Flight of Passage: A True Story Read online

  Eventually my father decided that I was still too young, slacked off on my lessons, and concentrated instead on my brother. I was relieved to be off the hook and, in one important respect, mediocrity never felt so good. Finally, indisputably, my older brother was better than me at something. I was actually proud of him now, even envious of his prowess in the air. Sitting in the back of the four-seat Beechcrafts and Cessnas we rented on weekends to fly off somewhere together, I loved the way Kern adroitly ran through his checklist, started the engine, and then managed a whole flight alone while my father sat with his arms crossed in the instructor’s seat. At the end of our long flying days together, I would suddenly realize that I was happy to be around Kern now, merely because he was happy, a refreshingly new sensation for me. Kern was euphoric about his success as a pilot and his entire psychology became wrapped up in aviation. At last he could concentrate on what he liked in himself and forget about what he detested in me.

  Best of all, my father was a lot more relaxed about both of us. Nothing bothered him now that he had a son who was a crack pilot. We were blissfully happy for the next four years, and all summer we spent weekend after weekend flying off the ramshackle grass strip a few miles from our home. In the fall, we picked up a burnt-out Taylorcraft or Aeronca trainer, disassembled it and towed it home behind our Jeep, and then spent the cold months inside our barn contentedly rebuilding our “winter plane.”

  Kern progressed as a pilot in the style that my father adored. In August 1964, he turned sixteen, the legal age for first solo. It would not be enough for the firstborn son of Tom Buck to merely circuit the field once in a nondescript Cessna trainer, the usual first-solo drill. Instead, he and my father concocted a multiple event. On his sixteenth birthday, they decided, Kern would solo four separate airplanes four times, for a total of sixteen hops around the strip. It was the kind of preposterous stunt that my father was known for, and Kern went right up and did it. Round and round the grass field, in plane after plane, my brother monotonously droned. My father had done his usual competent job of turning out a large crowd of family and friends to witness the event. But it was a sweltering hot day and everybody watching at the airport soon felt lazy and bored—sixteen consecutive arrivals and departures by a teenager in a light plane being about as entertaining as sixteen arrivals and departures by a crow. When Kern got to the last plane, which was a turd-brown Ercoupe, even my father had had enough. Stepping over to the shady side of the hangar, he lay down on the grass, removed his wooden leg, and took a nap.

  To my father, an event wasn’t an event until it was also a headline, and that too was arranged. That night my father called an old friend of his, Jack Elliott, the aviation writer for the The Newark Star Ledger, and we all sat around my father’s library listening to Kern describe his sixteen solos to Jack. The story ran the following week in Jack’s regular Sunday column, “Wings Over Jersey.” The piece appeared under the headline SOLOS 16 TIMES AT AGE 16, and it was illustrated with a three-column picture of my brother sitting at the controls of the family’s battered Piper Cub. Kern was still quite adolescent and small for his age and didn’t look much past fourteen. But his innocent Leave It to Beaver good looks only made the accomplishment seem brighter. Jack was an experienced newspaperman who knew how to take material gathered over the phone and gussy it up so that readers felt they were receiving an eyewitness account. “Kern took her up and brought her down again like it was something he’d been doing all his life and could do with one hand tied behind his back,” Jack wrote of my brother’s first hop. “Then he did it again.”

  Kern had trouble adjusting to his new status as the young star of the strip. One fall day shortly after he soloed, we were all out at the airport together, but it was a very windy afternoon and none of the instructors were allowing their students to fly. But my father considered the conditions a good challenge for Kern and told him to go up and practice his takeoffs and landings. Kern circuited the field for an hour or so, expertly crabbing into the wind and planting the wheels down without a bump as he did his “touch and gos.”

  He didn’t look a day past fourteen, but Kern’s innocent Leave It to Beaver good looks only made the accomplishment seem brighter.

  As my brother circuited the field, another student pilot who we liked a lot, Nick Stone, stood by the gas pumps and watched. Every time Kern touched down Nick would say, “Jesus, what a landing. Perfect.”

  Then my brother would come around again and Nick would say, “Jesus, what a landing.”

  I got so sick of hearing Nick say “Jesus, what a landing” that I started to pray that my brother would botch a couple, just for the record. He didn’t have to dig in a wingtip and seriously damage the plane, just touch down at an angle in the brisk crosswind and skid sideways hard enough to blow a tire, or let the drift push him over into the patch of gopher holes that lined the runway over by the windsock. Maybe he could even manage to hit the windsock. It would be good for Nick’s ego—hell, it would be great for mine—to see Kern screw the pooch, just once.

  But no, this was my brother. Every landing was perfect.

  After he made his last landing, Kern coasted the plane to a stop on the gas ramp, shut down and hopped out.

  More out of admiration than envy, Nick said to him, “Jesus, what a landing. Kern you’re good. You’re just so damned good.”

  When we got home that night, Kern was upset about it.

  “Rink, this just isn’t fair,” he said. “Did you hear what Nick said to me?”

  “Yeah. I heard what he said.”

  “Well, it isn’t fair. To be good at something, you’re supposed to work at it. But flying’s easy for me. I don’t even have to think about it.”

