Flight of Passage: A True Story (18 page)

Kern kept the Cub high to avoid any obstructions beneath us and punched through some yellowish, bumpy clouds. The runway ahead of us was obscured by rain. When I threw open the side door to stare down and see where we were, the prop-wash from the propeller sprayed my face and shoulders with rain. But I could see our position on the highway now and then I pulled back into the cockpit to look at the map. The runway ran due east and west, at a slight angle to the highway.

“Kern! Fly 270 degrees, now! Start your descent.”

“Rink, where’s the wind? We don’t know the wind.”

“Fuck the wind Kern! We’ve got plenty of room. It’s a 5,000-foot, paved runway.”

The wind wasn’t consistent anyway. By looking straight down at the tree branches, I could see that it was kiting all over the place, gusting hard and presenting us with a 25-degree crosswind from either side. But that was the great thing about Kern—I knew that he could sideslip or crab through anything, a freaking gale if he had to. We were weathervaning all over the place as we descended on final approach, but Kern was holding my 270 degrees pretty well.

Finally, through the vortices of rain and cloud ahead of us, we could see the white centerline of the runway. Kern closed the throttle and slipped hard to make the pavement.

We were fast and pushed both sideways and from behind, by gusts that couldn’t decide whether they were a crosswind or a tailwind. The Cub took up a lot of runway, jackassing down the wet tar. Kern would think he had the wings stalled, then a gust would balloon us up again, he’d slip and stall us again, and then we bounced some more. The wheels skittered all over the place, hydroplaning on the wet runway, and Kern didn’t dare touch the brakes. But finally we were stalled hard and the wheels felt solid in the puddles, and the tail would stay down.

As he turned off for a taxiway, Kern reached back and squeezed my knee, which I could never forget because my knee was tender to the touch from banging against the cockpit walls in the turbulence.

“Jesus, Rink. Way to go. That was aces—all day.”

I was happy about that compliment from my brother, and relieved to be on the ground. The raging stratocumulus couldn’t hurt us now. The front was right on top of the airport and all we had to do was wait an hour or two for it to cleanse the skies ahead of us, and then we’d crop the bejesus out of 71-Hotel that evening to make Indiana.

But it was more than beating the weather that thrilled me. I was enchanted with this journey now, in love with my brother and myself. Everything about us had led to this moment. My brother’s fortitude and skill with a plane had been outstanding. I had listened inside me and found a use for barnstorming blarney. Understanding navigation, enjoying it, seemed a divine gift now. And I had to admit that even my father’s kick-ass style of flying, my long education in being afraid in planes, had helped me across the Alleghenies. These forces had merged as one and delivered us through the storms. River to river we’d flown Pennsylvania in the most awful weather imaginable, and I was confident that the rest of the country couldn’t throw anything worse at us.

The wings echoed like timpani drums as we taxied in. Torrential sheets of rain were falling now. Water came through the seals on the windshield, beaded up on the ceiling, and fell on our heads. Drenched, our loafers and socks filling up to our ankles, we tied down the Cub and ran across the tarmac in the rain to the pilots’ shack. We were laughing and elated as we pushed through the door.

I was exhausted. Collapsing onto the couch in the pilots’ shack, I slept soundly for two hours. Kern woke me after the front passed through. I could see as soon as I rose off the couch that it was beautiful outside and I felt refreshed, expectant. We had earned this—clear, open skies across Ohio and into Indiana. Slumber had cleared my head. Already, we’d made the longest cross-country flight of our lives, and that hateful ride across the Alleghenies seemed like it happened a year ago.

I don’t recall what I dreamed about on that couch and I don’t remember thinking about it much, but not again on that trip, not for the rest of my life, did I fear flying with my brother.

Kern and I crossed into Ohio at six-thirty that evening, pointing the Cub west into an orange disc of sun. Now we were racing across another state, this time to reach Indiana before nightfall. In the wake of the storm the evening was clear and cool, and our wings rested on still air. The green immensity of Ohio opened before us, a moist, intense vista of ponds freshened by the rains and silver-domed silos drawing us west.

