That isn’t why he rates as one of the world’s premier eccentrics. Oh no. Guys that set off to hike around the world are a dime a dozen in California. Every day in this state women tell divorce judges, “He walked to the corner convenience store for a pack of cigarettes and decided to keep going, all the way around the world, and here is the postcard he sent to let me know.” They then display a card postmarked San Francisco or Vegas or Gloversville, New York, occasionally one from Europe.
What makes Francis special is that in 1973 he took a vow of silence and didn’t speak again for seventeen years, until 1990. According to the paper, he communicated during this period by “pantomime, giggling, and grunting.”
Imagine how your life would change if you tried this. Say you go to work tomorrow and don’t speak. Not a word to anyone. Just giggling and grunting. Your boss finally comes in and says the secretaries are upset, so what’s your problem?
You write a little note: “I have taken a vow of silence.”
At 10
A.M
. on a weekday you go home to give your wife the news that you have joined the ranks of the unemployed. You write her a note: “I’ve been fired.” She shrieks, she demands an explanation.
You do another little note: “I have taken a vow of silence.”
She is stunned. “What will my friends think?” she wails. “What will I tell them?”
Finally the truth will dawn on her—that all this is your fault—and she will crown you with an ashtray, then grab the checkbook and keys to the car as she announces in a quivering voice, “I’m getting a divorce.”
Sitting there amid the shattered ruins of your life, crying, giggling and grunting, it will come to you as it did to John Francis, you need to take an eighteen-year trek around the world. Since you have no car, of necessity the journey will be by foot, bicycle, and sailboat. You write notes to all your friends who will understand—both of them—and tuck your toothbrush into your shirt pocket, then lock the front door behind you on your way out. After all, you don’t want to be burgled while you’re away.
As you walk along the highway on your way out of town, a police car pulls up and the officer gets out. Remembering your vow of silence, you say nothing, merely giggle and grunt. He runs you in.
At the police station you keep your vow. Not a word passes your lips. They examine your wallet and call your wife. She tells them she never heard of you.
In jail you refuse to speak to the turnkey and other inhabitants. You refuse to talk to the psychologist when he makes his weekly visit. Before you know it, you are in front of a judge for a competency hearing. You write His Honor a note: “I have taken a vow of silence.” He sends you to a padded room at the funny farm.
How John Francis avoided this fate I have no idea. Since he’s talking again after seventeen years, maybe he would share his experiences. If he were still living in Inverness, I would have looked him up and gotten that explanation. But Francis has gone on to a new career out there in the real world.
With a resumé like that, what on earth could this man do to earn a living? I’m glad you asked that question. I wondered too.
Well, John Francis, world-class eccentric, is now an envoy for the United Nations.
Honestly!
According to the Point Reyes
Light
, a newspaper that once won a Pulitzer Prize, John Francis has been appointed Goodwill Ambassador to the World’s Grassroots Communities by the United Nations Environmental Programme (I know it’s spelled funny, but that’s what it is). After seventeen years of silence this guy came out waving a diplomatic passport!
As I drove out of Inverness and tried to keep from spilling my coffee in my lap, my hat was off to these proud people who helped mold the character of this extraordinary man.
That afternoon the fog cleared and I gave rides in the
Cannibal
Queen. First to risk life and limb with me was my nephew, Jack Coonts. Earlier that afternoon he had looked sun-bronzed and handsome as hell when he introduced me to his girlfriend, a cute blonde who also worked on the summer crew. His cousins, ages four and six, caught the two of them kissing one evening a few weeks ago and promptly reported them to the authorities, their parents. Jack just shrugged it off.
The marine layer of cool air seemed to top out about 2,000 feet, so I cruised from Petaluma to Point Reyes and back at 2,500, where the air was at least fifteen degrees warmer and smooth as silk. The sea looked like it was covered with frosted glass as the sun got lower and lower.
Next to go was Dino with six-year-old Carolyn on her lap. I forgot to give them cotton balls for their ears so Dino rode the whole way with her fingers jammed in hers. She said she enjoyed it though.
