Flight of Passage: A True Story (19 page)

There was an old Pullman-style diner on the other side of the interstate, out across a railroad line. We had to climb a wire fence on either side of the railroad tracks to get there. Before we went into the restaurant we called my father collect from the phone booth outside, cupping our ears together on the receiver. No way, we agreed, would we tell him about the Pennsylvania weather, or about landing at an unlit strip after dark.

My father must have been sitting all evening with the phone in his lap. We didn’t even get off a full ring before he picked it up. When he heard it was us, we could hear the tension and worry going out of his voice.

“Boys! How are you?”

“Fine, Dad. Just fine.”

“Where are you?”

“Indiana. East Richmond, Indiana.”

“Oh Jesus boys that’s just great. Jesus, Indiana. Mom, they made Indiana.”

My older sisters were there. I could hear them talking in the background. I guess they were now excited about our trip. Years later they would still talk about that week in July, when everyone would sit around the large family room adjacent to our kitchen every night, waiting for us to call.

“Indiana! Wow. Indiana. Isn’t that far? Dad, how many miles is that?”

My younger brothers and sisters had stayed awake in all the excitement. Now, as we spoke with my father, they were marching around the kitchen table together in their pajamas, letting out banshee whoops and singing a chorus of “Indiana, Indiana, Indiana.” My mother got on and we lied to her about what a great day we’d had, the beautiful weather all the way out and what a swell country America was, how well the plane flew. Before we hung up, we promised to call again the next night.

I was surprised by how relaxed my father was during that first call home. We didn’t say another word to him that night. For months, he had been secretly obsessed with this trip, painstakingly examining our maps, discussing the difficult desert and mountain crossings, egging us to finish the plane on time and hectoring us about the waterbag. Now the details of our flight didn’t seem to interest him at all. I suppose he just figured that he had worked us well all those years, and now we were down and safe in Indiana on the first night and that proved to all the skeptics, friends of his who had wondered why he was letting us make this trip, that his boys could do it. The details were now out of his hands.

Several years later, when he was struck with a bad phantom pain attack, I drove my father to the hospital for his Demerol shots. On the ride home in the car, before he fell asleep, he droned on and on about the night that Kern and I called from Indiana. He was so happy for us that night, he said, happy and relieved, that after we hung up he climbed the stairs to his room, took off his wooden leg, and cried in bed.

The waitresses at the diner were bright-faced and coltish, with long shiny legs, hairnets, and lacey bras showing up beneath the transparent restaurant uniforms girls wore in those days. The place wasn’t busy at all and we must have blown in at just the right time, relieving the Edward Hopper loneliness along the counter. The waitresses dawdled and flirted with us and I liked them a lot. They wore more makeup than eastern girls and moved between the tables and the kitchen with languid sexuality, and they didn’t have any pretensions. The special that night was all-you-can-eat Southern-fried chicken for $1.99. We wolfed it down with mashed potatoes, green beans, and iced tea. While we were eating our dessert the waitresses asked us where we were from, and we told them New Jersey. Boy, they said, that’s a lot of flying for one day. They made it sound as if New Jersey was a whole continent away, and actually I felt that way myself. Already, it felt as if we’d been gone for weeks. We swaggered out of there a foot taller, with toothpicks angled out of our mouths and our Ray-Bans sticking out of the top of our shirt pockets, the way we’d seen the big-time airshow pilots do it at home.

It was a cool, clear night, with an immense panorama of stars overhead, and we couldn’t believe how open the sky was out here. We walked the long way back to the airport, to avoid climbing over the fences. The air smelled of new-cut hay and manure spread on the fields. We didn’t say much as we walked along but Kern did thank me for one thing.

“Rink, you made a huge difference today. Really. I never would have made it to Indiana by myself.”

“Yeah. Thanks. The funny thing is, I agree with you.”

