Old Songs in a New Cafe (9 page)

On his way back from Kunming, he will be dragging tin or wood or hog bristles, or mercury or silk or refined tungsten ore.
Now and then he has a cargo of Chinese soldiers going to India for training. They are cold and airsick for most of the trip.

As Stilwell begins his 1944 push back down into the jungles of Burma, Charlie will haul bagged rice that is booted out of
the cargo doors at low altitudes to construction crews following the armies. The crews are building a new land route, the
Ledo Road, from India across northern Burma to China.

Conditions are seldom good enough for daydreaming. Most of the time he concentrates on his gauges and listens to the engines,
“… envisioning misadventures and figuring out what to do about them ahead of time.”

But now and then in clear weather he thinks about other things. He thinks about his girl, Emma Jo, back in Iowa and calculates
the days left before he gets his three-month leave in the States. And he remembers Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across
the Atlantic in 1927. He was six years old at that time, but somehow understood the magnitude of Lindbergh’s achievement even
then. That’s what brought him here.

His family moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he grew up building model airplanes and reading magazine articles about the new
world of flight. At fifteen, he bicycled out to the old Canfield Airport and used $2 from his
Des Moines Register
paper route to purchase his first airplane ride on a Ford Trimotor.

Bouncing around in a single-engine Taylorcraft, Charlie Uban learned to fly at Iowa State Teachers College in 1940 as part
of the federally sponsored Civilian Pilot Training program. At Iowa State College in Ames he studied engineering and passed
the secondary stage of the CPT program. He learned cross-country techniques at a school in Des Moines, taught flying for a
while in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and was trained as a copilot for Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis, where he picked up his
instrument skills.

When Pan Am wrangled a contract for supplying the Far East, he went to work for them and flew as a copilot in four-engine
DC-4s and C-87s, hauling cargo and passengers down the Caribbean to Brazil and from there to Accra on the coast of West Africa.
In Accra, the cargo was off-loaded onto smaller planes for the flight over the desert and across Asia to Calcutta.

In the summer of 1943 he was riding copilot alongside Captain Wesley Gray with a load earmarked for the Generalissimo himself.
In Accra, they were ordered not to off-load, but rather to continue on across Africa and Asia to Dinjan, pick up a Hump pilot
to guide them through the mountains, and take the cargo on into Chungking,

On the way, Charlie bumped into a few CNAC pilots and talked with one of them at length. Since Pan Am owned 20 percent of
CNAC, he applied for a transfer, and by the fall of 1943 he was flying the Hump.

The C-47 settles down on the runway at Kunming. It’s 9
A.M
. Charlie will spend the day at a hostel near the airfield. He will nap, play cards, and talk with other pilots. In late afternoon,
he takes off for the westward flight back to Dinjan. Tomorrow he will fly the same route once again. Often he will make one-and-a-half,
or even two, round trips in a single day.

Charlie Uban made 524 flights over the Hump in two years and knows of only one CNAC pilot who claims more wartime crossings.
After the war, CNAC moved its operations to Shanghai. Charlie went along, flying all over the orient-—north to Muckden in
China, west to Calcutta, and south to Manila.

Things got messy, though. Four planer crashed in one day in Shanghai due to weather and radio interference from commercial
stations operating at illegally high power levels. The Chinese communists had begun firing on the CNAC planes, and there was
dissension among the pilots over the way operations were being run.

Charlie had enough and came home to finish his mechanical engineering degree at Iowa State. He graduated in 1949 and entered
the family oil business in Waterloo. In 1964, and again in 1968, he was elected to the Iowa legislature as a state representative.

The CNAC Alumni Association meetings are important to him. Friends come by. “I see Kusak and Norman there. It’s an occasional
refurbishing, a touching again… all the time, throughout the decades.”

The old pilots talk about airplanes and mountains. Some flew for commercial airlines after the war or opened restaurants or
farmed. Others, they say, smuggled gold through Asia and flew contraband in South America. There is a bond of forever among
them. They bellied up against death, saw it all, and delivered the goods.

