The Cannibal Queen (16 page)
What the heck, the
Cannibal Queen
is as first class as you can get. This is how
Queen
Elizabeth would travel if she only knew how to tweak the rudder in a crosswind.
What was David’s comment as we flew south over Kansas bound for McAlester, Oklahoma? “This is the only way to fly.” I know that he tired quickly of the wind and noise and vibration, and I suspect he said that only because he thought the comment would please me, which it did. He is a fine fellow— always trying to please his mother and father if he can. As I fly along this afternoon over Cape Charles, with the Atlantic on my right and the Chesapeake on my left, I think again of David and wish his head were sticking up out of the front cockpit. He could even sleep if he wanted to.
Something directly above me catches my eye. I look up. Holy jeepers … three Hueys in formation, going in my direction, passing a couple hundred feet above me. One by one they cross over my upper wing and go on by.
Helicopters aren’t real flying—they’re just a crude form of levitation.
I’ve used that line a hundred times on helicopter pilot friends, and now I feel another twinge of regret that the
Queen
is so slow. Those choppers are levitating faster than I can aviate.
The Hueys spread out into a loose three-ship-abreast formation and alter course to the left. Gradually they disappear into the haze.
The haze is getting worse the farther I go north. Down to ten or twelve miles visibility, I estimate.
Over Salisbury, Maryland, I pick up the road heading north and begin to look for the grass airport at Laurel, Delaware. My airport book says they sell fuel, but even if they don’t I’ll land just for the heck of it. An all-grass airport! Not many of those still around.
I spot it and swing across the runways to study the wind sock. The Unicom man says the wind is out of the southwest at twelve knots, and he recommends runway 14. That’s a 90-degree crosswind perhaps twice as strong as any I have yet landed the Stearman in. The stick suddenly feels slippery and I have to wipe my palms on my shorts.
The wind sock is flopping around maybe twenty degrees, first favoring runway 32, then 14. There’s another little runway only 1,400 feet long, just enough, and the crosswind on it will be only about fifty degrees. I circle again looking the place over and trying to decide. Twelve knots of crosswind … the grass will help and I’ve been doing some decent landings these last few days, although certainly not every time and not with any degree of predictability. I’m tempted to try the crosswind. If it was asphalt I would use the short runway, but the twelve-knot crosswind on sod tempts me like whiskey tempts a drunk. I swing the
Queen
out in a left downwind for runway 14.
What was it we said in the Navy? “No guts, no glory.” Yeah, and that Cessna 172 I used to rent in Boulder, ol’ November One Seventy-Seven Charlie Bravo, had a little placard mounted right in the center of the instrument panel: “Don’t do anything stupid.”
John Weisbart’s admonishment was equally blunt. “Don’t alter the appearance of the airplane, Steve. Promise me.”
Close your eyes, John, and cross your fingers. Here goes nothing.
Tall trees guard the approach end of the grass strip. And I am high. I kick right rudder and apply left stick, slipping forward and scrubbing off that excess altitude. Coming down on the trees, straighten her out, now apply left rudder.…I’ll hold her straight with left rudder, use right aileron to keep the right wing down…yeah, and we’re floating right over the treetops, the Queen’s nose twitching as the wind swirls about the trees and has varying effects upon our path through it.
I work that rudder, watching the ground come up, flaring, right aileron, little less left rudder, now more, nose on up … and the main mounts kiss the grass as I get to full back stick. Keep on the rudder, holding her, stick more and more right … and we are taxiing.
I add power and exhale. Yeaaaaah!
The young man who helps me gas the
Queen
has a strange accent that I can’t place. When we are inside he says he is from the Netherlands. I am tempted to ask if he is Amsterdam Dutch, Rotterdam Dutch or Goddamn Dutch, but refrain. Instead I ask if he has any food. It is 6:30
P.M.
and I haven’t had a bite all day. He offers a bag half full of potato chips and I gratefully take a handful. “They took the candy machine out this morning,” he tells me—at least that is what I think he says.
The little FBO shack is my kind of place, a nifty place for guys to hang out and tell lies about flying and to play pool when they have exhausted the flying stories. The pool table looks well used.
