What's That Pig Outdoors? (35 page)

Taking someone along to serve as an ice-breaker as well as an interpreter solved the problem. My traveling companions—most often Debby
but also my sons, my sister, even my mother, friends, and fellow journalists at the
Sun-Times
eager for an all-expenses-paid trip—would say, as we sat down with a fellow passenger in the lounge car,
“We
are writing a book about the train, and . . .” By the time our audience realized that I was the actual author, the wall had been breached.

My companions were under strict orders to tell me everything they overheard—train announcements, snatches of conversations among other people—no matter how trivial it seemed. Otherwise I would have had no idea about the extent of fascinating (and often important) detail that is borne on sound waves. When Debby and I rode aboard a
Zephyr
locomotive from Oakland, California, to Lovelock, Nevada, and back, she not only passed on word for word the revealing banter between engineer and fireman but also the constant and sometimes annoying nattering of trackside electronic black boxes that told the engine crews the health of their trains—“Hotbox detector Milepost 221. No defects, no defects!”

Did I feel less of a journalist for receiving all this assistance? No. Quickly I realized that no matter how much help came from family and friends, I and I alone was the author of the book. Its sensibility was all mine. Furthermore, I was the boss and they my underlings (not that I treated them that way, you understand). If famous writers could employ researchers and gofers, why couldn't I? Essentially that is what my assistants were. (I paid them in free train trips, of course.)

On its publication in 1994,
Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America
also was widely reviewed, largely favorably. (A small number of critics objected to my characterizations of obnoxious and obstreperous passengers, as if the book were a cynical and mean-spirited
Ship of Fools
on rails.) There was another author tour for me—on the train, naturally—and the book, though not a best seller, did handsomely enough at the cash register to finance the research for the next one.

Another of my longstanding passions has been aviation. Although I had built airplane models as a youngster with my father, I had grown up with the “common-sense” but utterly mistaken notion that deaf people could not become pilots because they couldn't hear the radio. I was disabused of that idea upon meeting the late James Marsters, a California orthodontist and co-inventor of the teletypewriter coupler that eventually became the TDD, nowadays called the TTY, or “text telephone.” Jim was an expert
lipreader and speaker who lost his hearing in infancy and who was not only a pilot but also owned an airplane. “How?” I asked. “Easy,” he replied. “In more than ninety per cent of American airspace a pilot doesn't need to use radio. In fact, many airplanes don't carry a radio at all.”

What's more, Jim said, deaf pilots had been around since the beginning of aviation. Early airplanes had no radios and it was not until after World War II that most light planes were equipped with them. Even today many small aircraft, such as Piper Cubs, fly without radios all over the country, outside the immediate environs of big-city airports with control towers. Their pilots rely on the old Mark I Eyeball to keep them away from other airplanes.

I was fascinated and heartened, but I was also in my middle thirties and had two sons to send to college, so I put aside the idea of learning to fly for almost two decades, when
Pig
and
Zephyr
at last gave me two dimes to rub together. I was fifty-three years old when a friend took me aloft in his four-seater airplane, a Cessna 172, and the hook was thoroughly set. At long last I would become a pilot.

From the beginning of my training it was obvious there would be a book about learning to fly and having an adventure with it. Hearing pilots had written many books, but deaf pilots none. The natural audience for such a book was the one that read
What's That Pig Outdoors?
, but I sought a potentially wider group of readers. To sell the project to a publisher, I needed more of a hook than just my deafness.

It was true that in the beginning finding an instructor willing to teach me to fly was not easy. Notwithstanding the Americans with Disabilities Act, which forbade such discrimination, flight schools told me they “weren't set up to teach the handicapped how to fly.” Fortunately the pilot who had taken me up in his plane introduced me to his old instructor, who previously had taught a deaf pilot. That wheel didn't need to be reinvented.

