Flight of Passage: A True Story (42 page)

Oh you beautiful old mountain, I thought as we cleared the last wall, you gorgeous whore. You nearly got us that first time but now we have your number and so goodbye Guadalupe. We flew on across the high desert to Wink. That night, the airport manager and his hands took us on a rattler safari, and Kern and I each bagged several snakes.

I was always grateful about one thing Kern did when we reached central Texas. After we got into Junction, in the scrub prairie north of San Antonio, we were finishing up our RC Colas and Moon Pies when Kern flipped me the sectional map.

“Here,” he said. “Plan me a cross-country to Austin. You’ll fly the whole leg yourself from the front seat, as pilot-in-command. I’m sitting in the back with my arms crossed.”

I was jittery at first, taxiing out. I wasn’t used to handling 71-Hotel from the front seat. But then I got the throttle open and my tail raised, and I could always hold a centerline and break ground all right.

I was euphoric, flying that Junction-to-Austin leg by myself from the front seat, spending two hours and five minutes as pilot-in-command. There was a large oil field out along the lonely Pedernales River which I had to hit midway, practically our only major landmark, and it was right where it was supposed to be after an hour. Kern kept his arms folded in the back the whole time, not offering a single suggestion, lost in thought and enjoying himself. The route we followed took us right past Lyndon Johnson’s ranch, and Kern was excited about the possibility that we might be able to pick out the president’s spread.

When we got to Tim’s airport in Austin I dropped to pattern altitude and approached the field downwind.

“Here’s Austin!” I proudly yelled back to Kern, happy about my navigation and flying. “It’s your airplane.”

“Rink, I said the
whole
leg,” Kern yelled forward. “You can land this Cub.”

And I could too. Carb heat, three cranks on the trim, chop the power and hold sixty-five miles per hour. Over the fence I eased back on the stick. As we touched down Kern deliberately stared out the side windows with his arms folded, as unconcerned as a passenger on United Airlines. He knew that I would grease it on.

We flew on to Houston that evening. After dinner in town we rolled our sleeping bags out under the wings and lay there for a while, gazing up at the stars.

“This was good today, Rink,” Kern said. “Junction to Austin. You flew it all by yourself. For me, it’s the high point of the trip.”

My earnest brother. He was always overflowing with enthusiasm about something, making some event from an hour ago the high point of the trip, the sort of thing about him that I was never able to understand. Obviously, there were many more legitimate high points of the flight—Hank, back in Indiana, Pate in El Paso, and crossing the big pass. But if Junction to Austin was the high point for Kern, even though tomorrow he’d have a new one, it was good enough for me. I lay under the wing with my hands clasped behind my head, staring up at the stars, at peace with myself and with Kern. I wasn’t uncomfortable around him anymore. Everything between us seemed easier, practically effortless, now that I wasn’t wasting all my energy hoping he would change.

The next night, Tuesday, we were already in Florida. A geezer at the Pensacola airport told us about a cleared right of way for a gas pipeline that we could pick up about ten miles away and follow all the way up to New York. We practically threw away our maps. On Wednesday we reached North Carolina, and after four hours of easy flying up the Shenandoah Valley we crossed into Pennsylvania before noon on Thursday. My father had a reception at the airport and a party at home planned for Saturday afternoon, and we didn’t want to disappoint him by storming into our home strip two days early. So we dropped down low over the familiar Pennsylvania Dutch countryside and swung into our old Lancaster County haunt, the immaculately kept grass strip at New Holland. We spent the next two days in Ephrata, at the home of Ivan Martin, an Old Order Mennonite farmer from whom my father had bought horses over the years. We helped Ivan and his boys bring in their wheat and chased around the country roads at night in a horse and buggy.

On Friday evening, after dinner, Kern and I drove a buggy into Blue Ball for haircuts, because my father wanted us to “look nice for Mother” when we stepped out of the plane the next day. Kern was excited about getting back; he couldn’t wait to dive right into preparations for his commercial pilot’s flight test. I was a lot more reluctant for the trip to end, but there was one outcome of our flight about which I was confident. My father had listened to me back in California, after I told him about the waterbag. We’d grown closer and we understood each other better now. I had proven myself on this flight, and really stood behind Kern. My father would trust me now, and treat me with more deference. Certainly that’s what I felt I deserved.