Jack Williams and four-year-old Ashley were the final passengers. I took them past the village of Point Reyes out over the national seashore almost to the lighthouse. The wings of the
Cannibal Queen
passed over South Beach outward-bound. We were on our way to Hawaii but I decided we couldn’t make it before dark, so I turned around.
The sun set just as I landed for the third time. My passengers stood on the ramp in the twilight comparing notes. If only all my days could end like this.
P
ETE
B
AUR WAS AN
F-14
PILOT FOR
U
NCLE
S
UGAR’S
N
AVY
U
NTIL
last month. In September he’ll become a cattle-car pilot for Delta Airlines. Right now he’s hanging out at the Petaluma Airport.
When I arrived two days ago he watched me tie down the
Queen
and carry my stuff through the gate to the porch of the FBO building. I didn’t know him then, of course.
As I fished in my pockets for coins for the pay phone, Pete said. “You’re Steve Coonts, aren’t you?”
I never know quite what to say when accosted in this manner. Do I owe this guy money? Did I make a pass at his wife? Hell, I don’t even know any women in California!
Since I was about his height and outweighed him by thirty pounds, I cautiously admitted that he was correct.
“I love your books.”
I exhaled. When you puff up your chest they think you’re bigger. “Terrific. Keep reading them.” Actually I want people to keep buying them—I didn’t pay for the
Queen
with lottery winnings.
We shot the breeze a while that Wednesday afternoon, and he was here on the porch when I arrived on Friday morning. We leaned on the rail and waited for the overcast layer to burn off while talking about the Navy and getting out and what kind of airplane a fellow should buy when he gets a few bucks ahead.
The scud did burn off, suddenly, as if a curtain went up. In minutes the sky was blue and empty.
Pete helped me untie the
Queen
and push her to the fuel pump. When she was gassed and oiled, I asked him if he wanted to go for a ride. This was a mere formality. No guy who wore Navy wings would turn down a ride in a plane like this unless he were terminally ill and due to expire this afternoon.
When we were level and headed south for the Golden Gate, I turned the stick and rudder over to Pete. He made gentle turns and climbs to get the feel of her. The ball stayed centered. His experience in light planes was immediately evident. Here was a jet pilot that knew what a rudder was for!
Over Hamilton, the closed Army field, we could see the fog layer above the entrance to the bay. I took the controls and trimmed the
Queen
nose down. We went under the goo at a thousand feet at the water’s edge and had to keep descending to about six hundred. We flew by the Golden Gate and turned eastward to fly between Alcatraz and the promontory of the north shore. The buildings of downtown San Francisco, the Embarcadero, Fisherman’s Wharf, all of the great city lay on our right glowing in the diffused sunlight under the cloud.
With sailboats and powerboats and ships plowing the water of the bay under us, we flew northeast across the San Rafael Bridge, where we came out from under the cloud. I climbed back to altitude and turned the
Queen
over to Pete. In the mirror I could see his wide grin.
To write about flying is not easy. To write about it well is extremely difficult. I don’t know that I do it well, but that is my goal.
Jaded airline passengers who don’t fly themselves usually look skeptical when one tries to explain that flying is more than stick, rudder and airspeed control. It is more than manifold pressure and engine RPM. To catch the emotion of it, the feel, the wonder, on paper is the challenge.
Those who don’t fly can easily envision the thrill associated with flying hot jets, the tactical military machines. They suspect those birds are the unholy offspring of a roller coaster and a Grand Prix race car and can easily believe that being at the controls is a gas, which it is.
What they find more difficult to understand is that flying anything is fun, challenging, rewarding. Any airplane. Any machine that will leave the ground. The fun factor cannot be measured by reference to the airspeed indicator or the amount of money the aircraft would bring if sold.
But flying is more than thrills, more than fun. Intertwined with all the tasks and sensations of aviation are some deep emotions that have stirred pilots since the Wright brothers. If those two ever felt any of it they didn’t try to let us know. Yet many of those who followed the Wrights into the sky have tried to tell us in words the essence of what they felt when aloft.
