by Jay Barnson
“Well,” he says, “I got me a powerful thirst. And I ain’t slept in three days, ever since San Francisco, so I’m gonna check my eyelids for holes.” He reaches in one of the grocery boxes from Kessler’s General Store and comes up with a pint.
He points his bottle at the wheel, and the little table by the side of it, where there was a compass, a barometric altimeter, and a thick roll of charts. “Sit right there, and for the love of Pete, don’t touch nothin’. We got to get over the Rocky Mountains, but that won’t happen until at least tomorrow, maybe the day after. Nothin’ you can do to steer without the boiler goin’ and the propellers turnin’ anyhow.
“Don’t even think about tryin’ to start the boiler without me—you’ll blow us clean out of the sky. We’ll keep climbin’ for a spell. Then she’ll level herself out. Don’t touch nothin’. Just let the wind take us.” And with that he drains half that bottle, and quicker than a wink he was snorin’ like a freight train.
The first three hours was a joy, watchin’ the mountain tops speed by a thousand feet below, all in total silence. I could see golden eagles down below us, ridin’ the thermal currents above them hot rocky peaks. The mountaintops of the Great Basin slid past, the flanks with their blankets of spruce and quakin’ aspen, the north sides still with traces of snowfields even in summer. In between them, the dusty little valleys with the regular square green patches of irrigated farmland.
Ozzie kind of come to once, halfway at least, with just enough wits about him to drain the rest of that bottle. After that, he was really out.
Sure enough, just like Ozzie said, the blimp leveled out, all on its own, about twelve thousand feet. That high up, even in the summer it was kinda chilly, so I lit the little coal heating stove in the cabin.
When I came back from that, I was startled to see that the mountain I had been watchin’ grow gradually in front of me all of a sudden was far behind. We had to be goin’ way faster than I ever imagined.
That scared me, and made me curious, so I found the right charts, and started doin’ some figurin’. I was plain flabbergasted just how quick the geometry my mother drummed into my head became really useful. In a couple of minutes I had landmarked our position, and had our bearing and speed.
But what them charts showed scared me near to death. I ran to Ozzie and tried to shake him awake, but it was just no good. He was way too passed out. Never stirred. I screamed, I hollered, I slapped him. “Osmond! OSMOND! You’ve got to wake up and light the boiler! We’re going to hit the mountain!”
Nick Bottom stirred from his long, rapt silence. “You figured out how to navigate just from some bloomin’ books? How did you know you was going to hit the mountains?”
“Remember, I was Ma’s star pupil,” answered Ganesh. “She graduated from a fancy women’s teacher college Back East. You can bet she made sure all us kids got our lessons straight. Taught us all to read and write and do our sums. Some of us she taught algebra and geometry, even calculus. Latin and Greek, geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics. But that day the geometry was the most useful.
“Seems to me, mate,” Nick says, “you’re closer to being educated than not.”
“I know enough to get by,” said Ganesh. “Just don’t try to plunk me down in some fancy-ass drawin’ room. Them swells will spot me for a fraud in a hot second. I might have been around the world a few times, but I’m just a simple farm boy turned aeronautical sailor.”
Anyway, knowin’ our altitude, and having so many high mountains as landmarks, it was easy to fix our position on the chart, estimate the angle to a distant landmark, time our passage with the chronometer, and calculate our speed.
The winds at that altitude were lots faster than on the ground. We was movin’ at more than a hundred miles an hour, straight toward Mount Evans, one of the highest of the mountains on the Front Range of the Rockies. A lot of those peaks are over fourteen thousand feet, a couple of thousand feet higher than we were flying. And the way I figured it, we was goin’ to get there just after full dark.
The sunsets in the Rocky Mountains are really something to see, I can tell you. When it’s clear, like it was that night, the sunset arches all the way across the sky, from burnished gold against the western horizon, through the colors, from orange, to crimson, then purple, indigo, and finally to inky black. But we was going away from the sunset at a wonderful clip, so that sun disappeared in a real hurry.
For a while I could still see the snow caps on the peaks of Mount Evans reflecting the red glow of the sunset, like bloody fangs rushin’ at me out of a dark closet. That was bad enough. But when the light was gone completely it was worse: I knew that mountain was there, and that we wasn't high enough to get over.
