The Cannibal Queen (48 page)

I can’t do it. The wind is shifting directions and gusting and the Queen’s bucking like a pony at the county fair. I wave off and tell the Unicom man I’m going on down the road.

I would try it if I had to, but I don’t. Ashland, Wisconsin, is just 30 miles west and they have a runway pointed southwest.

The Ashland Unicom man says the wind is blowing at 34 knots.

Thirty-four?

Yeah, but it’s within ten degrees of runway 22 at Ashland. I’m flying into the eye of a hurricane. Every wind report is worse than the last one.

At Ashland I flatten the glide angle with power—I’ve got lots of excess runway—and concentrate on getting her to light on all three at the same time. I don’t concentrate hard enough and the mains touch first. She bounces as I try to pull the tail down. Now the tail touches, then the mains.

And with the power at idle, she is instantly down to taxi speed. “An arrested landing,” I comment on the radio.

“Yeah,” said the Unicom man, “but we liked the second landing best.” Then he hastens to add, “None of us could have done it any better.”

They can’t fool me. They all think they could. If they didn’t think that they shouldn’t be flying airplanes. Flying is an assortment of skills that one must acquire, practice, and try to perfect.

If you aren’t proud of your skill, you don’t work hard enough at it.

I’ll be honest—Steve Coonts is the world’s finest pilot still strapping them to his ass.

Ashland lies on an inlet on the southern shore of Lake Superior. The air temperature in the high 90s is unusual, rare. Sitting in his new log cabin office, the airport manager shakes his head in amazement.

The log cabin is a piece of work. The logs are big, fitted tightly, and the rafters inside are bolted together. This structure was built to endure harsh winters for a lot of years. The airport manager at Bryce Canyon, Utah, needs an office like this to complement his 1936-vintage log hangar.

Run your hands over the logs, finger the imperfections in the wood, examine how the logs are notched and fitted together. Built to last, like the Stearman.

Soon I am on my way again with the freshwater inland sea of Lake Superior on my right. Storms over the lake make it look dark and gray. The lake ends in a point at Duluth, Minnesota, and I fly slowly on, out across the Minnesota lake country, “the land of ten thousand lakes.” I believe it. The flat, forested land is pockmarked with lakes as far as the eye can see (about twelve miles in this haze), dimpled like the surface of a golf ball. There are too many lakes and they all look alike, so it is impossible to use these things for navigation. As usual, I’m stuck with roads and towns and the occasional railroad track.

The wind is still blowing ferociously and the
Queen
is still bucking. When I land at Brainerd, Minnesota, the temperature is 96 degrees. Inside the office building the line boy offers to call a motel that will send a car but I ask him to wait a little bit. I’ve had too much flying. I need to sit awhile on something that doesn’t move.

The coffeepot is still on. I pour myself a cup and sit looking out the window at the runways and the treeline beyond and the big sky covering everything.

The next morning I’m 40 minutes west of Brainerd under indefinite clouds, headed for Fargo and bucking a wind from the southwest, when I spot it. Yes, an airport with three—count them, three—grass runways!

I quickly check the chart. Yep, it’s a public field, right here at Wadena, Minnesota. And, glory be, they have a runway pointed right into that southwest wind. Now that is a piece of luck.

Quicker than a pickpocket can snag a wallet I have the power back and am banking into a left downwind for the southwest runway. No one answers my Unicom call, but that’s normal. It’s a public field and there are no cattle on the runway, so here I come.

The
Cannibal Queen
likes grass. Invariably she gives me her best landings on the green stuff. She does this time too, a perfect three-point that will be something to think about this winter on cold, snowy evenings.

Safely on the ground, I look about like a lucky K-Mart shopper. The grass is mowed like a PGA fairway and the areas between runways have just been hayed. The rolls of hay lie safely off the runways, which are outlined with bright yellow markers.

At the south end of the field is a little office and three or four hangars. I taxi over to the office and the two fuel pumps. Now which is which? One will probably contain 100 octane, which I am feeding the Queen, and the other will contain automobile gasoline—mogas—for airplanes that can use it. The pumps are so old and weathered I can’t tell one from another, so I park the
Queen
by the one against the building and kill the engine.

