The Cannibal Queen Read online

  A town! Now that has to be Bellingham. Only town it could be there on the coast with the water to the west like that. So if that’s Bellingham, then Anacortes is under this cloud on my left.

  Okay.

  Flying at 4,500 feet, I give Whidbey Approach a call. The young woman assigns me a discrete squawk and I manage to get it into the IFF by using first one hand, then the other. My fingers are like sausages tonight.

  “Stearman 58700,1 have you seven miles east of Orcas Island. Say your destination.”

  “Oak Harbor Airpark.”

  “Roger.” I assume that’s a clearance into the Whidbey ARSA.

  I pass the western edge of the cloud under me and am out over the water. Swooping down with the power on, letting the Queen accelerate, I descend past the lip of the cloud and spot Anacortes underneath. I level at 1,800 feet and fly south along the west coast of Fidalgo Island with the lights of the Naval Air Station on Whidbey plainly visible ahead.

  The controller wants me to climb back to 2,000 to cross through the Whidbey airport traffic area, so I do. That altitude puts me right at the base of a cloud. When the cloud starts to come down on me I have the airpark in sight and the controller releases me to the Unicom frequency.

  The wind is from the west, so I swing out over Penn Cove on the downwind and line up on the narrow ribbon of asphalt they so blithely call a runway. When I first transitioned from jets to light civilian airplanes at the Naval Air Station’s Flying Club, my instructor liked to bring me here to practice landings on the theory that if I didn’t crash here, I never would.

  I land downhill on a strip so narrow I can’t see if I’m lined up on it. When I flare the nose completely blocks my forward vision. After three or four panicky swerves, the Queen is safely slowed to taxi speed.

  I put her in a tiedown spot in the grass and pull the mixture knob to cutoff. It’s 8:45 P.M. It’s taken two hours to get here from Wenatchee.

  But I’m back on Whidbey Island, where I really learned to fly and got married and became a father and spent the better part of six years, the parts when I wasn’t at sea. Not exactly years of bliss, but damned good ones.

  Tonight I pry myself out of the cockpit and go inside the little Harbor Airlines commuter terminal for a cup of coffee. It’s been a long day and I’m tired.

  *Editor’s note. A few days after these words were written, the National Park Service announced its intention to change the name of this national monument to the Little Bighorn Battlefield.

  21

  FRIDAY MORNING I WENT OVER TO THE AIRPARK AND FUELED THE plane. She took 28.3 gallons. Normally she drinks eleven or twelve an hour, so that 8,000-foot climb out of Wenatchee cost me four or five gallons.

  This morning the air was clear and the overcast very high, so high that I could see the peaks of the Cascades to the east. This weather was much better than forecast. I would have had no difficulty getting across the mountains from Wenatchee this morning.

  Weather forecasting is not science, not art—it’s guesswork. There are too many variables for it to be anything else.

  I flew the Queen to the Naval Air Station and parked her right in front of base operations. A half dozen junior officers in khaki shorts and blue pullover shirts with the words “Whidbey Sea and Sky Fest 1991” on their left breast were greeting air-show arrivals and handing out cans of beer and pop. They were also handing out rental car and BOQ room keys. I assured them I was taken care of and hitched a ride back to the airpark to pick up my rental car.

  That evening I met Nancy and the kids at the airpark when they arrived on the 7:10 P.M. commuter from Sea-Tac airport. After dinner we drove around the island a little while Nancy marveled.

  I was serving a tour aboard USS Nimitz out of Norfolk, Virginia, when Nancy loaded the girls in the car in September 1976 and set off for Boulder. She was pregnant with David, who was born in Colorado. This was the first visit to Whidbey for Nancy and the girls since that day fifteen years ago.

  Whidbey has changed a lot in the last twenty years. The town and the Navy base have doubled in size and tourism has become a large chunk of the economy. What once was a sleepy little community of 2,500 to 3,000 people nestled in the heart of one of America’s most scenic regions has grown into a bustling little city filled with motels and fast-food emporiums. McDonald’s has come, as have Burger King, Taco Bell, Taco Time, Arby’s, Best Western, etc. Sears even has a mortgage company here. Everywhere you look are new commercial buildings, new condos, new subdivisions.

