The Cannibal Queen Page 21

  The man in his fifties who pumps the gas can’t do enough for me. He calls the hotel, a Best Western known as the Clemens Hotel, and loans me his mechanic’s van for the night. The key is in it. It has gone at least 130,000 miles and I can look through the rust holes in the floorboard at the ground, but it carries me off for town.

  After dinner in the Mark Twain Family Restaurant and Dinette right across the street from the Clemens Hotel, I took a walk as the evening shadows deepened. I didn’t have far to go. Right around the corner was the house where young Sam Clemens, the future Mark Twain, grew up. It’s a museum now.

  Running along the sidewalk downhill to the corner of Main Street is a white board fence, “the fence that Tom Sawyer’s friends paid him to paint.” Across the street is the building where Sam’s father kept a law office. It’s right beside the Becky Thatcher House! Somehow fact and fiction are badly intertwined here.

  Main Street parallels the river. Looking north, I could see a genuinely good, larger-than-life heroic bronze of two barefoot boys standing on a pedestal. Tom and Huck. After all, Mark Twain mythologized childhood.

  But turning south, Main Street is lined with buildings from the 1830s and ’40s. These buildings house shops selling souvenirs of Twaintown—please! I’m not making this up.

  The brochure the hotel handed out stated that two and a half miles south is Tom Sawyer Cave, a must-see attraction. And across the river is Tom Sawyer Island, where Huck and Jim hid for a day or two before setting off down the river on a raft. It’s obvious the National Park Service never laid eyes on this place.

  If you don’t know much about Mark Twain or the books he wrote, and I suspect most tourists don’t, this interplay of fact and fantasy must be pretty confusing. I’ll bet ten bucks of real money that the majority of tourists leave here thinking that Tom Sawyer really painted that fence, that Becky Thatcher lived right across the street, and that Twain just scribbled down all the things that went on in his hometown when he was a kid.

  I wandered on, looking at the old buildings in the dusk. A block or two south on Main Street I turned east for the river. After crossing a double set of railroad tracks, I found myself on the edge of a boat basin. I wanted to get beside the water. I chose a path through a little park that led out onto the levee.

  I estimated the river here is about three-quarters of a mile wide. Off to the south a replica paddle-wheel steamer moved slowly against the current. Off to the north, my left, a set of grain elevators block Twaintown from the river. Beyond that a highway bridge spans the Mississippi.

  Two boys sat on the side of the levee fishing. “What’re you fishing for?”

  “Everything,” the eldest replied, and turned to look at me. “We’re using worms and corn.”

  Corn?

  I examined their rigs when the youngest reeled in to check his bait. He was using a weight and no bobber, so his bait, a worm, laid on the bottom.

  I could see insects playing on the water’s surface and every now and then a fish would jump and make an audible smack. The fish were going after the bugs. These boys should have been fishing with flies. As if I knew. Boys have been fishing along this bank every summer evening for over a hundred and fifty years.

  These two weren’t catching anything, but they were doing all right for themselves. “Ain’t nothing else to do around here but fish,” the eldest said.

  He was leaning back against a rock with his feet braced and looked quite comfortable with his pole on his knees and his hands behind his head. Like me, he was watching the lights on the paddle-wheel excursion boat and monitoring its leisurely progress upstream against the current.

  This, I decided, was the real Hannibal, the memory that stood out when Sam Clemens was my age and sat down to write of his boyhood. The huge river flowing lazily along in the twilight, the boys fishing on the bank and looking south toward the bend in the river, the boats going upriver and down, down to St. Louis, Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans. Those names must have resonated in the imagination of small-town boys growing up along this river who had never been anyplace much. This was what Sam Clemens remembered. This was the material he wrought into his finest masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, my favorite American novel.

  When he was grown Clemens went down the river. He became a steamboat pilot and worked at the trade until the Civil War and railroads ended that way of life. And young Abe Lincoln from New Salem, he went down the river. Abe and another farmer’s son built a raft and floated a cargo of hogs all the way down the river to New Orleans, where he saw the slave markets and exotic women and tall ships. One wishes the thoughtful young man from the prairies, the rail-splitter who could read human hearts, had left us a journal, but he didn’t.

