Alaska (134 page)

When the other Flatches reached the fallen man, they saw that he was severely stricken, and Elmer shouted crisp commands: 'LeRoy, help your sister. Hilda, find me a couple of poles. Missy, loosen his clothes. Help him to breathe,' and with the efficiency he had always shown in moments of crisis, this skilled woodsman set his rescue party in motion, and when his daughter refused to leave her dead friend, this creature from the depths of the forest, he called wisely to his son: 'Stay with her as long as she needs,”and with the help of the two women, carried the old Irishman to the cabin.

Flossie and LeRoy did not reach the cabin before the old man died, and when the girl realized that not only had she lost her moose but that her much-loved old pioneer was also gone, she gave a mournful cry and fell to her knees, for she sensed in that awful moment that the old days were gone, the days when a girl could tame a moose at the edge of Matanuska, the days when children in church could hear a man explain what it was like to spend two long winters in a narrow lean-to in the heart of the arctic. And there on the floor she began to tremble.

ON A SCRAWLED PIECE OF PAPER MATT MURPHY HAD

penciled his will: 'Everything to Missy Peckham, but five hundred dollars each to LeRoy and Flossie Flatch, trusted friends of my old age.' The Anchorage courts accepted this as a viable document, and just as John Klope's unexpected gift to Missy and Matt that day in Nome in 1902 remade their lives, so now Matt's gift to LeRoy restructured his, because

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the day after the probate judge awarded him his five hundred dollars, he hurried to Palmer Airstrip, sought out Jake Carmody, pointed to the beat-up Cub, and asked: 'How much?' and Jake said: 'I really hadn't planned to sell,' and LeRoy said: 'You told me you were leavin' . . . goin' to buy a new Cessna.'

'Three hundred dollars, it's yours,' and to the bush pilot's surprise, LeRoy peeled off six fifty-dollar bills, and took possession.

'Flyin' lessons thrown in,' Jake said, and that afternoon LeRoy started to learn the intricacies of keeping this old relic aloft. An apt pupil, he took his first solo flight that weekend, and after two more weeks of intensive instruction he felt himself qualified to offer his services to the various mining camps. After one week of such flying with never a mishap, he returned his attention to Lizzie Carmody, who gave many signs of being interested in the young pilot, but when he suggested that he take her up for a spin, Jake roared out of the room where the local pilots waited: 'Holy Christ! You're not takin' my daughter up in that crate, are you?' and he forbade Lizzie to go near the perilous junk. Two days later Jake did exactly what he had threatened to do for so long: he took his wife and three children down to Portland, where he bought a new Cessna and entered the local aviation circles.

LeRoy, now the pilot of his own plane and eager to display his talents to someone, asked his mother if she would go up with him, and she said: 'I go up with no one,'

so he propositioned Missy Peckham, who almost leaped at the invitation. Together they flew .up the Knik Valley to see from aloft the three George Lakes making their assault on the face of the glacier.

When they returned to a smooth spot near the cabin, LeRoy's parents gave him their only advice about his plane: 'Don't go killin' yourself.' More specific counsel was provided by an old veteran who flew into the Palmer strip one afternoon after a horrendous flight in the mountains: 'Young feller, we welcome recruits like you. But if you want to sit here when you're my age, remember one thing: There is bold pilots like you, and there is old pilots like me. But there ain't never been an old bold pilot.'

When LeRoy looked perplexed, the man said: 'When I was comin' in, real cautious like, for I was still shook up by that fog in the mountains, I seen you actin' up with your plane. Real fancy. And when I landed I asked: ”Who's that young duck with his pinfeathers showin'?” and they told me it was you tryin' out a plane you'd just bought.

'He stared at LeRoy and wagged his finger: 'You're clever, but you ain't clever enough to break the rules.'

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'Not many. Five, six? Stay away from whirlin' propellers, they chop you into mincemeat.

Never, never climb into your plane without checkin* the gas. An empty tank is remorseless.

