The Dung Beetles of Liberia

by Daniel V. Jr. Meier

  CHAPTER 6

  TOO FINE

  When the Peace Corps act was passed by Congress on September 22, 1961, it was a particular boon to Africa Air Services. The company was able to add these Peace Corps volunteers to its long list of contract passengers along with technical service people and Liberian government officials. Although passenger service was lucrative, it was usually simple coastal routes that were considered less desirable by the AAS pilots. So it was not a great surprise to me that most of my trips in the beginning were coastal.

  My first solo trip was about an hour’s flight down the coast to a small town by a lake and close to a mountain. It was a beautiful place, and the sea was nearby. I decided to hotdog a little, so I flew along the beach and veered in and out between palm trees. It was a rush I hadn’t felt in a long time! I had a couple of missionaries on board and a lot of general cargo. The missionaries were silent and unconcerned.

  This airplane was designed to carry a thousand pounds as maximum payload; however, we usually took off with twelve hundred pounds. If we were operating from an especially rough or short field, we would stay within weight limits. The company would have pushed us to fly with more than twelve hundred pounds if they could have, but they had discovered that any more than twelve hundred pounds and the plane just didn’t fly.

  After offloading my cargo, I started back with two new passengers. But before I turned on course for Monrovia, I circled the lake. It was easy and beautiful, just as I thought it would be.

  The custom in Liberia at the time was that whatever a Big Man wanted, he got. Mike asked me to fly over to Robertsfield and pick up Honorable Williams and members of his family. They were due in on Pan Am Flight 51. Pan American ran Robertsfield, and they provided the air traffic control. I took off from Spriggs-Payne and shortly afterwards called the tower at Roberts and told them that I was about fifteen minutes out. A snappy controller’s voice called back and said, “We use Zulu time here,” so I asked him for a Zulu time check. He gave me one and I proceeded in to Robertsfield. I was cleared to land and after landing I turned off at the first intersection and starting taxiing. The controller came back with his snappy voice:

  “Cessna 180, you were not given permission to taxi. Report to the tower when you have completed your final check. And make it quick.”

  I climbed the ladder to the tower, which was on top of the terminal building and was let into the glass enclosure of the control tower where the controllers had a complete view of the airfield. By this time, Flight 51 had pulled up on to the ramp below. The “snappy” controller was an American—a short, red-faced man.

  He deliberately made me wait while he finished some paperwork, then turned to me and said, “I’m in charge here and I’m thinking of filing a violation against you.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Well, you don’t seem to know what time it is in this country,” he said.

  I suppressed my anger as best I could. “I know damn well what time it is.”

  He continued, “Or obey instruction coming from the tower. I’m probably not going to give you permission to fly out of here.”

  “That’s very interesting,” I said. “You see, I have some important passengers to pick up.”

  “I don’t really care,” he barked. “You’re not going anywhere right now.”

  I didn’t see any point in continuing this. I left the tower and met Honorable Williams in the terminal. He was a handsome man. He stood over six feet tall and was impeccably dressed in a blue, lightweight suit. His dark eyes showed both intelligence and kindness. At the moment, however, after a long trip and accompanied by his family, they showed fatigue.

  “We have a problem,” I said after introducing myself. “The man in the control tower won’t let us take off.”

  Honorable Williams said, “Oh, is that so!” He really did not want this irritation. He turned and spoke to a Liberian army lieutenant who was nearby. The lieutenant motioned to a couple of his soldiers.

  “Go an’ bring heem down,” the lieutenant ordered. The soldiers immediately went up to the tower and brought the controller down to face Honorable Williams. “This is the man who said you can’t takeoff?” he asked, looking at me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Honorable Williams rubbed his hands. “Do you need him to tell you how to take off?”

  “No.”

  Honorable Williams turned to the soldiers. “Take him into the customs room and hold him until you hear from me.”

  By the expression on his face, the controller knew that he had made a big mistake. I smiled at him, but he was avoiding any eye contact with me. We did take off and I flew Honorable Williams and his family members back to our airfield. Later, I heard that they let the controller go free but, at about three o’clock the next morning, soldiers went to his house and “interrogated” him. Then they took him to the local constabulary and he was gone on the next flight out. He had learned too late that one did not cross or refuse a Big Man.

  When the company had enough confidence in me, I was assigned to what I thought of as my first real trip. I was to transport supplies for a store owned by some Lebanese in the interior. It was at the end of the railroad to a new mining camp. This was a serious money-maker.

  The mining camp was part of the Liberian-American-Swedish Mining Company (LAMCO). LAMCO was the first large iron mining operation in Liberia. With mines in the Nimba mountain range in the eastern part of the country bordering Guinea and Ivory Coast, the mining company had built a 156-mile-long railroad to transport the ore to Port Buchanan.

  There were no facilities in Liberia, at that time, for filing an instrument flight plan or expecting radar coverage or air traffic control (ATC) guidance. You simply loaded your airplane, did your preflight checks, and took off. If there was somebody else up there flying around at your altitude, you didn’t know about them and they didn’t know about you.

