The Cannibal Queen (25 page)

Approaching Pittsburgh I let the
Queen
down to 2,000 feet and stare southwestward for my first view of the Ohio River. I catch a glimpse, a place where a break in the overcast admits a beam of sunlight that reflects from the water. I turn in that direction. In seven or eight minutes I am westbound along the river, then am turning to follow it southward around the Pittsburgh TCA.

I had planned to land at Steubenville, Ohio, for fuel, but the field appears deserted from the air—only one airplane visible parked outside—and no one answers my calls on Unicom. If there is a fuel pump I can’t see it. I turn southeast to return to the river while I consult the chart.

Wheeling has an airport, one with a control tower. And it isn’t far from here. So I swoop into Wheeling for fuel. I am in luck. The building the FBO is housed in also contains a short-order lunch counter.

Airborne again, the route is southeastward away from the Ohio River over a landscape that offers few places to set down in an emergency. The roads meander along twisty, winding streams draining mostly wooded hills. Hills and streams and roads seem to wander crazily in a random pattern across this rugged terrain. Only villages and an occasional farm break the montage of green hillsides. Of necessity I fly a compass course.

Air mail pilots were among the first aviators to record their fear of flying over this terrain devoid of flat places to make emergency landings. These forested hills were not pretty sights to airmen nursing sick or dying engines. Emergency landings were common, everyday occurrences in the 1920s, before truly reliable aircraft engines came along.

I sight the smoke coming from the big power generation station at Mannington, West Virginia, and use that as a navigation waypoint. I pass it to the north and cross Fairmont. From there I follow the Tygart River southward.

Before long I am circling the Lambert Chapel church site and cemetery just north of Belington. The abandoned church has just been torn down—the shrinking congregation could no longer afford to pay a preacher. Circling, I stare down across the top of the lower left wing at the old cemetery and the empty spot where the church stood until last month.

My father’s parents are buried there along with other Coontses back for four or five generations. Once this valley of the Tygart was the setting for hundreds of farms that supported large families, but no more. Now the farms that haven’t gone back to trees provide only supplemental income for their owners, and not much of that.

When my father was a boy his parents sent him to this valley to stay with his grandparents for the summer and go with them to Lambert Chapel on Sunday mornings, just as they had done when they were children. Dad played with his many cousins and helped with chores and acquired a collection of wonderful memories.

The farmers were almost gone by the time I was old enough to hear Dad’s stories. I knew only old men and women living on Social Security checks. And I went with my parents to their funerals in Lambert Chapel when they died, one by one. All that remains today to be seen from the
Cannibal Queen
are tombstones and naked dirt where the chapel stood.

Across Laurel Mountain is Elkins, with its airport built by the WPA in the late 1930s that still sells fuel. The town used to be serviced by feeders of major airlines; now only one commuter offers flights—two a day to Newark, New Jersey. I guess when you get to Newark the world awaits.

The town slides beneath the Queen’s left wing as I make my approach.

My father’s parents lived in Elkins while I was growing up. They didn’t make their last journey to Lambert Chapel until 1981, when they died just nine days apart. When I was a teenager my grandmother worked in Phil’s Restaurant in downtown Elkins as the evening cashier. I liked to drive to Elkins and visit with her at the restaurant on summer evenings. We would sit in one of the booths and have coffee, and every so often she would walk over to the register when people were leaving. It seemed as if she knew half the people in Elkins. “Hello, Mrs. Coonts,” they would say, and she would give them a warm smile and thank them for coming to Phil’s.

Sometimes I would drive over to their house and pick up Granddad and take him to his favorite restaurant, The Seneca Trail. He never ate at Phil’s. Claimed Phil had a dirty kitchen and poisoned everybody, which infuriated Grandmother.

Oh, how pleasant it would be to take a taxi from the airport and find Phil’s still in business and my grandmother Ruby perched on her stool behind the register, greeting all the regulars by name and giving directions to strangers. And to go to South Davis Avenue and find Granddad sitting in the glider on the front porch, wearing his hat, watching the world go by on a hazy summer afternoon.

I miss them both.

