The Cannibal Queen (31 page)

On the way back to my plane, Mr. Wass asks where I’m going to spend the night. “Thought I’d try to get to Missoula, but it’s getting dark.”

“Just fly 290 degrees until you hit the highway north of Deer Lodge, then follow the canyon. Take you right into Missoula. You won’t have any trouble.”

He seems so confident I decide to give it a try. It’s 8:30
P.M
. and the sun won’t set for forty-five minutes or so. Why not? Well, because I don’t have a landing light, so I’ll have to use the runway lights to flare and keep her drifting gently downward until the wheels touch. And I’ll have to use the runway lights to ensure the nose doesn’t swing.

Standing beside the plane, I think about how it will be and about the day not yet over. I’m tired, but it’s been such a perfect day of flying, I’m reluctant to end it.

So I strap in and wish Mr. Wass good-bye. As I start the
Queen
the BT-13 taxis in to pick up another load of joyriders.

I climb to 10,500 feet in the twilight to ensure I’ll not hit a granite cloud, and flip on the Queen’s exterior lights and the two little red lights that shine on the cockpit instruments. Steve Hall installed the instrument lights. Their glow is comforting. The route is as ridiculously easy as Mr. Wass suggested. Even with the sun gone I have no trouble. What more could a fellow wish for?

As the sun fades behind a layer of clouds on the western horizon and the great valleys below me turn gloomy and dark, I wish for a landing light.

Boy, Coonts, talk about a dumb stunt! You dingdong! You could crack up this forty-nine-year-old masterpiece that Skid Henley spent thirteen months rebuilding and you sweated blood to pay for. Bozo! Idiot!

Yeah, but Skid built this thing to fly. He wouldn’t hesitate to fly it over this terrain as night comes on.

True, but he’s got 15,000 hours in Stearmans—you got what, a few more than a couple hundred? Don’t make me giggle. I can’t fly and giggle too.

But when I was in the Navy I made at least a thousand night landings without a landing light. Navy pilots don’t use landing lights—they’re for civilians and Air Force pilots. We only used landing lights when arriving at Air Force bases because the guys in the tower got nervous.

Yeah, and you didn’t flare those Navy jets—you just drove them into the runway at 600-feet-a-minute rate of sink. You do that to this Stearman and that’s the last landing she’ll ever make.

Oh, shut up! I can hack it. Just watch me.

I am flying under a high thin stratus layer and now the moon is visible through it. And I can now see the flame that comes out the exhaust stack. It’s a yellowish blue, about six inches or so long, and in the growing darkness it is quite plain. It even casts a small amount of bluish light on the left wing root area. Neat!

I watch the flame, fascinated. And I would never have seen this if I hadn’t flown the
Queen
at night!

I am wearing two sweatshirts and a leather flight jacket, but still I am chilly. And hungry. My 10
A.M
. breakfast with John was a long time ago.

An hour passes and I’m still flying northwest down the valley toward Missoula. I have quit looking for landmarks: there is nothing to be seen below but the outline of the valley and the headlights on the highway.

Then I pick up the Missoula ATIS. Wind out of the east at ten, still a tailwind. Am I the luckiest man alive?

Finally I round a bend in the valley and catch sight of the lights of Missoula dead ahead. I spot the airport beacon on the first glance.

Tower tells me to make a right base entry for runway 9. Okay. Power to twelve inches, prop to full increase, down we come over the ridge east of town and across the lights of the city, the yellow-blue flame still quite prominent from the exhaust stack.

I must judge this just so. No religious experiences, no driving her into the ground, no wing dips, just a perfect landing. Please! You’ll never forgive yourself if you hamburger this one, Steve.

The crosswind is about twenty degrees from the right. I tweak in a little rudder and hold her level with aileron. There is just a trace of light, just enough. Stick gently back now, an ounce more rudder … let the mains touch first … gently now … there! The mains kiss and I pull the tail down with the stick. She settles in like she had Skid Henley at the controls.

I shut her down at the FBO and have to pry myself from the cockpit. I am exhausted. It’s almost 10
P.M.
and my stomach is so empty it aches. Yet I am the most contented man alive. To have such a day to fly …

The next morning the sun is out. The man driving the motel’s van just nods when I comment on how beautiful the morning is. With my stuff on the backseat I sit beside him. He is in his late fifties and pleasantly plump. He merely nods at all my comments.