  To go down the river. That was the universal ambition that Huckleberry Finn fulfilled so magnificently.

  If Sam Clemens were here tonight, he wouldn’t be up on Main Street looking into shop windows at Twaintown souvenirs—he’d be watching these boys fish and contemplating the river. Maybe he’d offer them some advice about bait. Young Sam Clemens caught a lot of fish out of this river.

  I woke up at 3:30 in the morning at the Clemens Hotel and couldn’t get back to sleep. After a half hour of tossing and turning, I got out of bed and performed my morning ablutions.

  Out at the airport the Cannibal Queen sat waiting. I had filled the mechanic’s van with gasoline and now I left it where I’d found it, the keys on the dash.

  The sun is trying to come up in the east but is having its troubles shining through the low clouds that lie in that direction. Overhead the sky is clear. Another gorgeous day to fly.

  At 6:30 in the morning I lift off into the still air. Climbing to the northwest for Kirksville, Missouri, the rising sun catches the yellow wings and makes them glow.

  I waggle the rudder and watch how the shadow of the tail moves back and forth along the lower left wing. This amuses me and raises my spirits. Before long I am singing in the cockpit, roaring snatches of an old love song about “it’s now or never, my love won’t wait.”

  It’s good to be flying, good to have such a beautiful country to fly over, good to be at peace with one’s fellow man. It’s good to be alive early on this summer morning.

  Away from the river the northern Missouri countryside becomes a landscape of low wooded hills and irregular pastures. Little ribbons of asphalt wind their way along the ridges and valleys past widely separated farmhouses. Northwest of Kirksville, where I stopped for coffee and fuel, I fly under a layer of scattered clouds that diffuse the sunlight still coming in from a low angle. The land below takes on a bluish tinge in the shadows cast by the clouds.

  I am still enjoying this southeast wind, now right on the Queen’s tail, as we scoot up out of Missouri into Iowa, where I turn straight west.

  Making my approach into Shenandoah, Iowa, at about 1,200 feet above the ground on a left base-leg I set the power at 12 inches and say a little prayer. Here goes nothing.

  Down she glides at 80, looking very nice. Miracle of miracles, I have judged the wind right, about twelve knots out of the south.

  With only a little fudging I make the landing area and retard the throttle as I pull her back into the flare.

  At the pump a guy in bib overalls is waiting with the fuel nozzle in his hand as I shut down. The prop has barely stopped turning when he says without preliminaries, “It’s gonna break your heart to hear this, but I bought three of these things one time for eight hundred dollars. That’s eight hundred for the lot.”

  “After the war?”

  “Yep. Government surplus.”

  I extract myself from the rear cockpit and step onto the back of the front seat. He passes up the hose. “Yep, we crashed one of them Stearmans and sprayed with the other two for years. Finally we retired one and used it for parts. Then we sold the last one. Wish we hadn’t done that. Wish I had it now.”

  “Be worth a bit more than a third of eight hundred.”

  “Yep.” He shakes his he
ad regretfully.

  Inside the new terminal-FBO building he tells me, “I’m an airport bum. Been retired for five years now and just hang out at the airport. Got a son spraying down in Oklahoma, flying one of them Pawnees. Now I think ag flying is the best flying there is. Ain’t nothing else like it. Course it turns into work on a real hot day.”

  We talk about the weather. “Reason there’s so much beans planted this year is that it was too wet for corn until about a month ago. Why, the end of May we was half flooded out here. So everybody put in beans.”

  Crossing the Missouri River just north of Nebraska City, it is obvious that the tailwind is now a crosswind, and substantial. The wind is right out of the south. I use a significant crab to hold myself on the section line road running west. But I am out from under the scattered cloud layer and am flying in clear skies. The Lincoln ATIS says the visibility is twenty miles. I believe it.

