Flight of Passage: A True Story (43 page)

We never planned to do this, to debrief our flight like a pair of NASA astronauts, but that’s what we did. It was one of our last long talks together before Kern left for college.

Kern was very selfless about it. He insisted that I appreciate my contributions to the trip, and was surprised that I still underestimated my role. The trip might have originated with him, it might have been his dream, he said, but I had helped “push it over the top.” It was an unexpected pleasure for him, he said, getting out to Indiana that first day and seeing what I could do. It was a lot more than just my navigation, or Junction to Austin, or taking over the controls in the middle of the pass.

“Rink, you know what the biggest thing I learned on this trip is?”

“No, what?”

“I’m smart and I don’t even know it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! I mean, the minute I first thought about flying coast to coast, there was like this voice inside me. 'You gotta take Rinky. Rinky has to be in that plane.’ I was pissed too. I had an argument with myself about it. 'Why should I take Rinky? He’ll just be bugging my ass all the time.’ But I couldn’t overpower that little voice and I knew there had to be a reason. Now I know. I mean, Jeez, both of us had to take the heat on the waterbag together, which made all of the difference.”

I didn’t say much about that, but I didn’t feel that I had to. There was knowledge and satisfaction for me in what Kern said. I’d done what I’d had to for my brother that summer and I was happy about it for the rest of my life.

A few weeks later, when Kern flew off to Red Bank to take his commercial flight test, nobody made a big fuss about it. He always got jittery before an event if people wished him good luck and, besides, this was just like any other morning. Every day that month, as soon as he was out of bed, Kern dashed off to the airport in the Willys to get ready for his test.

I was back working at the horse farm and came home tired that night, and I lay down on the couch in my father’s library before dinner. I could tell just from the sound of the Willys entering the drive that Kern had passed the test. The tires squealed coming around the corner and the pickup screeched to a halt in the drive.

“Rink!”

He was calling out to me almost as an abstraction—anywhere I happened to be on the place, even if I wasn’t, he wanted me to know. But I was right there, underneath the open library window.

“Yo! I guess you passed.”

“Yeah. The examiner didn’t like my chandels and lazy-eights, but what does he know, Rink? I got the ticket. I’m a commercial pilot.”

“Great. Now you can go off to college and relax.”

“Exactly. Now look, here’s what I’m going to do. By Christmas, you’ll be sixteen and ready to solo. So, I’ll get my instructor’s rating over the winter for that, and then I’m going to go for my instrument and multiengine. I’ve got to be all set up by the summer for Princeton Aviation.”

Exactly. The thing was, Kern did all this, right on schedule, and he had a pretty good little run of barnstorming blarney going for him by then. Up at Holy Cross, he started a flying club, and he even talked the Jesuits into buying a couple of planes for it. One afternoon, just for the hell of it, he landed one of them on the football field.

The last time I flew with my father was the day after Christmas in 1966, five months after we returned from our coast to coast flight. It was last in many respects. My father never barnstormed again, and he rarely flew in private planes. But I was approaching my sixteenth birthday, and there was one more chore for him to perform. That morning, my father looked up at the breakfast table and examined my face as if we were strangers.

In fact, we were practically strangers. After Kern left for college our old threesome had broken up, and my father and I had quickly grown apart. It wasn’t deliberate on his part or mine, it was just something we knew was wise to do. I was busy in school all week and led an active social life over the weekend, having reached the point where an outgoing boy doesn’t want to have much to do with his parents anymore. My father was preoccupied with work, finishing up a book, and his increasing fascination with “alternative politics” and civil rights. We hardly saw each other anymore, but there was one last respite to enjoy, one more time together in the air.

“Rinker,” my father said, “Let’s go out and solo you in the Cub. I always promised myself that I’d live to see the day both you and Kern were soloed. I just want to get it over with.”

I will still three days shy of the legal flying age of sixteen, and no licensed instructor had signed my logbook for solo, but I didn’t see any reason to object. Kern would have his instructor’s rating soon and could finish me off for my private pilot’s test. I wanted to solo and there was no question that I could handle a Piper Cub. And certainly in this old Stearman man I had an able instructor.