Halfway to the airport, in response to some remark or other, he says, “No speak English.”

I eye him. Speaking slowly and distinctly, and with added volume, I ask, “Where you from?”

“Russia.”

“How long you been here?”

He takes a while to process it. “One year,” he says at last.

I am itching to ask more, but refrain. Everyone can’t understand English, even if you shout it. I’ve tried it often enough to know.

Maybe he’s a Soviet Jew. Maybe he’s a KGB colonel who defected, telling our guys a million secrets, everything from the serial numbers of the Soviet missile subs to the layout of the bathrooms in Gorbachev’s dacha. Maybe he’s a spy who came in from the cold. Maybe …

When he drops me in front of the FBO I stop speculating and tell him, “Thanks a lot.”

He just nods his closely cropped head, then drives away, back toward the Econo-Lodge of Missoula, Montana. To leave home, friends, perhaps children and grandchildren, forever, and to come to live out the remainder of your life in this little city nestled in the Rocky Mountains where you don’t speak a word of the language, that takes a form of courage I don’t have. Few people would do it unless they had something really nasty that they wanted to leave behind. I don’t have that either.

This morning navigation is a piece of cake—I’ll simply follow the interstate highway northwest down the Clark’s Fork of the Columbia river to St. Regis, where the river S-turns north. I’ll stick with the highway after St. Regis, cross the spine of the Bitterroot Mountains at Mullan Pass and zip down the valley into Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Or I could stay with the river after St. Regis and follow it all the way to Lake Pend Oreille, then fly westward above the lake to Coeur d’Alene.

Mountains on both sides of the Clark’s Fork valley reach to six or seven thousand feet. I fly several thousand feet above the valley floor looking at the green mountains and the sky. The blue over Missoula quickly gives way to clouds with bases at about the height of the tallest peak. At first the clouds are scattered, then broken, then solid. And they are coming down. Now the clouds obscure the peaks.

Uneasy, I scan my chart. About a half hour west of Missoula near the village of Superior is a small airport. On a whim I pull the power and study the wind sock, then swing into a downwind leg for the western runway.

Taxiing in I see that there is a fuel pump. It is locked and there is no FBO. No phone. A few airplanes, but no place to call Flight Service to have my nervousness assuaged. I back taxi and take off heading west.

In another quarter of an hour I am over St. Regis, where the river turns north, then back east for ten miles or so before it loops around to the northwest for the straight shot to Lake Pend Oreille. The valley northward looks clear, the mountains to the northwest still free of clouds. That’s my bolthole if Mullan Pass is socked in.

So I’ll try Mullan Pass. It was supposed to be open this morning. Coeur d’Alene is supposed to be pretty good—why am I so goosey?

On the way to Mullan Pass I pass a high-wing aircraft flying the other way, east. Did he fly east through the pass from Coeur d’Alene, or did he try to go westward and find the weather too bad?

The clouds are coming down. There is a saddle through the mountains leading northward to an airport at Thompson Falls on the river, and it’s still open. Another bolthole. But is there gas at Thompson Falls? I don’t need gas, but in these mountains and clouds, the more the better.

The pass is listed at 4,738 feet above sea level. I am flying at 5,500. But the clouds continue to come down. Soon I am down to 5,000 feet and the clouds are just above me, seemingly close enough to reach up and touch. The way ahead into the narrowing, rising valley doesn’t look good.

I resolve to give the pass a peek. One peek and an instant decision.

Why am I so nervous? Because I had better do my turning around while I have the room. But there is room—the
Cannibal Queen
will spin on a dime. So stomach, calm thyself.

I get my peek. Through the pass I see only gray, and on the ground coming up the western slope of the pass, tendrils of ground fog. That is the face of death.

Prop full forward, mixture up, throttle to the stop and left wing down smartly, 80 degrees angle-of-bank and pull hard to whip her around. Wings level and eastbound with heart pounding, I reset the engine controls for cruise.

You wanted a peek, Coonts, and by God you got it.

The saddle leading north across the ridges to Thompson Falls is still open, so I turn the
Queen
north.

Over Thompson Falls Airport, a single 4,000-foot-long strip of asphalt, I look down the Clark’s Fork valley at a white haze. Time to find a phone, even if I have to walk to town.

