The Cannibal Queen (23 page)
What Twain forgot to mention is that Cooper told a whale of a story. Cooper was one of the first novelists to write action-adventure plots as we know them today. It would be nice if every published work by every author was a masterpiece, but this is the real world. I think a book should be enjoyed for what the author did put in, not discarded because of what he didn’t. But nobody is ever going to hire me to do literary criticism.
Otsego is not large in comparison with other lakes in this part of the world. Rather modest. Staring down from 3,500 feet, I see the roughness of surface chop and speedboats plowing wakes. Still, with only a little stretch I can imagine Deerslayer and his Indian pal gliding across the glassy-smooth surface in a birchbark canoe. That’s really a personality defect—I’ve a hyperactive imagination and I’m a hopeless romantic. Maybe a good shrink could help me.
At the lower end of Lake Otsego is the town named after the Cooper family, Cooperstown. In this municipal memorial to the writer that couldn’t write, the power that rules the universe has placed the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’ve never been there but I’m going someday. I want to see the bat that Babe Ruth used to hit his 60th home run on September 30, 1927, and the ball that went soaring out over the fence as those fans chosen by fate to witness that blow screamed themselves hoarse.
Leaving Cooperstown I point the
Queen
260 degrees, then fudge a little to the south to allow for the prevailing southerly wind. The country west of here is small farms and woodlots in gently rolling terrain with few prominent features. There are a few crossroads villages, but I can’t tell one from the other. To my weary eye they all look alike with their few dozen houses clustered around a pointy church steeple. The weather is getting better and better. The sunlight makes the Queen’s yellow wings too bright to look at without squinting.
I’m flying at 3,500 feet now, my visibility limited only by the haze. As the minutes tick by I begin to fidget. Let’s see, we left Cooperstown at 5:21
P.M.
on a course for Norwich, thirty miles away. That town on the right should be New Berlin, but where the heck is the sawmill south of town? And that race track to the east, that’s not on the chart. Well, it’s got to be New Berlin, that’s the only place it could be, so I’ll mark us here at 5:34.
More minutes pass. Where is Norwich? Well, it’s a cinch it should be around here someplace. The wind must be drifting me north.
I scan southward and see a town. The town’s in a valley, that’s right. … I fly south. Boy, I sure got pushed off course. That’s a good breeze from the south.
But that isn’t Norwich! Norwich has an airport north of town. That town has an airport … is that the airport? Yes, the airport is on the western edge of town. That’s Sidney.!
Oops!
I swing the plane northwest and study the chart. Ah ha, that town I thought was New Berlin was really this little village of Morris, which has a racetrack. So the wind is out of the north, and I compounded the error by turning south. You should have noticed that, Steve! You should have noticed the drift on the last leg, down the lake toward Cooperstown. You should have been examining the chop to see which way the wind was blowing, but you were thinking about guys with flintlock rifles in birchbark canoes.
Feeling rather asinine, I ponder how devilishly easy it is to make a mistake like this even when I am flying at 3,500 feet with eight or ten miles visibility.
Just then the engine stumbles. Just a hiccup, a half second of dead sound.
The adrenaline whacks me in the heart; the heart and respiration rate instantly double.
With a shaky hand I shove the mixture knob forward a half inch and study my three little engine gauges. Oil temperature 160 degrees, oil pressure 55 PSI, and cylinder head temp 190 degrees. All normal.
I listen like an old maid trying to hear a cat burglar at three in the morning. Now the Lye runs smooth as sipping whiskey. The RPM and manifold pressure needles look like they’re glued in place. The sound is a steady, throbbing hum.
The mind races. This happened to me once before, so I’m not as scared as I got the first time. I talked to Steve Hall about it and he assured me that there was nothing wrong mechanically.
“Nothing mechanical,” I chant to myself.
Steve thought that maybe a slug of water or dirt went through the carb. But he could find absolutely nothing wrong with the aircraft.
The
Cannibal Queen
is going to age me before she eats me. That little hiccup cost me two years off the top end.
As I fly I meditate on the evil perversity that all mechanical devices possess, and decide that I probably had the mixture just a touch too lean. That must have been it.
