Flight of Passage: A True Story (27 page)

As the day wore on, I became more physically hardened. Actually, it was the accumulation of days that helped. The night before, undressing at the MOTEL CHEAP, Kern and I were both surprised by the black and blue marks on our bellies and hips. Flying the rough air of Kentucky, the constant jostling of our bodies against the seat belts had bruised and opened up our blood capillaries. As we continued west in turbulence, the black and blue marks merged into a continuous ring around our waists, so that in bathing suits we looked liked zebras with a single stripe. The bruises didn’t hurt that much, except at the beginning and the end of the day, and we found that we could relieve the pain by taking a hot shower or jumping into a motel pool.

Kern didn’t seem to mind his own rough-air welts that much. But he was taken aback when he saw mine. He knew how much I hated flying in turbulence. As soon as we hit the first patch of bad air in Texas, he shook the controls so I could fly awhile myself, and we also elected to fly shorter hops, remaining in the air for two hours or less. This only helped a little, but Kern’s sympathetic attitude made it easier to bear the hours until the turbulence abated in the late afternoon.

Nobody told us about prairie dogs either. We didn’t even know what they were at first, and had to ask at the next airport. We encountered our first colony about fifteen minutes out of Decatur. I was navigating from the rear seat, peering out through the open window for landmarks. There, off our left beam, was a rectilinear lunar landscape, pocked by neatly spaced craters.

“Hey, Kern, what the hell is that?”

Kern authoritatively called back that we were now in the heart of “Stearman Alley,” and reminded me that we had passed a couple of large, abandoned World War II military training strips. Those craters up ahead, he said, were the remnants of an old Army Air Corps bombing range.

I didn’t think so. Nobody could drop bombs in neat rows like that. I had my own theory.

“No way Kern,” I called forward. “That’s an oil field up ahead.”

“An oil field?”

“Oh yeah Kern. We’re in Texas! Those are test bores for a big old oil field.”

We flew over for a look.

As we came in low hundreds of furry, Mad-Hatter creatures scurried in every direction, tumbling head-over-ass for their holes. We scratched our heads. Minks, maybe? Or chinchillas—yeah, wild, Texas chinchillas. Nah. We were in Texas. Out here, chinchillas and minks would be immense, as big as German shepherds back home. Probably they were some kind of western woodchuck. Whatever. These critters were apparently quite private, and smart as hell about passing aircraft. In the few seconds it took us to cross their cratered community, the place was instantly deserted, empty as a ghost town, as everybody dove for their holes. Except for a few stragglers racing in pellmell from the prairie, and some tumbleweed blowing across the edges, nothing moved.

There were dozens of those colonies across Texas, out as far as Midland, where the desert begins. We learned to play them just right. If we approached downwind with the sun in front of us, so the gophers weren’t spooked by our engine noise or shadow, we could gradually sneak in with gentle turns and observe their habits. They were lovable little devils, scampering about and bumping into each other in furry collisions, coming out of their holes on the fly, standing upright and inquisitively peering up at us with their babylike paws wedged against their cheeks.

Wildlife observation gets quite boring, however, and it was a lot more fun to terrorize the bastards. Kern developed our prairie-dog aerial assault tactics, but after a couple of colonies I took over the controls myself and perfected the technique.

Coming in with the sun behind us, we’d shut down the throttle and quietly glide in over the middle of a colony. The trick was to get about fifty prairie dogs all in one place, and then inch over with the rudders so that the Cub’s shadow made a direct hit on the crowd. The plane’s shadow was generally about three seconds ahead of us. As soon as it hit a big concentration of prairie dogs, they all dove at once for the nearest holes. At that instant we firewalled the throttle to give the fur-balls an extra shot of adrenaline from the noise. It was better than yelling “Fire!” in a movie theater. As we passed over and looked straight down, a dozen or more of the gophers were stuck headfirst in each hole, garroted at the neck, with a frantic circle of hind legs desperately kicking up a ring of dust. It worked every time, as good as a stun-grenade. Scare the bejesus out of fifty dense-packed prairie dogs, and they’ll all dive at once for the same hole.