Kern dove the Cub low, swooping down across the interstate highway and making big, sweeping S-turns as the big semis and station wagons loaded with vacationing families crawled by underneath. We threw open the windows and opened the throttle wide, beginning a kind of insect night-feeding, darting from pond to pond along our route. At the first pond we squawked up a flight of Canada geese, then hauled up over their heads to clear some high tension lines. In the opal light ahead of us two boys were playing catch with a Softball beside an oxbow creek. The wind must have been ahead of us as we bore down on them, because they never heard us coming. One of the boys tossed up the soft-ball, a graceful, arching high fly that greased right up between our wheels. The catcher reached up and—astounded—saw us at the last second, lost his footing, and went tumbling assfirst into the creek. Splash.

Further along, east of Columbus, a farmer had driven his tractor out across the fields to a spillway dam. He was running a pump off his power-takeoff to feed his cattle. He sat on his tractor seat, smoking a cigarette, taking in his fields and the falling light. His two boys, shirtless, lounged on the orange wheel fenders. They wore red ball caps. As we droned by they calmly reached up and waved, big, neighborly, mid-western farmers’ waves. They were expecting us, it seemed, as if we passed by that way every night.

I liked the midwest. The roads ran straight to the horizon, easy to follow, winding here and there around creek beds and stands of trees. The towns were orderly and compact, with clusters of white churches, spotless Greek Revival façades along Main Street, and listless clouds of dust rising from the Dairy Queen parking lots out along the edges. You could see life down there, just as it was lived, and the flat geography of the plains was open and explicit. Every town along our way announced itself with large block letters painted on top of the water tower or the grain elevators. HEBRON. Good. Just another forty miles to Columbus. Who needed a radio, or a gyro compass, in a land as sensible as this?

But all of this sightseeing was done in a hurry. Kern had the engine opened up to 2,400 rpm to make extra speed, but that was also consuming more fuel. Ohio is more than two hundred miles across, just about the range of our Cub, and we would have to stop for fuel. As we passed Newark I measured the distance we had flown from Pittsburgh with my route-plotter and leaned up over my brother’s shoulder to show him my calculations. Columbus, almost exactly in the middle of the state, was a logical refueling stop, and the smaller airport southwest of town was uncontrolled and we could get in there without a radio.

As soon as we found Columbus Southwest, Kern firewalled for the airport and steeply banked the Cub around to land. He wheeled onto the runway with the tail raised, fast-taxied to the pumps, and called back as he threw off the ignition switches.

“Rink, it’s almost eight o’clock. This is just a pit stop.”

“Affirmative.”

I raced for the ladder, he went for the fuel hose. We only needed ten gallons in the wing tank to make it to Indiana. A geezer came out and offered to check the oil and clean the windshield, but we told him not to bother. We pumped the fuel as quickly as we could, and the tab came to $3.96. Sorry Geezer, no time for you tonight, here’s $5 for the gas, forget the change. Skip the Brakes, Throttle, Contact! jive and just throw the prop. I dove into the backseat on the run as Kern dashed for the runway.

I felt sorry for the geezer, who seemed like a nice fellow. We left him standing in a cloud of dust thrown back by our prop, scratching his head and feeling quite useless. Kern opened up the throttle 30 feet from the runway. We skidded onto the centerline, popped into the air and turned west at 200 feet, hauling ass for Indiana. It was the swiftest aircraft refueling in history. We were in and out of Columbus in eight minutes.

We leveled off relatively high, at 5,000 feet, to get as long a view of the country beneath us as we could in the receding light. Maybe, just barely, we could make Indiana.

Indiana. It was a completely fabricated goal and, considering everything, especially the weather we had battled all day, quite pointless. We’d already made impressive progress for one day and passed our original target, Columbus. But to Kern a personal goal was a commandment, and I knew that he wasn’t going to spare an ounce of horsepower until we were hard down on Indiana soil. All I could do was laugh about it, chortling in the rear seat as I watched the pretty Ohio towns go by.

From the front seat, with those immense sunglasses still on, Kern looked back with that earnest grin of his. Beaver Cleaver in Ray-Bans. He knew what I was laughing about.

“Rink, you can shit on me all you want, but we’re making Indiana tonight.”

“Kern. Why don’t we just land at the next airport, call home, and
tell
them its Indiana? Nobody will know the difference.”

“Nope. It’s gotta be Indiana. I’m not going to lie about this.”

