Flight of Passage: A True Story (38 page)

“Folks, they are now waving at us. The Buck boys are waving. Obviously, they’re real happy to be in southern California.”

What I would have been happy with, right then, was a wing-rack full of air-to-air missiles. Continuously raking us with its rotor turbulence, the copter wheeled and panned its camera at us from every angle, and then it dove at us from twelve o’clock high for the long head-on shot. Finally they tired of harassing us and settled into a safe position off our left wing.

Opposite Dana Point a large green exit sign hung over the San Diego Freeway. S
AN
J
UAN
C
APISTRANO.
We followed the twisting two-lane road up to the top of the ridge. It took us a while to pick the airport out of the smog. We knew that the strip was tiny and difficult, because in San Diego a pilot had told us that San Juan Capistrano was legendary for its short-takeoff-and-landing flight school, where flyers about to ship off to Alaska as bush pilots were trained. But then the chopper clattered by and peeled off to the left, and we followed its rotor wash down to the airport.

It looked like a Hollywood movie set down there. The tiny airport and hangar were built into a bowl-shaped depression wedged in between two dusty canyons, surrounded by a serpentine irrigation canal. On the tarmac, a crowd of people waiting for us was ringed by the glinting rotors of more news helicopters and the blue waters of the canal. Everyone started to wave as we dropped into the traffic pattern and the whole airport looked excited and alert, the kind of place we were meant to fly hard for all week. I could even pick out Uncle Jim. Raven-haired and smiling, a foot taller than everybody else in the crowd, he was waving both arms over his head, like my father back home.

Turning downwind, Kern sized up the strip. The irrigation canal, with sloping cement walls, surrounded the airport like a moat. The runway was actually lower than the canal, paved into a basin. The strip was too short to glide down over the obstruction in the usual way. We would have to get low and slow over the canal and then side-slip briskly down over the wall. Our destination landing in California would be the most difficult one of all.

Kern always took a challenge like that and made it look easy. He got right down on top of the canal and kept us slow by holding the nose high and gradually adding power. Following the irrigation ditch around to the runway, he turned 90 degrees, slipped sideways down over the wall and leveled the wings just as we mushed into the stall. It was perfect, the first time. The runway was right there.

“Ah shit Rinker. Look at this.”

All four helicopters on the ground had launched in a frenzy and darted over to the runway to photograph our arrival. They were completely blocking the runway and throwing up a dust storm that covered the whole airport. The only thing we could do was throttle back up and go around, praying that the choppers didn’t climb underneath us and slice us up from below.

As we climbed and turned downwind, the helicopters rose in force and rat-tailed around in a crazyass formation behind us. They were real bronco-riders, those chopper pilots. When we descended again for the ditch, they all broke together and made a beeline for the runway to film our landing. But they were hovering so low on the runway, and throwing up so much dust, that it wasn’t safe to land. Three times we flew San Juan Capistrano like that. Go around, fly the ditch, turn for the strip. Each time, down on the runway, it was Vietnam, snarling with Hueys.

After the third pass, Kern got mad. The blood vessels on his temples bulged and he cinched his seatbelt tight. He coiled up his body and moved his shoulders back and forth, the way my father and Eddie Mahler did, approaching an airshow field, transiting in muscle tone and mood from cross-country to acrobatic flight.

“Rink, I am going to lose these goddam choppers!” Kern yelled back. “Watch! Just watch me do this.”