Snow had fallen over the past few days, and the runway was covered over in many spots by drifts. A sheet of white ice covered the low area in the middle. But there was six hundred feet of usable space at the north end of the field and a brisk wind was blowing straight down the strip.

There wasn’t a heater in 71-Hotel, and my father was shivering in the backseat as we taxied out in the snow. Taking off, we used every inch of clear space and blasted into the air through a drift. Fresh powder swirled around the plane and crept into the cockpit through the cracks by the windows and the door. I remember that like a picture, because it caused a sudden and rapid deterioration of age in my father that I instantly knew to be prescient. He hadn’t shaved that morning and the snow blowing in stuck like confetti to his whiskers. I looked back, and the man who had taught me to fly was Rip Van Winkle.

I hadn’t flown in a while but I found that being rusty didn’t hurt me much in the old Cub. Carb heat, three cranks on the trim, chop the power, and maintain 65. We circuited the wintery patch a couple of times and my landings were okay. Then my father got out and leaned into the front of the cockpit for some last words.

“All right Rinker, go ahead,” he said. “There’s nothing more I can teach you in an airplane.”

I blasted off through the drifts and circuited the airport, euphoric to be flying alone, amazed at the lightness of the plane and the controls without my father in the rear seat. I was shivering from the cold, but I was awed by the beauty of the white, snowy landscape all around me, mounded hills and naked stands of trees rolling off to the horizon in Pennsylvania on one side and over to the Atlantic on the other, with the sun glinting off the black ice on the nearby lakes. The Continental roared, the floorboards throbbed, and the cockpit smelled of burnt oil, and I loved being alone in the Cub.

My father warned me that I might overshoot my first approach—without his weight in the rear, the plane wouldn’t want to descend and mush to a stall in all that wind. I overshot just as he predicted, but I didn’t let it rattle me. Fire-walling the throttle, I flew around again, and on the second try I did a decent job shoehorning the Cub into the short space, deliberately scraping the wheels onto the first drift to help stall the plane. Plowing through the snow and throwing up great white plumes with the prop, I taxied over toward the hangar.

My father stepped out and kangarooed over, shivering and walking sideways in the wind with his pipe billowing out cinders and smoke.

“Good, Rinker. I always said you could handle a plane just as well as Kern, once you settled down. Now go ahead. Take off again and fly around for a while in 71-Hotel.”

The wind was really kicking up now and blowing in crossways, surrounding the plane with vortices of snow. But the windsock was pointed directly at me, so I just powered up right there and went off the ramp, Eddie Mahler style. As soon as I broke ground I cross-controlled against the drift, cranked in all of my trim and hung the Cub on its prop. With the plane steeply angled up, I kept my eye on the flagpole down in front of the high school to remain perfectly aligned with the runway. I enjoyed that, climbing almost vertically in the crab and never giving an inch to the drift while my father watched from below. When I looked down to him he waved a couple of times and smoke was blowing all over the place from his pipe. I felt good about it and the strong winds rifling the wings from the side reminded me of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Carlsbad, New Mexico, and then I realized something important about myself. In one respect I was just like Kern. The rougher the conditions, the better I flew.

My father told me to fly around for a while and enjoy myself, so that’s how I handled it. As soon as I got up to altitude and had the Cub leveled and trimmed I was joyful all over again to be soloed in a plane, and that just made me very hungry for a hamburger. The Walker family over at Somerset airport ran a very good snack bar so I flew over there. The crosswind was pretty bad there too and cranky old George Walker wasn’t happy to see me landing in it, but I got down okay and let him yell at me for a couple of minutes before I went in for my burger. Then I decided to take in Princeton—maybe Larry Tokash, or Big Eddie, would be down there. As soon as I got into the air I remembered that I didn’t have a map, but that was another nice moment. I was one of the coast to coast kids. I didn’t need a map to find Princeton. Route 206 ran right by the airport down there and the road was practically underneath my wing already, at the Flemington Circle. When I got into Princeton Big Eddie wasn’t around, but Larry was, and he bought me a hot chocolate from the vending machine and we talked for a while. Larry was an FAA flight examiner by now, but also a friend.