Over the span of a year I learned how to fly much as any other pilot does, by watching the instructor and carefully following his example. The only difficulty my deafness caused was during landing practice, when I could not fly the airplane around the landing pattern while at the same time reading the lips of my instructor, who was critiquing my performance in detail. We had to stop after every touchdown and taxi onto a ramp while he explained what I had done wrong and how
to make the next landing better. That was time-consuming, but there was no other solution.

During this time I discovered the heart of the book I would write. The first pilot to fly from coast to coast was an intrepid early birdman named Calbraith Perry Rodgers, who in 1911 hip-hopped his way from Brooklyn to Long Beach, California, in a flimsy Wright Brothers biplane called the
Vin Fiz
(after the grape drink produced by a sponsor), making sixty-nine landings during his six-week trip, some of them so hard the plane was smashed to flinders and had to be rebuilt. In one of the crashes Rodgers was injured severely enough to require weeks of recuperation.

And Rodgers had a hearing loss from scarlet fever that was so severe his speech was hard to understand, so severe it thwarted the naval career he sought. He wasn't a very skilled pilot, but he was a deaf one, and that was all I needed for a modern-day re-enactment of his adventure. I would retrace his coast-to-coast route in a small airplane, landing where he landed (or crashed), sounding out the stories of people along the way and telling mine as a deaf pilot as it echoed Rodgers's. The idea was novel enough so that the editor who had shepherded my previous books also agreed to take on this one.

Debby helped me with some of the interviews, but I made the flight alone. The little Cessna 150 two-seater I bought for the adventure with the proceeds from
Zephyr
didn't have room for two people
and
their luggage. And early on I knew it wouldn't be difficult to persuade other pilots to accept me as one of them and as a writer working on a book. Few shared enterprises bond a group of adventurers as much as flying does. That requires cash, commitment, and courage—or foolhardiness, as some might say, especially our spouses. Once in a rare while, of course, an ignorant troglodyte in an airfield lounge would shout that deaf people oughtn't be allowed to fly, but the other pilots usually dealt smartly with him.

In flying I also forged a bond with a group of the deaf. The then International Deaf Pilots Association, formed in 1994, the same year I earned my private pilot's license, boasted some thirty members, most of them certified airmen and airwomen. Most of them were ASL-speaking, but some also used their voices. (A few were lately deafened, but those who lose their hearing in adulthood tend to consider culturally Deaf people difficult to interact with. They don't often join our group.) I attended the
deaf pilots' yearly fly-ins and from them learned many things, notably that some had had a far harder time breaking into the world of aviation than I did. Their vocations ran the gamut, from printers and aviation mechanics to professors and priests. They were, I learned quickly, bright and accomplished people. American Sign Language as a first tongue and membership in its culture had hindered none of them. Some deaf pilots are so proficient that they hold commercial licenses, and at least one has earned a restricted instrument rating although he cannot communicate with air traffic control on the radio.

Occasionally the signing members and I had difficulty communicating, but they are resourceful men and women. At one fly-in a non-speaking pilot and I became chummy over a shared laptop, keyboarding our conversation, and are still good friends. Among my flying deaf colleagues is a Florida aviation mechanic who also grew up oral but turned to the signing Deaf world because, he said, he had enjoyed little social success among hearing people. He was unjudgmental about my choice and, indeed, we spoke together entirely by speech and lipreading. We still do.

In fact, for the first time in my life, I wished I knew ASL so that I could communicate easily with my new friends without all the confusion of coping strategies. The group meets but once a year and for only a few days, however, so learning an entire new language just to be able to use it one week out of every year has not seemed worth the time and effort.

Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet
, published in 1997, enjoyed good reviews but dismal sales, partly because space-age readers are no longer excited by books about old-time low-and-slow flight, and partly because the book was “orphaned” just before it appeared—my editor left the publisher because the bean-counting new president had ordered the cancellation of scores of book contracts that did not promise to result in blockbuster best-sellers. No one remained to champion the book and push for promotion dollars.