Relief floods me when I sight Ithaca in the haze and pull the power back for a descent. The tower gives the altimeter setting as 29.78 inches of mercury. The barometer is dropping. Another front is on the way!
I don’t care. I’ve had enough excitement for one day.
At 7
A.M.
on Sunday morning at a Sheraton in Ithaca I stare glumly at the rain pouring down, watch the lightning flashes, listen to the booming of the thunder. I haven’t seen a storm like this since Florida, and it’s only seven o’clock in the morning! The front is no longer west of here someplace; it’s right over my head!
Out at the airport the
Cannibal Queen
is getting another bath. She’ll be the cleanest dirty airplane in six states when this is over. Unfortunately rainwater will not take off the oily grime. Dirt and dust yes, but not the real crud.
Grounded in Ithaca without a car. Sounds like the title of a soap opera. If only David were here, with his cowlicks and braces and impish grin; he’d liven things up.
A
T 9 A.M.
T
HAT
S
UNDAY THE RAIN STOPPED
. AT 11:20 I WAS airborne and headed northwest for blue skies and Niagara Falls. The plan was to get fuel at the Niagara Falls airport, fly over the falls and photograph it, then head southwest for Ohio. Alas, my schemes rarely go as planned and this one was no exception. The weather was fine, about 4,500 scattered, visibility about 30 miles near Rochester but deteriorating as I neared Buffalo. I bucked fifteen knots of headwind from Rochester westward as the engine hummed merrily, no stumble or burble or hiccups. Lord, what do
you
think?
The Flight Service briefer thought I was trying to be funny when I called from the Niagara Falls airport and told her I wanted to go southwest VFR in the general direction of Cleveland. Intense thunderstorms covered half the sky in Detroit and Cleveland, Erie was IFR, and I should keep my antique flying machine firmly on the ground.
“But tomorrow will be better,” she told me, trying to soften the message. “The front will have passed by then. The prog (forecast, or prognosis, charts) shows patchy ground fog in the morning across your route, but it will burn off by ten or eleven o’clock.”
I thanked her and tied the
Queen
down in the grass beside the fueling mat. Yeah, tomorrow will be better. I’ve heard that song before. I can even hum it and sing a few stanzas.
The fuel attendant was a guy named Chuck who looked at the big yellow Stearman with affection. “Haven’t seen one of those since the Red Baron Pizza Team was here.” He told me the team gives pricey rides in Niagara Falls every year and donates the proceeds to Children’s Hospital. “And they sell a lot of pizza,” he added.
I’m familiar with Red Baron Pizza’s red-and-white Stearmans. They were out in Colorado this spring giving rides. They did aerobatics near Boulder and I watched them from my porch. The 450-HP R-985 Pratt & Whitneys they run sound impressive (read
loud
) I suspect the pizza team Stearmans are fully IFR-capable or they wouldn’t be running them around the country eight months of the year like they do.
“They don’t have naked women on their planes,” Chuck said, and grinned. “Just a lot of little pizzas.”
The vision of a squadron of pepperoni pizzas adorning the
Cannibal
Queen’s flanks made me shudder. “Some people got no class,” I agreed.
So here I was marooned in Niagara Falls. I decided to do what any normal person would do in Niagara Falls—rent a car and go see the thing. So I told Chuck I desired wheels. The rental place at the airport was closed Sundays, but he called the Hertz man at home. One car had been returned that morning, so he said he would come out and rent it to me, which he did.
At the Hertz office in the terminal he glanced at my Colorado driver’s license, then advised, “Try and avoid the traffic over the bridges to Canada in the evening. Half of Canada comes here to shop now that they jacked taxes over there again. And they’ll all be going home on Sunday evening.”
Of course I wanted to know why they shopped here instead of Canada. I was told that everything in Ontario costs two or three times as much as it does in the states. “It’s taxes. They tax the hell out of everything over there to pay for socialism. I don’t know where they think Canada’s going, but it sure is a bonanza for our businesses. Even gas costs twice as much over there. Every other car in the filling stations here has a Canadian tag on it. Canadians come in here all the time and rent cars to drive to the malls. That’s why I’m out of cars, as usual.
