Flight of Passage: A True Story (12 page)

Finally I saw the Champ wallowing up in the haze out over our house. Kern leveled off at 1,500 feet and flew back over the horse track. He waved the wings to show me that he was all right. I waved back and whipped the horse around the track.

I ran a couple of more horses that morning and pretended to myself that I wasn’t upset. Kern had kept his head and brilliantly recovered from a low-level spin, further proof of his exceptional flying skills. Maybe, just to spook me, he had deliberately held the spin until he was on top of the trees. Perhaps I should even be grateful. My father’s spin-training had saved Kern.

Fear, however, is a lot more stubborn than that and it doesn’t let you off the hook. I trudged home that night exhausted and worried, little twitches of anger flickering through my arms. Ten days before we departed on our dream coast to coast flight, my brother the pilot had missed killing himself by inches. All of my suppressed fears about my family’s swashbuckling flying style were revived. Kern’s fearlessness in the air wasn’t the asset I thought it was. He was going to kill himself someday if he didn’t watch it, and he could kill me. Why would I take off for California with a yahoo like this?

Kern was working at the Acme when I got home, so I sulked in the barn for a while and then I sulked in my room. When I heard him come in late from work, I shut off my light and got into bed. I didn’t want to face him yet.

Kern quietly undressed in his room. He left his door open and I could hear him in there, sighing his penitential mantra. “Jeez . . . Jeez. . . . ah Jeez.” He didn’t want to face me either so he spoke through the open door.

“Rink, I know you’re awake.”

“Yeah.”

“Look. I’m sorry. It was incredibly stupid, Rink. I almost killed myself today.”

“No kidding.”

“Well, I know what you’re thinking.”

“Oh, great. You even know what I’m thinking.”

“Rink, I promise. I’m not going to spin you in the Cub.”

“Gee, thanks. I really appreciate that.”

“Rink, have a little sympathy, will you? I’ve been furious with myself all day. I hate myself for this. Daddy keeps telling me that I have to set an example for you. I have to get you to trust me. Now I’ve done this. Jeez, I
hate
myself.”

Shit. The guilt trip. Kern was very effective at that. Now I had to find a way to make him feel better.

“Kern, relax. I’m past it, okay? It could have been me up there, spinning the plane. Everybody’s an asshole once in a while and this just happened to be your day.”

“Okay Rink. Thanks. But look, don’t call me an asshole. Yes, I spun my aircraft. But I knew what to do and I recovered. In fact, it was a classic departure stall-spin, a textbook case. And that’s the point, Rink. I was trained for this and I knew exactly what to do. That doesn’t make me an asshole.”

“Right. The textbook case. Sorry. I promise. I’ll never call you an asshole again.”

“Thanks. Now look, don’t tell Daddy about this, all right?”

“Ah Christ Kern. Why would I tell Daddy? I said you’re an asshole.
I’m
not an asshole.”

“Jeez . . . Rink, Jeez . . . Okay. But just for the record?”

“Yeah. For the record.”

“Champs suck.”

A side of me was always glad that Kern spun the Champ. It was a big blunder for him, a big scare for us to get past together. My father never did find out about it and Kern was extremely grateful that I kept his secret. He trusted me now.

A few days later Kern and I pulled our last all-nighter in the barn. All month, Kern had dawdled over minor repairs to the plane, and I was beginning to suspect that his perfectionism masked last-minute jitters about the flight. We planned to depart over the July Fourth weekend, just two weeks away. Now we were racing to finish everything in one night so we could reassemble the plane at the airport over the weekend. Then a licensed mechanic could inspect our work and issue us an airworthiness certificate.

My father was watching the calendar too, and he had lost all patience with Kern. He was constantly peppering Kern with questions about the plane, goading him to finish. He seemed desperate, almost crazed, for us to get the plane out to the airport, and I could see that he was getting emotionally charged about our trip.

After he came in from work that night my father stormed out to the shop. He must have been stewing about it all week, because he didn’t start out slowly, the way he usually did with Kern.

