The Oregon coast is where you go when you are tired tired tired of navigating. To go south, they say, keep the blue half of the world on your right.
To go north, however: that’s the problem I had to figure out this morning, and what I’m going to try is my sudden devil-may-care attitude — I plan to keep the blue part on the left, and see what happens.
( A few hours have passed.)
There was an odd feeling, earlier today as I wrote the words “I plan…,” as though I was being reminded about schemes and mice again, plus the meaning of “ganging aft agley.”
No problem with the morning, save the wind was 25 gusting 33 a few miles north, which was no real problem save they were directly on our noses, and forecast stronger as the day warmed. Dan calls them “fortuitous headwinds,” since they mean more flying time for him than a tailwind.
We reached the airport, made ready to fly, and before I even got to the Tail Section Inspection in my preflight checklist, Dan said, “Looks like you have a flat tire.”
There’s a difference between the two. Sometimes we forget, takes a little reminding once in a while.
Puff has picked up one of my traits, I think: it’s easy to say things, promise things, then we’re jostled when it’s time to make it so. I’ll set an appointment, agree to one meeting or another, then time comes to meet and I’ll whine, “Why ever did I agree to this? I’d much rather be alone than keeping my promise!”
Puff isn’t like me, she doesn’t whine. Today, though, it impressed her: running five hours over Nowhere to Land takes hard work ,when the chips are down.
She’s such a gifted little airplane, she doesn’t blink when I go an about she can land anywhere, she’s a STOL airplane (for Short Take Off and Land), whether it’s land or water, Puff’s safe as a helicopter, and without the mass of moving parts.
All the way across the country I’ve been her pilot: where do we land if the engine fails now. And most all the way there’s been an answer: here’s a river, here’s a lake, here’s a road, here’s a sand-bar, here’s a smooth place in the desert it only needs to be a couple hundred feet long.
Today it didn’t matter if she were a helicopter, today it was hour after hour over trees everywhere. Lose an engine in your helicopter today and you’re going down in trees, not much guarantee you’re gonna walk away from that landing no matter how good a helicopter, how good an airplane, how good a pilot you are.
Worse for Dan and Jennifer, I was leader today, all day. Their job was to go where I chose, where Puff flew. I decide to fly over trees, Jennifer’s engine fails, it’s Dan in the trees, Puff and me circling helpless overhead as they go down in a seething ocean of pine.
The forecast was not wonderful: winds to 25 knots on the north part of our journey. Those winds over rugged terrain would be less than fun for us, yet the old pilot’s adage is Never Cancel on a Forecast.
The prudent course: take off and see what it’s like, land if it isn’t pretty. Which we did, Dan and Jennifer leading as we climbed from Carson City over Reno, Nevada.
I once lived in Reno, a quiet, pretty town and if you like flashy lights, there’s an area for that, too.
We were two prospectors out of place crossing the high-tech Class C airspace over the city, but hey, what are radios for?
Each day, for Dan and me on our journey across the continent, begins like this:
We have no destination we must reach, no heading and altitude we must hold, no briefing says Dan’s leader today or Richard is. What we have is we generally agree on the approximate direction we’re heading, and we’ll land maybe somewhere that looks inviting, and now and then for fuel.
Today’s flight was yesterday’s agreement: our Geologist’s-Dream Air Safari and Gentle Cross-Country Adventure should probably include a circuit of Mono Lake, filled chock-a-block with natural wonders like tufa and lava and brine shrimp, and whatever came after that, all it had to be was north.
Dan turned out to be flight leader by virtue of he’s got the camera — I’m leader when Puff’s ready for her closeup, and he flies Jennifer as required to get the picture he wants. From Bishop there wouldn’t be pictures but a long climb to altitude, since Mono is surrounded by high country, so Dan was leader.
While Dan navigated, Puff took the chance to nail her altitude record above ten thousand feet:
She will place this on the wall of her hangar next yesterday’s 100-feet-below-sea-level record from yesterday’s Death Valley adventure:
The difference in airspeed has something to do with the density of the air, but that’s a story for you to explore as you get your Sport Pilot’s license.