Not being able to see it made it even scarier. I imagined us plowin’ into the mountainside a thousand feet below the summit, high up on those permanent snowfields, way high up where nobody one would ever find us. If anyone ever bothered to try.
I tried again to rouse Ozzie, but it was completely useless. No help there. He didn't expect us to get to the Front Range until at least the following day, so he figured we was completely safe just driftin’ along. A man doesn't get more asleep than that without bein’ dead.
“Well, that tears it,” I says to myself. “I know he said not to touch anything, but if I don't, we'll die for sure.”
I stood and stared at the maze of pipes and gauges and fireboxes and valves and gears and fly wheels and push rods that connected the boiler to the propellers, trying to make sense of it all. It couldn't be all that different from the steam engine that drove the sugar beet processing machinery at the Co-op, could it? I had watched Pa operate that often enough. Ought to be the same, right? At least in principle?
But I had no more than an hour to figure it out, get it fired up and up to pressure—without blowin’ us to kingdom come—before we hit the side of that mountain. We were flyin’ at it straight as an arrow.
Then it dawned on me, like a lump of lead landin’ at the bottom of my stomach, that the boiler at the Co-op took more than an hour to get up to pressure. If Ozzie had left the ground in an organized and orderly way, he'd have made steam before he cast off. But no one ever accused Ozzie Osmond of doin’ anything organized or orderly.
I hurried and laid a fire in the boiler, slowly started feedin’ in coal, made as sure as I could that water was flowing in to cover the firebox, started watching the pressure gauge with one eye, the chronometer with the other.
It was a race: could I get up enough steam to get the propellers turnin’ enough to get us across the wind and get through a pass on either side of those fangs? Or would time run out? Would I be watchin’ the boiler gauges when we plowed into the side of the mountain and the hydrogen in the blimp went up in a giant fireball?
Below us was mile after mile of smaller mountains and forest. No sense even thinkin’ about venting gas and tryin’ to land; hittin’ the ground here would be as fatal as hittin’ the side of Mount Evans. I had to either steer us around the mountain, or up and over.
My options wasn't good: either I would get the propellers turnin’ and be able to steer, or I would have to dump ballast. But I had no idea how to dump enough to get us up the couple of thousand feet we needed, without sendin’ us too high--so high there would be no air to breathe.
Quickly I figured my point of no return, the moment when I would be forced to dump ballast or die. Would the blimp climb as fast as it did leavin’ the ground? I had no idea. I watched the minutes tick away, knowing that out there in the darkness that mountain was coming at me so fast that if I crashed into it, I would die instantly, and never know what hit me.
Since then I've learned all the things I should have done, the finer control I might have used, but just didn't know about at the time. As it turned out I might just as well have sat down and waited for the crash, for all the good any of it did me. Because the steam pressure gauge never moved off the bottom.
I knew I was making steam, but I had no idea Ozzie had opened all t
he pressure valves when he shut down the boiler. I was making steam, but it was just puffing out behind the blimp, not turning the propellers.
So there I sat, with my hand on the handle I hoped would dump ballast, watching the chronometer tick down the last few seconds to the point of no return, when the altimeter jumped to life. Suddenly, without me doing a blessed thing, we were climbin’ even faster than when we left the ground. Within a minute we had gained the two thousand feet we needed to clear the mountain, and just kept climbin’.
What I learned that night is that a strong wind doesn't want to hit a mountain any more than I do. It wants to go up and over, just like me. You know how when a strong wind blows a scrap of paper down the street, and it comes to a house, it lifts the paper up and over? Like it is ridin’ an invisible wave? ”
The altimeter just kept climbin’. Fifteen thousand feet, then seventeen, then twenty. It got so cold even the boiler wasn't enough to warm the cabin. My heart was poundin’ like a racehorse, my head was splittin’, and it was getting hard to think. Should I do somethin’? Should I vent gas from the blimp to bring us down? Was it better to crash than to freeze to death or smother without air?