No one comes out. After the unstrapping ceremony, I get out the camera and photograph the
Queen
with the grass runways in the background. This chore takes a couple minutes. There are two cars behind the building, but still no signs of life.

Finally I try the office door. It’s unlocked. Inside is a counter with an honor-system snack box, comfortable chairs, lots of flying magazines, a pop machine and a restroom. I use the rest-room and go back outside for a smoke.

When I have been here a quarter of an hour I go back inside and inspect the place more closely. A lot of flying stories have been told in this room, crops discussed, the fortunes of the high school football team, the weather endlessly. On the wall a half-page clipping from a newspaper published in April 1990 informs me that Frank Pothen, the manager and operator of the Wadena Airport, just turned eighty years old. The story has a photo of Mr. Pothen at the controls of his Piper Colt in which he still gives flight instruction. He first soloed on May 22, 1931, and, according to the FAA, is believed to be the oldest active pilot in Minnesota.

But he isn’t here. Probably went flying. Or to town for coffee. And left the place unlocked. After all, this is Wadena, not L.A. or the Bad Apple. The folks in the cafe on Main Street will probably tell you—this is God’s country, full of honest folk. Then the waitress will say she hasn’t locked her door in years. And the guy on the next stool will tell you he still leaves the keys in his car. Who would steal it?

Indeed. Who?

Rumbling thunder brings me back outside. A storm three or four miles north is tossing lightning bolts at the ground. Some rain is falling up that way. And there’s a boomer to the west. They’re partially embedded in the haze but the lightning flashes give them away.

I sit listening to the thunder and watching the storms and the wind sock as my pipe smoke hurries away on the wind.

This hasn’t been a wet summer here. The grass is dry and yellowish and the dirt has the consistency of dust.

According to the newspaper, Mr. Pothen has managed this airport for over twenty years. That’s a lot of flight students, a lot of thunderstorms, snows in the winter, wet springs, summer afternoons with baseball on the radio, gorgeous falls with touchdowns and halftime bands.

Sixty years of flying. … I wonder if Mr. Pothen regrets any of it. Does he wish he had flown for an airline, or perhaps farmed a little place ten miles out of town? I wonder …

Money and material possessions are not the measure of a life well lived. Fame? That’s smoke on the wind.

Looking at the Queen, almost a half century old, against the grass runways and thinking about Mr. Pothen, I can’t help but take inventory of my own life, my career. As much as I love flying, I long ago concluded that I didn’t want to spend my life doing it. I didn’t like law, which is merely helping people settle disputes, all of which boil down to money—how much? If you help rich people settle theirs you make a lot of it. But.

Writing books seems like an occupation more likely to make a lasting impression, until you’re in it and find out that the shelf life of a paperback novel is about a month. That’s it—a month on the shelf and the ones that haven’t sold are recycled into grocery bags. Hardcovers? Go to your library and look at all the best-sellers of yesteryear that nobody reads today.

Before I get very much older I am going to build a house, one made of stone and brick and logs. I’m going to build it with my own hands on a mountain where I can watch the storms and look at the stars at night. That is what I want to do with my life.

Sound silly? I suppose.

I’m going to do it someday.

There’s blue sky to the northwest between the thunderstorms, in the direction I have to go. I knock out my pipe and climb into the Queen.

The southwest runway points straight at Wadena, so I go over town climbing at full power. It’s a nice little town, like a thousand others that I’ve flown over this summer. It could be in Texas or California or Illinois or anywhere. But it’s here, in Minnesota, with a little airport that has never been paved and an eighty-one-year-old active pilot as the airport manager. So it’s special.

Passing between the two boomers the
Queen
gets a light rinse, not enough to even wet the plane thoroughly. No turbulence. On the other side of the shower the sky clears and the wind shifts to the southeast. Now it’s a tailwind. This was the front the briefer mentioned this morning. And a thin line of scattered thunderstorms was the whole shebang.

The sun comes out and shines on the Queen’s wings. They look brilliant against the greens of the land.

Flying west into Fargo, North Dakota, I notice the trees are no longer a forest. They’re in groves and woodlots between cultivated fields and hayfields. This is the eastern edge of the Great Plains. The western edge is the first upslope of the Rockies.

