The Cannibal Queen (34 page)

Then the peak is behind and I am heading southward toward Portland. After a while I look behind, past the tail at the receding mountain.

Mountains are so big and I am so small—God must be like that. Mountains remind me of Him.

South of Portland is the Willamette River Valley, a wide fertile valley with apparently every square foot under intense cultivation. To the east and west rise tree-farm mountains.

I fly south up the valley under a clear sky, helped along by a wind from the northwest, a quartering tailwind.

I once knew a man who lived in the Willamette Valley. He had a farm here. I got to know him because he also had an airplane, a Grumman Hellcat. I met him at the Canadian National Airshow in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1974. I let him sit in the cockpit of the A-6 Intruder I had flown to the show and he let me sit in the cockpit of his Hellcat. Of course I was intensely curious about how he came to own and fly one of the premier naval fighters of World War II. So he told me the story.

It seems the president of Alaska Airlines got into trouble with his board of directors and was shown the door. The board decided to immediately rid itself of one of the president’s more flashy toys, the Hellcat, which was sitting at Boeing Field in Seattle. The farmer read about the airline’s desire to sell this plane in the newspaper one morning at breakfast. He invested in a long-distance telephone call and was told the price was $25,000 and the plane had to be off Boeing Field by five o’clock.

Like any true airplane enthusiast, our hero was a man who could make up his mind in a hurry. He stopped by the bank on the way to the airport and cleaned out his savings account. In Seattle he paid cash for the plane and presumably they gave him a ride to the hangar.

Although our hero had never flown a plane more powerful than a Cessna 172, he strapped himself into the captain’s seat of the Hellcat, successfully started the engine and aviated the fighter into the sky. He flew it home filled with emotions that can only be imagined.

Gasoline was expensive, he told me, and the Hellcat had a powerful thirst for it, so he logged his hours flying to and from airshows. When he arrived they filled the tanks for free. He flew it in flight demonstrations all weekend; then they filled up his tanks gratis when he left for home.

He never used the supercharger on that double-row radial engine, which made his flight demonstrations look a little anemic. He didn’t want to risk blowing one of those thirty-year-old jugs, he told me, because the cost of overhauling that engine would be more money than he had in the plane. He couldn’t afford it.

And he had a lot of jugs at risk. The Hellcat used an engine with two rows of nine cylinders each, a total of eighteen. That’s thirty-six spark plugs, eighteen intake valves, eighteen exhaust valves. Mechanics qualified and willing to work on these engines are an endangered species. Spare parts? Better have your own machine shop.

I always wondered whatever became of the Willamette farmer and his Hellcat, and a year or so ago I found a book that listed the owners and location of every flying warbird in the world. His name was in it. According to the book he was killed in 1977 when the Hellcat was totally destroyed in a crash.

I have no idea why he crashed and I’m not about to look up his widow to ask. I don’t know if the weather got him or that old engine failed at the wrong time. I don’t know if he properly maintained the engine and airframe. I don’t know anything and I probably never will.

Still, flying over this valley I can see his smiling face and that beautiful airplane, and I envy him the joy it gave him. Every person should have a passion like that once in his life.

The valley narrows the farther south one goes. Past Eugene the farms peter out and the valley winds through mountains. The character of the vegetation is changing. The southern slopes of the hills and mountains have huge meadows that appear golden in the midday sun. The amount of rain carried in from the sea is apparently not enough to sustain forests on the southern-facing slopes. So the residents raise cattle.

The valley rises steeply south of Medford. Just short of the pass is the small city of Ashland, Oregon. I drop in for fuel. Inside the FBO office building I call an artist I know, Bill Phillips, to see if he would like a Stearman ride. I get his answering machine and leave a message.

The FBO building is crammed with aviation memorabilia and out-of-print books about flying. I take my time and peruse everything. Photos of Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, other famous aviators and planes, old goggles, model planes, posters—the place is a small aviation museum, a shrine to flight.