The proprietor comes in. His tummy pokes out of his pullover shirt. He wipes his hands on his dirty jeans and asks where I’m from. He looks like he could whip my socks off on that pool table and tell more flying tales than I could count. I wish I had the time to challenge him to a game, but I want to go on to Montgomery County Airpark in Maryland and call my brother. He’ll come pick me up. And I have to get there before dark.
The FBO man tells me about the new Terminal Control Areas the feds have inaugurated in the metro Washington area. This is the worst TCA complex in the nation with four of these inverted wedding cakes—Baltimore-Washington International, Andrews Air Force Base, National Airport and Dulles Airport— all running together. They suck up all the airspace from the eastern shore of Maryland to the Blue Ridge Mountains. I spread my chart and he gives me pointers on how to sneak through the VFR corridor that runs between the BWI TCA and the Andrews-National toadstools.
Reluctantly I say good-bye and go outside to study the wind sock. The takeoff will be a little tricky too. I grin. By God, this is fun!
I am aviating at 1,400 feet just to the left of U.S. Route 50 as it crosses the Chesapeake Bay bridges. On my left, near Annapolis, is an impressive array of tall, low-frequency transmission towers that the Navy uses to talk to submarines. The red brick buildings of the Naval Academy are also quite prominent, as is the Maryland capitol. On my right, real but quite invisible, is the Baltimore-Washington International—BWI—TCA.
I have the chart open on the board on my lap, and I make a tick and note the time as I cross The Generals Highway intersection. Two minutes later I cross a four-lane running north and south, and I note that. No other airplanes in sight, but they will be hard to see. The sun is only ten or so degrees above the horizon and red in the haze. Visibility down to six or seven miles, a typical summer day in the east—we complain in Colorado if the visibility is less than 90 miles. These poor schnooks.
Three more minutes down U.S. 50 to the road intersection at Bowie where I must turn. Before I know it I am there—I think. There are two four-lane intersections here, and which one is the one? Oh well, they are only three-quarters of a mile apart, so it doesn’t matter.
At the first one I swing the
Queen
to a heading of 310 degrees. I carefully measured the chart at Laurel and 315 degrees is the track I need over the ground, but with this southwest wind, I throw in a five-degree drift correction. Now to hold this heading on this sloppy wet compass.
I am sweating. To the right is the BWI TCA and to the left is Andrews. If I make a mistake here and wander off course I will get a flight violation as surely as God made women smarter than men. I think about that now as I kick the rudder to hold course precisely. Maybe for a first offense I’d only get a three-month suspension and a thousand-dollar fine. Maybe I’d lose my license. I’d rather lose a testicle.
But I routinely bet my flying license. Everyone does every time they go up in an airplane sitting in the cockpit. And I can do this—that’s why I have a license.
I pass over the first of the Washington-to-Baltimore expressways. I tick it on the chart. Off to the right, up there smack against that l,500-to-10,000 feet blue TCA circle, I can just make out Suburban Airpark. From there fly a group of aviators who truly bet their tickets every day. A minute later I go over the second superhighway.
1-95 is next … there it is, and then Route 29. Yes. I tick it because I have ticked all the others. Now I can turn north and fly over my brother’s house in Fulton, a little suburb west of Laurel, Maryland. It’s on the other side of that reservoir on the Patuxent River right there, right … what if that wasn’t Route 29?
Galvanized by doubt, I swing the plane northwest again. That last superhighway had a lot of development around it—I don’t remember seeing all that from the ground.
But … that had to be 29. There aren’t any more superhighways heading northeast. Convinced, I swing northeast.
Okay, there’s the reservoir, there’s the bridge at the west end, and John’s house should be in that subdivision right there … and there it is. Golly, he’s out in the driveway. He’s waving. And there’s Nancy, John’s wife, and their daughter, Amy.
I make three circles, waving like a demented fool, then swing the
Queen
westward for Montgomery County Airpark.
That night I totted up the times. I flew 6.6 hours today, from Georgetown, South Carolina, to Montgomery County, Maryland. And when I got up in Georgetown I thought the weather would be too bad. Just goes to show …
A
VISIT WITH MY BROTHER,
J
OHN, IS ALWAYS A TREAT; HE’S
taller than I am, skinnier, smarter, better looking, and fourteen months younger. And he’s an extrovert. We fought like dogs when we were teenagers but as the years have passed and we slogged along on separate paths, we have become closer and closer friends. I think part of the reason is that we admire and respect each other.