  I couldn’t understand my brother. He never overlooked an opportunity to question himself. Suddenly I felt terribly guilty about him, and guilty about all of the things that I thought I could do better than he could, and I decided right then and there that I would turn over a new leaf and become a better brother for him. It was my job to build him up, compliment him, make him feel better about himself.

  “Kern,” I said, “You’re being an asshole. What’s work got to do with it? You’re a good pilot, a great pilot! If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

  “Okay Rink,” he said. “Look, I’m going to make an agreement with myself that it’s okay for me to be good at flying. I’m not going to feel guilty about this, no matter how good I get. And then you know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “I’m going to stick to it.”

  You can begin to appreciate my problems. I spent a great deal of time then cursing my fate and wondering how I ended up with a brother like this.

  In August 1965, on his seventeenth birthday, Kern effortlessly passed the flying test for his private pilot’s license, and by that fall he had almost one hundred hours of logged time. Kern was also quite methodical and organized, the sort of boy who had his “career” all planned out at an age when most boys were merely planning their first date. He was determined to have his commercial pilot’s license before he left for college in 1966. This was vital, he thought. We were all aware that my parents, though reasonably well off, turned out children at fantastic production rates, and they could never afford to put us all through college. Kern planned to “fly his way through school” as a charter pilot and flight instructor. To qualify for the commercial flight test, Kern needed an additional one hundred hours in his logbook, mostly of cross-country flying time.

  That was the practical side of my brother. But Kern also had a brooding, dreamy side, the Irish in him, I guess. And he had inherited from my father a desperation to prove himself, but he was still too young to know what to do with his ambition. But it was there. Now that he was good at something, aviation, there had to be something more he could do, a way to apply it and stand out. Nobody should be able to forget that he was a great flyer.

  He was obsessed about it. One night, shortly after he passed his private pilot’s test, I found him
upstairs in his room glumly pacing back and forth across the floor.

  “Rink, you want to hear something pathetic? I mean, really pathetic?”

  “Sure.”

  “Rink, I’m seventeen years old, and I haven’t done a thing with my life yet. Not a thing!”

  Damn. Here we go again. There had to be something I could say to cheer him up.

  “Kern,” I said, “Don’t be such a weirdo. You’ve got a pilot’s license already! Most of your friends don’t even have their driver’s licenses yet.”

  “Nah, nah Rink—that’s nothing. I want to accomplish something, something everybody will be excited about and can respect. With aviation, maybe. But I don’t know what it is yet. I’m going to shoot myself if I can’t figure it out.”

  “Kern,” I said. “Relax. If you shoot yourself, you won’t figure it out.”

  For him, the situation called for something big, a lot bigger and better than SOLOS 16 TIMES AT AGE 16. Having grown up listening to rapturous tales of Pitcairn Mailwings and Waco 10s pushing out past the Ozarks and the Mississippi and into Oklahoma and east Texas, my brother had the advantage of great raw material to build on. The only plane available to him was the weatherbeaten, 85-horsepower Piper Cub my father had bought for $300 two years earlier, so that Kern could continue his flying lessons. So he began to dream big, harnessing his fantasies to the equipment at hand. That fall, as we returned to the Benedictine boys academy that we attended near our house, he seemed dreamier and more pensive than usual. His imagination was roaming west.

  He announced his plan one weekend in late October. Working alone and without my father’s help, Kern said, he and I would spend the winter rebuilding the Cub in our barn. Then, over the summer of 1966, we’d make a coast to coast flight to California. My brother insisted that he needed my help because he didn’t think that he could finish the plane over the winter by himself. And he didn’t believe that he could both navigate and handle the plane alone all the way to California either.

  “Rink, I need you for this,” my brother said. “I can’t do it alone.”

  It was the most ludicrous idea I had ever heard. My brother barely had one hundred hours in his logbook. He had never piloted a plane beyond the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. Nobody flew a Piper Cub all the way to California. Nobody had even thought of it until my earnest, dreamy brother came along.

  That fall, after Kern received his private pilot’s license, we had flown a few times together, and I was surprised by how much we enjoyed ourselves in the air. Kern wasn’t at all demanding like my father and, when he gave me the controls, he didn’t mind the way I wallowed the plane around the sky. In fact, he was idiotically easy to please. All I had to do was sit in the backseat of the Cub and not complain while he “pulled a buzz job” over Louie DeChiaro’s house, or pretend that I wasn’t airsick when he threw a roll of toilet paper out the window and then screamed down through the clouds to slice up the unfurled rolls of paper with the prop. I wasn’t doing anything back there, except turning green. But Kern was extravagantly grateful for my company and complimented me profusely on being a “great copilot.”

  Those flights revealed an important side of my brother to me. He was not only lonely, he was desperate for my approval. He didn’t have a lot of close friends anyway, and those that he had didn’t know a thing about aviation. I was the only one who knew what he was really like as a person, which to Kern at that age meant what he was like as a pilot. He enjoyed my company and wanted more of it, and I could tell that he was immensely frustrated by my failure to respond to him the way he felt a younger brother should. But it wasn’t in Kern’s nature to blame me for that, he blamed himself. Winning me over and earning my love was an enormous piece of unfinished business for him, another one of those things that he wanted out of the way and resolved before he left for college.