The collection belongs to the owner of the FBO, Jerry Scott, whom I meet later that evening when Bill and his wife, Cynthia, pick me up at the motel and we come back to the airport to fly. Jerry wears a blue flight suit and has white hair. Aviation never lost its magic for him. And he’s the kind of guy that you would like to get to know.

Successful fixed base operators, I have noticed, all have this trait. To succeed at a fixed base operation you must have repeat customers, the same people over and over. People who own or fly airplanes are like everyone else—they return to do business with people they like who like them. In this book I have followed the practice of not saying anything if I couldn’t say something nice, which is not to say that I have included every good person I met, because I haven’t. But I have purposely omitted references to those FBOs that operate like they were running a convenience store-gas station on a freeway exit.

Those FBOs are often owned by investors who are in business for the money, so they hire the cheapest desk help they can find, usually a young person, usually a female, who knows absolutely nothing about aviation and has no desire to learn. The office person can be pried away from her paperback novel or telephone conversation with her boyfriend only long enough to process your credit card invoice. She doesn’t care where you flew in from or where you’re going. She has no idea if the weather is good or bad to the east or west. She doesn’t know one plane from another and so would have no comment if you arrived in The Spirit
of St. Louis
which you had just stolen from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. She would merely punch up your credit card invoice and go back to the romance novel. And the owner wonders why his business gets worse with each passing month.

It’s not that I am the world’s most gregarious guy, but after a couple hours of flying by myself I appreciate a friendly face and smile. Most people do. Which is why FBOs like Jerry Scott make decent livings in out-of-the-way airports like Ashland, Oregon, only a few minutes’ flying time south of the big airport at Medford. His ramp is full. His line boy is busy most of the time. And his aviation collection isn’t dusty.

The next time you see him, tell him I said Hi.

Bill Phillips goes flying with me first. I circle to climb out of the valley into the clear evening sky. The air is smooth. The sun low on the western horizon illuminates the
Queen
like a giant spotlight. She flies against a green and yellow landscape with Mt. McLoughlin on the eastern horizon and Mt. Shasta to the south. Both these old volcanos seem close enough to touch in this clear air.

I take Bill to the pass and circle Pilot Rock, the core of an ancient volcano, then pull the power and let the
Queen
descend back into the valley for a landing. Cynthia is my next passenger. She sticks her hands up, then puts her elbows on the rail.

The delight on my passengers’ faces gives me great pleasure.

Wednesday morning the cloud deck that the low-pressure trough off the Washington coast was supposed to push inland doesn’t arrive. Which is great for me.

I top the pass that leads down into California and head straight as a bullet for Mt. Shasta, a truly impressive mountain. Unlike Ranier, which is about the same height, 14,400 feet above sea level, Shasta rises from a river basin that is only several thousand feet in elevation. So Shasta is a genuinely large mountain to delight people who like genuinely large mountains, which I do.

Another old volcano, Shasta’s giant cone has a lesser cone of ash and soft stuff sticking up from the west side. I approach the monster from 11,000 feet with my camera out. The wind here is out of the south, very light, but it is breeding a cloud on the peak that streams off northward. When I get around to the south side of the mountain the updraft lifts the
Queen
another 500 feet.

I wheel and turn next to the mountain, making sure I don’t get too close. Prudence and experience dictate that one not rely on mother nature and luck to keep light aircraft out of severe up- or downdrafts. A strong gust of wind from the wrong direction when you are in close to a colossal rock like this could ruin your whole day.

The Redding-Benson airport has a deli on the second-floor above the FBO office, and I sit on the deck there drinking coffee and looking northward at Shasta. The wind here is out of the south at about fifteen knots, which means every mile of my progress south will be earned.

An hour down the valley of the Sacramento River, I decide to stop for fuel and to take off the leather jacket, which is too much in the warm air at 3,500 feet. It’s over 90 degrees on the ground.

The airport I land at has no FBO office, merely a trailer for the guy who pumps the gas. There is a fuel pump, a pay phone against a hangar wall, a little restroom building beside the mat, and near the fuel man’s trailer, a fountain shaded by four trees. Flat plowed fields stretch away in every direction. To the west one can clearly see the coastal range.