At the third or fourth colony, I remembered the Lance Moon Pies that we had purchased back in Oklahoma. As Easterners, we were not familiar with the Moon Pie, but apparently it was a popular food staple out west. Moon Pies consisted of two giant saucers of chocolate cake, held together like an Oreo with a caloric wad of sweet white cream in the middle. They looked filling, and we had a long flight ahead, so I bought a few and stuffed them in the baggage compartment. Now I wondered how a prairie dog colony would react to a Moon Pie dropped in its midst.

When the next colony came up, I took out the first Moon Pie, unwrapped it and resisted the temptation to try a bite, and opened up the side door. I shook the stick and took the plane from Kern.

I set up a nice, gentle glide toward the colony, with the sun on the tail. I figured that, with the forward momentum of the plane behind it, the Moon Pie would hit just about where our shadow was. So, I would release just as the prairie dogs all dove for cover. After we passed over, the prairie dogs would all extricate themselves from the holes, shake the kinks out of their necks, and discover that Moon Pie.

Bombs away, and it looked like a good drop. I powered up, but not too much, so I could turn sharper in a slower plane, and came back over the colony.

The Texas prairie dog, I can report, definitely goes for Moon Pies. It was like a single bucket of slop thrown to fifty starving hogs.

In one madass tangle of fur, tumbleweed bits, and trampled-over youngins, the whole damn colony declared war on itself. With all those craters around, theoretically it should have been difficult to see which one of them had been my Moon Pie drop zone. But in practice, it was easy. There was this writhing, slithering, gyrating pyramid of mammals down there, sixty or seventy furious little beasts scrambling over each other, clawing each other’s eyes out and snapping shiny teeth to get to the prize, the Moon Pie at the bottom of the seismic heap.

The prairie dog must be related to the lemming. As the scrummage piled higher, more gophers ran in from the suburbs and jumped on, just because everybody else was doing it. How many prairie dogs can fit on top of a Moon Pie? At least a hundred. And it was all just a Hobbesian farce by now, because some big ole dominant male, burrowed in at the bottom, had probably snapped up that Moon Pie in six furious bites. But it was only a partial victory for him. With the weight of the whole colony upon him, that sucker had to be hurting, with complications from asphyxiation and sucrose shock.

I circled the colony a few times to see what happened next. After a while, the prairie dogs just got tired of being on top of each other, and they gradually slid off the pile and staggered home to their craters. I felt sorry for the ones on the bottom. It was obvious that they had been squished. After the others left, the critters from the bottom just lay there for a while, shellshocked and listless under the hot sun, and then they started scratching off on their bellies. I prayed for their survival. There were a lot of heavy-duty vultures and hawks circling those colonies all the time, and if one of those flattened critters dawdled getting back to his hole, he would be somebody’s dinner before long.

I kept the plane well stocked on pastries after that, and this was one of the great pleasures of our coast to coast flight, feeding the prairie dogs. If an airport didn’t have a vending machine with Moon Pies, I bought doughnuts or peanut-butter crackers. We could even throw out a bag of potato chips, unopened, and the prairie dogs would tear through the wrapping paper and greedily consume the potato chips in a matter of seconds. Those bastards were really starving down there. The big scrummage over the Moon Pie wasn’t fair to the animals on the bottom, so I started altering my technique, to protect lives. Instead of releasing one, solitary Moon Pie or cracker, I threw out a bunch at high speed, so the baked goods were dispersed over a wide area by our slipstream. It was a lot better that way because then only ten or twelve critters jumped onto a single pile, and nobody got hurt.

In the afternoon, the headwinds had picked up, and circling to feed the prairie dogs had consumed extra gas, and we were forced to refuel before we reached Abilene. As we passed Breckenridge in the central prairie, I calculated our time aloft and fuel burn, concluding that we should land as quickly as possible. Our only choice was the airport at Albany, a ranch hamlet thirty miles ahead. The airport lay right on the north edge of town, so that the runway looked like a continuation of the street grid, and we whistled in just over the roofs as we made our landing.

From the air, Albany looked quaint and ideally western, a no-frills cowtown. As we descended to land we saw a dusty, wide main street, wooden sidewalks, porches, and false-front roofs. There were even hitching posts and a watering trough for horses. It was the end of the Independence Day weekend and the annual barrel races at the municipal arena were just breaking up. Several groups of riders on horses were loping through town, four and five abreast, manes and tails curved up in the breeze.

