Blue Sky Dream (3 page)

What Jerry Robinson appreciated in young Hal, though, was not heroism but a certain straightness, a personal philosophy, in my father’s words, that “flying was to be approached as a science.” Jerry Robinson noticed that my father had taken the initiative to work out the F9F-8 Cougar’s fuel consumption rates and make charts for all the squadron to strap to their knees when in the cockpit. It was an “aero-weenie” thing to do, says my father now, but it was something his flight commander saw and liked, and that, probably, is why out of a group of twenty flying officers, Jerry Robinson had chosen my father to join his run at a speed record.

With good fortune so easily wafting his way, there seemed to be no hurry to think creatively about life past one more day aloft in the F9F-8 Cougar. There were not yet any air combat veterans over Vietnam, though a squadron mate would go on to be one. There were not yet any astronauts, though a fellow naval aviator, John Glenn, would become the first American to orbit Earth. Perhaps Hal would remain in the Navy and be another Jerry Robinson. Perhaps he would move to the controls of the coming commercial jet airliners. If my father had any favorite notion of his fate, it was that he would live the aero-weenie’s ideal as a troubleshooting test pilot. Anyway, why worry about it? The options all seemed so good and readily in view and directly in his flight path.

H
ere is how a cumulus cloud is formed. A bubble of warm air meets cold and up it rises, cooling as it expands, eventually reaching dew point and condensing its moisture into steam, a process
that releases heat and causes the cloud to rise, releasing more moisture and lifting it all the higher. The aero-economy of the Cold War was beginning to be like this. A bubble of government money sucked away from other places and warmed by competition with the Soviet enemy had become a cloud of self-perpetuating steam enfolding millions of lives and livelihoods. That billowing economy had created the F9F-8 and paid for my father to be in its cockpit, had allowed my father to believe that he landed in that cockpit by just being himself.
I liked it. I was good at it. And it was my own idea.

This, then, is what it meant to be a twenty-three-year-old naval aviator in 1956 if you were my father. It meant to consider oneself a fact of progress waiting to be established. Hadn’t Jerry Robinson seen that in young Hal, just as he’d seen it in the new F9F-8 Cougar? Wasn’t that why my father had been selected to be here, safely off from Olathe, Kansas, buoyed by an updraft of national will to an altitude of 40,000 feet, an altitude at which visibility appeared unlimited?

“S
o away we go,” my father tells it, “the four of us, and we’re in a little tighter formation this time, but I’m basically alone—it’s not like you’re snug up against another airplane. And there’s Chicago over there to the left. Cleveland’s up ahead. Louisville is down there to the right. It’s just a gorgeous day. You could see forever. And as I’m gazing around at the scenery I look over at my left wing and I notice the trim tab is deflected quite a bit. Now, the trim tab on your wing trailing edge is meant to correct any left wing/right wing heaviness. That is, if one wing has more fuel in it than the other, that wing will be heavy. And the way you correct for that is you deflect the trim tab a little bit to pick that wing up. You do this with a button under your thumb on the control stick, and you manipulate that button almost unconsciously, reflexively, whenever you feel a pressure under your thumb, the pressure caused by a wing dropping. Turns out I had
been clicking the button over and over without even realizing it, until the left wing trim tab was very much deflected. So something was going wrong with the way fuel was fed from the left wing.

“Well, I finally deduced that my leading edge fuel tank was not being emptied by its electric pump. I made a quick calculation and realized I had enough fuel to make Peconic field, our turnaround point on Long Island. But in no way, without that leading edge fuel, could I hope to make the return trip, east to west, because of the prevailing winds. So I radioed ahead to Commander Robinson. I said, ‘My leading edge fuel tank is not feeding, and we have to do something about that when we land at Peconic, and we have to do it quickly because we don’t want to waste a lot of time on maintenance.’ So. When we landed at the Grumman works at Peconic, we taxied up into a swarm of ground people. The Grumman ground people were all over my airplane, troubleshooting what had gone wrong and how to fix it.”

But the ground people swarming below him could not fix my father’s problem, not fast enough, anyway. And so he was left behind with the ground people, watching the three other naval aviators take off and head back to San Diego, where they would arrive in time to break the record by thirty-eight minutes, where their portraits would appear over newspapers’ accounts about how they had established another fact of progress.

“I’m not going to get to do this one,” is what my father remembers thinking as he stood on the runway with the ground people. “I’m not going to get to do this one. But hell, there will be another chance, something just as good.” He did not guess that in thirteen months he would leave the Navy, and not to fly airliners or to be a test pilot, but to sit at a metal desk and wear the clip-on badge and the white shirt of an aeronautical engineer. He did not guess that the expanding cloud below his wings would catch up with him just enough to draw him into it, that America would stop asking him to be a jet pilot and ask him instead to be content with corporate life. He did not have any idea that he
would ease into the easy thing, the thing that America was easing into, life in the booming Cold War industrial project. And that once he did, he would chafe against that choice for the rest of his employed life.

You should know, if you are to give our family totem its deeper reading, that my father’s life as an organization man perfectly traced the arc of the Cold War aerospace industry. And that (much like America itself) he became more and more dubious about the deal he had made. What our colorful pictographs do not reveal is that our father was the polite man that liked to laugh, yes, just as Terry remembers Hal. He was also the man who carried within himself a mercurial, mysterious anger that wouldn’t subside until Cold War America was finished with my father, and he with it. You should know, since we in our pictographs are so good at making it look easy, that life in a four-bedroom ranchette in the sun could be, in certain unspoken ways, an uneasy life.
A tribe’s secret, guarded closely.

