The Cannibal Queen (20 page)
Later I find Gene working on the original rotary engine of the Sopwith Camel replica, preparing it for flight. He takes the time to explain the workings of the engine to me. As I listen that doggerel from World War I keeps running through my head: “A Fokker, a Snipe, and a Bentley Camel, met for a scrap over Beaumont Hamel …”
Gene’s hands are the hands of a workingman—short nails, thick fingers, with ground-in dirt. It is obvious that working on airplanes is a passion with him. We should all be this lucky, to have a trade that fulfills us so completely.
I wander on in awe, trying to take everything in. There are treasures everywhere. Near the runway on the western side are a half dozen hangars that house the airplanes currently starring in the Old Rhinebeck airshow that is performed every Saturday and Sunday, two shows a day, from June 15 to October 15, weather permitting. The place is open for tours Monday through Friday from 10 A.M. until 5
P.M.
from May 15 through October. The aircraft used in the show are original World War I fighter planes or replica aircraft with original engines.
Here you can watch the replica Sopwith Camel with an original rotary engine take to the skies. You can see a 1914 Avro 504-K, a 1918 Spade XIII, a 1915 Nieuport 10, a Fokker DR-1 Triplane, a 1911 Bleriot XI, a 1917 Morane-Saulnier A-1, a 1918 Curtiss Jenny—and they all fly on weekends.
The place resembles nothing so much as the ultimate farmer’s fantasy storage shed out behind the barn. Treasures from yesteryear sit in the shadows gathering dust, dripping oil into delicate little puddles in the dirt while cats wander about on their eternal quest for mice. Antique planes, cars, motorcycles and aircraft engines are crammed in everywhere.
Up in the museum—the three Quonset huts—you will find not only the second New Standard, but a 1929 Pitcairn Mail-wing wearing a 220-HP Continental radial engine, a 1931 Bird Model K with a 125-HP Kinner B-5 radial, a 1929 American Eagle with a 100-HP Kinner, a Waco Model 9 dating from around 1925 to 1927, and a Waco Model 10 from 1927 to 1930. These are just a few of the treasures.
None of these planes are in museum display condition, and that somehow seems appropriate. They are working aircraft flying every weekend, or retired working aircraft awaiting rebuild or refurbishment so that they may fly again. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only place in the world where you can see aircraft of this vintage fly every weekend, all summer long.
You lean over and blow a layer of dust off a fabric-covered wing, study the oily engine, and a little voice whispers that you could climb into the cockpit and fly this thing if only someone would swing the prop for you. You couldn’t, of course. I couldn’t.
These planes need the hand of a highly skilled pilot thoroughly schooled in their quirks. These machines with rotary engines built their reputations in World War I killing the fledglings who tried to fly them. As many as thirty percent of the British pilots on their first solo in the Sopwith Camel crashed, and most of those crashes were fatal. Those were the statistics bandied about in Parliament at the time, although the Royal Flying Corps denied that the casualty rate was that high.
These airplanes became obsolete because better, safer aircraft with larger performance envelopes and more reliable engines came along. The pilots who flew them switched willingly and thankfully to machines that were better in every way imaginable. Only now, when the world of aviation includes spaceships that can go to the moon, do we look back so nostalgically at the early days.
Cole Palen started looking back as a very young man. The Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome and collection is his. He bought the airplanes one by one wherever he could find them, sometimes literally in farmer’s barns. He restored the originals to flying condition, gave people rides, finally started airshows at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome.
Palen wasn’t there the day I visited. I would like to meet him. Here was a man trying to make a living who attended auctions, hunted through barns, attics, tee-hangars and the pages of Trade-A-Plane. He paid hard-earned money for trashed-out old planes and engines that no one else wanted, convinced that somehow, some way, he could make them pay. He has. He’s even built replicas of planes that no longer exist from original drawings.
I doubt if Palen is getting rich on the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, but he’s making it. And the world is a richer place.
I ended my visit to Rhinebeck watching Mike Lockhart and his three children wash the original 1918 Curtiss Jenny. They pulled her from her shed into the weak sunlight and went after the winter’s accumulation of dust and dirt with rags, buckets and a hose. Mike is a professional aircraft restoration expert who works for Buehler Aviation Research in Florida. On his vacations he returns to Rhinebeck, where he grew up, and washes aircraft and helps with the mechanical chores.
