Flight of Passage: A True Story (9 page)

“All right. All right. New bungees then.”

With a deep, swift swipe of a matt knife, Kern severed the dusty and oil-soaked old bungees. They released with a pallid twang and spilled onto the floor.

The new bungees—hard and tight—were murderous to get on. They felt strong enough to hold up the landing gear on a Boeing 707. We used a crowbar gripped with an extra length of plumbing pipe for leverage. Grunting and heaving, leaving a fresh deposit of knuckles on the landing gear, we finally secured the bastards. When we screwed down the jack the Cub bounced onto the cement floor, jaunty and a little taller than before.

That was our winter, more or less. With the big Texan radio blaring with Cousin Brucie and WABC, we worked liked the possessed on 71-Hotel. More than fifty different repairs and part replacements had to be made on the airframe—everything from the brakes and carburetor heat baffles to a new trim tab augur in the tail. We ripped out the entire cockpit, from the floorboards to the headliner, and replaced everything with new materials. Parts that weren’t available in a catalogue we made ourselves. Kern decided that the old baggage compartment, which was made out of burlap, was substandard and wouldn’t hold up in the turbulent conditions we anticipated out west. So we fabricated a new one out of heavy sheet metal that we bought at Sears.

I had always been mechanically inferior to Kern, and was quite self-conscious about it. It annoyed me that I lacked his ability to repair a bike or a tune a car engine, but I never even attempted to apply myself in the shop because that would just turn me into a tool-geek like Kern. I suffered the common affliction of boys who aren’t naturally adept at mechanics. I thought that there was something inherently complicated and mysterious about it, when in fact all that is required is a lot of patience. Kern never confronted me on this. It was just something that naturally resolved itself over the course of our long winter of confinement in the barn. After he had assigned me a succession of simpleminded tasks that one of the NASA monkeys could have figured out—changing the bolts on the bungee covers, or putting new rubber grips on the control sticks—he slowly graduated me up to more difficult jobs. By the end of the winter I was rebuilding the carburetor and installing new Plexiglas windows in the cockpit.

I couldn’t wait to get into the shop every night. Mostly I was overjoyed about the way I was weasling out of my homework, but I also surged with new feelings of competence and technical knowledge. Kern was pleased too, because he could see that he had converted me into a dedicated tool-geek. I became increasingly fussy about “my own” workspace, insisting that all of the parts and tools I needed for a particular project be neatly segregated in a corner of the shop, away from Kern’s parts and tools. With the pride of a mentor, Kern detected these nascent indications of compulsiveness in me and decided to reward them. One Saturday morning, at Sears, he decided to blow some of our Cub money on a new Craftsmen tool box, socket wrenches and a top of the line, rubber-handled set of screwdrivers for me. Back at the shop, he showed me how to etch my initials onto every tool with a soldering gun. “Rink,” he said. “You can always tell a good mechanic. He doesn’t let
anybody
fuck with his tools.”

Bizarre things happen to a boy undergoing profound life changes like this. One morning in late February I woke just before dawn with a start, deranged by a terrible nightmare. In the dream, I was being chased around a room with no exits by a man who was attempting to poke my eye out with a carburetor-heat cable. The dream was reminiscent of the scene in the three-dimensional
Three Stooges
movie where Moe and Curly are menaced by a doctor with a long syringe. I wiped the sleep from my eyes. The only way my tormentor could have gotten that carb-heat cable off, I figured, was if the bolt assembly on the inlet valve beneath the carburetor was not properly secured. This happened to be the exact part I was working on before I came into bed that night. Shit.

So, I threw on my clothes, tiptoed past my brother’s room, and crossed the snowy lawn outside in the romantic gray light of dawn. I pushed through the barn door and threw on the lights to inspect the Cub. Underneath the carburetor, the bolt was properly installed on the inlet valve, and the cable running down from its control in the cockpit was secure. But, sure enough, I’d forgotten to attach the safety nut which kept the whole assembly in place.

I found the nut right where I left it, on top of one of the engine cylinders, and torqued it on with my new socket-wrench.