Moreover,
Gin Fizz
got me into trouble at the
Chicago Sun-Times.
One of the reasons I had written the book was to cope with the malaise that comes in midlife, partly from dismay over what was happening at the paper. In the mid-1990s the industry's economic bottom was beginning to develop cracks, and the symptoms had showed up early at the
Sun-Times:
circulation was hemorrhaging and profits were dwindling. Budgets were
squeezed and the staff was decimated. Shirlee, the sweet-tempered editorial assistant who had been making my phone calls and opening the scores of boxes of books that arrived each day, was reassigned elsewhere, and I suddenly had to do clerical tasks as well as my own job. Editorial policies changed; the paper aimed at the lowest common denominator of the mass market, hoping to reverse circulation losses. Most everybody on the staff was unhappy, and I said so in the book—and that offended the
Sun-Times'
editor. He called me on the carpet and charged me with disloyalty—but his punishment was simply that the
Sun-Times
did not review the book.

Not that the paper's refusal to notice one of its own employees' books drove sales any lower. Bad luck is often what happens when one writes about subjects off the beaten path, but it's what I like to do—which is a vainglorious way of admitting it's all I know how to do. Or, as Hemingway didn't quite say, all I can write about is what I know—and hope other people are interested.

In 2000 I decided to turn from nonfiction to fiction. Over the years I had assembled a filing cabinet full of lore about western Upper Michigan, the beautiful and remote land on Lake Superior where Debby's father had built a rustic log cabin on the shore for his family in 1947. The Upper Peninsula is a fascinating place that in the 1840s and 1850s was the northern frontier of the United States, a wild place that was home to Indians and voyageurs, rough-hewn woodsmen and hard-bitten miners, many of them immigrants from Europe. Life in that region was often hard and violent and even today can be difficult, and I thought I might be able to tell its story, perhaps in the form of a true-crime book. But I needed a core tale around which to build the larger narrative—and couldn't find it. Perhaps the chronicle of a serial killer? No. The only one who had stalked the Upper Peninsula in recent years dispatched only two victims, hardly enough of a casualty list to justify a rousing true-crimer.

Then one day an idea occurred to me. Mystery novels are sometimes constructed around unusual means rather than motives. What if a bear were trained to be a murder weapon? Not a ferocious grizzly, for there are none in Upper Michigan, but careless campers and hikers occasionally meet a bloody end at the teeth and claws of smaller but still formidable black bears. A little research into the subject showed that
such bears indeed could be habituated into committing mayhem, and I was off and running.

Briefly I considered making my detective hero a deaf one, but soon discovered that had already been done by Penny Warner in her mysteries featuring a deaf journalist-sleuth named Connor Westphal. Besides, I reasoned, a deaf hero would hardly be believable as the gun-toting law enforcement officer I envisioned, even in the wildest boondocks of Upper Michigan. Then I hit upon the solution. My deputy sheriff hero would be a hearing one, a Native American raised in the white culture. One of Colin's boyhood friends had been adopted as an infant from a Lakota reservation in South Dakota and had once told me he might have looked Indian but he thought white; indeed, he knew nothing about his birth culture and sometimes felt like a fish out of water. That echoed my own history as a deaf child brought up in the hearing culture. I'd apply some of the events and feelings I had experienced of being caught between two stools to the character of Stephen Two Crow Martinez, Deputy Sheriff, Porcupine County, Michigan.

My deafness brought one unintended consequence. A reader of an early manuscript of my novel marveled, “But there's no
sound
in this book! There's noise all around us all the time, and you've got to put that in!”

She was right, and I set to work furnishing my novel with the music of the world that I had been utterly unaware of, plunging into research and employing the journalist's not so mysterious skill of asking people about things. Debby told me about the soft sighing of the wind in the trees and quiet lap-lap of the waves on the Lake Superior shore even on an absolutely calm day. An Upper Michigan resident told me about the conversations she had in her backyard every day with chickadees. “Dee?” they'd respond to her “dee-dee!” I learned about the yelps of wounded animals and the growls of enraged ones. So much sound did I put into the manuscript that readers later marveled that a deaf person could be aware of so much.