“Kern, this plane is perfect!” my father bellowed. “You’re not going to hang the thing in the Museum of Modern Art. Get it out of here!”

My father’s fury crippled both of us, but it was particularly hard on Kern. He knew that almost anything he said was useless when my father lost control like that. All he could do was stand there with a wrench in his hand and a dejected look on his face.

“Dad, wait! Wait! Let me explain.”

“Horseshit! I don’t want any explanations. I want this plane at the airport.”

Usually I would just let them fight it out. Kern’s reticence about confronting my father was his problem, I thought. But I was fed up with my father that night and viewed his visit to the barn as an invasion of our territory. Maybe I could pull him away from Kern by deflecting attention toward me.

“Hey Dad!” I screamed. “It just so happens we’re taking this Cub to the airport tomorrow. So pipe down.”

“Now goddam it Rinky, you stay out of this. This is between Kern and me.”

“Bull. It’s between you and nobody.
I’ve
worked with Kern all winter on this plane.”

“Oh, I see. I’m just some old fart you want to push out of the way, is that it?”

“Hey! Your words, Dad. Your words.”

Furious, my father fished a pipe out of his pocket and lit it. His position was hopeless and he knew it. For years he’d pumped us full of admonitions about brotherly love, how Kern and I had to stick together to accomplish things, and now I was swinging it back at him like a wrecking ball. He stood there lopsided, looking at us and the plane with this quizzical, pathetic look on his face.

“All right then,” he yelled. “Tomorrow! I want this plane at the airport tomorrow!”

He steamed out and left for the house. As he receded into the darkness, the lights from the shop lit his silhouette from behind. When he was angry like that his bad leg jerked up at the knee and gave him a hideous limp, and his head was bent forward with this vacant, hurt look on his face.

We went back to work on the plane. Kern was spraying with the Sears compressor, applying a finish coat of red paint on the wing struts. He looked up when he was done.

“Rink, you know what my damn problem is with Daddy?”

“No, what?”

“I like the guy. I just
like
him. I can never stay mad at him for more than five minutes.” The Rocky Mountains were endlessly alluring to me, a walled labyrinth resisting safe passage in a fragile, low-flying Cub. I knew from my reading and from studying maps that we should cross somewhere south in the range, near El Paso, but I couldn’t find the right pass. My father was worried too. He suggested that we seek the advice of an experienced crosscountry pilot, Alex Yankaskas, who was the chief pilot for the Ronson Corporation and the father of one of our friends. Yankaskas flew Ronson executives all over the country in twin-engine corporate planes, and he knew the west well. He came over for a visit one Saturday afternoon in late June.

Yankaskas was a quiet, gentle man with all of the advanced pilot ratings, and he didn’t have a lot of tolerance for the kind of crazyass barnstorming flying that we did. We could tell from the questions he asked that he was skeptical about two boys flying coast to coast in a Piper Cub without a radio. He gave Kern and me a solemn lecture about the conditions we would face, and he was particularly concerned that we understood the concept of “density altitude.” At the high elevations and scorching temperatures we’d be operating in out west, the air would provide a lot less lift and the engine wouldn’t run very efficiently. In high density altitude conditions, a plane flying at 6,000 feet actually “feels” as if it is flying at 8,000 feet. Takeoff and landing distances can double and even triple and planes dismally wallow in a climb. We promised Yankaskas that we would bone up on the principle, but we never did.

It was Yankaskas who showed us the route through the Rocky Mountains. My heart fluttered as he laid the El Paso sectional chart flat on the coffee table in our living room, fishing a pencil out of his pocket to use as a pointer.

The pass. It was the route through the mountains, the gateway to the Pacific. It was a highly mysterious and emotional place for me. I had always been captivated by the early airmail era in aviation, when brave men flew open cockpit in any weather to get their cargo through, and many of them died doing it. The “southern route” that they pioneered through the Rockies was legendary, and all of the aviation greats—Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, Jimmy Doolittle, and Ernest Gann—had flown it at one time or another. Now Kern and I, in a plane no better than the Mailwings and Fairchilds that the airmail pilots flew, would follow the same narrow opening through the great continental wall.

