The Cannibal Queen Read online

  I have no idea why he crashed and I’m not about to look up his widow to ask. I don’t know if the weather got him or that old engine failed at the wrong time. I don’t know if he properly maintained the engine and airframe. I don’t know anything and I probably never will.

  Still, flying over this valley I can see his smiling face and that beautiful airplane, and I envy him the joy it gave him. Every person should have a passion like that once in his life.

  The valley narrows the farther south one goes. Past Eugene the farms peter out and the valley winds through mountains. The character of the vegetation is changing. The southern slopes of the hills and mountains have huge meadows that appear golden in the midday sun. The amount of rain carried in from the sea is apparently not enough to sustain forests on the southern-facing slopes. So the residents raise cattle.

  The valley rises steeply south of Medford. Just short of the pass is the small city of Ashland, Oregon. I drop in for fuel. Inside the FBO office building I call an artist I know, Bill Phillips, to see if he would like a Stearman ride. I get his answering machine and leave a message.

  The FBO building is crammed with aviation memorabilia and out-of-print books about flying. I take my time and peruse everything. Photos of Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, other famous aviators and planes, old goggles, model planes, posters—the place is a small aviation museum, a shrine to flight.

  The collection belongs to the owner of the FBO, Jerry Scott, whom I meet later that evening when Bill and his wife, Cynthia, pick me up at the motel and we come back to the airport to fly. Jerry wears a blue flight suit and has white hair. Aviation never lost its magic for him. And he’s the kind of guy that you would like to get to know.

  Successful fixed base operators, I have noticed, all have this trait. To succeed at a fixed base operation you must have repeat customers, the same people over and over. People who own or fly airplanes are like everyone else—they return to do business with people they like who like them. In this book I have followed the practice of not saying anything if I couldn’t say something nice, which is not to say that I have included every good person I met, because I haven’t. But I have purposely omitted references to those FBOs that operate like they were running a convenience store-gas station on a freeway exit.

  Those FBOs are often owned by investors who are in business for the money, so they hire the cheapest desk help they can find, usually a young person, usually a female, who knows absolutely nothing about aviation and has no desire to learn. The office person can be pried away from her paperback novel or telephone conversation with her boyfriend only long enough to process your credit card invoice. She doesn’t care where you flew in from or where you’re going. She has no idea if the weather is good or bad to the east or west. She doesn’t know one plane from another and so would have no comment if you arrived in The Spirit of St. Louis which you had just stolen from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. She would merely punch up your credit card invoice and go back to the romance novel. And the owner wonders why his business gets worse with each passing month.

  It’s not that I am the world’s most gregarious guy, but after a couple hours of flying by myself I appreciate a friendly face and smile. Most people do. Which is why FBOs like Jerry Scott make decent livings in out-of-the-way airports like Ashland, Oregon, only a few minutes’ flying time south of the big airport at Medford. His ramp is full. His line boy is busy most of the time. And his aviation collection isn’t dusty.

  The next time you see him, tell him I said Hi.

  Bill Phillips goes flying with me first. I circle to climb out of the valley into the clear evening sky. The air is smooth. The sun low on the western horizon illuminates the Queen like a giant spotlight. She flies against a green and yellow landscape with Mt. McLoughlin on the eastern horizon and Mt. Shasta to the south. Both these old volcanos seem close enough to touch in this clear air.

  I take Bill to the pass and circle Pilot Rock, the core of an ancient volcano, then pull the power and let the Queen descend back into the valley for a landing. Cynthia is my next passenger. She sticks her hands up, then puts her elbows on the rail.

  The delight on my passengers’ faces gives me great pleasure.

  Wednesday morning the cloud deck that the low-pressure trough off the Washington coast was supposed to push inland doesn’t arrive. Which is great for me.

  I top the pass that leads down into California and head straight as a bullet for Mt. Shasta, a truly impressive mountain. Unlike Ranier, which is about the same height, 14,400 feet above sea level, Shasta rises from a river basin that is only several thousand feet in elevation. So Shasta is a genuinely large mountain to delight people who like genuinely large mountains, which I do.