  Syracuse, Palmyra, Crete, Friend, Exeter, Fairmont, Sutton, Harvard—the small towns and villages slowly pass beneath the Cannibal Queen. How did Harvard, Nebraska, get its name?

  I get lunch at Hastings, Nebraska, and keep flying west, across Minden, Holdrege, Arapahoe, Cambridge. Scattered clouds reappear several thousand feet above me. Their shadows are moving briskly north right up the section lines. I am holding the Queen in a twenty-degree left crab and the turbulence is light to moderate. She bumps and grinds and rolls and flying becomes work.

  David would not enjoy this. Most people wouldn’t unless they were flying the plane.

  McCook, Nebraska, has two paved runways that make a neat X, but the third one intrigues me. It is a short, 1,300-foot turf strip pointed 170 degrees. I ask the Unicom man if it’s in good shape and he assures me it is.

  A concrete taxiway crosses the approach end and I resolve to land just beyond it. The surface wind is out of the south at twelve knots gusting to twenty-two. The Queen gyrates down the final approach path. As I pull the power to idle and go into the flare—the worst possible moment, just as the Queen is the most vulnerable—a gust hits and she sinks abruptly. I add power. Not enough. Instead of landing in the grass beyond the concrete, the main mounts hit the lip. We bounce.

  Dang nab it!

  Taxiing back to the taxiway, I see that on landing I barely missed a blue taxiway light mounted on a rod eighteen inches high. What the heck—if this were easy, everybody would be doing it.

  On the ground the heat is breathtaking. At least 95 degrees with that strong furnace wind. As soon as I am out of the seat I tie the controls in place with the seatbelt. I am inspecting the wheels and tires when the owner of the FBO comes trotting out to look the Queen over. “You were in St. Francis, weren’t you?”

  I admit it. I can see no damage at all to the tires or the wheels. Stearmans are tough. They wouldn’t have lasted this long if they weren’t.

  “I had the white Stearman there,” the owner tells me. He is a young man, in his midthirties I guess. “You been flying around ever since St. Francis?”

  “Sure have. Been to Florida and New England. Doing a good bit of flying.”

  “Longest flight I made in mine was back from Illinois when I bought it. That wore me out.”

  “Little windy here today.”

  “Yep. Been like this for three days. Too windy for me and my Stearman.”

  I have no trouble getting off the grass strip, even in this heat. The tail comes up instantly in response to this wind and she’s off after a modest run. Climbing out over the town of McCook I examine the engine instruments. Oil temperature is 160 degrees and cylinder head temp is 200 degrees Fahrenheit. You couldn’t even boil water on those heads.

  One of the primary reasons this round Lycoming engine is still running like new forty-nine years after manufacture is that it runs so cool. It has no turbocharger and the compression ratio is only six to one. That’s the prescription if you want an engine to last—get a big one and go easy on it.

  The route now is west up the Republican River, past Swan-son Reservoir and the towns of Stratton, Benkelman and Haigler. The river valley is farmed but to the north and south the plains are used for grazing and occasional winter wheat. The colors are changing again. The green of the watered east has given way to yellows, ochres and browns under a brilliant sun in a cloudless sky. The visibility has also improved.

  And I’m climbing. The elevation of the airport at Wray, Colorado, is 3,662 feet, so I let the thermals lift the Queen higher and higher. After twenty minutes of this I am at 8,500 feet. Now the winds have shifted and I’m no longer crabbing to follow the two-lane asphalt below. It seems the wind is out of the east, right on my tail.

  I’m back at this altitude for the first time since I left Colorado and I notice the difference in the Queen’s performance. Full throttle yields just 22 inches of manifold pressure. I let her cruise at 20 inches, which gives me 95 MPH indicated. And I have a substantial amount of right rudder constantly applied to keep the ball centered. At the low altitudes of the east the Queen is so well rigged you can fly her with your feet flat on the floor and the ball will stay centered. At this altitude you need right rudder. This is the origin of the term, “Stearman leg.”

  Rudder trim would be nice, I tell myself, then grin at my impertinence. And Raquel Welch needs a few little improvements. Yeah.