Puff stayed up at altitude, watched Dan and Jennifer play down among the tufa towers, which I had never heard of and for which Mono Lake is famous to everybody else.
Dan was aloft in Geologist Heaven — who else is using his airplane to study stone? When I innocently estimated that by now he must have a thousand photos of rocks and Puff along the way, he looked at me pityingly: “A thousand?” I didn’t want to compound my out-of-it-ness by asking, so I suppose he’s got fifty thousand photos on this trip for his book which ought to be titled Jennifer’s Living Geology: A Handbook for Small Amphibian Airplanes. That may not be quite the title, but I’m ready to be floored by the photos.
Of course he had to touch down on the surface of that strange lake, just touch it and fly again. If he had stopped on the water, at that altitude, Jennifer could not have taken off again till the air went much colder.
This is the real color of the water where they touched, by the way. I just held my phone-camera out the window and clicked:
After a while, Dan called Puff down for her glamor-shots in the Land of Odd that is Mono Lake. It’s a strange feeling, flying there. Strange as in creepy, weird, dead. There are no fish in the lake, Dan said, but millions of brine-shrimp, supper for seagulls. And Mono is supposed to be a water supply for the city of Los Angeles? Hm.
We flew around a volcano vent or whatever it’s called, in which the lava had been tumbled in blocks. I have not yet been able to stump Dan with my questions on how can the earth possibly do rocks like that, but I’ll guess lava-blocks have to come from earthquakes and I’d guess large earthquakes of the sort human beings have never witnessed.
I’ve never had more than a passing interest in geology, but this flight with a man who has such passion for studying it first-hand is getting me fascinated. I had thought of rock as, well, rock-like: hard, unyielding: bonk-bonk. Not so. Watch it on a newsreel of millions of years, Dan says, or watch it deep beneath the crust, and rock is liquid, plastic, curving, twisting, bubbling. Look at it from altitude, you can see solid ground rippling away like water from crust-plates crashing together, splashing mountains all directions. I’m waiting in line for his book to come out.
By the time our photo-shoot was over, the ground was warming and we became pretend-sailplanes looking for lift to get out of the soup-bowl that holds the lake. On her own at that altitude and temperature, a SeaRey can climb a few hundred feet per minute…she’s near what they call her service ceiling, about as high as she can go unaided. But we found today that aided by columns of rising air, a Rey can climb more than a thousand feet per minute. She can also lose altitude that fast in falling airs, so it was a dance we did, changing partners with air-columns till we were over the rim to lower country.
Relatively lower. We reached Walker Lake after half an hour’s flying through rough air. Density altitude was 6,000 feet, and we chatted on our private radio channel:
“Elevation’s four thousand, Dan, but the density’s six. No wind, or not much. Can we take off again if we land?”
“Don’t know. Let’s try it. I’ll try it first, see if Jennifer can do it.”
“If she can’t, we’ll land too and camp the night. Fly off in the cool air tomorrow?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Then I’ll go first. See how Puff likes western high altitude.”
“You’ve got it.”
We’ve got it, Puff, I told her. Let’s have a little splash.
She was keen for the adventure, sure she could take off again. It’s a pretty lake.
I agreed. Walker had none of the eerie vampire-ness of Mono, The water was blue-green, sparkling colors and clear.
“We’ve got it. Wheels up for a water landing.”
I checked the wheels up for the millionth time, slowed Puff to 60 mph, flaps down, boost pump on, turned down into the wind. In a few seconds the wavelets were whipping by inches beneath us, then the juddering hiss as Puff’s keel touched down. She slid graceful to a stop, floating calm and sweet as Jennifer came sweeping by on the step.
Now, my Puffly, I thought, Let’s see if you can take off again.
Piece of cake, she said. She has picked up that phrase from me. I got it, I think, from the Royal Air Force.