  Another old volcano, Shasta’s giant cone has a lesser cone of ash and soft stuff sticking up from the west side. I approach the monster from 11,000 feet with my camera out. The wind here is out of the south, very light, but it is breeding a cloud on the peak that streams off northward. When I get around to the south side of the mountain the updraft lifts the Queen another 500 feet.

  I wheel and turn next to the mountain, making sure I don’t get too close. Prudence and experience dictate that one not rely on mother nature and luck to keep light aircraft out of severe up- or downdrafts. A strong gust of wind from the wrong direction when you are in close to a colossal rock like this could ruin your whole day.

  The Redding-Benson airport has a deli on the second-floor above the FBO office, and I sit on the deck there drinking coffee and looking northward at Shasta. The wind here is out of the south at about fifteen knots, which means every mile of my progress south will be earned.

  An hour down the valley of the Sacramento River, I decide to stop for fuel and to take off the leather jacket, which is too much in the warm air at 3,500 feet. It’s over 90 degrees on the ground.

  The airport I land at has no FBO office, merely a trailer for the guy who pumps the gas. There is a fuel pump, a pay phone against a hangar wall, a little restroom building beside the mat, and near the fuel man’s trailer, a fountain shaded by four trees. Flat plowed fields stretch away in every direction. To the west one can clearly see the coastal range.

  The FBO man comes out of his trailer as I taxi up. He is portly, in his fifties, and wears bib overalls. I’m going to get a pair of those. They make a definite statement.

  As he tots up the charge for gas and oil using the top of the pump as a desk, I pronounce the name of the airport.

  “A good place to be from,” he grunts. “I been here thirty years too long. Married one of the local broads”—he jabs his thumb at the trailer—“and she won’t leave her mama.”

  With the paperwork done, he announces, “Well, I gotta go inside and get fatter,” and nods his good-bye.

  It is lunchtime, I notice with surprise. I get a drink from the fountain and stand in the shade smoking my pipe.

  Well, everyone has his problems. I’ve had places I wanted to leave too. When I finish my pipe I leave this one without ceremony.

  An hour later I landed in Petaluma and called my sister-in-law’s brother, Jack Williams, at the administration office at Point Reyes National Seashore. He is the head engineer there. With the Cannibal Queen tied down, I am soon on my way to Point Reyes Station in a rental car.

  I confess, California has always charmed me. There is nothing attractive about the sprawl of Los Angeles, but that is the only boil on this fair state. The countryside between Petaluma and Point Reyes is rural California at its best. Straw-yellow hills accented by groves of green trees are occupied by dairy farms and beef ranches and little else. No shacks with collections of junk cars, no abandoned refrigerators, just straw-yellow hills under a brilliant blue sky and cattle lolling in the shade of the trees.

  The road winds and traffic is light.

  I could live in a place like this.

  That evening Jack and I drove out to the seashore to meet my nephew Jack when he got off work. He won a lottery and qualified
for a summer’s employment with the Youth Conservation Corps at Point Reyes National Seashore. It worked out well—he is spending the summer with his aunt and uncle and their two young daughters and having a great time on his first summer away from home at the ripe old age of sixteen.

  The park lies on the west side of the San Andreas Fault and will become one of the Aleutian Islands in ten years or so. In the interim the northern half of the 94,000-acre park is a grassland on which hundred-year-old ranches still raise cattle for milk and meat. The southern half of the point is wooded.

  After recovering from the surprise of finding ranches on property administered by the National Park Service, I was enchanted by the pastoral beauty of the place. Surrounded on three sides by water, the point is often covered by fog and low clouds in summer. This afternoon the clouds whipped in off the ocean and the air smelled of the sea.

  The next morning after the two Jacks had gone to work and Dino and the girls had departed for errands, I drove back to the national seashore. The low clouds were solid, the wind at least twenty knots. After passing through Point Reyes Station and the village of Inverness, the road followed the western shore of Tomales Bay for another few miles, then cut up onto the point.