  Ascending slowly from Spriggs-Payne, I crossed the crumbling remains of the outer ring road, originally designed to bypass Monrovia but never finished. The road, an orange band of bare laterite over a green carpet, passed slowly by the cockpit window until small rice farms started to appear. There was a small hut next to each green patch of rice. Occasionally, their roofs would flash in the sunlight. After some minutes, the Saint Paul River came into view. I was well inland by this time. My flight path would cross the river nearly at right angles. Its brown flow seemed to be more like a wide highway than a river.

  Scattered along the near bank lay huge decaying mansions, ironically reminiscent of the last vestiges of the antebellum South. This was one of the early and misguided choices for a settlement location. Over a hundred years ago, the original black settlers who migrated from the United States tried duplicating the plantation homes that they had known in the Old South. Now, the crumbling buildings had been taken over by the jungle, leaving only roofless ruins—a decaying echo of a system that should never have existed.

  After crossing the river, the rice farms began to disappear. Civilization fell back and beneath me. The world below was a more primitive place now. The matted mangroves of the coast steadily gave way to the forest of the rising plateau. The farms that remained were small and isolated. A thick double canopy of the high rainforest now covered the land. Only the bravest villages, diamond mines, and missions, supplied by bush plane, dared the forest. From here to the savanna 150 miles to the northeast, the escarpment of vegetation resisted human passage and all signs of civilization vanished in the jungle. I was bound for the rim of the Savannah and beyond. The great forest itself soon disappeared into the opaque clouds below as I sought cooler altitudes nearly a mile above the jungle.

  To get to the mining camp I had to clear mountains with peaks somewhere near three thousand feet. The mountains had not actually been mapped, so three thousand feet was just a guess. Not very high as far as mountains go, but the cloud ceilings were usually down around fifteen hundred to two thousand feet during the wet season. I esti
mated my position by dead reckoning, held my course for the estimated time then started letting down, hoping that I would see the St. John River before I hit something. Once I had it in sight, the usual procedure was to spiral down over the river so as not to lose sight of it, then fly up the river to the estimated position of the mining camp and hope that the airstrip came into view. If you missed it, you had to fly down the river and back up again until you saw it.

  To transport their heavy equipment, LAMCO had cut a rough road for about 150 miles through the jungle. The bright orange laterite indicated the area was rich in iron ore. LAMCO was the wealthiest business interest in Liberia, so lack of money was never an issue. They used a large number of bulldozers and other heavy equipment on these sites to build an airstrip and to clear away the jungle for open pit iron mines. These mines looked like terraced rock quarries, some about the size of a midwestern town in the US.

  This particular mining camp was all open air and populated with local laborers and wild-looking Europeans. When I arrived, a European man was standing on the edge of the jungle slowly shooting his pistol into the bush for no observable reason. I decided to do my business and leave quickly.

  My trip out of the area was tricky too. And I knew that if I were to go down, no one would ever find me.

  About every couple of months an air service operator would lose an airplane. Sometimes the pilots would survive, but most of the time they would not. I decided to never let down below 2,500 feet unless I had the river in sight. If I couldn’t spot the river, I would have to go back with my load. One pilot, Johann Muller, always went in, no matter what the conditions. One day he didn’t come back. Neither he nor the airplane were ever found. The jungle swallowed them up. I came to the quick realization that my life was worth more to me than a load of mining supplies.

  Over two weeks had gone by since our dinner, but I had spoken to Ana several times on the phone. There was a soccer match coming up the following week at the stadium, and I asked Ana if she would like to go. She said yes. In the meantime, I had a flight up the coast to a small village near the Sierra Leone border.

  I was to meet a group of Peace Corps volunteers and fly them up the coast to Gola village. They arrived on a chartered bus from Robertsfield around noon. There were three women, all young, white, and recent college graduates. There was also one man who was older and seemed to be in charge.

  It had been a long series of flights for them with no real opportunities for rest. I knew how they must be feeling. They had been dropped into an alien world of heat and humidity with no sleep, bad food, and strange sights and smells. They off-loaded their bags from the bus and, looking bewildered and disheveled, flopped down on them. The man walked over to me, probably because I was the only white man there. We did not wear uniforms or any form of designation such as silver wings pinned on our shirts or epaulets with gold stripes on them—no suit of lights for the pilots of African Air Services.

  He extended his right hand and smiled. “Are you the owner?” he asked in a clear masculine voice.

  “God no, I’m just one of the pilots. I’ll be flying you to where you want to go.”

  “Good, good,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously. “I’m Chuck Townsend. I’m the director and, as you can see, my guys are pretty beat. How far is it to the village?”

  “About an hour, give or take ten minutes.”

  “Great, great! So if we could start getting everything and everybody loaded,” he said, his voice rising as he turned to the huddled group.

  Paterson had arrived with two of his loaders. He called these boys his “rollers” because they rolled the equipment carts around. They pushed the empty four-wheeled cart toward us. Paterson said something to them that was unintelligible to me and then very politely asked the women to stand away from the bags. The women wearily struggled to their feet and stood patiently while Paterson’s boys loaded the bags onto the cart. With all the bags teetering on top of each other, one of the boys pulled while the other pushed the cart over to the airplane.