Twenty nautical miles west of Elkins lies Buckhannon, my favorite American small town. You guessed it, it’s my hometown, the place where I grew up. My parents still live here, and this coming Saturday will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Most of my parents’ friends are still here and many merchants I remember from my youth. Even some of the youngsters I went to school with elected to stay. So I know people here and people know me.

The downtown has some vacant stores, but its decline is due more to the sad state of West Virginia’s economy than mall blight, although that too has had an effect. The nearest mall is about twenty-five miles away in Clarksburg and nowadays people go there for serious shopping.

This year they’re building a four-lane bypass on U.S. Route 33 that will take traffic blasting around the north end of Buckhannon at the national speed limit, 55 MPH, which that congressman from New Jersey foisted on an American public that had done him no evil. When I was a kid all that traffic went right down the two lanes of Main Street. Cars and coal trucks rumbled through bumper-to-bumper five days a week, and on Saturdays all the farmers in bib overalls came to town in pickup trucks.

The farmers liked to stand on the corner of Kanawha and Main in front of the G. C. Murphy Five-and-Dime trading watches and spitting tobacco juice on the curb. My mother was always appalled by men chewing tobacco, but I thought it would be a fine thing to be an accurate casual spitter and even tried chewing a few times, though I never told her that. I never could get the hang of spitting just so. My mouth watered too much.

Saturday mornings I liked to stand inside Murphy’s Five-and-Dime and read comic books. Then in the afternoon my brother and I would go to a movie. There were three theaters to choose from back then—today they are all closed—and they all had matinees. Our choice of theaters was often dictated by the state of our finances. The Saturday matinee at the Kanawha Theatre cost a quarter, at the West fifteen cents, and at the Opera House a whole dime. One year my dad did a bunch of work for Garland West, who owned the West Theatre, and didn’t charge him anything, so from then on my brother and I got into the West absolutely free. That was a deal!

In the finest American tradition my mom routinely used the car to taxi us boys around town. I grew up thinking of Buckhan-non as a big place. Today when I go back I am stunned when I see how small it really is. From my parents’ house to the West Theatre in the heart of the business district is three-quarters of a mile, and the same from their house to the grade school and junior high I attended. If I cut across fields the distance to school is less than half a mile and can be walked at a comfortable pace in ten minutes.

After I graduated from law school in December 1979, at the age of thirty-three, I came back to Buckhannon to practice law in my father’s firm. He had had a major stroke six months before and been forced to retire. My mother needed help taking care of him and the other lawyers in the firm wanted me. The fly in the wine was that my wife refused to leave Colorado. Her invalid mother was living with us in Colorado and the alternative to that arrangement was a nursing home. So trusting that it would all work out somehow, I came back to Buckhannon alone.

It didn’t work out. After Nancy’s mother passed away in the summer of 1980 she still refused to join me. Dad’s health improved enough so that Mom could take care of him by herself. And I learned that you can’t go back. You can’t go back to your boyhood home after being away for fifteen years and expect to find it the comfortable, delightful place you remember. Buckhannon wasn’t that for me in 1980 and ’81. It was a small coal town in a depressed area, and the coal mines were shutting down, one by one.

One day I advised a divorce client wailing about her finances and job prospects to pack the kids in the car and get out of West Virginia. Desperate to be with my wife and children, that evening I decided to take my own advice. I eventually landed a job in Denver as an in-house attorney for an oil company. In July 1981 I truly left Buckhannon.

I go back occasionally to visit my parents. On these short visits I can recapture the hometown that I remember. It is once again a delightful little town of 8,000 people, complete with an excellent private college, West Virginia Wesleyan, pretty homes on shady streets, and good people who can be good friends if you will only take the time to get to know them. I have. I still have friends in Buckhannon that I visit every time I am there.

I am thinking of them when the spire of Wesleyan’s chapel appears in the haze. There’s the courthouse! And the First Methodist Church and Frank Hartman’s house next to it! And the college, and that tree on the corner of Camden and Meade that I passed out under the Saturday I got drunk for the first time. There’s the house where my first girlfriend lived. … . From a thousand feet you can see it all, so neat and appealing, people and cars coming and going, folks in their yards. … .

I circle my parents’ house, hoping Mom will hear the
Queen
and come out into the yard. Today the house is surrounded by big trees; when we moved in this was naked cow pasture on a hillside. I was eleven that summer. I helped plant all those trees.