I was having too much fun to worry about it. Ohio is a flyer’s paradise, with a grass landing strip every twenty miles or so, alongside nearly every town. Some of them were just long fairways that the airport operator shared with the local golf course, but we’d been into a lot worse and Kern could put us down almost anywhere. When it got too dark to see ahead of us, we could swing around and land at one of those.

So, we were relaxed and laughing in our small cockpit, soothed by the pastel twilight. I loosened my seatbelt and leaned forward from the rear seat, holding the map on my brother’s knee. If we still had half-an-hour’s light when we got abeam of the big air base at Dayton, I told him, Indiana was ours. The paved municipal field just over the Indiana line at Richmond was probably already out of reach, but I’d found on the map a small grass strip at East Richmond, fifteen miles closer.

At dusk, we passed out of Ohio along the forested, western edge of Preble County, just beyond the hamlet of New Paris. The sky was slate-gray as we crossed the state line into Indiana. But we could make out the rotating beacon at Richmond off to the south and, navigating off that, we found the little field at East Richmond. As Kern descended and banked for the runway, the last of the sun fell behind the horizon and it was almost pitch-black. But there was a full moon that night, a great, merciful disc of light planted midway above the horizon right where we needed it. Kern expertly nursed the Cub down through the dark, probing for the grass with the stick.

As we taxied in over the rutted grass, we noticed a long line of ragged yellow biplanes parked by the hangar.

“Rink,” Kern called back, “those are Stearmans. This is a duster strip.”

We were excited about that, and couldn’t believe our good luck in choosing a place to remain overnight. My father and all of the old barnstormer types that we knew at Basking Ridge had always referred to this part of the country as Stearman Land. They were very sentimental about it, and to pilots of their generation the cropdusting region west of the Ohio River was revered as a flyer’s nirvana. During World War II, more than ten thousand open-cockpit Boeing Stearmans had been produced for the Air Corps training fields out west, and tailwheel pilots like us regarded the Stearman as the most majestic, noble plane ever built. After the war ex-military pilots, or just farmers with a love of flying, had snapped the Yellow Perils up at government auctions and converted them for cropdusting use, installing huge, 450-horsepower and even 600-horsepower Pratt & Whitney radial engines, gutting the front cockpit for a one-ton hopper, and welding sprayer bars to the wings. Many pilots of the postwar generation had built up their time as cropdusters before they joined the military or the airlines. There were still huge fleets of yellow Stearmans roaming the west, following the crops all summer the same way that the big wheat-combine crews moved north across the plains with the national grain harvest.

The lore of Stearmans, the wild flying and living that the young duster crews enjoy, acted powerfully on pilots. All flyers are wanderers at heart and harbor Walter Mitty fantasies. If they could only shuck their jobs and the lives they know, they would leave the local airport far behind and spend a season flying bush planes in Alaska, or get a job dropping mail along the sheep-station routes of Queensland and New South Wales. Of course, they never did it, but that just made the dream more alluring. No flying fantasy, however, quite surpassed a long summer tour of the cropdusting strips of the American west. That’s where barnstorming still lived. My father was very excited about this aspect of our trip, and he thought that we were leaving at just the right time—early July is the height of the dusting season. We would love the “Stearman men of the west,” he said, and find them very hospitable and entertaining. In Arkansas or Oklahoma, when it was time to find the waterbag, all we would have to do is ask a good old Stearman man about it.

As we taxied in, the dusting operation was still busy. The hangar was lit, and a mechanic with a helmet on was welding inside, throwing off a nimbus of orange and blue sparks. The place was a classic American dump, with the stench of pesticides and nitrogen fertilizer hanging along the taxiways and rusting one hundred-gallon drums holding up the pilots’ shack. This didn’t seem like an airport that handled a lot of transient traffic, and no one came out and directed us to a parking spot. So we just wheeled around behind a large gathering of parked Stearmans and shut the engine down.

A couple of the cropdusting pilots had been working late, readying their loads for the next day. They wandered over as we climbed out of the Cub. They were wondrous specimens of the breed, big, tall hulking guys with brown pegs for teeth, western drawls, and sunburnt scars on their arms and hands. They certainly weren’t geezers, but they were helpful. They had watched us land in the dark and told us we were honorary dusters now, young fuckups, they said, who could snatch a landing from the jaws of a crash. They helped us tie down and fuel the Cub and we would launch with them at dawn.