You should know also that in spite of this, the tanned faces in the pictographs are smiling because all along, we—Hal and Terry and the four children—imagined ourselves to be living the inevitable future. And that we are very surprised today to discover we were but a strange and aberrant moment that is now receding into history.
A tribe’s fall from dominance.

My father, as he watched his fellow aviators fly west without him on October 5, 1956, could not possibly know any of this was ahead of him, because, after all, he was still the twenty-three-year-old naval aviator who wears the white uniform and gold wings in the wedding photograph. As you see, the man in that photograph, the groom, Hal before he was my father, is staring directly into artificial light so bright that it makes him and his new wife luminescent and plunges all that is behind into invisible blackness.

ONE
 LUCKY STAR
 

M
y father and I are together in the sky. I am eight years old and he has taken me up for the first time in the Piper Cherokee, a four-seat, single-prop, family sedan of an airplane he rents every once in a while. My father’s idea is that we will fly over our house and get a look at it from a new vantage point, from high above on a clear summer morning. We will fly over at an agreed-upon time and my mother will stand in our backyard and wave, and we will wiggle our wings back at her to tell her we see her.

“Won’t be long till we get there. Five, ten minutes. Have a look.” My father’s voice in my headphones cuts through the vibrating thrum of the airplane’s engine. He smiles and points out the window, tracing a circle with the tip of his index finger as if marking an intersection on a road map. I follow his finger, look down and, suddenly, vaguely, I am terrified.

My fear has nothing to do with any lack of faith in my father’s piloting. This morning has so far been one of his happy, whistling days, and I have been reassured by the words he shares
with the man in the control tower—
cherokee eight six seven niner whiskey over
—the way men must speak to each other when they know exactly what they are doing.

What terrifies me is not even the fact of being here, so high in the sky. Many times my father has told me look upwards, and we have stood together in the backyard watching some interesting silhouette pass overhead on its way to the nearby air base. Having been told so often to look into the sky, it seems perfectly natural to be here now.

No, the queasy doubt rushing over me comes from what is there below, staring up. Down there is a labyrinth of freshly scraped earth and cedar-shingled roofs and white cement driveways and severe little lawns and blacktop ribbons snaking in and out endlessly, every curve bent with such precise consideration that I feel I’m looking at some immense, far too complicated board game. The sensed design to it all is what vaguely terrifies. This is some stranger’s unsentimental schema without our home, my family, me, at its center. Down there, we could be
anywhere
.

I search out the familiar shape of a cul-de-sac, for that is where we live, in the house at the end of our cul-de-sac. But what I see, like berries growing on trellised vines, are many, many cul-de-sacs. How could any one of these tiny, repeated shapes announce itself to be our very own? From up here one could never see the brand-new lemon yellow Naugahyde couch my family has just installed with such momentous pleasure in front of the television set. From up here one could not see my sister, Marybeth, four years old, or my baby brother, Dan, or the melon stomach of my mother, pregnant with my sister-to-be, Maggie. From up here one could not see my father’s workbench cluttered with baby food jars filled with nuts and bolts, or the dusty model of the Grumman F9F-8 Cougar hanging over it by a nylon thread. From up here there is no way to see the sky blue walls of my bedroom.

A few years before, my father had made a down payment on a newly built four-bedroom tract house with enough yard, enough land, to be visible from the sky, and so today he naturally
thought I’d be excited to come along with him for an aerial view of where we’d made a place for ourselves. But now I am looking hard and I cannot locate our lives amidst all the sameness below, and that is what terrifies me.

That is what terrifies, and instructs. A child absorbs such a vision and begins to sense, at some level, the imperative of making a bigger meaning of things. I wonder whether all these people living just like me might be
my
people—all of us, perhaps, with some shared story. I wonder whether the pattern below might be a mass of connections joining me to some whole.

My father banks the plane over to his side for a long, slow turn. He is looking hard, too. His chin is stretched forward, his eyes are scanning calmly, deliberately, but they are not yet coming to rest on any one thing. I am watching his eyes. And now they turn my way. And now my father gives me one of his winks. I am wondering if there might be, readable in the design below, some reason not to be vaguely terrified.

S
putnik
was my lucky star, its appearance in the darkness a glimmering, beeping announcement that my family would not know want. As my mother and father have so often told it, on chilly nights in the fall of 1957 the two of them would stand on the back porch of a rented cottage in Springdale, Ohio, watching that first satellite arc across the evening sky while I, the firstborn son but a few weeks old, lay in my crib. Already my father was growing bored with testing jet engines for General Electric, his first job out of the Navy. But then, not long after the appearance of
Sputnik
, he received the phone call that set our lives in harmonious motion. The Lockheed Corporation’s Missiles and Space Division invited him to come help build America’s own satellites in a place that was said to be the balmiest, most fertile in all of California (and therefore the world), a place that was called, in the brochures Lockheed sent us, the Valley of Heart’s Delight. This is how we came to live in our house at the end of the cul-de-sac.

This is how
Sputnik
came to be a lucky star to millions of others like us, for its distant pull caused vast sums of money to ebb from once favored states and to flood into America’s out-lands, causing tract home societies like ours to spring up in places like the Valley of Heart’s Delight.
Sputnik
, a 23-inch aluminum sphere weighing 184 pounds, launched into orbit by the Soviets on October 4, 1957, sped the transformation of the aircraft industry into something called “aerospace.”
Sputnik
did this by rewriting the rules of the Cold War arms race, and when it did, the new rules favored my people, our future.