Any regrets about getting out of flying? Some. But Charlie Uban has looked backward, looked forward from there, and is comfortable
with his choices. Yet he has a recurring dream in the nights of his life, even now. In the dream, he is flying low toward
obstacles, trees and mountains and such, and there is never enough room to pass between them. He wonders about the dreams.

And I wonder what there is in the ordinary machinations of life to rival flying the Hump at twenty-two. Can the adrenaline
ever flow that swift again? Can there ever be another sound as pure to the soul as the landing gear coming down at Kunming
or a sight like that of Everest and Kanchenjunga to the northwest on a clear day as you come in to Dinjan?

Most of us think of life as a long upward sweep to some modest glory in our middle years. But if you have battled the great
whale in your early times, what can ever compare? Maybe Hannibal or Lindbergh or the foot soldier at Normandy or even Orson
Welles also suffered these proportions.

On the other hand, maybe none of this is important. Maybe it is enough to have done it and to live a life on the memories
of having done it—of having swept upward from a thousand blacktop runways into the jungle nights on your way to China.

Others will do it again, but not in that place, in that way. The Hump, as a presence, has disappeared. It was a concoction
of the times and the available technology. In a jet airplane, at 40,000 feet, the Hump no longer exists.

It’s been forty-two years since Charlie Uban flew the Burma Hump. He talks about those times, late of an April afternoon,
while Emma Jo makes supper noises in the kitchen. “I remember the time I realized I was doing an excellent job of flying this
tough, tough route, and it just did wonders for my self-esteem.” “If you’re doing a good job, and somebody knows it and appreciates
it, that’s about as good as life gets.”

His khaki uniform with a CNAC patch on the right shoulder drapes from the back of a chair. He wears a bush jacket from his
India days and shuffles through piles of flight maps and logbooks and picture albums on the table in front of him. As he warms
to the memories, his voice alternates between the past and the present tense, and he speaks softly, more to himself than anyone
else, running a finger gently along his recollections.

“Fall of ‘43. Two of ‘em crash in Suifu, up the Yangtze River from Chungking. Robertson is still up there in the overcast,
sees two puffs of smoke come up through the clouds, decides that’s enough of that, and heads back to Dinjan.” “A hundred and
twenty-one hours this month.” “Here! Hydraulic pump failure, good weather, short of personnel; flying the Hump solo, no copilot,
no radio operator.”

“Kunming, Dinjan, Kunming, Kunming. That means I had trouble leaving Kunming and had to come back in.” “Next day, blower failure
and had to return.” “Next day, the 14th, rice dropping.” “January 6, 1945, Russ Coldron disappears over the Hump.” “January
7, 1945, my old friend Fuzzy Ball flew into Tali Mountain….”

His voice trails off to a murmur as he reads. From his kitchen table in Iowa, Charlie Uban is reaching back four decades into
the night and the wind and the deep snows of the southern Himalayas where some of his friends still lie.

I listen not so much to the words themselves, but rather to the sound of his memories. It’s something like the drone of a
C-47 cruising out there east of Dinjan, above the Burma Hump, in the days when it was pretty clear who was right and who was
wrong. Over his shoulder I can see airplanes coming and going at the Waterloo Airport a mile away.

Just outside the window, wood ducks are circling among the trees by a pond, peering through the fog at the end of a rainy
afternoon, looking for a place to land. Captain Charlie Uban watches the lead drake come in through the dusk on his final
approach, sees him catch the headwind as he lets down through the haze, and nods his appreciation—from one old pilot to another.

Whether it’s Dinjan or Calcutta, Kunming or Shanghai, or a small pond in Iowa, those who live on the wing understand one another.
They have been taken aside by Iris, trained by scholars of the twilight. And, while the rest of us plead for guidance and
struggle for the trace, old fliers have no need of that, for they know secret things and hear distant ragas that carry them
along the great bend of the night toward home.

______________________________________

I
ndiana autumn. Blooming-ton, in 1967. The man comes through little swinging doors separating the dining room from the bar
in the Holiday Inn. He smiles and asks, “Do you boys know the ‘Wabash Cannonball’?” I do, but I haven’t done it for a while.
My partner, Wayne Schuman, riffles around on the five-string banjo for a moment, grins his funny little grin, nods to me.
“Yeah, we can get through it,” I say. The man and some friends are eating in the dining room and can hear the music just fine
through the doorway. Back he goes to his table, carrying a napkin.