I struggled to decide, but before I could make my brain work, the altimeter started fallin’ again. Seventeen thousand. Fifteen. Thirteen. It slowed. And leveled back out at twelve thousand feet. I had ridden the invisible mountain wave up and over the top of that mountain, down there in the dark somewhere, and back down the other side.
And that, my friend, is how I piloted an airship over the highest mountain I had ever seen, by sheer dumb luck, on the first day I ever got off the ground.
Nick stood up and stretched. “You tell a mean tale, you do! And after I fetch a tin of biscuits from the galley and pass by the loo mayhap you’ll get to the point.”
“Danged if it ain’t gone right out of my head what the point was in the first place!” Ganesh laughed. “Oh right! How did I come to be a megamech. How I come to be mechanized in the first place.”
“Too right!” Nick exclaimed. “But you just go right on. I don’t need to be in the salon to hear ya—your voice is the same all over the ship. Sunrise won’t be for hours, and I won’t sleep. So we may just as well keep swappin’ tales until orders come.”
Well, there was a great deal of cussin’ when Ozzie finally came to, but that wasn’t until way after the sun came up, nearly noon the next day. He sat up with a start, took one look out the window, and stomped around log jammin’, horse cloppin’, and runt buckin’, until his splittin’ hangover headache slowed him to a crawl and a whimper.
By the time he came to, we was way past the Rockies, out onto the Great Plains, and the wind had died down to a breeze. We was driftin’ along above eastern Colorado, with nothin’ but patches of wheat fields below us for landmarks.
He tried for a few minutes to figure out where the bleepity bleep we were. I tried a couple of times to tell him, but he just shouted me down. Finally he got desperate, or calmed down a little, I don't know which, and let me tell him. It's not that hard when you've been payin’ close attention to every possible landmark right through the night. I pointed out the smoke of a Transcontinental locomotive away to the north, and a couple of little hamlets thousands of feet below. I showed them to him on the chart.
We were about halfway between Denver, Colorado and Omaha, Nebraska. Covered seven hundred miles from where we started while Oz was sleepin’. And since you don’t know the middle of North America, let me just tell you it’s mile after mile after mile of wide open nothin’. They call it the Great Plains for a reason: because it goes on for days, with not a blessed thing but a farmhouse once in a while to break up the monotony.
He got busy firing up the boiler, and I got busy watchin’ really close how to do it. He knew enough to get the propellers turnin’, but not much more. Before he had to leave his pilot in San Francisco he had only been a passenger, and that only for a couple of weeks, so he didn't know a whole lot more than me.
I watched for a while which valves did what, which let me know why I hadn’t been able to get the propellers turnin’. Pretty quick I saw which pressure gauges went with which sections of pipe, and what lead to what. Being handy and all, right away I could tell how he had managed to use up all his coal getting’ from San Francisco to where he found me. After tryin’ a couple of times to explain how to regulate his steam, he finally listened to me, and we got pushin’ toward Omaha at a pretty good clip, what with the prevailin’ winds behind us and all.
Along the way we stopped at one little teeny farming town after another, all of them well away from the railroad towns, where the station masters might have gotten telegrams from Mr. Peterson to be on the lookout for the scoundrel that stole coal, groceries, and kidnapped a local boy. Before the first week was up I was doin’ all the flyin’, while Oz laid around with a pint bottle in his hand any time we was up in the air.
Every time we landed it was just like at home that day, folks comin’ at a gallop from all around the town. We would give rides in the blimp at five cents a head, and for another nickel Ozzie would supply pint bottles of a special patented elixir he said he got from an Apache medicine man, that had the venom of Gila monsters and komodo dragons, and was guaranteed to make faint women hearty, weak men strong, and grow hair on a bald grandfather's pate.
He told folks that I was a poor innocent deaf mute ten-year-old orphan that he had rescued from starvation on the streets of Sydney, Australia, and had fed on that amazin’ elixir all the way across the ocean. He was taking me home to my dear saintly grandmother in London, England, and couldn’t they see their way clear to help him on his way, on his errand of mercy?
“Why, see how big and strong he's got in just a couple of months!” he'd exclaim. “If this elixir can do that for a starvin’ orphan boy on just a tablespoon per day, just think what it can do for you!”