No answer on Unicom, but the wind sock tells me the wind is out of the west, as I suspected it would be. All these clouds are coming from that direction.

Taxiing in I see a fuel truck and a man and two children standing beside it in front of a hangar several hundred feet east of the parking mat. As I kill the engine I look at my watch. It’s 10:30
A.M
. and I have been flying for 1.4 hours.

The man from the hangar comes walking over trailed by the children. His name is Jim Carstens. He’s in his sixties, wearing bib overalls and a small blue cap with a tiny bill, the kind that heavy equipment mechanics wear to keep grease out of their hair. The children are his grandchildren, visiting from Washington state for a few weeks.

He compliments me on the condition of the plane, then adds, “Boy, we sure are getting some old ones this summer. Couple days ago two guys in an old Fairchild stopped here on their way to Oshkosh.”

“A 1937 Fairchild?”

“Think so. Wearing a Wright engine.”

“Saw them at Sheridan, Wyoming, yesterday and heard about them in Bozeman. Small world.”

After we fueled the plane and added a couple quarts of oil, I called Flight Service. “I don’t have a current observation for Sand Point, and no forecast. Coeur d’Alene is fifteen hundred overcast, rain showers about. No forecast for them either. You know, the weather wasn’t supposed to get this bad.”

I knew. “Call you back in an hour or so. Maybe you’ll have a forecast then.”

“Maybe.”

I hung up the phone on the workbench of Carstens’ hangar and walked outside for a look. The wall of white was still there. Mr. Carstens offered to loan me his Jeep to go to town for lunch, and I accepted.

As I parked in front of Granny’s Restaurant the rain began. And I had left the cockpit cover off the Queen.

For some reason I developed a headache.

After a hamburger I filled the Jeep with gas as the rain continued to fall, then drove the three miles back to the airport to get the cockpit cover installed. I finished that chore thirty seconds before the rain stopped. Thirty minutes later another shower came though, obscuring the valley to the west.

Mr. Carstens, the kids, and I were having a pleasant visit outside when we heard an airplane. Automatically the chins rose and four pairs of eyes scanned the cloudy sky.

There! A high-wing tail-dragger. It passed over Thompson Falls and continued westward down the valley into the opaque rain squall. It disappeared into the rain as Mr. Carstens shook his head and I made a flip comment about people without good sense, one I instantly regretted. Who just flew into Mullan Pass for a peek?

The words were no more than out of my mouth when the plane popped back out of the rain. It passed overhead and set up for a left downwind approach. When it landed Mr. Carstens and the children walked over to greet the pilot and his passenger, a woman. As the little party came back to the hangar, another rain squall arrived.

This couple were from a city in coastal Washington and were returning from the annual Cessna 180 fly-in this past weekend at Cody, Wyoming. Over 150 of these airplanes were there and many people camped out under their plane, they informed us, as they did.

They were nice people and Mr. Carstens loaned them his Jeep for the jaunt to town for lunch.

As the afternoon progressed and two more showers came and went, Mr. Carstens and I talked about flying. He learned to fly in 1958, he said, but soon dropped it when money got tight.

“I tried farming and didn’t make it, tried trucking and didn’t make it, so I told my wife that if we weren’t going to make it, we might as well do something fun. So I bought this hangar and got a lease from the county and got into the FBO business. There never has been an FBO here, so I figured to give it a try. We aren’t in the books yet and most people are surprised when they find gas here, but the word will get around and things will pick up.”

It’s painful to hear such optimism. You hope it’s true, you suspect it isn’t. If it were that easy someone would have tried to float an FBO here years ago.

Carstens has plans—he was building a picnic table to put out front as I watched; he’s going to build a little office building beside the hangar. Then he wants to put up four tee-hangars that people have told him they would rent.

He went back to work on the picnic table and I got out of his way. I examined every airplane on the line—all five—and watched the clouds roll in from the west.

The children visited with me in turn. The girl likes to ride in her granddad’s Cessna 172, and she and her brother were going to visit for three weeks unless her grandmother tired of them sooner and sent them home. The boy’s favorite radio station in Washington was KORD, which plays all of his favorite songs, including his very favorite “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” His granddad learned welding the hard way.