  In the gloom and wind the seashore was a lonely place. Empty roads, cattle cropping grass in the pastures, every now and then a ranch complex. And I had it all to myself.

  Out on the point near the lighthouse the fog blew up the ridge from the sea. Here and there I got glimpses of the surf smashing on the beach below.

  This wild, lonely place seemed to me very British, like a moor from a Thomas Hardy novel. Or perhaps Scotland. All I have seen of Britain is London, but I suspect one could drop a Scotsman onto Point Reyes and he would think it was home until he met his first Texan driving an RV.

  But no RVs this morning. I drove slowly out of the park on Sir Francis Drake Drive—he was supposed to have landed on South Beach while on vacation from sacking Spanish galleons in the tropics. If it was a day like today he must have felt right at home. Then I stopped in the village of Inverness for coffee.

  Inverness looks like a lot of other villages near major tourist attractions, picturesque bric-a-brac on the buildings and cutesy little signs on boutique shops, but its real claim to fame is that it is or once was home to one John Francis, a serious eccentric.

  The local paper, the Point Reyes Light, ran an article about him and I had to admit, jaded as I am, that Francis is something out of the ordinary. This is a man that the locals justly point to with pride.

  In fact, he is so kooky I would have gone to look him up, except that he isn’t there anymore. In 1983 he set off on an eighteen-year trek around the world by foot, bicycle, and sailboat.

  That isn’t why he rates as one of the world’s premier eccentrics. Oh no. Guys that set off to hike around the world are a dime a dozen in California. Every day in this state women tell divorce judges, “He walked to the corner convenience store for a pack of cigarettes and decided to keep going, all the way around the world, and here is the postcard he sent to let me know.” They then display a card postmarked San Francisco or Vegas or Gloversville, New York, occasionally one from Europe.

  What makes Francis special is that in 1973 he took a vow of silence and didn’t speak again for seventeen years, until 1990. According to the paper, he communicated during this period by “pantomime, giggling, and grunting.”

  Imagine how your life would change if you tried this. Say you go to work tomorrow and don’t speak. Not a word to anyone. Just giggling and grunting. Your boss finally comes in and says the secretaries are upset, so what’s your problem?

  You write a little note: “I have taken a vow of silence.”

  At 10 A.M. on a weekday you go home to give your wife the news that you have joined the ranks of the unemployed. You write her a note: “I’ve been fired.” She shrieks, she demands an explanation.

  You do another little note: “I have taken a vow of silence.”

  She is stunned. “What will my friends think?” she wails. “What will I tell them?”

  Finally the truth will dawn on her—that all this is your fault—and she will crown you with an ashtray, then grab the checkbook and keys to the car as she announces in a quivering voice, “I’m getting a divorce.”

  Sitting there amid the shattered ruins of your life, crying, giggling and grunting, it will come to you as it did to John Francis, you need to take an eighteen-year trek around the world. Since you have no car, of necessity the journey will be by foot, bicycle, and sailboat. You write notes to all your friends who will understand—both of them—and tuck your toothbrush into your shirt pocket, then lock the front door behind you on your way out. After all, you don’t want to be burgled while you’re away.

  As you walk along the highway on your way out of town, a police car pulls up and the officer gets out. Remembering your vow of silence, you say nothing, merely giggle and grunt. He runs you in.

  At the police station you keep your vow. Not a word passes your lips. They examine your wallet and call your wife. She tells them she never heard of you.

  In jail you refuse to speak to the turnkey and other inhabitants. You refuse to talk to the psychologist when he makes his weekly visit. Before you know it, you are in front of a judge for a competency hearing. You write His Honor a note: “I have taken a vow of silence.” He sends you to a padded room at the funny farm.

  How John Francis avoided this fate I have no idea. Since he’s talking again after seventeen years, maybe he would share his experiences. If he were still living in Inverness, I would have looked him up and gotten that explanation. But Francis has gone on to a new career out there in the real world.

  With a resumé like that, what on earth could this man do to earn a living? I’m glad you asked that question. I wondered too.

  Well, John Francis, world-class eccentric, is now an envoy for the United Nations.