“Shit Rinker. You shouldn’t be flying around in these winds. On your first solo no less. But hell. You got the Cub down here. I imagine you can get her back.”

On the way back I remembered that I’d promised the priests up at school to fly over the monastery as soon as I was soloed, so I went over and did that, and then winding my way back over the low hills I became transfixed by the skaters and iceboats on the lakes in Gladstone and Peapack, and I circled for a while to watch them. By the time I got back to the strip it was almost dark and the Cub was low on gas. My father had left hours ago. I tied down the Cub and hitchhiked home in the cold.

When I got in, my father was typing in his library beside the fire.

“How’d you make out?”

“Fine Dad. I did Somerset and then Princeton. Sorry. I should have called and told you where I was.”

“Nah Rinker. It’s okay. I told you to fly around for a while. I wasn’t worried.”

I didn’t mean for that flight to be symbolic, but it was. Probably my growing estrangement from my father was inevitable—many of my friends and their fathers were going through the same thing—but the turbulent events of the 1960s also had a lot to do with it. My father had always been a public man, changing with the times, and he couldn’t resist the siren call of activism sweeping the country. Even before we returned from our coast to coast flight, he was girding himself for his last great crusade.

It began innocently enough, with weekend excursions to civil rights marches down south, then the marches on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam, and before long he had joined groups like Clergy and Laity Concerned and was holding strategy sessions for local demonstrations in our living room at home. He got arrested a lot at peace demonstrations. Other men of his stature and age—writers, ministers, university professors—were doing the same thing by the late 1960s, but they usually had enough sense not to deck the cops. When he was manhandled by officers at demonstrations in New Jersey, and then again at Foley Square in New York, my father fought back. The police and the district attorneys, bringing him up on assault charges, never seemed to understand that there wasn’t a judge in the country who was going to throw this one-legged father of eleven into jail, so he always beat the rap. But his trials attracted a lot of attention and were covered in the press, and he soon gained a reputation within the “movement” as a kind of aging firebrand who had made a rather classic transition from establishment politics to radical causes. Invitations for him to speak poured in from all over the country. Defense attorney William Kunstler, pacifist David Dellinger, and the antiwar priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan were now his friends.

Of course, he could never do just one thing at a time. To his delight, he had also emerged as an author. He had finished writing
But Daddy!
, a humorous and anecdotal account of his experiences raising eleven children, the year after we made our coast to coast flight. It was modestly successful as a hardcover book but took off in paperback, and soon he was in demand before women’s and church groups on this subject too. To help define and package him, his lecture agent in Washington called him the Catholic Dr. Spock. In 1968 he quit his job at
Look
and lived off his proceeds from lecturing and writing.

I spent my last three years at home in the throes of a most curious role reversal. While my father was radicalized by the sixties, I was the smug conservative, mainly interested in girls, expensive foreign cars, and accumulating enough advanced placement credits to shave a year off college. Occasionally I joined my father at peace demonstrations, and because it was expected of me, I was active in social causes myself, organizing food drives for indigent families down south and tutoring underprivileged children up in town. But I was too numb inside and distracted by something else to know if my heart was really in it.

My father’s health had visibly begun to slide, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. There had always been something inadvertently suicidal about his behavior—not just the way he flew, but the sheer variety of his activities, the killer pace he set. His doctors had warned him for years that phantom pains generally grew worse with age, and that his only protection from them was leading a more leisurely life and reducing stress. But my father was never going to do that. The harder he drove himself, the worse the phantoms became, and that only made him feel old and angry at himself for spending too much time in bed. After each successive attack, it took him longer and longer to recuperate. But as soon as he felt better again he accepted another speaking engagement and jumped onto another airliner, almost as if he was deliberately running away so he wouldn’t have to face himself. He was a burnout case who didn’t know it.