Flight of Passage: A True Story (13 page)

In the lower Pecos range in New Mexico, just east of the Rockies, the Travelair blew its main gasket and my father was forced down on a deserted farm and ranch road. He waited there in the shade of his wings for six hours until a rancher came along in a pickup and gave him a lift to the nearest town. Thirsty and hot, my father drank from the waterbag and dumped a few ounces of water over his head. As far as he was concerned, that waterbag saved his life, or at least it
would
have saved his life, if he had been forced to sit on the desert floor all night instead of for just six hours.

“And you know what Alex?” my father said.

“No, what, Tom?”

“Kern and Rinker here, they’ll be carrying a waterbag for the deserts. We’ll lash ’er right between the wheels of that Cub.”

“Tom, I don’t think that’s necessary,” Yankaskas said. “A waterbag out there will distort the design and make the Cub fly poorly. If the boys stay over roads in the deserts, they’ll be fine.”

The waterbag was news to us. I think the idea just occurred to my father on the spot. But once a notion gripped him like that there was no getting rid of it. After Alex Yankaskas left, my father just shrugged his shoulders and pointed his finger at us.

“Boys, find yourself a waterbag. If you can’t find one here, I’ll check around New York. We need a big job—at least ten gallons. Canvas on the bottom, metal cap on top. Now get cracking. This thing could save your lives.”

The waterbag. That freaking waterbag. The waterbag was a curse, retribution, my penance for mooning the old lady in the Volkswagen and doing too much dope with my sister out in the barn. My father was obsessed with this mythical vessel of water. Kern and I could see that it was some kind of talisman for him, a reminder of his own youthful barnstorm across the prairies, because he kept insisting that we find one “just like I had in ’37.” We should have been making other, more vital preparations for the trip. But we didn’t want to deny my father this one, quaint fantasy—71-Hotel crossing the high deserts of Texas and Arizona with a Depression-era waterbag lashed between the wheels.

In the blue Willys, we visited every hardware store and Army-Navy outlet in three counties, from Dover all the way down to Princeton. The hardware store men were an American personality type. They wore plastic pocket protectors with lots of pens and tiny metal rulers, heavy black glasses, and got annoyed if you asked to see a parts manual, because they knew every sparkplug and hex-bolt by heart.

“Ah, son, you want a waterbag? This is a hardware store, not a pharmacy.”

“No, not one of those jobs,” Kern would say. “An old-fashioned waterbag, like Henry Fonda had on his truck in
Grapes of Wrath.
”

“Well, it’s not in the manual. We don’t have it.”

Kern was easily flustered by rejection. The flinty hardware store men made him feel insecure and he stammered a lot before stalking out of the store. I was annoyed at him for projecting an air of defeat. (“Say, you wouldn’t have one of those old waterbags lying around in the cellar, would you?”) To put him out of his misery, I volunteered to go into the stores alone while he sat outside in the Willys.

“Sorry son, no waterbags. What are you doing, making a movie?”

The cause was hopeless. It was obvious that waterbags hadn’t been manufactured for at least twenty-five years. After a while I didn’t even bother asking anymore. While Kern waited in the Jeep, I stepped into the store, looked at the new John Deere lawn tractors for a couple of minutes, and then walked back out, letting the wooden screen door slam with a thwack behind me.

“No dice, Rink?”

“No dice.”

It was hot in the Jeep cab and I quickly lost patience with the waterbag chase. I was furious at my father for sending us on this asinine errand, furious at Kern for going along, furious at myself for being related to both of them. It was such a typical regression for us. I had worked hard all year, forging a better relationship with Kern. But something like the waterbag always came along to upset my progress and rekindle my anger at my father and Kern.

Meanwhile, my father was looking in Manhattan. It is a pitiable image to me, still. Here was this poor, phantom-pained man, a victim of his own nostalgia, a top executive with a major American magazine, dragging a heavy wooden leg over the hot tars of Manhattan, searching for a waterbag. At one point he had two secretaries from
Look
and the executive director of the Explorers Club crazed by the project. The Manhattan Yellow Pages were worn thin. Goldberg’s Marine down on Chambers Street checked with all of their suppliers. But in Gotham, famous for having at least one of everything, there were no waterbags.