Wayne and I crank it up—“From the green Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific shore…” I’m singing and playing the guitar, Wayne
is flying along behind me, working out his instrumental break as he backs me up. “This train, she rolls through Memphis, Mattoon,
and Mexico…” It’s early. The bar is only a third full as we hit the chorus: “Listen to the jingle, the rumble, and the roar,
as she glides along the woodlands, through the hills, and by the shore. Hear the mighty rush of engine, hear the lonesome
hobo call. Ridin’ along in safety on the Wabash Cannonball.” We end and look at each other. Not bad for the first time through
the tune together.

Back the man comes, through the swinging doors. Three others are with him. A round, familiar-looking fellow with friendly
eyes asks if we’ll play the song one more time. Playing the bars over the years has prepared me for things worse than singing
a song twice in a row, so we do it.

After we finish, the round fellow holds out his hand. “I’m Charles Kuralt from CBS. We’re doing a television piece on the
death of the Wabash Cannonball, and we want you boys to play the music for it, right here in the bar.” Confusion takes over.
The motel manager is gone. The bartender, Cliff, is a suspicious sort, as bartenders are wont to be. This is his world, he’s
responsible for it. Finally, he agrees that Kuralt and his crew can do what they want, as long as nothing is damaged.

Confusion turns to chaos. Kuralt’s old van is pulled up to the outside door of the bar. People are carrying lights, cameras,
sound equipment. While this is going on, Kuralt interviews us. I’m writing my doctoral dissertation and playing here on weekends,
trying to get my wife, baby daughter, and myself through the last year of an interminable number of years of school, Wayne
is an undergraduate, playing mostly for fun.

People in the bar are agog, asking questions. We announce over the mike what is taking place. This leads to a crush at the
pay phone in the lobby as they call friends (“Yes, yes, CBS Television is going to film the folksingers right here in the
Holiday Inn bar.”). Five minutes later cars start screeching into the motel parking lot. The friends are arriving. Chaos shifts
to pandemonium. Cliff is mixing drinks at record pace, while the waitresses fight their way around equipment, over cords,
and through people streaming in and about the bar.

Forty-five minutes go by; Kuralt’s crew is ready. Sound test. Okay. The klieg lights come on; it looks like midday in what
was a dark bar. The labels on the two big cameras in front of me say “CBS TELEVISION.” “Jeez, this is for real,” I think.
The sound man lies on the floor at my feet, just out of view of the cameras, holding a large microphone that looks like it
means business.

“All right,” someone says, “start playing and don’t stop until we tell you to.” Sweaty hands. “Here’s to Daddy Claxton, may
his name forever stand…” Ten minutes later they flag down the Cannonball. Next, we do just the banjo part for six or seven
minutes, Wayne’s magical, double-jointed right hand waving like long grass in the summer wind as he picks.

It’s over. “Yeah, thanks, we enjoyed it too.” We take a long break. Cliff counts receipts and mumbles about “city folks.”
We stagger through the rest of the night, continually rejecting requests to play the “Wabash Cannonball” one more time.

A few days later, TV on, and Cronkite smiles, “Here’s a report from Charles Kuralt, who’s on the road.” There we are! We’re
on the screen for about a minute, hammering away, with some voice-over by Kuralt about the end of the Cannonball (he’s riding
on the last run). Kuralt interviews passengers and the conductor. At the end, an aerial view shows the train moving away,
whistle blowing. They have synched the guitar and banjo with the clicking of the wheels. It’s pretty touching. She fades into
the distance, almost out of sight, and Kuralt says softly, “Tomorrow the Wabash Cannonball won’t be a train at all, only a
banjo tune.”

Cronkite sighs, “That’s the way it is…” My phone rings. It’s an old friend from Connecticut, shouting. “I can’t believe it!
I just saw you on Walter Cronkite.” We talk. I hang up, and the phone rings again. Everybody in the world watched Cronkite
tonight. They run the tape the next day on a morning news show, then later on a program called “The Best of Charles Kuralt.”
We’re famous, sort of.