The
Queen
floats round and round, the wings almost vertical, the engine noise surely audible to those below. From this height I can even see their barbecue grill. But no one appears in the yard.

I level the wings and head for the airport, a strip in a little valley a mile west of town. A hill guards the approach end of runway 26, so I cautiously S-turn around it to line the
Queen
up with the narrow ribbon of asphalt.

Another plane lands just ahead on me. This is unusual. Normally there are only three planes in the hangar north of the runway and I have rarely seen them fly. The FBO here went out of business fifteen years ago. His fuel pumps are rusting just as he left them.

I swing the
Queen
into the grass a little off the mat. The owner and pilot of the plane that landed before me walks over to inspect her. His name is Gary. He has never ridden in an open-cockpit plane. After a bit he asks, “What would it cost to get a ride?”

“Not a nickel. Would you like to go now?”

Yes. Now would be just perfect. I strap him into the front cockpit and together we roar off over the town where I grew up.

Gary and his friend helped me push the
Queen
into the hangar. While I was installing the cockpit cover, the fuel sight-gauge began to leak. Again. Rotating it counterclockwise 90 degrees didn’t help)—the plastic or Plexiglas is not a screw-in affair—but the leak stopped when I twisted it back the other way a whole turn.

The next day Dusters & Sprayers Supply in Chickasha, Oklahoma, agreed to send a new sight-gauge in the overnight mail, the whole assembly. Armed with a five-gallon bucket and my meager collection of tools, I went back to the airport to change the Queen’s oil. To my disgust I discovered that the weld that Siggy did on the cowl latch in Poughkeepsie had broken. At least the sight-gauge wasn’t leaking just now.

With the help of Ernie Samples, who works for my folks, the cowling and left-side inspection panel came off the
Queen
as my father watched from his wheelchair in the shadow of a wing and a tractor cut hay on the adjacent hillside. Thinking about the busted cowl latch, I stared at the old oil running out of the sump drain. It looked as black and grungy as raw crude. I should have done this a week ago.

At the hardware store on Main Street the clerk waved away any payment for the four feet of wire he had just cut off a huge roll. “We sell it by the pound,” he said with a smile.

I used the wire to safety-wire the cowl latch with the broken part. Sweating in the hazy sunshine and filthy with oil, I inspected the job carefully. I thought it looked pretty neat. The baling wire repair didn’t seem to detract from the Queen’s dignity in the slightest. Were the truth known, this was probably not the first time she had been so adorned.

After lunch, sitting alone in the grass by the wheel in the shade of the top wing, I smoked my pipe and waited for my afternoon joyriders. If I had lived during the Roaring Twenties I would have been a barnstormer, would have kept Jennys flying with baling wire and old shirts cut up for patches, would have sat contentedly in pastures all across America waiting for passengers who could afford five dollars for five minutes aloft in the summer blue. I might even have joined a gypsy airshow and looped and twirled over county fairgrounds. Sure. But it wouldn’t have been any better than this sunny afternoon sitting in the grass, the smoke from my pipe drifting upward past the
Cannibal
Queen’s yellow wings.

On Thursday the guys at KCI Aviation in Clarksburg drained the fuel from the
Cannibal
Queen, installed the new sight-gauge that came in the overnight mail from Chickasha, Oklahoma, then helped me refuel her.

She took 42.3 gallons, full to the brim. I think the only way anyone could get 46 gallons in that tank would be to lift the tail to the in-flight attitude, which would be impractical to do on a daily basis. With all the gasoline aboard the new sight-gauge didn’t leak a drop. The whole operation took less than an hour. Most of KCI’s employees came over to watch and examine the Stearman.

The president of the company, Charles A. Koukoulis, led me to a corner of the hangar where his pride and joy was parked. She was a 1956 Cessna 172, the 488th off the production line in the first year of manufacture. With only 400 hours of time on her tach she still had the look and feel of a brand-new plane, resplendent with orginal as-new interior, upholstery, paint, instruments and avionics. Even the paint on the rudder pedals showed almost no wear. It was as if I’d been transported back to the year 1956 and a Cessna dealer was showing off the latest model, ready to carry me through the skies to every adventure I ever dreamed of.