Disappointment, however, was waiting for me when I stepped out of the barbershop in that pretty little town. I called home from the phone booth out in front of Goode’s general store.

“Lancaster? What the hell are you still doing there?” my father growled into the phone. “That’s south. You’re supposed to be approaching the field tomorrow from the west. Christ, do I have to tell you guys everything? Everybody expects a Cub out of the west.”

I was crestfallen. A huge gray pit opened in my chest. Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. I’d been flying hard all week thinking everything was romantic, that my life would now be transformed for the better, but in fact I was just winging east toward situation normal. But I must have learned something on that trip because I thought about what was happening and deliberately waited several seconds before I replied. Anger and snide remarks just weren’t the way to handle him anymore.

“Okay Dad, I’m sorry,” I said. “We made a mistake. But I think we can recover. We’ll fly north to the Delaware and turn right from there. Don’t worry. Everybody will see us coming out of the west.”

“All right then. Noon. Noon sharp. Jack Elliott will be there, and a lot of other press. Make sure you both give your mother a big hug. And Rinker, none of this backtalking and awful language you’ve picked up on this trip.”

When I got back to the buggy, Kern was just coming out from his haircut.

“Everything okay Rink?”

“Yup. Fine and dandy. The old man is really happy tonight.”

In the morning, our last day of flying, we experienced one of those real high points that Kern was always crowing about. In truth, it was something for us both to crow about.

We were off the grass at New Holland before eight and had plenty of time to make central New Jersey by noon, so we decided to drop in and see some friends at Princeton. The airport operators we had grown up with at Basking Ridge had moved their business south to Princeton the year before, and many of the old Basking Ridge flyers had moved with them and taken their planes down there. Probably, they had all heard about our coast to coast romp by now and would be glad to see us.

Big Eddie Mahler had led the move of the old Basking Ridge flyers down to Princeton, and we hadn’t seen him in a long time. When we landed at Princeton that morning and taxied around the corner of the hangar, he was pulling his open-cockpit biplane out of the hangar, getting ready to fly off for his Saturday afternoon show. Eddie Mahler was a regal man. He rarely showed emotion about anything and when he crossed a ramp he ambled, imperturbable and majestic as a big African cat.

But as soon as he saw the Cub with the red sunbursts come around the corner, Eddie broke in a run for us. It was all we could do to stand on the brakes and get the prop stopped before he got to us. He reached in and pulled open the door and pumped my hand. Then he wrapped one of those big tanned arms of his around Kern’s shoulder and hugged him like a child.

“Kern Buck, I am so proud of you,” Eddie said. “You have done this thing. Everybody followed you all the way across in the papers. Everybody thinks this is just great for aviation. All the old Basking Ridge flyers just can’t get over you, Kern.”

For Big Eddie, that was a lot of syllables at once, practically all the emotion he had in him for a full year.

What Eddie said that morning built a marker inside Kern that never left. Over the years, whenever we sat out on a porch somewhere and talked about that summer, reaching out with imaginary sticks and kicking at the rudders, Kern would repeat Big Eddie’s words like a mantra.

“And Rink, the day we got back, Eddie Mahler said he was proud of me. He
hugged
me that day. I’ll never forget it.”

A number of other pilots, some of whom we knew and many that we didn’t, started piling out of the hangars and the pilots’ lounge and surged around the plane. Before we could even get out of the Cub, Eddie stepped back, hoisted the tail up to his waist and started pulling us back toward a tiedown spot on the grass. The other pilots joined in and pushed on the wings and the struts, and it was a wonderful moment for Kern and me, flowing backward in our cockpit seats as all of our old barnstorming buddies—Larry “No Cash” Tokash, John O’Johnny, and “Bird-Dog” Nelson—pushed us along in a crowd and called out questions. It was one thing to have earned the adulation of the news media and the public. But these were pilots, heroes of our childhood, buzz-job artists and famous airshow performers and airline captains, and they marveled at our journey.

“Damn it all, Kern, this is great! Why didn’t I think of this?”

“Whoa. Let me just get my head inside that cockpit. No radio! Kern, you’re frigging nuts. But I love this.”