It was a moment of pure knowledge and pure satisfaction. I didn’t feel particularly elated about making a big difference all day, I just knew that it was true. I knew, as well, that I never would have believed this before we left home—I didn’t expect to contribute that much to the flying effort. During that walk in the dark a new welter of feelings that would build throughout the trip began overtaking me. First of all, time seemed unbelievably stretched—hours became days and days became weeks, even months. Distance, too, seemed implausibly and romantically grand. Here in Indiana, we were still close enough to Ohio to spit back across the state line. But the short distance we’d traveled to “make Indiana” and land in the state seemed oceanic, as if we’d flown all the way to Montana. And with the stretching of time and contentment every other muscle and pore in my body was relaxed. It seemed easy, all of a sudden, being at peace with Kern. All we had to do now was live moment to moment for this flight we were making together.

Back at the airport, we rolled our sleeping bags out beneath the wing. We used the Cub’s seat cushions for pillows. We lay there for a while, lazy from our meal and drugged by the nitrogen pall of the duster strip, chatting, staring up at the stars. Kern was pleased with himself and our hard day of flying and I was happy about that. Except for the distant hum of the interstate, Indiana seemed real quiet. At a little before eleven a lone locomotive roared through on the tracks and then we dozed off, still laughing inside about the little ones back home, marching “Indiana” around the table.

The coughing of four Stearman engines woke us at dawn the next morning. The sky was still all flinty gray, with a ribbon of cobalt and pink glowing on the eastern horizon. The duster pilots at East Richmond had arrived for their morning flying and were firing up the yellow biplanes parked in front of us, to warm the engines before they flew. Kern and I were cold and stiff from sleeping on the ground and our sleeping bags were wet with dew. Sand and pebbles thrown back by the props raked our faces, and the stack exhaust was a velvety bit of warmth.

It was a morning ritual, and we grew used to it as we followed the cropdusting strips west. As the first streams of sun warmed the country, the Stearman pilots were the first to wake. The still hours just after dawn are the best time of day for cropdusting. Before it was light Kern and I would hear the sound of boots crossing gravel, the rattle of tie-down chains, the telltale whine of starter-clutches engaging. The pilots left the biplanes idling on the ramp while they went in for coffee. Kern and I would roll up our sleeping bags and follow them into the shack. In the half-light behind us, the big Pratt & Whitneys radials played a morning hymn. The gear boxes clicked, the throaty manifolds hummed, the air from the props whistled through the sprayer bars. The sound seemed to urge us west. In the baritone rumble I could hear the crescendo of a hundred more cropduster radials coughing to life down through Arkansas and Texas, a vast American symphony tracking the sun across the Rockies to Bakersfield and Salinas.

We rolled out of our sleeping bags and stowed them in the baggage compartment. One of the pilots we had met the night before jumped off his wing and strolled over to the Cub. He was older than the other dusters, forty-five perhaps, tall and bony in a faded jumpsuit, with a face so burned and wrinkled by the sun that it looked like driftwood. He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, smiling as he watched us wiggle into our pants and pull on our shoes.

His name was Hank, Hank the Stearman man. Hank was the chief pilot and owner of the duster operation at East Richmond. He introduced himself and seemed curious about us, amused that we had dropped in the night before and then camped under the wing. Raunchy duster-strips like East Richmond didn’t get a lot of transient traffic, certainly not a pair of scrawny kids in Levi’s and penny loafers who spent the night sleeping under the wing of their plane.

Hank ran his hands over his face to wipe off some sleep, stretched his arms high and cracked his knuckles, and then ran the hand with the lit cigarette through his hair.

“Where you boys from?” he asked.

“New Jersey!” Kern piped.

“New Jersey. Hmmm. All the way from New Jersey. How long did that take you?”

“One day. We took off just yesterday.”

“Jeez. Pretty good. All the way from Jersey in a day. Where you headed in such a rush?”

I prayed inside that Kern would just say something innocuous, like Indianapolis, so we could prop and get out of there fast without a lot of fuss and bother. But Kern flashed him his best
Leave It to Beaver
smile and gave Hank the whole nine yards.

“Ah, Hank, we’re flying this Cub to California,” Kern said.