As I watched the Lockhart children, all under ten years, scrub the Jenny and get filthy, I couldn’t help wondering how many kids in America today have even touched a Jenny, let alone scrubbed and poked and prodded and examined every nook and cranny. To the best of my knowledge, there are only four or five Jennys still flying in the world. The bath, Mike explained, is preparatory to the Jenny’s annual mechanical inspection so she can be used this summer in the airshow. Maybe this coming winter she will be overhauled.
The
Cannibal Queen
accelerated readily on the hilltop—she was off before she got to the downslope. I climbed above the treetops feeling like Eddie Rickenbacker and headed east looking for Huns.
The FBO in Meriden, Connecticut, Robert Carlson, had the naked fuselage of a Stearman parked beside his office building. Carlson and his partner are going to restore her. She was a sprayer—the spray tank that filled the place that the front cockpit occupies in mine sat beside the fuselage on the ground. The 450-HP Pratt & Whitney was off for overhaul. The wings were in the hangar being inspected.
I carefully examined the bare fuselage structure. This is the way the
Cannibal Queen
looked after Skid Henley finished welding on a new tail section. For the first time I began to appreciate the true magnitude of the job Henley, and these fellows, faced.
Carlson took photos of my Stearman to send to his partner, who is away for the summer. He told me the caption will read, “Finished the Stearman and she’s flying great. Wish you were here.”
Carlson drove me to a Taco Bell and bought me a burrito. Three years ago he and his partner quit well-paying corporate jobs, he said, sold their toys—among them a North American AT-6 Texan—and got the city lease on this FBO business. So far they’re loving the work and making a living, although at times it’s a tight squeak.
I admire the courage of these optimists who believe in aviation in spite of everything. Like me, they love flying and all that goes with it. And like Gene DeMarco and Cole Palen, they are working like hell to create the niche that they want to be in.
Somewhere over New Hampshire I fly out from under the clouds. All that remains between me and the sun is an extremely thin cirrus layer up high where the angels sing. The sun feels good.
I have the
Cannibal Queen
flying high in the crisp, clean air at 5,500 feet. Visibility is 40 miles or so. I saw the tall buildings of downtown Boston off my right wing 30 miles away all the way across Massachusetts. In fact I saw them on the horizon as I climbed away from the Providence, Rhode Island, airport, a visible reminder that New England is small, like its namesake across the Atlantic.
Passing over Concord, New Hampshire, I swing the
Queen
to 060 degrees, aiming to overfly Lewiston, Maine. My destination is Knox County Airport at Rockland, on the coast by Penobscot Bay. I called ahead from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and the hotel has a room waiting. Normally I take potluck, but that seemed unwise with the Fourth of July just two days away. I like showers and clean sheets too much to relish the prospect of trying to sleep under a wing while swatting mosquitoes all night.
Below me is a forested, hilly land dotted with lakes. I have never before been to Maine, so this will be fun. In fact, the only states that I had never visited before I started this trip were Maine, Vermont, and Alaska. Alaska won’t be graced with my presence this year, but Maine and Vermont soon will. Somehow I doubt that the governors of those states will be waiting at the airports to shake my hand.
The big Lycoming drones steadily as the
Queen
flies through still, cool air. My leather flight jacket and jeans feel good today. From this height, with this visibility, navigation ceases to require much attention and I can relax and look at the sights.
“Don’t you ever get bored up there?” someone once asked. No, I don’t. As the miles slowly pass I think of many things, of things I have done, of things I wish to do, of my children and my parents and people I have known. Over a mile above gorgeous country on a gorgeous day, my mind wanders freely.
Up here life takes on its proper perspective. You are a mere gnat afloat in this endless sea of air, above this huge, sprawling land. You and your earthly concerns shrink to their true significance. Ambition, love, lust, acquisitiveness, pride, envy— all of these components of the human condition lose their attraction and their sting up here in the vastness of the sky.
