Flight of Passage: A True Story (15 page)

That breakfast was agony. To date, my mother had not expressed the least concern about the wisdom and safety of two teenage boys tackling the Rocky Mountains in a Piper Cub, but she was very concerned about our nutritional intake. When she asked my father about it a couple of weeks before we left, she was horrified to learn that it might take us an entire week to reach California. She knew very well what we’d be up to for those seven days: skip breakfast, wolf down Lance crackers and Yoo-Hoos for lunch, chow down after dark at some awful barbecue joint in Tennessee. Like a lot of northern women, my mother harbored deep, irrational fears about dietary standards elsewhere in the country. It was a well-known fact, for example, that south of the Mason-Dixon line coffee was served to minors. So, she really loaded up the plates that morning. That breakfast had to last us seven days, until we were safely into the nutritional clutches of Aunt Joan in California. Handing us over plates heaped with scrambled eggs, bacon, potatoes, and cottage cheese, she poured herself a cup of tea and sat down to watch us eat. But Kern and I were too excited to eat very well and we picked aimlessly at the food.

My father had the opposite temperament when he was excited. He ate like a horse. Greedily consuming his usual Saturday morning fare—coffee, burnt toast, and a giant bowl of oatmeal—he bantered away.

“God, don’t you just love it boys? You stuff your belly full of food, gas up your ship, and fly the bejesus out of the thing until the sun falls at night. Then you sleep under the wings and watch the stars. Christ, when I was your age I would have killed for a trip like this.”

Actually, my father was killing us, because he was up to another old stunt that morning. For important family occasions like this—christenings, confirmations, first solos—he loved to make a great show of the family elan. Everybody in America was infected with the Kennedy bug then. The country couldn’t get enough of those big, black-and-white spreads in
Life
and
Look
, showing Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, or Sargent and Eunice Shriver, with a dozen Kennedy children in tow, escorting Rose Kennedy to Mass at the little chapel up in Hyannis Port. The model American family was now a clan, doing things en masse. We would have been infected with that bug with or without the Kennedys, but the Kennedys legitimized our behavior. Anyway, that’s how my father decided to handle our takeoff for California—it would be managed as an Official Buck Family Event. Every one of our ten brothers and sisters, my father announced at breakfast, would travel out to the airport that morning to wave us off and lend their “moral support.”

Shit, I thought. Kern and I didn’t want their moral support. Probably even the Kennedy kids were sick and tired of all that moral support by now. But there was no talking my father out of something like this once he was in the mood for chaos, and Kern and I were working hard at avoiding confrontation so he wouldn’t have an excuse to pull the plug on our flight.

After breakfast, my father started bellowing up the stairs for my older sisters to put on their best clothes and help my mother get the younger children organized for the day. From the top of the stair landing, all we could hear was doors slamming and my sisters turning their radios on loud.

It was a disaster. My sisters couldn’t have cared less, and they didn’t like being ambushed with an Official Buck Family Event at 8:30 on a Saturday morning—the beginning of the long July Fourth weekend no less. Dempsey had been away all year at college, and didn’t even know that Kern and I were planning on flying coast to coast. Macky was depressed that Kern and I weren’t taking her along and wouldn’t even get out of bed. Bridget spent her weekend riding horses and detested airplanes, and she wasn’t about to interrupt her schedule for this.

Indeed, it seems unimaginable that my father wasn’t more sensitive to the immense family rift that had already developed over our flying. Over the past five years, all of my father’s time, and virtually all of his spare cash, had been devoted to flying, to Kern and me, and our planes. My sisters weren’t openly resentful about this—they were teenagers, and glad to be left alone—but they did feel excluded, ignored. My father never volunteered to blow all of his money on them. Actually, after our trip got underway, both Dempsey and Macky were quite supportive, genuinely excited for us. But they didn’t want to be pressured into going out to that “dirty, smelly old airport,” as Dempsey put it, to perform the Kennedy routine for us. They didn’t need to be reminded all over again how weighted the family was in favor of the two oldest boys.

Dempsey was in a particularly testy mood anyway. She’d had a wonderful time being away at college that first year, learning how to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and getting away from all those noisy kids at home, and it was miserably depressing to be back in the bosom of her family again. Now my father was yelling up the stairs for her to get dressed and join the family mayhem out at the airport. When he called up the third time, she stormed out to the stair railing and shrieked back down.

“Hey, Daddy,” Dempsey yelled. “Airport-Schmairport. I’m not going!”

“Ah c’mon, Dempsey,” my father yelled. “You’re going to disappoint the boys now.”

“Come off it, Daddy,” Dempsey yelled back. “They’ll be disappointed if I
do
come.”

“Now listen here young lady!”

“Daddy, don’t give me that listen-here-young-lady stuff.
I’m
not flying to California. Kern and Rinky are flying to California. What am I supposed to do? Go out there and wind up the rubber bands for their little motor?”

My father couldn’t roll over my sisters unless my mother backed him up, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with it either. Official Buck Family Events were a trial for her, requiring hours of preparation, and this one was unannounced and she wasn’t ready for it. Besides, she could see that Kern and I were anxious to take off, and dragging my sisters along would just delay us by hours.

“Dear,” my mother said to my father, “leave the girls alone. They don’t like the airport.”

My father was absolutely brilliant in retreat, an instant victim. When my mother shot him down, he shrugged his shoulders and turned his face up into a scowl. It was the nobody-likes-me-everybody-hates-me-guess-I’ll-go-eat-worms approach.

“Boys,” my father sighed. “We got skunked. You bust your ass all winter working on a plane, and your own family doesn’t even want to see you fly it. That’s gratitude for you.”

Silently, with dejected looks on our faces, Kern and I pleaded with him to let us leave for the airport.