This will be the fourth time this summer I have flown the Great Plains. This southeast wind will probably shift to the southwest, yet even so, the Great Plains will be worth it. Once a great sea of grass that supported millions of buffalo and thousands of Indians, today the plains are America’s breadbasket. Here the grain that feeds America and a large portion of the rest of the world is grown as the seasons cycle by with their sun, rain and snow. As old as the planet, this cycle is life to the people here, far from big cities and big city worries. Every hour the local radio stations give the information that these people need—the weather and the farm report. Natives of the big cities of the East regard the plains as merely dreary stretches to pass through, which in a way is sad even if it is understandable. This is America’s beating heart.

I stop for fuel at Jamestown on the western edge of the intensely cultivated Red River valley, only nine-tenths of an hour west of Fargo. At the Queen’s modest rate of progress the airports with fuel west of here are far apart. And the wind has shifted, now straight out of the south. I’ll be bucking it south west ward.

Still, leaving Jamestown I climb to 6,500 feet. The visibility is up to about 30 miles. The scale out here is huge, the landmarks far apart just like everything else, so I must get up where I can see.

From almost a mile above the earth the view is spectacular, although limited by the haze. I follow a two-lane highway south, one with ranches arranged a mile or so apart. Thirty minutes south of Jamestown the road doglegs east at the town of Edgeley, but I am through with it. I strike off southwest for the town of Mobridge, South Dakota, on the Missouri River. I pass over an area used only for grazing before I get back to wheat country.

Southwest of Ashley I follow an abandoned railroad right-of-way that is going in my direction. Not too many years ago the railroad was the only way to market wheat and cattle, corn and hogs. It was also the best way to travel and the carrier that delivered fuel, clothes, spare parts and machinery, and goodies from Sears & Roebuck. Then after World War II the roads out here were improved and trucks and cars became practical. Finally trucks could do it cheaper than trains, so an era ended.

The Missouri River in this section of South Dakota is a lake. They dammed the river 70 miles south of Mobridge at Pierre, so today the Missouri here is wider than the Mississippi and long arms of water reach up the valleys. Yet all this water is between empty hills covered with yellow grass this late in the summer. A few roads, a rare house, and nothing else. Not a tree anywhere. Not one.

These hills must look almost exactly as they did to Lewis and Clark when they came up this river on their way west to the Pacific, back in 1805. Thomas Jefferson sent them to find out what the United States had just paid France fifteen million bucks for. And Lewis and Clark found out: oceans of grass, mountains with glaciers, great huge valleys so big they stun the human eye. The United States had purchased an empire.

Today Mobridge is a small town on the main drag east and west, U.S. Route 12. But Route 12 is not an interstate, not four lanes. It’s precisely two lanes of blacktop threading its way westward from Aberdeen and crossing the river here on a bridge, the bridge that gave the town its name.

They just repaved the runway at the airport. It looks nice, but I’m too busy fighting the 70-degree, 15-knot crosswind to appreciate it. The landing isn’t pretty.

The fuel man isn’t in the office. The only person there, a flight instructor waiting for a student, tells me he has been called. When the fuel man arrives we gas the plane, then he loans me his elderly Buick for the two mile jaunt into town.

Signs on the edge of town proclaim that Mobridge is the Walleye capital of the world, “the Oasis of the Oahe.” They call the river Lake Oahe. The temperature on the bank clock reads 96 degrees.

Rick’s Cafe in the heart of downtown Mobridge is the first eatery I see. Sure enough, they have a wall covered with big movie posters and publicity shots from
Casablanca
. I eat a bowl of chili with Humphrey Bogart smoldering over my shoulder.

Halfway through a hamburger it occurs to me that I have just landed in the 48th State since I left Boulder on June 8. South Dakota was the last one.

So I’ve done it! I’ve flown over and landed in all 48 of the contiguous United States in the
Cannibal
Queen. In one summer.

I haven’t crashed. I haven’t had a major breakdown. I haven’t run out of gas and landed in some farmer’s potato field. I’ve left two credit cards behind and had to call and have them mailed home. I’ve trashed four pairs of socks and bought more. I’ve gone through 17 rolls of film and maybe have three decent photographs.