Hank paused a lot between words and never showed much surprise, which I took to be the midwestern manner of speaking.

“California. You bet . . . Hmmmm . . . okay. Let’s just look at that. What’d’ya got here anyway, the 85-horse?”

“Yeah. It’s a PA-11.”

“Yeah, good . . . lights. I mean, you got lights? You landed after dark last night.”

“Well, Hank, see, we were just trying to . . .”

“Nah, nah, nah, hold on. I’m not saying nothing or anything, you know? Lights? Who needs lights? Hell’s bells, we’re landing Stearmans in the dark around here all the time. Who’s got lights? I don’t have any lights.”

“Yeah,” Kern said. “We don’t do that all the time, Hank.”

“Who said that? Did I say that? . . . Exactly. Just when it’s forced on you, you know? Ah, what about radios? You’re going all the way to the coast. I bet you put in something real nice.”

“It’s the standard Cub, Hank,” Kern said. “No radio.”

“No radio! Hey, who’s got radios? I ferried a 450-Stearman all the way to Panhandle, Texas, last year. No radio.”

Kern spread his hands wide and lifted them toward his shoulders, palms up.

“You don’t need it!”

“Exactly! You don’t need it!” Hank said. “Fuck ’em. All these guys flying around in Bonanzas and shit. They’re such hot stuff because they got a panel full of radios. And then, you know, they crash, and the FAA inspectors come. Everybody’s standing ’round the wreck scratching their heads. How’d they crash with all them radios in the panel? Nobody gets it. You don’t need radios.”

“Yeah. Well, for us, we just couldn’t afford a radio, that’s all.”

“Okay . . . great. Let me just run this by once more, so I get it right, okay?”

“Sure Hank.”

“We got two kids from New Jersey.”

“Yeah.”

“Names? You got names?”

“Yeah. I’m Kern,” my brother said, reaching over to shake Hank’s hand.

“
Kern
?”

My brother smiled sheepishly. He was always self-conscious when people got stalled on his name.

“Yeah, Kern,” he said. “It’s short for Kernahan.”

“Fernahan. Jesus.”

“No, Kernahan. That’s the name my parents gave me.”

“Some parents. Ferdinand. Whatever. And what about the sidekick here? Is this a brother?”

“That’s me,” I said, stepping over to shake Hank’s hand, which was so weathered and rough it felt like a cedar fencepost. “I’m Rinker.”

“Rinker?” Hank said. “That’s the name? Rinker?”

“That’s the name.”

“You bet. Ah . . . okay, we got a last name here? Go on now, just do it to me. I’m ready for this one. Hit me with that last name.”

Kern and I said it together.

“Buck.”

“Buck! Whoa. Buck! Good. Good-good-good. All of a sudden, situation normal. I mean, I just like this all over here. Ferdinand and Rinkle—what is it again?”

“Rinker. R-I-N-K-E-R. And Kern. Buck.”

“I copy that. Romeo-India-November-Kilo-Echo-Romeo. Rinker. I like it. It’s catchy.”

“Yeah. Thanks Hank.”

“All right then. Here we go. We got the standard Piper Cub with nothing on it—just seats, two sticks, and the 85-horse Continental No lights, no radio, no nothing. And we got Ferdinand and Rinker Buck. And this whole frigging hoo-tenany is flying coast to coast.”

“That’s it Hank,” Kern said.

“Hey, what the fuck? I’m not saying nothing or anything! I mean, stick with aviation long enough? You’ll see everything.”

Kern didn’t like the insinuation. He was very sensitive to criticism anyway, and he didn’t consider what we were doing to be the least bit abnormal.

“Ah, Hank, I’ve just got my private now, and a little over one hundred hours,” Kern said. “But I need cross-country time for the commercial. So, this is what we’re doing. You have to use the equipment you got.”

“Exactly,” Hank said. “Look at all these shithouse Stearmans here. That’s the equipment I got. But listen, how are you going to get this Cub over the Rockies?”