The FBO man comes out of his trailer as I taxi up. He is portly, in his fifties, and wears bib overalls. I’m going to get a pair of those. They make a definite statement.

As he tots up the charge for gas and oil using the top of the pump as a desk, I pronounce the name of the airport.

“A good place to be from,” he grunts. “I been here thirty years too long. Married one of the local broads”—he jabs his thumb at the trailer—“and she won’t leave her mama.”

With the paperwork done, he announces, “Well, I gotta go inside and get fatter,” and nods his good-bye.

It is lunchtime, I notice with surprise. I get a drink from the fountain and stand in the shade smoking my pipe.

Well, everyone has his problems. I’ve had places I wanted to leave too. When I finish my pipe I leave this one without ceremony.

An hour later I landed in Petaluma and called my sister-in-law’s brother, Jack Williams, at the administration office at Point Reyes National Seashore. He is the head engineer there. With the
Cannibal Queen
tied down, I am soon on my way to Point Reyes Station in a rental car.

I confess, California has always charmed me. There is nothing attractive about the sprawl of Los Angeles, but that is the only boil on this fair state. The countryside between Petaluma and Point Reyes is rural California at its best. Straw-yellow hills accented by groves of green trees are occupied by dairy farms and beef ranches and little else. No shacks with collections of junk cars, no abandoned refrigerators, just straw-yellow hills under a brilliant blue sky and cattle lolling in the shade of the trees.

The road winds and traffic is light.

I could live in a place like this.

That evening Jack and I drove out to the seashore to meet my nephew Jack when he got off work. He won a lottery and qualified for a summer’s employment with the Youth Conservation Corps at Point Reyes National Seashore. It worked out well—he is spending the summer with his aunt and uncle and their two young daughters and having a great time on his first summer away from home at the ripe old age of sixteen.

The park lies on the west side of the San Andreas Fault and will become one of the Aleutian Islands in ten years or so. In the interim the northern half of the 94,000-acre park is a grassland on which hundred-year-old ranches still raise cattle for milk and meat. The southern half of the point is wooded.

After recovering from the surprise of finding ranches on property administered by the National Park Service, I was enchanted by the pastoral beauty of the place. Surrounded on three sides by water, the point is often covered by fog and low clouds in summer. This afternoon the clouds whipped in off the ocean and the air smelled of the sea.

The next morning after the two Jacks had gone to work and Dino and the girls had departed for errands, I drove back to the national seashore. The low clouds were solid, the wind at least twenty knots. After passing through Point Reyes Station and the village of Inverness, the road followed the western shore of Tomales Bay for another few miles, then cut up onto the point.

In the gloom and wind the seashore was a lonely place. Empty roads, cattle cropping grass in the pastures, every now and then a ranch complex. And I had it all to myself.

Out on the point near the lighthouse the fog blew up the ridge from the sea. Here and there I got glimpses of the surf smashing on the beach below.

This wild, lonely place seemed to me very British, like a moor from a Thomas Hardy novel. Or perhaps Scotland. All I have seen of Britain is London, but I suspect one could drop a Scotsman onto Point Reyes and he would think it was home until he met his first Texan driving an RV.

But no RVs this morning. I drove slowly out of the park on Sir Francis Drake Drive—he was supposed to have landed on South Beach while on vacation from sacking Spanish galleons in the tropics. If it was a day like today he must have felt right at home. Then I stopped in the village of Inverness for coffee.

Inverness looks like a lot of other villages near major tourist attractions, picturesque bric-a-brac on the buildings and cutesy little signs on boutique shops, but its real claim to fame is that it is or once was home to one John Francis, a serious eccentric.

The local paper, the Point Reyes Light, ran an article about him and I had to admit, jaded as I am, that Francis is something out of the ordinary. This is a man that the locals justly point to with pride.

In fact, he is so kooky I would have gone to look him up, except that he isn’t there anymore. In 1983 he set off on an eighteen-year trek around the world by foot, bicycle, and sailboat.