The throttle came ahead to takeoff power, yet for a few seconds Puff didn’t react, as though she were startled by how thin the air is, here. She moved, but plowed through the water instead of leaping on top of it.
I pushed the control stick full forward, a trick that Dan had suggested for high-altitude takeoffs, and sure enough, Puff went a little lighter, picked up a little speed, spray beginning to fly. Then she sort of shook her head and got serious about this project. With that, she was all at once lifted from plowing the water to planing on top of it, and after that there was no doubt that she would fly. It was a long takeoff slide, for her, but finally the wavelets were barely flickering on her keel, and then we were flying.
“Good girl, Puff!” I said it aloud, I believe, as when I fly alone with her I’m not sure when I speak to her and when I think to her. All the same to Puff. She was quite pleased with herself, her chance to show Jennifer how it’s done. I felt her big sister noticing. Good job, Puff!
“Wheels up for the water,” Dan called, and as we climbed and turned, he and Jennifer descended. What a lovely sight that is from the air, his little ‘Rey, touching down.
We landed again, close by Jennifer, as she taxied on surface toward shore. We taxied too, and I watched through six feet or so, clear water to the bottom. Sand it was, with bits of broken sandstone scattered there. The water went shallower, and clearer. I noticed that Jennifer, ahead of us, had stopped, her engine shut down.
A second later I felt a bump as Puff’s keel touched sand. then another. We were a hundred feet from shore, but with a final sliding stop Puff said this is as far as we go.
“Thank you, Little Cat,” I said, and before she could protest, switched her engine off.
It was totally silent, save for the lap of waves against Puff’s hull. As I unfastened my shoulder harness, took off the headset, I noticed that Dan was out of his cockpit, wading to shore. He moved unsteadily, as though he were sinking in mud with every step.
In a minute, I found that’s exactly what he was doing. I sank eight inches in the thick stuff every few steps. I could pull my feet out of it, but not my water-shoes, which stayed buried there. Finally found those and pulled ‘em loose, made it to shore.
I stood there, watching the wide empty lake and our two airplanes.
We four were the only living creatures in sight, miles around every direction.
Dan and I looked at the sight, at each other, and then we started laughing. The laugh, it had happened before in the same situation: are we the only two crazy nuts in all the world, to come out here to the center of nowhere no other soul for fifty-hundred miles?
Answer: Yes.
What it felt besides funny, was free. We had nobody’s permission but our own, and needed no other, to follow what we each most loved to do with our lives, which at that moment was standing on this beach forsaken by all others. No footprints, no tire tracks, no nothin’ but us four friends in the sunlight, clear cool water rippling like high-speed rock as we stood nearby.
We laughed for that freedom. How much study and work and cash and loving effort we had taken, giving priority to these little airplanes and to practicing our own skills, and now we stood free on a desert lakeside that could be any waterside anywhere in the world, if we chose to be there.
By that moment I had spent over a hundred hours in Puff’s little cockpit, flying, had made hundreds of practice water landings. Scared myself now and then, laughed alone in the sky and now with a friend who had made so many of the same choices, sacrificed other possibilities to make this one come true. No golf, no bowling, no sports events, no drinking or card-games with buddies on Saturday night. Gave it all up. To stand where we were standing. Now.
And that, somehow, is so funny that one laughs out loud, for the joy of it.
From there is was half an hour to another Nevada lake, this one with people here and there, dots on the beach, a sparse few boats on the water but not in sight when we came ashore.
We called it a day at Carson City, put the airplanes to bed at the airport, were offered and accepted a ride from a local pilot on his way home for the day.
Now it’s two a.m., time to finish writing for the night.
There’s no sound in the room, but I’m still laughing.
There’s a restaurant in the hotel in Boulder City, Nevada (I’ve forgotten the name I think it has “Ranch” in it) surrounded by slot machines in which after dinner if you say you’d like to taste the carrot cake they serve you a six- or eight-layer cake about the size of a pumpkin. You take the seven-eighths of a pumpkin leftover with you to your room, but at 6 am the next morning it may no longer be what you had in mind on which to start your day.