Today is my day to fly and get a glimpse of eternity. This is my day in the sun. Yet like all living things, I will grow old and my eyes will dim and someday soon I will again be a part of that earth below. Then it will be someone else’s turn to fly up here, breathe this pure air, feel the sun’s warmth on his arms and hands, look with mortal eyes toward that horizon that stretches into forever. Perhaps, just perhaps, he will do it in the
Cannibal Queen
or one of her sisters. With proper care this mechanical contrivance of Lloyd Stearman’s brain and the hands of Boeing craftsmen will still be flying long after I have joined Stearman in the grave. Stearman, the Wrights, my grandparents, my parents—all of those who went before.
But that still lies ahead for me in this great adventure we call life. Today I am here, aloft. Today is my day. Today is my day to fly.
R
OCKLAND,
M
AINE,
J
ULY 4
. T
HE RAIN PREDICTED FOR TODAY
hasn’t arrived. Maybe tomorrow, when I’ll be trying to fly west. The morning dawned dead calm, the flags hanging lifeless from their poles.
I studied the limp flags with mixed emotions. Flying the
Cannibal Queen
this past year I’ve become a fervid petitioner of Mother Nature and the Almighty—I’m unsure of just which is in charge of wind, theology being the arcane art that it is—to keep the air still, quiet. But this afternoon I am scheduled to go sailing on a small schooner in Penobscot Bay, and we won’t sail very far without wind. So today, Mom or Dad, as the case might be, please send a nice stiff ocean breeze. I don’t ask often for wind and I won’t make a habit of it, but today please favor your petitioner with a canvas-bellying breeze laden with salt and the smell of the sea.
Sailing seems to me to be to boating what flying the
Queen
is to aviation. Biplanes and sailboats are craft from a time now past, short on the modern conveniences and technical advances that are supposed to improve our lives and somehow us. Both make light of the value of time, assuming in some Zen-like way that those who choose these forms of transport have plenty of it. More fundamental, in biplanes and sailing vessels the journey is more important than the destination. Modern forms of transportation reverse this priority—you board an airliner to go somewhere: the journey is merely an experience to be endured.
By noon it was obvious that my petition had been received favorably in whatever headquarters it was routed to. The wind was a good ten knots out of the southeast.
As 12:45
P.M.
I was standing on the public pier in Rockland with my camera, a sweatshirt and a couple cans of grape soda pop in a bag. At five minutes before the hour a bewhiskered gent in a dark-blue cap came rowing through the anchorage in a double-ended wooden boat. He maneuvered expertly to the pier and slipped a rope over a thingy that had been provided. As he walked toward me I could see he was barefoot and had a modest tummy under the disheveled long-sleeved shirt and faded khaki trousers that hadn’t had a crease in years. No designer duds for this salt.
“Mr. Coonts?”
“Yes. You’re Captain Yossarian?”
He smiled and led me back toward his boat. I studied this barefooted sailor as he rowed us through the anchorage. I confess, looking him over and feeling the motion of the little boat and the sea breeze on my face, I felt like Jim being rowed out to the ship that was to take him to Treasure Island. If only this barefoot sailor had had one peg leg and called me “Matey” …
Captain Yossarian’s trim little schooner lay at the outer edge of the anchorage, which was why I hadn’t spotted her from the pier. With a green hull and black trim Annie McGee looked like the object of a man’s passion. She was a wooden ship— “boat” is a word that somehow implies one of those fiberglass things—and her deck was about half resanded. Yossarian later told me that he did all the sanding by hand. He didn’t trust a belt sander on those soft cedar planks.
Captain Yossarian had one other passenger, a woman he introduced as Patty. She stepped very lively when Yossarian started issuing orders, which he did about sixty seconds after we were aboard. She obviously knew which rope was which and a lot of other nautical stuff. I watched as he and Patty untied this rope, pulled on that one, hooked up this and unhooked that.
The triangular sail on the bowsprit went up first, then the funny rectangular one on the forward mast, then the mooring rope was let go. As the main sail on the aft mast went up, without fanfare or noise the sails filled out and Annie McGee began to move through the water with Patty at the tiller.
“I never cease to be fascinated,” Yossarian remarked, “with the subtle way that sailing vessels just go in motion.”