  Paterson handed me the passenger list and loading sheet, which read 1200 lbs. I called all the names and they all answered like a Girl Scout troop, saying “Here!” when they heard their name.

  The company had recently acquired a Cessna 185 with a cargo pod fastened under the belly of the airplane. It was a bigger, heftier airplane than the 180 and required more takeoff room. The speeds were a little higher than the 180, but other than that it was laid out like most Cessna aircraft—comfortable, easy to read, and made to fly.

  After the boys had loaded the bags on the airplane, I waited for the passengers to seat themselves. Chuck took the front seat next to me. It was obvious that we were overweight. In the US this would be a violation of the aviation regulations and, therefore, the takeoff weight limitation is usually strictly observed. But this was West Africa, and all the rules hadn’t been written yet. I was learning you did what had to be done.

  I taxied to the very edge of the bush at the end of the runway to give myself every available foot. I double checked to make sure everyone had their seat belts on, then started the takeoff run.

  The airplane accelerated more slowly than I expected, but it steadily gained speed. We reached rotation speed about two thirds down the runway and I slowly pulled the nose up. The airplane struggled into the air and the stall warning light came on immediately. The loading sheet had been fudged of course.

  I eased off of the back pressure and the light went out. The airplane continued to accelerate but wasn’t yet ready to climb. The end of the runway was coming up fast; the palm trees looked like they were reaching out to grab us. I did not want to end up in a pile of crushed aluminum in the same spot where Joe did.

  I held it down, gaining speed, as long as I dared then eased back on the yoke and the airplane started to climb nicely. We cleared the cable and tops of the palm trees by what seemed like inches. Chuck looked at me with an expression of relieved terror.

  “Just a day in the life of an African bush pilot,” I said, hoping my weak attempt at humor would relieve the tension in his face.

  The young women behind us seemed unconcerned. Most gazed out of the windows in wonder at this “brave new world.” The weather was good, and I was able to gain enough altitude to safely fly over Monrovia. After passing over the city, I dropped to a lower altitude to fly along the coast. Chuck had indicated on the map where the village should be. The head men had been informed, by radio, of our arrival and had put a large cross made of bed sheets on the runway. I reached a point where I estimated that I should turn inland. Ten minutes later I saw the village.

  I could clearly see the cross, and as I circled the runway, people started to remove the sheets. It was a dirt strip with puddles of rain water scattered over it. I suspected that the ground was soft, so I set the airplane up for a soft field landing, which means, in aviation jargon, hanging the airplane on the propeller and dragging it in at plus five knots above the stall speed with full flaps. Since I knew that the airplane was overweight, I added an extra five knots and made the approach as low as possible, skimming over the tops of palm trees. Chuck looked terrified again, as well he should have.

  As the airplane neared the ground I added a little power to reduce the rate of descent, then, as the plane settled, a little more, and a little more until the wheels began to touch the ground very gently. I slowly reduced power and the wheels began to sink into the mud, splashing fanlike sprays of muddy water onto the wings and tail. Once on the ground, the speed dropped rapidly. I did not want the airplane to come to a stop and sink deeper into the mud so I kept it rolling, turned with some difficulty, and taxied on the runway to a grassy area beside the runway near a large mud hut. I shut the engine down. Chuck seemed relieved.

  Villagers began crowding around and I opened my door and asked for the Head Man. I saw him making his way through the crowd. He was, as expected, older with graying hair and bad teeth. I stepped out of the airplane and the man greeted me with the u
nique Liberian hand shake with a snap at the end. We introduced ourselves.

  “Helloo ya! Ah Mulbah,” he said.

  “Hello Mulbah, I’m Ken. Could you get some of the boys to help with the bags?”

  He looked back and made several quick gestures with his walking stick. Several boys pushed their way to the airplane, and he said something to them in a tribal dialect. One of the boys ran to the cargo pod and opened it as though he had done it before. By now the women had started to deplane and gather near the tail. Chuck was with them.

  Again Mulbah said something unintelligible to the boys, who were now lifting the bags onto their shoulders, and pointed to the mud and grass hut with his stick. They pushed through the crowd, each carrying a bag on his shoulders. I went behind them, followed by Mulbah, Chuck, and the women, almost in single file.

  The hut was a fairly large rectangular structure of dried mud and wattle, a roof thatched with palm leaves and several small rooms, each with an open window. There was a single entrance. Each room had a cot, a wooden stand with a metal wash basin and a metal water pitcher. The few pots, pans, eating utensils, and linens in the hut were shared. There was no electricity, and each room had an oil lamp and a large grass rug on the dirt floor. Oil, Mulbah emphasized, was strictly rationed.

  Mulbah showed the hut off as an object of pride, and the women, as well as Chuck, did a good job of hiding their shock and disappointment. When the tour was over Chuck thanked him for his generosity and kindness and directed the women to select rooms and do the best that they could. Chuck said he would walk back to the airplane with me to make a final check, but I suspected that he wanted to jump into the front passenger seat and get out of there.