts, diffidence was greatly prized and it was an angle to play up, even if it was total horseshit. According to United Press International, “The Buck boys seem as unconcerned about their transcontinental flight in a tiny 85-horsepower Cub as if they were on a hop around the local airport.”

The silliest malarkey, of course, originated with my father. It was obvious from the articles that he was carefully managing the coverage from home, the way he ran one of his political campaigns, sitting up all night in his library with both phones busy. He was the one keeping the Kennedy fantasy alive. One of the reporters had asked my father what “inspired” our trip. “'The boys never forgot John Kennedy’s inaugural address,’ said their proud father, Tom Buck. 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.’”

The virtuous appeal of two boys from a large Irish-Catholic family was another reliable theme. It was the original “family values” pitch and my father knew just how to milk it.

“We think it’s far better to have the kids attracted to wholesome adventures like flying,” he sermonized in one article, “than have them running off to discotheques in Greenwich Village.”

“Ah Jesus Kern,” I said, talking through the bottom of the toilet stall. “I think I’m going to puke. Better than a discotheque? What
is
a discotheque?”

“Yeah!” Kern said. “I never told Daddy I was inspired by John Kennedy’s inaugural address. I completely forgot that Kennedy ever said that stuff.”

“Yeah. Probably even Kennedy forgot about it. Some speechwriter like Daddy makes up all that crap.”

The strange thing was, I was supposed to be the cutup and ham in the family, outgoing with strangers. But I didn’t want to deal with the reporters. Kern was very comfortable with the press coverage, however, and immediately understood what it meant.

“Rink, look,” he said. “Daddy’s going to eat this stuff up back at home. This is great for him. Let’s just spoon-feed these guys whatever they want to hear.”

“Yeah. No problem Kern. Just shovel the Kennedy shit.”

Now that we were over the mountains, nothing bothered us, and we were determined to enjoy ourselves. We agreed that Kern would handle all the reporters while I found a motel. We were both exhausted and ached all over from the ride through the pass, and we couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping outside with the plane.

“And none of this Motel Cheap stuff either Rinker,” Kern said. “Splurge! Luxury accommodations.”

Kern was in a joyful, buoyant mood. As we walked back through the airport lounge, several pilots came up to us, clapped us on the back and shook our hands. Kern cocked his cowboy hat back on his head, laughed, and shook hands all around.

“Rink, I just can’t get over this,” he said. “Everybody thinks this is such a big deal.”

He pushed through the glass doors and went out to face the reporters. His gait was stiff from flying the deserts all day, and his arms and the back of his neck were so burned it was painful just to look at him. But he was glowing all over, cocksure and game, elated to be over the mountains. I never forgot that image of him from behind, through the glass doors. The sun was glinting off his cowboy hat and throwing bright splashes of yellow and purple off his paisley belt. Here in El Paso, he was a completely different person.

Along the wall of the pilots’ lounge there was a bank of phones beneath plastic-embossed color posters depicting several local motels. Apparently El Paso was a popular tourist destination, with everything ordered for convenience. When I found a motel that I liked, all I had to do was pick up the phone, and a clerk on the other end of the line answered right away and took the reservation. I chose a motel that featured pictures of beautiful women in bikinis lounging by the pool, lavish meals served by chefs in white hats, and a loving, affectionate couple propped up by pillows in a king-sized bed, smoking cigarettes and watching color TV. Color TV was a must, I decided. We still didn’t have color TV at home. When I picked up the phone and made the reservation, the clerk promised to send out a motel van right away.

When I got back out to the plane, Kern was jauntily leaning on the propeller with his cowboy hat perched high, posing for pictures and answering all the reporters’ questions. The reporters weren’t interested in the technical aspects of the flight, factors like the weather, the turbulence, or getting over the Rockies. Mostly all they wanted was a bunch of hooey—how my father had taught us to fly, how we decided to “relive” his youth, what my mother had to say about all this. We caught up with a lot of those stories written after the El Paso press conference a couple of days later, in local papers in Arizona. It was all baloney, some of it very rancid baloney. If Kern and I failed to say what the reporters wanted to hear, they just dialed up my father and got him to say it.