It was a close call. Every night, as soon as we had finished my homework, Kern inspected everything I’d done the night before. Most of the mistakes he found were minor—I might have used the wrong washers, for example, or the wrong grade of safety wire—and Kern was very patient about that. But the missing nut on the carburetor-heat assembly was serious. It would have earned me a stern lecture from Kern, because you need that carb heat to prevent ice in wet conditions.

“Rink, do you know what would have happened if we hit a rainstorm in Ohio and the carb heat didn’t engage?”

“The engine quits, and we wipe out the gear during a forced landing.”

“Exactly. Then we don’t get to California.”

Late in the winter, on a Saturday night, Kern took a rare break from the plane and went up to a dance at school with a date. It was one of those assignations that my sister Macky set up by writing a phone script out for Kern on a yellow legal pad. As soon as I got wind of the deal Macky was setting up for Kern, I bailed out on the dance myself. I still didn’t want to be seen socially with my brother.

I was restless at home that night. Three straight months of working every night on the Cub had given me a routine, a mission, and I simply didn’t know what to do with myself inside a house any longer. I felt drawn to the plane in the barn outside.

I headed for the front door with my reading book. When I got there, a shipping box from a midwestern aviation supply company was sitting on the hall table. It contained the magneto ignitions for the Cub, which we’d removed from the engine a couple of weeks before and sent out for reconditioning. I stuffed the box of magnetos under my arm to carry out to the barn.

The magnetos. Kern and I were very proud of this step. Most of the pilots we knew—including my father—never bothered to have their magnetos rebuilt until one broke. But Kern and I could afford to go first-class on our ignition system because we’d made so much money plowing drives. It was the kind of precaution we were taking on our coast-to-coast ship. Nothing could fail on our plane, nothing was too good for 71-Hotel.

It was a lovely, moonlit night outside, and I liked being alone with just the sound of my boots crunching on the snow, and the brisk wind chilling my face.

When I got inside and threw on the lights, the engine cowling was off the Cub. On the aluminum firewall, I could see the two spots, bright and shiny, where the old magnetos had been. Out of curiosity, I leafed through Kern’s Piper Cub manual and found the pages and diagrams on the magnetos. One thing just lead to another, I guess. Before I knew what I was doing I had pulled the magnetos out of the box and begun installing them on the plane.

Putting magnetos on isn’t very complex, no more difficult than changing the oil filter on a car. I’ve installed dozens since. But I was excited about my first set, and impressed by the importance of the repair. These were the little dynamos that would fire sparks into our cylinders all the way out to the Pacific.

When I was done, I left the wiring down to the spark-plug harnesses alone. The electrical hookups were too easy to get crossed and Kern would be very particular about that.

I was pleased with myself and didn’t want to leave the plane yet, so I made a fire in the tack-room woodstove and sat inside reading, leaving the door to the shop open so I could gaze into the Cub now and then.

It was either that night or a couple of nights later that I came across the passage in Charles Lindbergh’s
The Spirit of St. Louis
that simplified our navigation planning. Kern and I still didn’t have any idea of where we would cross the Rockies. So I had turned to Lindbergh’s book, and the writings of Wiley Post, because both of them had done a great deal of transcontinental flying before they made their famous international flights. On one flight, experiencing engine trouble over the Rockies, Lindbergh had turned “south toward the Mexican border, where the mountains are lower.” Post referred to the same area as “the old southern airmail route through El Paso.” It took me some time just to
find
El Paso on the map, and I still didn’t know what pass to fly, but indeed the peaks down there were a lot lower than up north. I figured that El Paso would be a major waypoint for our trip, the gateway to the far west, and that we should base our navigation planning on that.

It was that kind of night for me, a time for insights and reflection. Mostly, I just enjoyed being alone in the barn with the plane.

The next day Kern and I pulled our usual Sunday morning routine. We put on our best jackets and ties, exited the house through the kitchen so my mother could see us dressed for Mass just the way she liked, and left in the Willys. As soon as we got out of the drive we ripped off our ties, turned left at the intersection instead of right for the church, and drove up to Morristown for breakfast at the Lackawanna Diner.