I never forgot the view I had of one of them. A cowgirl on a big Appaloosa was galloping up the street from the arena to catch the other riders. As we turned for the airport, right over her head, she neck-reined the horse around and I looked straight down. The horse was prancing and whipping around in circles, and the girl’s blond hair and the fringes on her shirt sleeves whirled like a dervish, and she waved up at us and smiled, a pretty picture from the air.

The other riders raised their hats and waved too.

“Kern! Get a load of this, wil’ya? These people are just riding their horses right into town.”

“Darn it all Rink. I’ve been trying to tell you this all day. Everybody rides their horse into town out here. This is Texas!”

Still, I couldn’t get over it. It never occurred to me that Texas would be this old-fashioned, so close to its frontier roots.

It was only four in the afternoon and we could have done some more flying. But we liked the look and feel of Albany so much we decided to skip Abilene and stay here for the night. The airport owner gave us a ride into town in his pickup.

The hotel in Albany was a grand old-fashioned affair with a white adobe front, Mexican tile floors, and a big front desk made of ornately carved wood. Our room upstairs was large and tall, with a ceiling fan and immense, whorehouse-style beds. A set of tall vertical windows opened onto a railed balcony. The view was north, out over the board sidewalks and false-front roofs. The prairie beyond, dappled with sagebrush, glowed pink in the late afternoon sun.

We were hungry when we got in, and the hotel coffee shop had a special going—two “Texas-size” hamburgers and a large RC Cola, for ninety-nine cents. We brought the burgers up to our room, but they were inedible. It’s an abomination, what Texans do to a piece of meat. Slopped on to both sides of the burger was a sauce, thick as swamp mud, that appeared to consist of mustard, pickle relish, jalapeño peppers, chopped onions, Tabasco sauce, and some other material that I can only guess at, but it looked awfully close to week-old, refried beans. We flushed the burgers down the toilet and decided to take a stroll through town.

The air smelled sweetly of sagebrush in bloom and manure piled at the hitching posts. All the horses were gone now, but there were still cowboys running up and down Main Street in their pickups, lots of pretty girls with sugary Texas accents, and, in the barbershop, men getting haircuts and a shave at six o’clock at night. In the window of the drug store, there was a stack of shiny straw cowboy hats, with thin, black string bands and metal grommets for air-holes, real, western-style headgear. Kern began to salivate. He didn’t want one of these big heavy Stetsons anyway—it would be too hot inside the plane. But these straw jobs looked perfect, and we went in.

Kern bought himself one of these immense, ten-gallon jobs, which made him look perfectly ridiculous, but he was happier than shit with that big cowboy hat on so I made an agreement with myself not to be embarrassed standing next to him. I settled on a black ball-cap emblazoned with a state map and a logo in yellow lettering, D
EEP IN THE
H
EART OF
T
EXAS
, which I thought looked just right with my Ray-Bans. Thus attired for the wide open west, we swaggered out to the street.

Next door, there was an old western cafe, and we sat down for some chicken-fried steak.

Nobody was fooled by our hats. Because of our penny loafers and paisley shirts, which were difficult for people not to stare at, everybody could see that we were from out of town, way out of town. But these Texans were very sweet-natured and kind, not at all like those yahoos cropdusters back in Arkansas. They all wore broad Stetsons, pointed boots, and ornate belt buckles, and they kept stepping over to our table and introducing themselves. Nu Jursa! I could have listened to that nasal twang all night. Everything was a “thang,” everybody was an “ole boy” or a “gal,” and if the folks in Albany, Texas, liked something a lot, it was a “humdinger” or an “all-day horse.” They couldn’t get over the fact that we had flown all the way from the East Coast, just to land in little ole Albany.

“Piper Cub, hunh? Ain’t that kinder like a Model T or sumthang? Hot-diggety-damn. You boys is all bidness.”

We felt like a pair of real cowpokes, back in the room, dialing home for the first Texas gam. We carried the phone and two chairs out to the balcony and Kern kept his cowboy hat on while he spoke with my father. The moon rose over the prairie as they talked. Kern told him all about our day, and described our routes. My father was worried that we were flying too hard, and thought we should take a rest once we got over the Rockies. He wanted us to plan a one-day layover in El Paso, which Kern was resisting by being noncommittal.