“Had a schoolteacher in here yesterday that claimed he made sixty thousand dollars a year in Canada and can retire at fifty-five. That’s what’s wrong with that country. He was painting his house, he said, and house paint over there costs thirty-five dollars a gallon. Imagine that! So he earns his huge salary over there and buys his house paint over here. And they’re buying houses here— a house here costs a third of what it does in Ontario.”
He got me a discount on a hotel room downtown and warned me not to park my car on the Canadian side. “Lots over there charge you six bucks a pop. Walk across the bridge.”
My hotel had a maple leaf flag flying out front and a big banner hanging in the lobby. “Welcome Canadians!” In my room was a give-away newspaper that told Canadians where to shop in Niagara Falls and Buffalo.
Americans know a good thing when they see it. They’re cashing in.
When I was growing up in West Virginia everyone, and I mean everyone, honeymooned in Niagara Falls. I heard the hotels had whole floors full of bridal suites with mirrors on the ceilings. My hotel did not give me a bridal suite, probably because I was paying a discounted rate and had no nervous bride fidgeting beside me. There was no mirror on the ceiling, either.
The pay telephones and pop machines in the lobby had prominent signs posted about the evil things that would happen if you fed them Canadian coins, which jam them. Banks won’t change these coins into American money, so they are essentially worthless unless you’re planning a trip to Canada in the near future. Unwary American merchants end up with a till full. Some of these coins then get passed as change to unsophisticated rustics like me.
Standing on Goat Island and watching the cataract, I was seized by a powerful urge to throw coins in. This urge also struck many of my fellow observers of this natural wonder, especially boys under ten years. I thus got rid of the three Canadian coins I had pocketed during my travels—one quarter and two dimes. I suspect a good percentage of the Canadian mint’s production goes into this river. Someday this riverbed will be a tin mine.
The observation platforms on Goat Island were like a sauna. The mist off the falls raised the humidity to 99.99 percent, which combined with the 85-to-90-degree July heat to make the sweat roll off everybody like they were fat ladies at a Labor Day picnic.
The Niagara Falls Chamber of Commerce should be justly proud of the public relations job it has done worldwide. From the look of the international crowd and the sounds of Spanish, Japanese, Swedish, German and Italian that I heard, this waterfall is on the itinerary of every foreigner alive who’s planning a trip to the States.
On a sour note, part of the river below the falls is covered with foam caused by industrial chemicals and other pollutants in the water. Americans will be pleased to hear that the soapsuds are mostly on the Canadian side of the river. However, most of the stuff that made the suds came from cities and factories on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes.
Still, even with the suds, it’s a heck of a waterfall. Best I’ve ever seen. This is the Grand Canyon of waterfalls, absolutely the biggest and most stunning, so standing here in the heat and humidity parboiling slowly, American hearts swell with pride. It’s too darn bad we have to share this waterfall with the Canadians. If we could only get them to sell us a hundred-yard-wide strip of Ontario shoreline for a mile in each direction, it would be all ours.
The thing that impressed me most was not the falls, which are indeed impressive, but the wide river coming down the chutes toward the falls. In the chutes this stupendous quantity of water accelerates, losing elevation quickly, and becomes a raging torrent racing toward the brink where it will shoot into space and fall the 160-odd feet to the rocks below. This white-water fury seems to possess infinite energy. No wonder the name of the river—Niagara—has taken on this connotation in our language.
The waters of the four upper Great Lakes have been racing these rapids to leap the falls since the end of the last ice age. This is the power of the eternal. We humans are but small motes in nature’s scheme.
Before I came to the Falls, while I was waiting for the Hertz man to arrive at the airport, Chuck and I visited. He told me about the last air show they had at Niagara Falls International, three years ago.
It seems the two solo Blue Angels were doing an opposing loop—that is, one came racing in from the east, one from the west, and after passing each other they pulled up in a loop to pass again on the top, then a third time on the bottom. This time, Chuck said, instead of passing on the top, the two planes collided. One pilot was killed on impact. The other pilot ejected and his plane crashed in a junkyard off the east end of the runway.
Niagara Falls hasn’t had an airshow since, Chuck told me. The insurance companies want $3 million now to insure the airshow, so it’s history.