  Saturday morning we visited each of the four houses we had lived in during our Whidbey years. We even called on the next-door neighbors at the last house we lived in, on 900 Avenue East. Bob and Denise Nelson remembered the girls as tots. The girls remembered the Nelsons too, and the little park right beside the Nelsons’ house with its slide and merry-go-round.

  I used to let them go down the slide by themselves and catch them at the bottom. Kids in diapers slide slow on those things. Still, they wanted me there. “Catch me, Daddy,” they used to shout. “Catch me!”

  They remembered my carving their initials in the park logs that they walked on with me holding their hands, but the logs are gone. I took photos of these two college-age young women posed at the top of the slide. They were laughing.

  Saturday evening was airshow time. My little yellow biplane looked odd surrounded by an F-lll, an A-6E, and a B-l bomber. Rather an eclectic mix.

  The Canadian Snowbirds were there and the U.S. Air Force had sent F-16 and F-15 demo pilots who, as usual, put on a great show. But then the clouds dissipated, almost at a fingersnap, and we were treated to the most spectacular flying exhibition I have ever witnessed. A gentleman named Manfred Radius was towed over the field in his sailplane and released at 5,000 feet. He had a smoke canister on each wingtip. As the evening sun reflected off the sailplane and the smoke trails, Radius did aerobatics against the blue sky. He spun, he looped, he did vertical 8s, he did every aerobatic maneuver I know about as the loudspeaker system played classical music. No engine noise, just classical music and the sailplane soaring against the blue vault of heaven.

  The silent crowd watched, mesmerized.

  Lower and lower the sailplane came, then Radius flipped it inverted and dove at a ribbon stretched across the runway between two poles. He was too high by about a yard.

  He rolled the sailplane upright, did a couple more whifferdills, then a 180-degree turn to a perfect landing. His mastery of his craft was total, his exhibition a tour de force.

  The next day, Sunday, he successfully cut the ribbon.

  Sunday we loafed through the streets of downtown Oak Harbor, now all spiffed up for tourists, then drove to Anacortes and caught the ferry for Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.

  Nancy and the kids thought we were just going for a ferry ride, but I had a secret motive. Friday Harbor is the home of Ernest K. Gann, who is merely the greatest flying writer who ever lived. Fate Is the Hunter, The High and the Mighty, Island in the Sky, Blaze of Noon—the list is a lot longer and mighty impressive. I hear Ernie Gann is now devoting his time to oil painting. Not much of a chance, of course, but Friday Harbor isn’t a big place, so maybe, just maybe, I’ll see him strolling along the street and lean out the window and say, Thanks for changing my life with your books, Mr. Gann, and for making it richer.

  But on the ferry I saw a poster that convinced me we had made a major mistake. Friday Harbor had hosted a Dixieland jazz festival all weekend, and that crowd would be trying to board the ferry that evening for the trip back. So we just drove around San Juan Island for forty-five minutes, then joined the traffic trying to get on the ferry. A wasted afternoon. If I had caught a glimpse of Mr. Gann amid that mob, I wouldn’t have had the heart to shout a greeting.

  Monday morning I drove Nancy and the kids to Seattle to catch an airplane since we had been unable to get them seats on the commuter airline. When I got back from Seattle I went over to the base to get the Cannibal Queen.

  Navy and Air Fo
rce crews were preflighting their craft and filing flight plans. On the observation platform of base ops a female aviator in a flight suit watched me preflight the Queen and man up. Actually she spent most of her time watching a ground crew ready a B-52 for flight and glanced at me occasionally to see if I’d fallen off the wing or tripped over a pad eye.

  Her Whidbey years are still going on. Like me, she will probably realize their meaning only in retrospect. But maybe she’s wiser than I was.

  After I tied the Queen down at the airpark, I returned to the Captain Whidbey Inn depressed. As usual when I am in that condition, I took a nap.

  Whidbey was an important time in my life. On this island I learned that dreams don’t always come true, that I would get out of life only what I put into it, that happiness is a state of mind, not a condition to be achieved or a commodity that can be bought and sold. I grew up here.