Lindbergh and his wife were both excellent writers and gave us flying as exploration of the world and the human spirit. Saint-Exupery gave us the experience as poetry, Ernest Gann found both challenge and peace aloft, Richard Bach tried to show us the beauty. Alas, my writing is less focused. Flying gives me all of these emotions and a host of others that will probably take a lifetime of sorting and cataloging to get right.
And language seems so pale when compared to the richness of the aviation experience. What words can I use to tell you how I felt when the Sierra Nevadas lay before me and I coaxed my little plane higher and higher into the clean moist sky?
This cunning contraption of welded steel tubing, wood and fabric rose readily, willingly, until the upper tree line of those ragged summits was even with her, then below. Slowly, aided by five or six knots of quartering tailwind, she carried me toward them. As my heart thudded out some of the allotted moments of my life and the pistons spun the crankshaft, she carried me across the reddish crests toward the sunlight and shadow playing on the emerald blue lake of Tahoe.
Shivering in the cockpit I watched the panorama change and thought how life resembles flight. We grow, mature, age slowly, imperceptibly, while the landscape of our lives changes at a steady, merciless pace. One day we realize we have traveled far on a journey that cannot be repeated or retraced. We turn and look back and find the perspective much different than it was coming through facing forward. Yet the past recedes at the inexorable pace necessary to sustain our forward progress. At some point the past is no longer visible—it is hidden by the crests we have crossed, and the haze. Then we have only our memory of it as we fly on toward an unknown destination.
How does one capture all that on paper? How to say it so the reader will comprehend, feel, the essence?
To write well of flying is not easy.
An electronic billboard beside the taxiway at the Lake Tahoe airport gives me the current density altitude. Today it reads 7,400 feet. Actual field elevation above sea level is 6,264.
The higher one goes, the thinner the air gets, until at some point way up there for every airplane the molecules are so far apart that an absolute ceiling is reached. The machine can go no higher without additional speed, which the engine cannot give. This altitude is different for every machine. The service ceiling is that altitude at which the aircraft can climb at only 200 feet per minute. The absolute ceiling is, of course, higher.
And as air gets warmer, it gets thinner. Density altitude is a term that describes the density of the air that your craft must fly in by comparing it to a so-called “standard day”—29.92 inches of mercury and 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Today the air here at 6,264 feet is equivalent to 7,400 on a standard day.
Density altitude is not an esoteric gee-whiz number. Like indicated airspeed—which is a mechanical measurement of the actual molecules available to fly in—density altitude is a computation of the actual molecules available to provide lift. Both numbers are equally important. Lift is what flight is all about. Without lift we are firmly grounded.
At this density altitude at Lake Tahoe the
Cannibal Queen
takes her own sweet time about accelerating, rolling for a significant time before the tail lightens, then rises slowly to the flight attitude. The airspeed indicator needle has also got a case of the slows. The engine is sucking in this warm, thin air and so produces less power. How much less is recorded on the manifold pressure gauge, which reads a mere 22 inches. The propeller thrashes the thin air and gets less bite. And the wings must be going faster—a higher true airspeed—to get sufficient molecules passing under them to provide the lift necessary to raise our weight from the ground. The amount of lift necessary to support the plane never changes.
When the
Queen
finally achieves an indicated 65 MPH I tweak the nose up and she reluctantly leaves the ground. I say reluctantly because the rate of climb is quite modest.
I cross over the airport boundary and climb straight ahead. I am a thousand feet above the ground when I cross the shoreline of the lake. Still climbing I continue northerly along the west shore.
When I finally reach 8,500 feet on the altimeter, only 2,300 feet above the lake, I level off and reduce power. Soon the
Queen
settles at an indicated airspeed of 95 MPH. Our true airspeed is much higher, but that doesn’t matter. What matters are the 95 MPH-worth of molecules passing around the wings.
Halfway up the lake U.S. Route 50 cuts east through a pass in the mountains and drops down to Carson City on the high desert below. I angle for the pass.