  I was just fourteen that fall and in the throes of an awkward adolescence, and I was never going to admit that I experienced such nauseating emotions about my brother. I didn’t want to talk about such things. So I assented to his plan, almost immediately, because if I didn’t he would pester me endlessly about my obligations to him “as a brother.” Besides, by then my teenage rebellion against my father was in full swing. I was still getting into trouble at school and my father and I fought a lot about that. Without really meaning to, Kern was finally doing what I had expected of him all along. His coast to coast plan, which would require a long winter rebuilding the plane in the barn, offered me a perfectly defensible excuse for dodging my father for almost a full year.

  My father, too, was initially hesitant about my brother’s plan, but one aspect was irresistible to him. Ever since the Depression, when he and his four brothers had worked all-night shifts at diners together and delivered papers at dawn, rescuing their family from financial ruin, the concept of brotherly collaboration was almost sacred to him. It pained him greatly that Kern and I had never been able to live up to that ideal. He viewed the coast to coast scheme as an opportunity for us to work together on something, transcending the jealous rages and petty squabbles that had marred our happiness as brothers and his happiness as a parent. And he was too much of a newshound to ignore another aspect. Two teenage boys flying coast to coast in a Piper Cub was a seductive adventure tale, a headline just waiting to happen. For him, the flight would be the ultimate opportunity to live vicariously through his sons and bask in the glow of their success.

  The simple audacity of our trip, our complete naïveté and nonchalance, astounds me still. Our tiny, two-seat Cub, manufactured in 1946, had no battery, no radio, no lights, not even a starter. The four cylinder Continental engine was ignited by my brother yelling “Contact!” from the cockpit while I stood outside, swinging the propeller by hand. Our only navigational aids were an ancient magnetic compass bolted to the instrument panel and a shopping bag filled with airmen’s charts. We nearly killed ourselves getting over the Rocky Mountains and, as we followed paved highways through the remote deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, the cars and pickup trucks traveling the blacktop the same way routinely overhauled us from behind and passed us, mocking us with their dust-devil wakes as they sped on west.

  Most of all, we were naïve about ourselves. Setting out on our journey, my brother and I considered ourselves young adventurers in the style of the aviation greats—Wiley Post, Charles Lindbergh, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. We would coax our frail plane across the continent, conquering every inch of terrain between New York and L.A., simply because “it was there.” But this was bunk. In fact, we needed to discover each other as brothers. The love that had been bottled up inside us since we were boys had to be acknowledged and expressed somehow, and this was all we knew, flying. And there was redemption for us in the perils of a coast-to-coast flight. That is what we found out among unfamiliar deserts and high mountain passes, and that is what odyssey is all about I guess. The odyssey was us.

  For years I wanted to write about that trip. Since college I have carried around from house to house an old Quaker State Oil box stuffed with mementos from our flight—our old flight logs and fuel records and maps, a yellowing pile of newspaper clips, a carousel of color slides that we took along the way. My wife and friends urged me to spill out the story just as I told it in person, mixing in the eccentric details of my family and the times. It was a classic tale of the 1960s, they said, and I needed to write it. This, in fits and starts, I gradually did.

  Still, the full book eluded me. Any account of those years would have to confront the painful, unresolved feelings for my brother and my father that were boiling over in 1966. My father died in 1975, nine years after we made our flight, and I deluded myself for a long time with the excuse that the sorrow of losing him to an early death, the sorrow of just knowing a man as complicated as he was, was still too intense. In fact, I had neither the courage nor the detachment to confront my father and how I really felt about him. I was running away from my best material.

  Then, one beautiful, cloudl
ess August afternoon in 1994, I took my daughters for an airplane ride around Cape Cod. Sara was eight that year and Charlotte was four. We took off from Chatham in a four-seat Cessna and banked east for Pleasant Bay, flying low and slow with some flaps down and the engine power reduced, following the familiar white beaches up through Wellfleet and Truro and then swinging around Race Point at Provincetown. I was delighted with the way that Sara already could handle the controls from the copilot’s seat. Little Charlotte, in the rear seat, took off her shirt—”To get a tan,” she said—and fell asleep.

  The night before had been Kern’s birthday, and he had driven down from Boston with his family for a party. We sat out on the porch in Yarmouth Port and talked about our old flying days together, kicking out at imaginary rudder pedals and jabbing with our sticks as we sat in wicker rockers, our daughters falling asleep in our laps. Sara is a tomboy, a very determined and competent child who worships sports heros and Huck Finn. And she’s a dreamer already, which all of the older children in our family always seem to be. I guess she was taking in a lot more than I realized.

  After our sightseeing ride the next day, when we landed at Chatham Airport, Sara pretzeled up her body the way children do when they have something important to say and suddenly blurted it out.

  “Dad, when I’m seventeen, can I fly to California with Charlotte?”

  “Ah Jeez, Sara. C’mon. Kern and I were teenagers before we cooked up something like that.”