You'll be flyin' into strange areas without strips, so never, never land straight in. Circle to see whether the ice is frozen or the sand strip along the river is solid. On the way out, check every visible point, you'll need 'em comin' back. Don't hesitate to sleep beside your plane, because try in' to find your way home at night in a fog ain't really productive. And for Christ's own sweet sake, tie down your cargo. Keep plenty of light rope in your plane and lash down them floatin' objects, or sure as hell they're goin' to smash right into the back of your head at sixty miles an hour.' As LeRoy tried to visualize the situations in which these instructions would apply, the old-timer added a special one for Alaska: 'And, LeRoy, maybe you wouldn't think of this, but in winter always keep an armful of spruce branches in the rear of your plane, tied down, of course.'

It was a magnificent world into which LeRoy Flatch entered with his Cub. It was a sturdy plane, so thoroughly rebuilt after its predictable series of accidents that not much of the original structure remained. Its engine, sixth in the series for this particular craft, was now a 75-hp Lycoming, but it too had been heavily recast after smashups. It gave good mileage to a gallon of aviation fuel, but it had also flown quite a few hours on various hideous mixtures, including one flight on half kerosene, half gasoline, and as the man who was flying it at the time said: 'Plus another half alcohol. But the alcohol was in me.'

It was a plane that had to be flown by muscle power, for it contained no automatic pilot or the sophisticated instrumentation that would make its successors much easier to operate. It responded slowly to instructions and its various surfaces could be activated only by brute strength, but it had one characteristic which made it revered by its longtime pilots: it could land on almost anything, remain upright, and fly out after repairs had been completed. It was almost an ideal plane for an Alaskan bush pilot, but after LeRoy had flown it several hundred hours he saw that for it to serve him as he intended, it needed two simple modifications, and he spent the remainder of Matt Murphy's bequest to engineer them.

'What I got to have,' he explained to Flossie when she flew with him to mining camps far in the hills, 'is a pair of pontoons so's I can land on water up in the lake country. A smooth lake is far better than a rough field. And I simply got to have a pair of skis for landin' on the snow in winter.'

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Reflecting on this, she said: 'LeRoy, you'd be takin' your plane apart every four months. Now wheels, now pontoons, now skis,' and he said: 'It'd be worth it,' but when he scouted around for such gear he learned that it was not cheap, and finally he had to approach Flossie: 'Only way I can get the plane I need is you lend me the money to buy the other landing gear.'

She had the funds to make the loan, Matt Murphy's bequest would take care of that, but she was not satisfied that her brother was really serious about making his living as a pilot until he rushed home one afternoon: 'Floss! A man at Palmer is selling his plane, going to Seattle. He has a buyer who doesn't want the extra landing gear.

A bargain, a real bargain!'

She accompanied him to the airfield, where she found that what he was saying was true, for an old-timer told her: 'Them's the best pontoons around here and the skis are practically new.'

'Could my brother get them on and off?'

'I'd teach him in ten minutes.'

It was a deal, and with his acquisition of pontoons and skis, LeRoy became a fullfledged bush pilot, able to land on ground, snow or lake, but as Flossie had predicted, switching them was hard work. However, the man who had encouraged Flossie to lend her brother the money now showed him how to approach this difficult task: 'You get yourself a long spruce pole, and a short oak stump for your fulcrum. Watch how easy it is to lift the Cub right up in the air!'

When the front end was high off the ground he said: 'Now edge this other stump under the middle, and let your pole down bitsy, bitsy, and you have your plane right up in the air where we can work on it.' And he showed LeRoy how to switch between wheels, pontoons and skis.

'Of course,' the old fellow said, 'each year you have to spend four mornings of hard work. Mid-March, off with the skis, on with the wheels. June, put on the pontoons for the lakes. September, you need wheels again, and in early December, back to skis.'

With this relatively simple shifting back and forth, LeRoy had a most versatile machine, and he used it imaginatively, flying anywhere anytime in almost any weather, promoting new business and earning real income.

At Palmer Airstrip, where he kept his plane when it had wheels, he became acquainted with several young hotshots who performed amazing feats, flying onto glaciers with their skis, landing on remote, uncharted lakes, or carrying immense toads far beyond the stated capacity of their planes, and they were a glamorous lot until the night when they lost

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their way home and crashed, out of fuel, in a timbered area. If they were picked out of the tree next morning and if their plane could be rebuilt, they were talked about on all the airfields, while cautious farm boys like himself attracted no attention.