So it was with me and Dan. We continued our journey carrotcake-less, as how would you feel to have an engine failure in the middle of Death Valley and they find you fifty years later with a petrified cake in your hand?
We did take extra water, as in case of a forced landing we would find ourselves in what the military calls a “survival situation.”
We were airborne as early as the opening of the fixed-base operator would allow.
It still feels odd to me, to see Puff and Jennifer, these wilderness creatures, on a busy modern airport:
We left quick as we could, Dan carrying five gallons of fuel in the cockpit with him as our destination, the Furnace Creek airport in Death Valley, has no fuel available.
Did know yon mountainside is not igneous, but metamorphic? No, but I found out today,
Anybody with an aircraft radio scanner along our way is getting a free education on geology. I hadn’t paid much attention till this voyage across the continent, but now it strikes me…this entire country (and by now I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the whole world) is made out of rock!
And all that rock? It’s moving!
We were flying along, our two little SeaReys, and all of a sudden up ahead and to our left, this!
One minute I looked ahead and everything was dead level. The next minute there’s this big cloud of dust and the block of mountain six miles wide it’s come roaring up from below like it couldn’t hold its breath a half-second longer and had to get some air.
I knew this picture was going to be taken days before the shutter clicked. Exactly this picture.
Certain things come true because it is their nature to come true. Dan Nickens is your geologist’s Indiana Jones. Other geologists are content to examine their shales and limestones and igneous gneiss, examine it specimen by bagged specimen, they’re happy at the controls of their scanning tunneling electron microscope.
We were off at 7:30 a.m., wheels lifting from the runway at Plainview. The wheels keep spinning after one leaves the runway after the wheels are retracted. If if bothers, press the brake handle.
We turned west, though air like brushed satin. Let go the controls, our airplanes flew themselves, north and west toward the high country.
At first the land beneath us was intensively cared for, no sign of wilderness so far as one could see:
Gliding on that silk, though, the country slid under us like a great earthen wedge, lifting both airplanes higher, butterflies in sunlight. Within the hour it was just the opposite, we flew over wilderness, one horizon to the other,
as though humans had never existed.
I felt the chill in the air as we climbed. At six thousand feet, it was pretty cold, I thought. At seven thousand, it was very pretty cold. Yet by that time, descending back to six thousand would have put us several hundred feet underground. Cold I preferred.
Puff was setting new personal altitude records every few minutes. She would nearly quadruple her record by the time we landed, but she was learning to wear experience lightly, an invisible cloak, tossed casual over her wings. Some days we set records, she said, some days we don’t.
Ronnie Robbins runs the maintenance hangar at Plainview Airport. One of those folks one instantly likes, the first half-second on meeting. Forty years he’s been working on airplanes, flying them, rebuilding them so they fly again. On the wall of one of Ronnie’s hangars, as far from the sea as it is possible to get, look who slips into our world of appearances:
Her rememberings of flights past but with her still, I’ll bet, as vivid as mine. There’s a way, isn’t there, of making her living memory our own, if we desire it to be, if we value the lessons she’s learned and chooses to share? I expect the answer is of course. I expect we’ll see examples still to come, on this journey with the two Little Cats.
Today was all maintenance, till late,till just an hour ago. But in this one day, Dan had replaced the carburetor, found a problem and fixed it in the other carburetor (this engine has two of them), replaced the spark plugs, replaced the tailwheel assembly, invented a system to keep freak failures from attacking his landing gear and test flew Jennifer in the sunset. End of daylight, he’s flying perfectly.
Tomorrow we plan to be on our way early in the morning, a curviwandering route toward Farmington, New Mexico.
It’s already late and my belief is that I must sleep, this quick page all in haste but I wanted you to feel the surprise of Granma Cat, same as we felt it, reminding she’s with us along the way.