  Seeing it again is bittersweet—I don’t know anyone here anymore and I am only an invited guest at the Naval Air Station. The young pilots and bombardiers treat me as an outsider, which I am. I am no longer a part of naval aviation.

  But Whidbey occupies a special place in my heart. It is important to Nancy too. I got an inkling how she feels when we were driving around San Juan Island Sunday afternoon. To my eye the vegetation, topography and modest, weather-beaten homes were indistinguishable from those on Whidbey, but Nancy announced, “Whidbey is prettier.” I didn’t argue.

  Tuesday morning arrives foggy. I play with the journal on Rachael’s computer and drink too much coffee and brush my teeth three times. By 9 A.M. the fog is thinning, so I check out of the Captain Whidbey Inn and drive to the airpark.

  By ten I have the Queen preflighted, untied and loaded, and the sun is shining down from a blue sky. She rises off the narrow runway like a kite in a strong breeze.

  From a thousand feet I can see the fog that still remains over the eastern waters of the sound. South of Whidbey Puget Sound is clear, not a cloud in the sky. Blue sky, blue water, green land, mountains to the east and west, a modest quartering tail-wind, what more could anyone ask of life?

  I stop at Olympia for gas since I didn’t refuel after my hops to and from the base. The FBO loans me a car for the drive to a McDonald’s in town for lunch.

  South of Olympia I turn the plane southeast for the 8,300-foot cone of Mt. St. Helens, the volcano that blew her top in 1980. I have flown over this mountain several times since then, but it has always been obscured by clouds. It’s clear today so I’m going to see it.

  With the prop full forward and the throttle to the stop, the Queen climbs slowly into the cold, moist upper air as I survey the hills and low mountains that rise gradually toward the grand climax, the giant shattered mountain that dominates the area.

  One of the misconceptions popular among people who don’t fly light airplanes is that the coastal mountains of Washington and Oregon are forests, full of wild animals and scenic vistas. There is some of that, it’s true, but most of the mountains comprise one gigantic tree farm. Here trees are grown as crops and harvested periodically in clear cuts, vast areas where every tree is taken down and hauled away to be turned into plywood and two-by-fours. A lot of the scenic vistas are of naked mountainsides infected with tree-stumps and logging roads.

  The timber industry has argued for many years that clear cuts are the most economical way to harvest the trees, and they are probably correct. But everything else in the clear-cut package is not so good. To get the trees off the mountains and down to the mills the timber companies bulldoze roads. The dozer operators go at it with a will. From the air you can see that every ridge, every knoll, every hillside has had dirt roads gouged into it. The roads cover the terrain like veins and capillaries. No valley, cove or glen is spared.

  Denuding steep terrain and cutting roads ensures that the natural erosion process will be speeded up, so centuries worth of erosion can occur in the decade or two it takes for the area to reseed itself. Rivers and lakes silt up and the numbers of salmon and other fish decrease drastically.

  Wildlife also has a hard time making it in these tree plantations with their huge tracts of trees all the same age. The plight of several endangered species may eventually force the timber companies to change the way they do business, which will have a catastrophic effect on many families and whole towns. Between sixty and eighty thousand jobs will be lost in the Pacific Northwest in the next few years if clear-cutting is drastically curtailed to protect the spotted owl and other endangered species. That’s a lot of families.

  There would be a lot less hue and cry over the timber companies’ harvesting practices if they were clear-cutting private property, but they are not. Most of these mountains are public lands, owned by all the citizens of the United States. We citizens seem to want the mountains and rivers protected, wildlife given a chance to thrive, cheap lumber for homes, and jobs for everyone. The American way is for industry, government and the environmental groups to fight it out in the courts and legislatures. They will. I suspect the timber industry will be forced to cut only selected mature trees in the most unobtrusive way possible. It’s that or no cutting at all, an option that only the most zealous eco-crackpots advocate.

  Looking down at the leaf-vein roads and the naked hillsides, I have this gut feeling that we haven’t been good stewards of the land.