But he noticed two important facts: the really great bush pilots, like Bob Reeve and the Wien brothers and Bud Helmericks, took none of these unnecessary chances, and the young bucks who tore the place apart, challenging the far north with their frail planes, invariably wound up dead. Gallant legends, the very heart of the bush pilot's charisma, but very dead.

It had now become standard practice for any Flatch who was at home when LeRoy set out on a flight to tell him: 'Don't go killin' yourself,' and he did not resent the implication, but even though he was a most careful pilot when he reached his twenties, he did not escape the normal adventures that seemed to lie in wait for all bush pilots.

On one flight into a high lake in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Palmer where a man from Seattle had a hunting lodge, he was carrying a load of mail and groceries purchased at the local store. He had his pontoons on, and after twenty-two minutes he spotted the landmarks leading to the camp. With care he zeroed in, circled the lake to be sure its surface contained no unexpected additions like rafts or loose boats, and made a perfect landing upwind to help him stop his forward progress. Dropping the revolutions on his propeller to their lowest practical speed, he steered his Cub deftly up to the floating dock, where the owner of the camp and his wife awaited.

'LeRoy,' the Seattle man said, 'you make a better landing on this lake than any of the big boys. The minute you get yourself a fourseater, Madge and me are goin' to fly with no one else.'

He heard this refrain constantly: 'Get yourself a fourseater. You'd have three times the customers.' But a used fourseat Waco with pontoons and skis extra would cost not less than forty-five hundred dollars plus the Cub, and this he could not afford.

'I pick up the grocery trade,' he told the Seattle man. 'Or like when you built your new wing.'

When he made such deliveries, he tried always to be extra helpful in unloading the gear, doing most of the work himself to let the owners know he appreciated their trade, and always if he had time, when he was finished, he asked. the wife: 'Ma'am, would you like to take a short spin to see the land around here?' and he almost never got a refusal.

Then he would climb into the pilot's seat, instruct the woman as to how she could manage the struts to climb in 820

beside him, ana after she was belted in he would take the plane slowly out to the farthest end of the takeoff area and tell her: 'Now, ma'am, I don't want you to watch me. I've done this lots of times and it's old hat for me. But you lean way forward, keep your face close to the window, and watch how we use the step.'

The what?' she usually asked.

”The step. The pontoon isn't just straight, you know. Halfway back, it has a step, a break in the smoothness, and unless we can get this plane up on that step, where the adhesion of the water and the friction is less, we won't be able to lift off.'

When he felt that she understood, more or less, he said: 'Watch! Here we go for the good old step.'

It was sometimes incredible the amount of lake LeRoy required before his plane went up on the step, and several times the watching wives shouted: 'Are we going to make it?' and always he yelled back: 'Sooner or later, up we go,' and always, when it seemed that the plane was never going to fly, it would mysteriously lift itself onto the step, and then the length of pontoon clinging to the water was diminished by half, and in a few moments, from this more advantageous posture, the plane finally broke completely loose, whizzed along throwing bits of spray, and rose grandly into the air while the passenger clapped and sometimes shouted with triumphant joy. The fact was, LeRoy also wanted to cheer every time this miracle of the seaplane took place; he couldn't believe that it required such a very long takeoff before the pontoons broke loose, and he was cautious about the maneuver because on three occasions, to his great embarrassment, his plane never did get onto the step, and twice he ran right onto the beach at the far end of his attempt. For that reason he added an extra precaution to the ones the old-timer had given him: 'When you start to take off from a lake, always study the far shore, because pretty soon you may be on it.'

Usually on a sightseeing trip he stayed aloft no more than fifteen minutes, but on this afternoon the lady wanted to investigate the entire area surrounding her family's holdings, so she called to LeRoy: 'Give me a real trip. I'll pay for the full hour,'

and he was happy to comply, for he also enjoyed such exploration. It was a fine sunny day with just a hint of clouds moving in from the distant ocean, and the scores of lakes nestled among the hills glowed like emeralds when the sun struck them. Being careful to maintain his orientation among the mountains which protruded, he spent more than an hour aloft, and this took him well to the north.