At the diner, Kern was excited when I told him about El Paso and we began doodling on paper napkins, drawing maps of the country and discussing the various advantages of one route over another. Most of our flight planning was done that way. All winter Kern and I were engaged in a kind of Socratic dialogue about routes—Ohio to Indiana, Indiana to Illinois and so forth—before we reached a consensus on how to cross each state. In stages, we mapped the entire flight on paper napkins at diners and on the back of shipping receipts in our shop.

When we got back to the barn that day, Kern saw the shiny magnetos bolted onto the engine firewall.

“Ah shit Rink. You didn’t try to put the mags on, did you?”

“Kern, I followed the drawings. Look. Just look at them.”

Kern pored over the mags with the meticulousness of an FAA inspector. Frowning a lot, he looked from the drawings to the engine, then back to the drawings several times, exhaling his mantra of worry, “Jeez . . . Jeez . . . Ah Jeez.”

But I could tell that he was pleased, and surprised.

“Gosh Rink. I can’t get over this. These mags are perfect. You wanna know something?”

“No, what?”

“Well, I always had you pegged as strictly airframe. But, Jeez, you can do powerplant stuff too!”

“Hey, thanks man,” I said. “I really appreciate that.”

When the spring thaw arrived, in mid-March, we rolled the airframe out onto the driveway in front of the barn. It was a bright, sunny Saturday with the fragrance of daffodils and crocuses blooming. My brother was right about the plane. The reconditioned Cub looked factory-fresh, with the tubular steel fuselage sparkling under zinc paint, and the new metal baggage compartment and tail augur gleaming like Cadillac tail fins.

My father was home sick that week. Several times over the winter he was felled with phantom-pain attacks on his leg, and his doctors had ordered bed rest. He wasn’t much good at that and he had spent most of his time down in his library, banging out speeches and a book idea on his typewriter. From his library window, he saw us roll out the Cub. He’d kept his promise all winter and left us alone, but he was restless after several days of inactivity and decided to come out and inspect the plane.

From the barn, Kern and I saw him step out to the porte cochere, gaze down the drive, then stop to light his pipe. Gingerly favoring his bad leg, which gave him a funny kind of kangaroo gait, he walked down toward us.

“Rink! It’s Dad,” Kern said. “He’s coming to see the plane.”

Kern raced into the tack room and carried a rocking chair out to the Cub.

My father was going through a lot of painful changes that year. For more than a decade politics and charitable causes—AA mostly, but also a lot of fund-raising for Catholic hospitals and schools—had been his lifeblood, defining his identity outside of work and his family. After John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, he managed a few more political campaigns, but the shooting in Dallas and its aftermath broke his spirit and gradually he lost faith in electoral politics. He was sickened by the escalating war in Vietnam, especially after one of my cousins, Jerry Kernahan, was killed in the conflict. He was always looking for something new to do with himself anyway. By the mid-1960s he had gravitated toward reform movements, first civil rights and then the antiwar effort, and now on weekends he was flying off somewhere to join protest marches, or writing speeches for civil rights leaders, even delivering a few of his own.

It was a fascinating and even a noble soul-searching for a man of my father’s background and achievements, and within a few years literally millions of middle-aged men like him would be transformed in the same way by the fabled sixties. But this could only be appreciated with the passage of time. To many of his closest friends in politics and business, civil rights and peace in Vietnam were issues that you paid lip service to, espoused to your children, and then promptly forgot. Successful businessmen with good jobs in New York—at the time, my father was associate publisher of
Look
magazine—weren’t supposed to be morally indignant about social causes and exploring activism as a weekend hobby. But that’s what my father was doing and he felt unappreciated and lonely. His five oldest children were now all teenagers and developing lives of their own—my oldest sister, Dempsey, had already left home for her first year of college—and we didn’t want to join him at protest marches on Saturday afternoons. We were all surprised by the intensity of his focus now—outward to the world, no longer inward to the family—which seemed to be alienating him from everyone. There had always been an undercurrent of unpredictability and instability about him, but now it seemed like a tide.