It was a very slick piece of flying Kern did right then. Ramming the throttle forward and going around, he faked right with the wings so the helicopters followed around downwind. Then he dove for speed and drew sharply back with the stick and we shot straight up through the hazy smog. Just before the stall he threw in all of his left aileron and plowed the rudder to bring the tail around. We snapped half-inverted 180 degrees into a wingover reverse, falling back onto our own propwash. Full stick down and we screamed for the far side of the ditch. All of this was done so briskly the helicopters above didn’t even know they weren’t on our tail anymore. This time Kern flew the inside of the irrigation wall, really smoking the plane around the turn. God, watch the accelerated stall, I thought. But Kern was aware of that too, and he kept pouring on more power and jabbing at the air with his outside rudder to make sure the Cub still had something left. All of this he did as one long and graceful sweep of the controls, so that each maneuver flowed smoothly into the next and I couldn’t even discern that much was happening to the plane. There’s no accounting for a young pilot as good as Kern was that morning in California. He was my father and Big Eddie Mahler, and all of the instructors and barnstormers back at our home strip, giving back all at once everything they had put into him over the years. Bonk he pulled out of the turn. Wham he crossed the controls, flying us sideways to bleed off speed. Slam he closed the throttle and then kicked in the last of his rudder and aileron to keep us in the sideways slip. All the while he was playing way over on the left side of the cockpit with the stick to hold us flat and nose-high in the slip, so the plane would be expended and have nothing left when we got over the runway. Mushing, we porpoised down over the canal. From the wingover up top to the slow-flight down here, a matter of thirty seconds or less, the plane had been stretched to every attitude and extremity of speed. Screech he planted the wheels on the first ten feet of the runway. But there was no stopping him now, because the helicopters had finally seen us and they were peeling back for the runway. Powering back up, Kern fast-taxied the length of the strip with the tail raised, took the corner at the taxiway on one wheel and made directly for the crowd with the Cub weather-cocked up on its main gear. When we were twenty yards out he reached for the magnetos and pulled the mixture control to shut down the engine and stood on the right brake, wheeling us around in front of everybody with the prop still clicking and dirt devils blowing off the wheels. Kern could really fly an airplane when he needed to and it was a very stylish arrival.

The crowd was cheering. There was a group of pilots from the San Juan Capistrano short field course standing up front, and they had enjoyed watching Kern work that tight little strip. The flight school director, who was also the airport manager, was the first to the plane, and he pumped our hands. Uncle Jimmy pushed through the crowd with his arm around Aunt Joan. Tall and tanned, with that gracious, broad smile that I remembered, he was dressed in one of those white, Mexican-style shirts that hung down over his waist, and these geeky, black hightop sneakers, very “California” I thought. Aunt Joan was dressed to the nines, in a white rayon skirt and blouse. My cousins, Kevin, Tom, and Kelly, came behind with a group of Jimmy and Joan’s Orange County friends. It was obvious that Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Joan’s friends didn’t know anything about the small airport culture, because they were dressed for the country club instead, with lots of costume jewelry and pink golf pants. The print reporters started shouting questions and the photographers shot a lot of pictures. As soon as I got the door open Jimmy had his big arms around us and Aunt Joan kissed Kern, getting her bracelets and rings tangled in his hair.

“Oh Kern!” Aunt Joan said. “You look so handsome and tan! Just look at you!”

That was the thing about Aunt Joan that was great. She treated Kern as if he were Cary Grant.

“Real fine Kern. Real fine,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Wow, what a landing you made. Wait’ll I tell your dad.”

“Uncle Jimmy, don’t you dare tell my father about that landing.”

“Real fine Kern, real fine. I am
not
telling your father about that landing.”