Finally, my father gave up, in his own way. One Friday night he came in looking hot and tired, with his shirt all wrinkled from perspiration, and announced that we could take off from New Jersey without a waterbag. But we were to stop and look as soon as we crossed the Mississippi.

He pointed his finger at us again. “No crossing Texas without a waterbag, you hear?”

A lot of thought had been devoted to the subject and he had identified the problem.

“Boys,” my father said, “these hardware-store turkeys here on the East Coast don’t know shit from shinola about waterbags. It’ll be different as soon as you get out into that Arkansas country. Mark my words. Every damn store out there will have waterbags stacked right up to the ceiling. A dime-a-dozen. You’ll see!”

“Dad,” I said, “You’re absolutely right. Assignment Number One when we hit Arkansas? The waterbag.”

Lee Weber, the mechanic out at Basking Ridge, called Kern one morning in late June and told him that 71-Hotel was ready for its test flight. Lee had completed the required annual inspection on the Cub, issued us an airworthiness certificate, and he told Kern that the recovering job on 71-Hotel was one of the slickest that he’d seen in years. Elated, Kern picked me up at work during my lunch break and we drove over to the strip.

Lee had worked on our planes for years and he and Kern had always been close. He was one of the few people who knew over the winter that we were preparing 71-Hotel for a coast-to-coast flight, and when we got to the airport it was obvious that he had really babied the plane. The controls were perfectly balanced and rigged and Lee had made a number of other fine tunings and adjustments—greasing and calibrating the throttles, justifying the compass for accuracy—that Kern and I had not thought to do. The Cub looked spotless, practically brand new.

As we rolled the plane out of the hangar, Kern was excited when Lee motioned for him to take the seat in the cockpit. Usually Lee or some other older, experienced pilot made the first few flights in a newly rebuilt plane.

“Me, Lee? Me?” Kern said. “You want me to take the first hop?”

“Ah Christ, Kern” Lee said. “Yeah, you. You. You rebuilt the Cub, you test-fly it.”

Kern hoisted himself in by the cockpit struts and strapped on his safety belt.

Older, prewar designs like the Cub came stock from the factory without electrical systems, and they didn’t have starters. The engine was ignited by manually swinging the propeller, in much the same way an old Ford Model T was pulled through with a hand crank. The starting procedure harked back to the barnstorming era. The copilot or mechanic standing outside and swinging the prop called out an established set of commands, which the pilot responded to as he activated the various controls and switches required for starting. “Switches off” meant that the magneto ignitions had not been engaged, and thus it was safe to pull the propeller through to circulate primer fuel shot into the engine from a metal syringe mounted on the instrument panel. When all was ready, “Contact!” meant that the ignitions were engaged.

“All right, Kern,” Lee yelled. “Give me three shots of prime with the switches off.”

“Switches off.”

Lee threw the prop clockwise three turns, and then gave it a swift, counter-clockwise heave to surge the primer fuel back into the carburetor. A few drops of fuel spilled out of the bottom of the engine cowl and the ramp filled with the smell of 80-octane gas.

“Kern. Brakes.”

“Brakes.”

“Throttle.”

“Throttle.”

“Give me Contact.”

“Contact!”

She was a dandy old Cub and the cylinders caught on Lee’s first throw. Kern eased the throttle back to idle. From underneath the cowl the valves and rocker-arms evenly clicked and purred, and the exhaust contentedly blurt-blurted and coughed white smoke out through the stack. The Continental sounded perfectly tuned.

Kern knew the test-flight drill, and he S-turned the Cub down the grass taxiway for the short, north-south runway. He ran the engine up longer than usual to make sure that everything was working properly, and then he swung onto the runway for a couple of “fast-taxi” runs to check the controls and the stability of the plane, opening the throttle to half-power and raising the tail as he sped by us at thirty miles an hour without lifting the plane off the ground. Fast taxis are treacherous on a bumpy field like Basking Ridge—it’s a lot easier just to “firewall” the throttle to full power and yank the plane into the air—but Kern didn’t seem to notice and handled the Cub well.

Everything appeared ready and Kern taxied back down for the runway. At the end of the strip he spiked the throttle, stood on the right brake, and whipped the plane around in a tight 360-degree turn on the ground to check for traffic.