Eddie wanted to hear all about our trip—the deserts and the mountains, the Stearman men, whether we had any breakdowns, or got lost. We all sat around on the grass in front of the gas pumps drinking Cokes as Kern waggled his hands in the air telling everyone how he flew the Kentucky swale, or smoked 71-Hotel onto those big long runways out west in the density-altitude air.

I felt joyful for Kern. Everybody kept clapping him on the back and telling him what a “hot shit” pilot he was now, and then somebody else we knew would pull into the parking lot and burst out of their car. “Jesus! Is that the Cub? It’s Kern Buck!” He was no longer that scrawny teenager running around the airport all day, wondering about what everyone thought of him. Larry Tokash, who ran the airport operation, told Kern that morning that as soon as he got his commercial and instructor ratings, he had a summer job flying for Princeton Aviation.

Then we all enjoyed our old Saturday morning routine—watching the great Eddie Mahler take off for his show. Eddie said goodbye, shook our hands and then wrapped his arm around Kern’s shoulder one last time before he stepped over to his plane.

It was the standard Mahler departure. Full show smoke on takeoff, rotate off the ground into a climbing chandel turn, two snap rolls over the windsock and then a hammerhead stall over to the intended route of flight. He was an awesome flyer that Eddie, like a big old stud horse coming out of the barn in the morning. He liked to kick over a few doors as he went by, just to make sure he was awake.

We took off ourselves a few minutes later, and just because it felt right, we gave the crowd of pilots a buzz job low enough to make them duck and then we hammerheaded up and over to our route of flight.

We were accomplished arrival artists by now, and it wasn’t hard doing it right for my father and the crowd waiting for us at Basking Ridge. The bit about a “Cub coming out of the west” turned out to be a lot of wasted anxiety on my father’s part. It was so hazy over central New Jersey by noon nobody could see an airplane very far anyway. But we did that dumbass thing just to please him, diverting way out toward Somerville and approaching from the west.

When we came over the little mountain in Mendham we could see there was a cloud right over the airport. Kern stayed on top of it until we were almost past the runway and then threw the stick over and down, so we came out over everybody’s head in a graceful diving bank. Back with the stick for the chandel turn, kick the rudders over for a short downwind, and we came out of the turn onto final approach with the Cub already sideways in the slip and fell steeply down over the telephone wires. We touched down right in front of the crowd in a puff of dust.

It was mayhem all over again out there, and I had a completely different feeling about it than our reception in L.A. Kern and I had been so free for a month. We had seen everything two boys could see across America, flown the Mississippi, the prairies, the deserts, and then the big pass, and slept under the wings at night. Barnstorming together, there were only two people to worry about—him and me. Now we were swarmed with people, photographers, old family friends, and howling younger brothers and sisters spilling Coke all over the plane. My father directed the press traffic, assigning a pecking order according to the importance of the publication.

Despite my fresh haircut, my mother was annoyed about my hair. It was unruly then and there was nothing I could do about it. I had just flown almost six thousand miles, half the time with my head out the side looking for landmarks or watching avocados disappear. Even Elvis Presley couldn’t do that and exit the plane with his hairdo intact. But my mother was upset. She took one look at me and couldn’t help herself. The reporters were all right there and they had their notebooks open, and everything she said made the newspapers the next day.

“'You’re home, I see,’ sighed Mrs. Buck. 'Rinker, push that hair out of your eyes.’”

Yeah, shit, we were home, freaking home sweet home.

Afterward, there was a big party at the house with all these Roman Catholic priests my father always had around, friends from town, and my older sisters’ boyfriends. My father was in his element, and I was happy for him. He needed this, basking in the glory of our coast to coast flight. But after about an hour of the merriment, Kern and I could see that the party wasn’t about us any longer. It was just another excuse, like a birthday or a confirmation, to fill up the rooms. We had to get out of there. Our heads were still out in Texas.

We slipped out of the house together and walked out to the barn. The blue Willys was parked in the main shop, in the same spot where we had rebuilt the plane. It had become coated with dust while we were away and we brushed it off with oil rags. Puttering softly out the drive in reverse, we rode over to the Minuteman restaurant on Route 202.