John and his wife, Nancy, fit each other like a story-book couple. She is even more outgoing than he is, into everything, friends with everyone she meets.
Their eldest son, John Williams Coonts, “Jack,” is spending the summer with an uncle who works for the National Park Service in California. But striding down the ramp with John and Nancy this evening came Amy, thirteen years old and all filled out in the womanly places. She wears a retainer on her teeth—the braces came off last year—and she thinks I am a real neat uncle, so I used her as a character in my last two books. Now I can do no wrong as far as she is concerned. This evening I hugged each of them in turn.
They oohed and aahed over the Queen. Amy wanted to go for a ride right then. I begged off. The sun was sinking lower and lower in the thick haze and I was tired and hungry. Flying is like sex—I’ve never had all I wanted but occasionally I’ve had all I could stand. This evening I was satiated.
Amy sat in the front cockpit for a moment, then John climbed in. Amy was leaning over looking in the rear one when John pulled the stick back. “Something broke off,” she announced. Sure enough, the radio microphone button on top of the rear stick had caught in a tangle of loose threads in the front cockpit shoulder strap knot, and now it was gone.
John was mortified. He got out on the wing and helped me inspect the damage. “God!” he exclaimed, “John arrives, sits down, and breaks something.”
“Forget it. I can get it fixed easy enough. I’ll bet there’s an avionics shop right here on the field.”
We spent five minutes trying to get the button off the front stick so we could install it on the rear one while John apologized six more times. No luck. It looked to me like the sticks would have to be taken out to allow the change to be made. John laughed nervously, plainly embarrassed. “Forget it, John. It was an accident that could have happened anywhere.”
On the way to John’s house we stopped at a McDonald’s and I inhaled hamburgers. I started to feel human again. John and Nancy wanted to know all about my trip so far, so the gabfest began in earnest.
Back at John’s house I called Steve Hall in Colorado. He confirmed that the original mike button was still in the airplane, Velcroed to a fuselage stringer but still wired up. I could move it to the stick and use it instead on the stick button. Problem solved.
Friday and Saturday were ride days. On Friday my niece Amy Carol was my first passenger while her mother watched apprehensively. She wasn’t worried about Amy—just the fact that she was supposed to be next.
As usual, as soon as we were aloft Amy couldn’t hear the intercom. I talked to no avail. What the hey, it’s a nice hazy day in Maryland and what is there to say?
After fifteen minutes I brought her back. I was unfamiliar with the area and didn’t want to venture too far north of the airfield. I went north until it was just about to disappear in the murky haze, shot a landing at Davis Airport, a little strip out in the Maryland countryside—if this expanse of sprawling, manicured estates can properly be called countryside—and then flew back to Montgomery County. Amy was ecstatic.
Nancy was still reluctant. It was an act for my benefit, I suspected, and I played along. Her daughter was not so sure and said, “Oh, Mom,” with all the disgust and impatience that teenage girls the world over can inject into that phrase.
At last Nancy seated herself with trepidation and latched onto the side of the cockpit combing with each hand. As we taxied out I told her that we’d do a few stalls and a couple spins, just to let her get a feel for it. Then I gave the engine the gun and we were off.
I didn’t get to attend John and Nancy’s wedding twenty-two years ago, but I met the bride shortly thereafter. We are all past forty now, our children all teenagers; my eldest just completed her first year of college. In the Stearman with Nancy I thought about the fact that middle age has crept over us, yet we are still healthy, still alive and flying on this hazy summer morning.
Like Amy, Nancy didn’t hear a word I said over the intercom system. I talked anyway. Six miles north of the field I did a couple gentle turns, then Nancy found her voice. “Okay, we can go back now.”
Back on the ground, I told her that I could see her knuckles turn white. She said, “I can’t believe I did that, actually went up in this thing. Do you know that woman who posed for the painting on the side?” She looked at me and grinned widely, signifying her willingness to enjoy a juicy lie.