  Rising above the Pacific Northwest tree farm is Mt. St. Helens, tangible proof that God hasn’t finished with creation. I remember the pictures—everyone does—of the inconceivable, a cubic mile or two of solid rock turned instantly to dust and blown into the atmosphere by the incomprehensible forces at work inside the earth. It seems only yesterday that the mountain exploded, yet it happened in 1980.

  Eleven years later—an eyeblink in real time, cosmic time— the volcano is still gray and bald. The trees are gone, the creeks are still choked with dust and debris, stark testaments to the power of nature. But life has a foothold. From 8,500 feet I can see a greenish tinge to the gray slopes below the peak.

  The peak itself resembles color photos of the moon. It’s just a bald, pockmarked gray rock cone with the northern face missing. Inside this gash is the caldera, and in the middle of the caldera is a mound from which steam wisps skyward in three or four places. The mountain is still alive.

  The contrast between the way nature and man work is vivid here. Nature made an instant change in just one place, a catastrophe, yet man works like a zillion deranged ants to change the whole ecosystem, a fatal disaster. Most species can survive nature’s whims. They succumb under man’s ministrations. Our planet is a tiny lifeboat adrift in the infinity of hostile space, yet we persist in chopping holes in the bottom.

  I feel extraordinarily small against this volcano, a tiny blob of protoplasm adrift on the wind above something so massive and powerful that my mind cannot comprehend it. A rising column of air forced aloft by the peak reinforces my mood by making the Queen quiver and dance. I wrestle the stick and let the rising air lift her higher.

  Then the peak is behind and I am heading southward toward Portland. After a while I look behind, past the tail at the receding mountain.

  Mountains are so big and I am so small—God must be like that. Mountains remind me of Him.

  South of Portland is the Willamette River Valley, a wide fertile valley with apparently every square foot under intense cultivation. To the east and west rise tree-farm mountains.

  I fly south up the valley under a clear sky, helped along by a wind from the northwest, a quartering tailwind.

  I once knew a man who lived in the Willamette Valley. He had a farm here. I got to know him because he also had an airplane, a Grumman Hellcat. I met him at the Canadian National Airshow in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1974. I let him sit in the cockpit of the A-6 Intruder I had flown to the show and he let me sit in the cockpit of his Hellcat. Of course I was intensely curious about how he came to own and fly one of the premier naval fighters of World War II. So he told me the story.

  It
seems the president of Alaska Airlines got into trouble with his board of directors and was shown the door. The board decided to immediately rid itself of one of the president’s more flashy toys, the Hellcat, which was sitting at Boeing Field in Seattle. The farmer read about the airline’s desire to sell this plane in the newspaper one morning at breakfast. He invested in a long-distance telephone call and was told the price was $25,000 and the plane had to be off Boeing Field by five o’clock.

  Like any true airplane enthusiast, our hero was a man who could make up his mind in a hurry. He stopped by the bank on the way to the airport and cleaned out his savings account. In Seattle he paid cash for the plane and presumably they gave him a ride to the hangar.

  Although our hero had never flown a plane more powerful than a Cessna 172, he strapped himself into the captain’s seat of the Hellcat, successfully started the engine and aviated the fighter into the sky. He flew it home filled with emotions that can only be imagined.

  Gasoline was expensive, he told me, and the Hellcat had a powerful thirst for it, so he logged his hours flying to and from airshows. When he arrived they filled the tanks for free. He flew it in flight demonstrations all weekend; then they filled up his tanks gratis when he left for home.

  He never used the supercharger on that double-row radial engine, which made his flight demonstrations look a little anemic. He didn’t want to risk blowing one of those thirty-year-old jugs, he told me, because the cost of overhauling that engine would be more money than he had in the plane. He couldn’t afford it.

  And he had a lot of jugs at risk. The Hellcat used an engine with two rows of nine cylinders each, a total of eighteen. That’s thirty-six spark plugs, eighteen intake valves, eighteen exhaust valves. Mechanics qualified and willing to work on these engines are an endangered species. Spare parts? Better have your own machine shop.

  I always wondered whatever became of the Willamette farmer and his Hellcat, and a year or so ago I found a book that listed the owners and location of every flying warbird in the world. His name was in it. According to the book he was killed in 1977 when the Hellcat was totally destroyed in a crash.