The crowd surged forward. Everybody was poking the fabric and reaching inside to touch us and the throttle and stick, anything they could get their hands on really, and I liked all the excitement, the emotion and joy swelling off the crowd into us. It was the first moment that I felt that there was anything remarkable about our trip. But my feelings about that reception were curiously detached, as if all the excitement were directed at someone else. Everyone there was thrilled about our flight, their imagination of what a transcontinental crossing in a Piper Cub must have been like. But I was exhausted, tired of flying, and all I could remember was five days of nonstop turbulence and a blurry scramble through a mountain pass. I was stunned by the spectacle of it all, the queer logic of what excited people. Kern and I were oddballs, aviation nerds, sons of an eccentric, one-legged ex-barnstormer. One Saturday we took off and flew west for the mountains and the Saturday after that we hit the next ocean, and now we had this personal monkey off our backs. But nobody else saw it that way. This was America, where everything had to be exaggerated and hyped to the max. All of a sudden it was patriotic, what we had done. We were great American boys. I could practically hear the “Star-Spangled Banner” wailing away in the background. But that wasn’t us. That’s what everybody else was bringing to our flight. But I figured I could learn to milk this dog and enjoy our fifteen minutes of fame. Then the reporters started calling out questions all at once, elbowing each other, and snarling about who got to interview us first, and everything got back to normal. People kept pushing up through the crowd and asking for our autographs. Before I was even out of the plane, I had signed a dozen autographs on postcards and scraps of paper shoved into the cockpit. Some little brat even ran off with two of our maps.

The TV helicopters came clattering back down, and it was just a media brawl after that. My father had asked Jimmy to “supervise” the press coverage, but he was no good at it, not being the aggressive newshound and efficient greeter that his older brother was. The television producers kept getting angry at him for letting a competing newsman interview us first. One of the reporters got wind of the fact that Kern had dated the girl across the street from Jimmy’s when he visited California in 1963. It wasn’t exactly a hot romance. She and Kern played Ping-Pong in the cellar, and held hands at Disneyland. But somebody—Kern swears it was Aunt Joan, Aunt Joan says, nope, it was Kern—blurted out her name, Carol Brantley.

It was hot out on the tarmac and everybody got all bollixed up over that, dragging poor, sweet Carol, the proverbial girl next door, into the media shindig. As far as Jimmy was concerned, the story of our coast to coast adventure was now contaminated by a love angle. We all knew that the papers would print Carol Brantley’s name, which committed Kern to calling her up for a date. But seeing Carol again had never been a part of Kern’s plans for the California trip, and he was surprised at the way her name had popped out of the blue.

And the waterbag, the freaking waterbag just wouldn’t die. All week, my father had been regaling Jimmy over the phone about the waterbag, and Jimmy in turn had regaled Aunt Joan. On the way out to the airport that morning, in her Cadillac, Aunt Joan had told all her Orange County friends about the waterbag. So, there was sort of a waterbag coterie now—people in the know, people “close to the trip,” a VIP list of insiders privy to information about the waterbag.

So, Aunt Joan and her friends decided to stroll over to the Cub to check out the waterbag. In the excitement of all this, however, Aunt Joan’s internal gyros failed and she slipped backward into the Cub, right at the oiliest spot. Now she had the reverse image of a Piper Cub landing gear, in 40-weight oil, indelibly printed on her white rayon derriere. She forgot all about the waterbag.

“Jim! My skirt,” Aunt Joan moaned across the tarmac. “It’s ruined!”

“Ah Joan, relax,” Uncle Jimmy said. “I’m trying to manage all these reporters here.”

“But my skirt, Jimmy. It’s ruined!”

“Dear, just buy yourself another one,” Jimmy said. “You
own
a dress shop. You own
five
dress shops, for God’s sake.”

I felt terrible about it—not about the skirt, but about Jimmy and Joan. In our family, they were legendary for the warmth of their relationship. At our family reunions, all the aunts sat around talking about how rough it was being married to these Buck men. But Aunt Joan out in California, they all agreed, had it made. Jimmy was such a peach, and he and Joan never exchanged a harsh word. Now, just because we had landed, they were arguing for the first time in years.

“Ah Jeez Rink,” Kern said. “Look at Aunt Joan’s skirt. I knew we should have cleaned the gear off back in Yuma.”

“Yeah. This is a zoo. Let’s get out of here.”

It was a relief when the last news-chopper finally lifted off. We made arrangements for tying the Cub down at the airport for two weeks and piled into Jimmy and Joan’s matching Cadillacs. I rode the lead Caddie with Uncle Jim and my cousins, and Kern and Aunt Joan followed behind as we twisted down the canyon road.