Then he'd make wiggly wobbly finger signs at me while I stood there mute, pretending to agree with everything he wiggle wobbled at me, and he would wipe away a crocodile tear. He sold many a bottle of elixir that way, and many a tender-hearted woman in those Nebraska towns took us home to her table and fed us up like royalty.
The end of that summer of 1889 we was workin’ the fairs and carnivals around Omaha, which is a sleepy little frontier railroad cow town. Late one afternoon we was tied up at the train station, next to a big dirigible from the Standard Oil Company by the name of River Raft, and I got stuck again shoveling coal into the blimp. Without no warnin’ at all, the sky clouded over and within ten minutes the clouds went from white to gray to greenish black.
Now, the locals all knew what that was: a tornado sky. When the air got muggy and still and full of electricity, they disappeared into the woodwork, leavin’ me out there shovelin’, fat, dumb, and happy. Ozzie Osmond was snorin’ away in the blimp, sleepin’ off another bottle. Tired out from all those strenuous hundred-feet-up-hundred-feet-down blimp hops with pretty local girls, I guess.
I felt somebody grab my shoulder. When I turned around I was face to face with a man I would have recognized anywhere, whose photographs and sketch portraits were in a dozen books and penny dreadfuls I had at home: Mark Twain himself, Mr. Samuel Langhorn Clemens, all decked out like a riverboat gambler.
Could have knocked me over with a feather. I stood there starin’ at him with my mouth hangin’ open, and he shook my shoulder. “Boy,” he said, “you and that carnie better get out of here. There’s going to be a blow.” He pointed to the sky, but I guess I just looked confused, because he shook me. “My conveyance, the River Raft, is casting off the second I get back on board from warning you. I suggest you do the same.”
“Just then there was a big gust of wind that nearly knocked us both off our feet. That gust was too much for the flimsy moorings of Ozzie’s blimp, and it tore free, shootin’ across the countryside, whirlin’ around the cyclone center that was just becomin’ visible, a mile or so off. The River Raft was tied down hard to a st
eam engine with steel cable. She tugged and pulled at her moorings, but thank goodness she didn’t let go.
I scrambled to my feet and started to run after Ozzie's blimp, but Clemens grabbed me by the elbow and spun me toward the dirigible. The man was fast! He pelted across to the River Raft way quicker than I'd have believed possible for a man in his fifties, and pretty much threw me up the ramp and through the boardin’ hatch. The captain yelled, the ground crew let go the moorings, the new-fangled diesel engines rose up in a roar, and all the dozen or so propellers on the River Raft clawed the air.
Thank goodness it wasn’t a big tornado, as such things go, or it would have torn that dirigible, and Ozzie’s blimp, to shreds. The dirigible fought its way clear, clawin’ and screamin’ all the way. The blimp did not. Later, Ozzie spun all sorts of yarns about that twister, about how he got sucked up and blown away to a wonderful land, where he set himself up as a wizard and had all sorts of adventures with witches and tiny people, talking lions, living scarecrows, and mechanical men. Me, I take it all with a grain of salt. I know Ozzie too well.
Mr. Clemens was on his way home that summer. He had gone with his friends to northern California just to see the total eclipse of the sun. The whole way across the country! They had hauled the brand-new River Raft on a Union Pacific train all the way from New York to Sacramento, where they loaded her up with hydrogen. And now they were takin’ their sweet time pokin’ along back across the country by air.
It was my pure luck—or maybe blessed providence—that they were in Omaha when that twister hit, and that Mr. Clemens noticed me out there shovelin’ like a slave, and come after me. Saved my life. And changed it forever.
He hauled me up to the billiard room inside the dirigible, sat me down, and put a glass of water in my hand, with real honest-to-goodness cubes of ice in it. Then he sits down in front of me and leans forward.
“I caught your snake oil act with that Ozzie feller back there in Omaha,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.“I’ve seen a lot of them in my day. But that one took the cake—you pretending to be ten years old and deaf and dumb. Big strapping farm boy like you. What are you? Sixteen? One or the other of you read my book from a few years ago to come up with the deaf and dumb angle.”He grinned real wide and sucked on his big old cigar, blew a cloud of blue smoke at the ceiling.