  Honestly!

  According to the Point Reyes Light, a newspaper that once won a Pulitzer Prize, John Francis has been appointed Goodwill Ambassador to the World’s Grassroots Communities by the United Nations Environmental Programme (I know it’s spelled funny, but that’s what it is). After seventeen years of silence this guy came out waving a diplomatic passport!

  As I drove out of Inverness and tried to keep from spilling my coffee in my lap, my hat was off to these proud people who helped mold the character of this extraordinary man.

  That afternoon the fog cleared and I gave rides in the Cannibal Queen. First to risk life and limb with me was my nephew, Jack Coonts. Earlier that afternoon he had looked sun-bronzed and handsome as hell when he introduced me to his girlfriend, a cute blonde who also worked on the summer crew. His cousins, ages four and six, caught the two of them kissing one evening a few weeks ago and promptly reported them to the authorities, their parents. Jack just shrugged it off.

  The marine layer of cool air seemed to top out about 2,000 feet, so I cruised from Petaluma to Point Reyes and back at 2,500, where the air was at least fifteen degrees warmer and smooth as silk. The sea looked like it was covered with frosted glass as the sun got lower and lower.

  Next to go was Dino with six-year-old Carolyn on her lap. I forgot to give them cotton balls for their ears so Dino rode the whole way with her fingers jammed in hers. She said she enjoyed it though.

  Jack Williams and four-year-old Ashley were the final passengers. I took them past the village of Point Reyes out over the national seashore almost to the lighthouse. The wings of the Cannibal Queen passed over South Beach outward-bound. We were on our way to Hawaii but I decided we couldn’t make it before dark, so I turned around.

  The sun set just as I landed for the third time. My passengers stood on the ramp in the twilight comparing notes. If only all my days could end like this.

  22

  PETE BAUR WAS AN F-14 PILOT FOR UNCLE SUGAR’S NAVY UNTIL last month. In September he’ll become a cattle-car pilot for Delta Airlines. Right now he’s hangi
ng out at the Petaluma Airport.

  When I arrived two days ago he watched me tie down the Queen and carry my stuff through the gate to the porch of the FBO building. I didn’t know him then, of course.

  As I fished in my pockets for coins for the pay phone, Pete said. “You’re Steve Coonts, aren’t you?”

  I never know quite what to say when accosted in this manner. Do I owe this guy money? Did I make a pass at his wife? Hell, I don’t even know any women in California!

  Since I was about his height and outweighed him by thirty pounds, I cautiously admitted that he was correct.

  “I love your books.”

  I exhaled. When you puff up your chest they think you’re bigger. “Terrific. Keep reading them.” Actually I want people to keep buying them—I didn’t pay for the Queen with lottery winnings.

  We shot the breeze a while that Wednesday afternoon, and he was here on the porch when I arrived on Friday morning. We leaned on the rail and waited for the overcast layer to burn off while talking about the Navy and getting out and what kind of airplane a fellow should buy when he gets a few bucks ahead.

  The scud did burn off, suddenly, as if a curtain went up. In minutes the sky was blue and empty.

  Pete helped me untie the Queen and push her to the fuel pump. When she was gassed and oiled, I asked him if he wanted to go for a ride. This was a mere formality. No guy who wore Navy wings would turn down a ride in a plane like this unless he were terminally ill and due to expire this afternoon.

  When we were level and headed south for the Golden Gate, I turned the stick and rudder over to Pete. He made gentle turns and climbs to get the feel of her. The ball stayed centered. His experience in light planes was immediately evident. Here was a jet pilot that knew what a rudder was for!

  Over Hamilton, the closed Army field, we could see the fog layer above the entrance to the bay. I took the controls and trimmed the Queen nose down. We went under the goo at a thousand feet at the water’s edge and had to keep descending to about six hundred. We flew by the Golden Gate and turned eastward to fly between Alcatraz and the promontory of the north shore. The buildings of downtown San Francisco, the Embarcadero, Fisherman’s Wharf, all of the great city lay on our right glowing in the diffused sunlight under the cloud.