Somehow, we all got out of the house that morning and departed the drive in Official Buck Family formation. My father led the way in his Oldsmobile with the younger boys, my mother carried the younger girls in her Volkswagen van, and Kern and I brought up the rear in the Willys. At the traffic light up in the village, Kern and I swerved left out of the motorcade and took the back roads through the Great Swamp. We didn’t want to be seen dead anywhere near these people.

It was madness out at the airport. My father had invited a number of his friends to watch us take off, and some of the Basking Ridge pilots brought their wives out to see us off too, but they were the nonflying wives and none of them knew squat about aviation. While Kern and I were trying to ready the plane, there was a crowd milling around the Cub, and people kept banging their heads into the wing struts, pestering us with idiotic questions and changing babies’ diapers back on the tail section. Everybody was astounded by the simplicity of 71-Hotel. They kept sticking their heads into the cockpit, wiggling the stick for a second or two and then staring at us in disbelief, asking one of the pilots if this really was the plane the Buck boys were flying to California, or just a toy. On top of this, my father had arranged to have the soda machine opened up for everyone’s use, and my little brothers and sisters kept spilling root beer and Coke on Kern’s new paint job.

While Kern preflighted and gassed the plane, I stowed our gear. The only way to wedge everything into the baggage compartment, I discovered, was to cram the pillowcases with our clothes at the very bottom, the shopping bag full of our maps in the middle, then the sleeping bags on top. Still, there wasn’t enough space. The sleeping bags on top overflowed up past the windows, which would block my view out the back, and we were concerned that the protruding gear would bang up against the fabric headliner and cause it to break apart in heavy turbulence. At the last minute we took everything out again and started jettisoning things from the pillowcases—duplicate tubes of toothpaste, paperback books, extra pants and sneakers. I handed the discarded items over to my mother in a big, messy armful, and stuffed everything back into the baggage compartment. More or less, all we had to wear now were the penny loafers and the Levi’s that we already had on.

I jammed the sectional maps we would need that day, and my clipboard for keeping flight notations, into the leather pocket behind Kern’s front seat.

The nonexistent waterbag was another royal pain in the ass. My father had told everyone about the waterbag, but of course he forgot to update them when we couldn’t find one. Curious onlookers kept coming over to the plane, dipping their head down between the wheels, where the waterbag was supposed to be lashed, and coming back up disappointed. I was civil to the first seven or eight people who asked about the waterbag—maybe it was even a dozen. Then I blew my stack.

“Hey, Rinker, Kern!” my little brother Nicky howled. “Where’s the waterbag? Daddy said you can’t take off without the waterbag.”

“Shut up Nicky,” I said. “It’s none of your business.”

“It is too! Daddy says you have to have a waterbag!”

“Nicky, we don’t have it yet. But I’ll tell you what. If I do find a waterbag, I’m going to shove it straight up your butt. Now scram!”

Nicky ran off to inform my father that I was threatening to shove a waterbag up his butt.

“Screw this Kern,” I said. “Let’s fly.”

“Yeah. This is a train wreck. Where’s Dad?”

Finally, my father bounded over to the plane with an exasperated look on his face, as if this was all our fault.

“Hey, boys, c’mon now! You can’t get to California sitting here on the ramp. Hop in. I’ll prop you.”

Kern strapped himself into the front seat, I took the rear. With a raised hand and a growl, my father cleared the area of kids. Then he leaned into the cockpit for a final chat.

“All right boys,” my father said. “Now I’m not going to give you the big lecture or anything. Just pace yourselves, that’s all. Six or seven hours of flying a day is plenty. Nobody cares how long it takes you to get out to the coast.”

Kern was impatient to go.

“Got it Dad.”

“Now another thing,” my father said. “We’ve got a nice crowd here. Everybody came out to watch you take off. Once you get in the air, circle the pattern once, and then come back down the runway for a flyby. A flyby, I said, not a buzz job. There’s a difference. Don’t get too low. Then just wiggle the wings a little for Mother. Okay?”

Kern wasn’t even listening.

“Dad, I think I can get this airplane off this strip, okay? My switches are off, and I’m priming.”

I always liked the way my father turned a prop. He had this graceful, muscular way with a propeller in his hands, a jaunty confidence that bespoke years of flying. Embarrassed as I was, sitting there with a crowd watching us, I enjoyed watching him throw the blades.

“All right boys,” my father called out. “Make us proud now, and have a great trip. Brakes, Throttle, Contact!”

“Contact!”

The cylinders fired on my father’s first throw, blurt-blurting and coughing through the stack, blowing back an aromatic puff of smoke. We waved goodbye to my mother, taxied down to the end of Runway 28, ran up the engine and cleared the controls.

As soon as Kern ruddered onto the strip and firewalled the throttle, I loved that Cub. Despite two passengers, baggage, and a full load of fuel, we only traveled a hundred feet or so down the runway before 71-Hotel popped off the ground and clawed for air. Kern immediately trimmed for some down elevator, to get the nose lower.

He and Lee had rigged the plane well. As we passed the windsock I wiggled my stick in the rear to signal Kern that I wanted to feel the controls, and he wiggled back and gave me the plane. I did a gentle aileron bank to either side, and tapped the rudders. The controls were firm and responsive, not at all like the other old taildraggers we flew, where you moved the controls and then waited a second or two for a response. There was no doubt about it. 71-Hotel was our best restoration yet.

We leveled off downwind of the runway and then Kern banked and dove the Cub to come back in over the crowd. He yelled back to me over the roar of the engine.

“Hey Rink. Did he say a flyby, or a buzz job?”

“Buzz job!”

It was a lie, but I’d had enough of my father at that moment. We were up here, he was down there, and for the next few weeks there would be 2,400 miles of open country between us. Fuck ’im. A buzz job it would be.