  The Queen is pointed true west, right down a section line. I casually scan the wet compass. The reading, 270 degrees, finally sinks in. Something’s wrong here. I crane my neck and examine the compass in the front cockpit. It reads 260 degrees. I examine the chart. Yes, just as I thought, the magnetic variation hereabouts is eleven degrees east—call it ten degrees since even Lindbergh couldn’t see one degree on these old army compasses. So 260 is the proper reading, and the rear compass is ten degrees in error. How long has it been that way? Is this why I got in trouble flying a compass course southwest from Cooperstown, New York? Perhaps. I should have noticed this problem weeks ago. Ah me ….

  I am anxious to get home. Past Yuma, past Akron at 4,694 feet MSL, then out over the high, empty plains toward the Rockies, which are still hidden in the haze. I scan the blue horizon repeatedly looking for mountains. After five weeks away I want to see them again.

  At last, a half hour later, there they are, all purple-blue and indistinct with dark anvil clouds crowning their peaks. Summer in the Rockies. Approaching Longmont I pick out Pike’s Peak, 90 nautical miles away to the south. Visibility is down today, only 90 miles in haze.

  A storm is just north of Boulder. I descend toward the base of it and enter its shadow. The air is so clear that it seems I can reach out and touch the houses and trees on the land below. The eastern United States has crystal-clear air like this only in the winter after a cold front has moved through.

  The wind over Longmont is out of the east, but at the Boulder Airport in close to the foothills it’s out of the northwest. And strong, maybe twelve to fifteen knots. Field elevation here is 5,300 feet and pattern altitude is 6,100. I swing into a right downwind for runway 26.

  “Welcome back, Cannibal Queen,” someone says on the Unicom.

  On final I decide to land on the grass glider strip parallel to the paved runway. A little right wing down, power off, a waggle of the rudder and I’m home.

  Eight-point-four hours of flying today. Even this fool is tired.

  Colorado makes the 30th state I’ve visited since the 8th of June. Only eighteen more to go. But they’re big ones, not those little eastern-U.S. postage-stamp states.

  The guys working in the hangar turn to watch as the Cannibal Queen taxis up. Steve Hall comes walking out.

  When the prop stops, I pull off the headset and call, “Bet you thought you’d never see this ol’ gal in. one piece again.”

  He throws back his head and laughs.

  *Author’s Note: Further research has revealed that the village of New Salem I flew over is not the one young Abe Lincoln lived in. His New Salem was about 25 miles northwest of Springfield. Illinois, and is now only a memory.
There are a variety of Lincoln museums on the site, however.

  19

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE LONG-HAIRED SANDAL-WEARING anti-everything hippies of the ’60s and ’70s? Remember them? They renounced materialism, republicans, corporations and soap, and dedicated their lives to cheap drugs and free love. Their fate is one of the minor mysteries of our time. You’ve probably puzzled about it.

  They moved to Boulder, Colorado, the little city where I live.

  An endangered species in most parts of America, they are quite common in Boulder and seem to thrive here. Balding, graying, with varicose veins bulging above their Birkenstocks, they can be seen on street corners and in restaurants and espresso coffee shops all over town. They also like to hang out on the Pearl Street pedestrian mall, which is perhaps the best place for tourists to observe these creatures in a natural habitat.

  Not everyone in Boulder is an aging hippie, of course. Humans could not survive here if that were true. But the hippies with their drug-fried synapses and political lobotomies give the town a distinctive tone that we locals have a phrase to describe. When you see something really screwy or kinky, you nod knowingly and say how “very Boulder” that is. Try it the next time you visit the People’s Republic of Boulder. You’ll impress the natives.

  The Boulderist thing in Boulder is probably the Naropa Institute, “a private, non-sectarian, upper division college of the arts and humanities … founded in 1974 by Tibetan meditation master and scholar, Vidyadhara the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. It is the only North American college whose educational philosophy is rooted in the Buddhist contemplative tradition.” This quote is from the Naropa Institute course catalog.