I was passionate about discovering the pass for another reason. My father had never fulfilled his dream of flying himself across the Rockies. His only transcontinental attempt, in 1937, had ended ignominiously in engine failure, just east of the mountains. Kern wanted to fly coast to coast for many reasons, but mostly he was trying to discover himself and find a way to stand out. Over the past year I had gradually realized something important about my own motivation. I wanted to beat my father at something, and beat him good. He had never made it across the mountains himself. If Kern and I beat him there and got through, this would not be something he could question or correct or make us do over—it would be fact. I was fixated on the mountains and the pass as a way to measure myself against my father.

“The pass is right here boys, in the Guadalupe Mountains,” Yankaskas said.

He pointed to a narrow ravine between two tall peaks, 8,700 feet high, the twin Guadalupe Peaks. The hard black and gray hatch-markings for the peaks looked ominous and challenging, with swiftly climbing contour lines sweeping up from the deserts of West Texas along a 70-mile wall of even higher peaks. El Paso lay 80 miles due west, and the Rio Grande River curved and eddied along the Mexican border 100 miles to the south. Otherwise, there was nothing but the endless monotony of the deserts marked in beige. We would have to work, just to find the pass.

We would have to work, too, getting over it. The pass was too narrow, and the prevailing “westerlies” whistling through it were too turbulent, to just barrel in between the peaks. We had to
clear
them by well over 1,000 feet, which meant climbing the Cub to well over 10,000 feet. On a hot day in July, this would mean achieving a density altitude of 12,000 or 13,000 feet. It didn’t seem possible. The manual for our Cub listed a “maximum altitude” of 10,000 feet, and those published numbers were always notoriously optimistic. We’d be pushing the Cub well past its limits for the whole leg over the mountains.

But that was our mountain, and I was excited just to know its name. Guadalupe. She was the point we’d fly for. I circled the twin peaks in red grease pencil and studied the El Paso and Albuquerque sectionals for nearby airports. Where would we launch for the pass? Even the names sounded romantic—Artesia and Carlsbad in New Mexico, and in west Texas, Pecos and Wink.

Yankaskas gave us another solemn lecture on how to fly the pass. We were to climb for as much altitude as possible and prepare ourselves for brutal leeward turbulence, and then stiff rotors and wind shear on the far side. If the weather reports called for winds greater than fifteen knots, we should wait and try for another day. We shouldn’t be afraid to abort, but that decision had to be made at least two miles out. Once we got up near the peaks, there was no turning back. The violent downdrafts and turbulent “ridge effect” could turn us over and plunge us down onto the rocks as soon as we gave up the westerlies on our nose.

Yankaskas put his hands on his knees and stared at us across the coffee table.

“Boys,” he said, “This is very serious business. The Rockies are treacherous. Pilots a lot more experienced than you have killed themselves out there. Don’t treat this as a lark.”

Kern and I nodded attentively, but we weren’t really listening. We were young and anxious to be on our way, swelled with the adolescent delusion of invincibility. Fifteen knots of wind didn’t sound like very much.

My father embarrassed us that day in front of Yankaskas. After we were done with the maps we all sat in my father’s library and drank Cokes. My father got into yarning and telling flying tales. Mr. Yankaskas fiddled with his fingertips and his wedding band. Barnstorming blarney was not one of his pastimes.

One of my father’s favorite flying stories was his abortive transcontinental flight. In 1937 he was paid $85 to ferry an open-cockpit Travelair from Dothan, Alabama, to San Diego. In those days pilots flying ships with the old water-cooled engines carried a ten-gallon waterbag lashed between the wheels, like the Dust Bowl Okies heading west in their jalopies. Aircraft radiators were notoriously leaky and frequently boiled over on a hot day. When the prop started throwing too much steam back into his face, a pilot picked a field or a level road, dead-sticked in, and refilled the radiator from the waterbag. Cooled for a while, the plane flew out fine.