I never forgot the picture the Cub made that day, whirling around on its axis at the end of the strip. 71-Hotel looked exquisite, pristine. As the wings spun around the light caught the new sunbursts and they shimmered and merged as one barn-red swirl, the new windows glinted, and the sun also illuminated the neat row of ribs underneath the fabric. All of this was wrapped in the vortices of dust thrown back by the prop. I felt a possession for the Cub stronger than anything I had felt all winter, and this was mixed with appreciation for the way my brother handled a plane, which was so fluid and graceful I couldn’t distinguish the end of one movement he was making with the controls to the beginning of the next.

Kern poured on the coals and dunked the stick forward coming out of the turn, and the plane lunged onto the runway with the tail already raised. The Cub vaulted into the air at the first bump, shivering off some dust. I could see right away that we had a great plane. As he climbed past the windsock, Kern was already leaning down with his left hand to crank the trim-control and lower the pitch of the nose. And he was pulling back power too. 71-Hotel just wanted to go. With just one person aboard and not much fuel it was all my brother could do to keep the plane from climbing almost vertically.

I was surprised and even a little annoyed at my reaction as the Cub blew over. I had always prided myself on not being emotional. But my throat was fighting for air and my eyes welled with tears as my brother and the Cub clawed for air. A lot of it had to do with my suppressed affection for my brother, which now I knew that I couldn’t deny. And I was proud, as well, to have helped bring him and the plane to this moment. All winter I was worried that we could never possibly finish the Cub on time, and Kern would have been disappointed, shattered by that. Now he was banking the Cub directly over my head, wiggling the wings to show me how well it flew. The sunbursts gleamed, the Continental roared, and 71-Hotel just didn’t want to stop climbing. They belonged together, my brother and that plane.

Over the airport, Kern flew straight and level for a while to check the Cub’s trim, and then he pulled up for some sharp stalls and tight turns. He descended for the runway in a sweeping, 180-degree turn, side-slipping down over the phone wires and trees before he flared and touched down smoothly on the grass. Pulling up to the ramp, he left the prop turning for Lee.

“Lee, it’s perfect,” Kern said. “This Cub flies just right. Take her up yourself.”

There was none of this trimming down the nose and pulling back the power for Lee. At the end of the runway he pushed the throttle to its stop, raised the tail high, and hauled for air. As he went by us at the gas pumps he was already clearing 500 feet. Kern and I just couldn’t believe how that Cub climbed. Lee’s strategy of “pushing” the dope with extra thinner had really worked. Not only did we have a great recovering job that made a smooth, efficient airfoil for lift, but all the extra sanding and thinned dope had made the plane a bit lighter.

Lee banked over sharply for some 360-degree turns, did a few stalls, and rechecked the trim. Then he dove down over the windsock, pointed the nose at us, and pulled the Cub straight up and over onto its back for a loop. This was the right thing to do, and we were glad that Lee had stretched the wings a bit for us. Nobody at Basking Ridge considered a plane finished until it had been christened by an official Lee Weber loop.

I had to get back to work right away and there wasn’t enough time to give me a ride in the Cub. But that didn’t seem to matter because Kern was so happy about the plane. All the way back to the horse farm he was jubilant, jabbing out with his free hand at an imaginary stick and kicking around down near the clutch pedal as he told me about how the plane flew. He seemed immensely relieved, carefree, now that we had a finished plane. Maybe this would be the personality I would come to know on the trip.

Kern and I never forgot that date. We test-flew the Cub on June 29, just four days before we took off.

Everything had fallen into place. The night after we test-flew the Cub, Kern and I sat upstairs on his bed and counted the earnings we had stashed in the coffee can. The total came to $326, a comfortable margin over the $300 we had budgeted for the flight. My father called his brother James at his home in Orange County, California, and made arrangements for us to stay with him for a couple of weeks after we reached the west coast. That had been the plan all along, and Kern and I were excited about that. Jimmy had always been our favorite uncle, and we considered him “very California.” Casual and relaxed, effortlessly successful in business, Jimmy was notoriously indulgent toward children and didn’t lay down a lot of rules for visiting nephews and nieces. Everybody called him Uncle Real Fine, because everything with Jimmy was always “real fine.” Jimmy had reservations about our flight, especially when my father told him that we were flying all the way to California without a radio, but he agreed to sit tight and relax until we arrived. He was looking forward to showing us a “real fine time” in California.