by John McPhee
ON U.S. 1 SOUTH OF TRENTON, the megalopolis had come in so fast that horses trapped between motels continued to graze there. The region had two Levittowns, two turnpikes, an interstate highway, and shopping malls that were cambered to fit the curve of the earth. It was a wonderful place for a gas station—most particularly in the mile of commercial concentrate between the Pennsylvania Turnpike interchange and the Philadelphia County line. This was the site of Neshaminy Esso. The telephone rang there one hot summer night in 1971. John Fitzpatrick answered. “Neshaminy Esso,” he said. “Yes … . Yes … . It was dampness inside the distributor, that’s all. You’re going to shoot me, right? Very well. Shoot me.” He hung up, and got underneath a big Chrysler on the lift. He pounded its exhaust pipe with a rubber hammer. A shower of crud fell on his head and down the neck of his striped Esso coveralls. “I’m trying to save this muffler,” he said. “If I can get this tail pipe away from the muffler, I’m in business.” He pounded again, and more things fell. Fitzpatrick was in his forties—a short man, around five feet eight. His face was weather-lined, handsome, tough, and sad. There was a sense of grandeur in it, and a sense of ironic humor. His hair was dark and graying, and neatly combed. His body looked hard. He had a muscular, projecting chest. His stomach and abdomen were as flat as two pieces of sidewalk. He had the appearance of a small weight lifter, a German-shepherd owner, an old lifeguard. He was smoking the stub of a thin cigar. He pounded hard. The tail pipe would not move. Resting, he wiped his forehead with a sleeve of his coveralls, and he looked out through the service-bay doors at the Ridge Farm Motel and, beyond that, Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken. Although he spoke softly, he seemed to be talking to something beyond the bay, beyond the tarmac and the gasoline islands. He seemed to be talking to Colonel Sanders, whose head and shouldersilluminated from within—were on the side of an enormous revolving chicken bucket on top of a high pole. “If you talk to any man who has been associated with lighter-than-air for any length of time, you find that they all have the big dream,” Fitzpatrick said. “The dream is bringing back the big rigid airship.”
The owner of the Chrysler stood to one side, as did I. The owner of the Chrysler was a mild-appearing man, not the sort who might be prepared to speak of his impatience. He shifted his weight every so often from one leg to the other. Fitzpatrick ignored him completely. On the gasstation wall was a sign that said “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, because I am the biggest son of a bitch in the valley.” Fitzpatrick also ignored the muffler and the tail pipe, and, gazing out reflectively from under the automobile, went on quietly talking to Colonel Sanders. “The story of lighter-than-air is a sad one, a story of pathos, tragedy, and mysticism,” he said. “The lighter-than-air vehicle form had enormous possibilities, but they were misapplied. Airships had fantastic capabilities. They were less vulnerable to weather than any other form of transportation. They were almost immune to ordinary weather phenomena. They were much more forgiving than ordinary aircraft during conditions of instrument flight. Do you know how many people died in the Hindenburg? Thirty-six. Thirteen were passengers. Those thirteen were the only passengers who were ever lost in twenty years of commercial travel by airship, but an eyewitness announcer was there when the Hindenburg burned, and he snivelled and he cried, and the Hindenburg disaster became one of the great news events of our time. Every year, on its anniversary, pictures of the flaming Hindenburg appear in the newspapers. Since the Hindenburg, we have been through the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam: major world catastrophes. Yet every stinking year the Hindenburg appears. This is paradoxical nonsense.” He picked up a hacksaw and began to saw the tail pipe. He talked sporadically as he worked, pausing between hacks to look off into the middle distance and to remember the time of the airships, and to say how odd a feeling it was to go up into the sky at a forward speed of fifteen miles per hour, and to fall in the shadow of clouds, and to rise in the heat of the sun. “Airships had extreme range and low operating cost,” he said. “They were the most economical means of air travel ever conceived. They were almost never used for what they did best. The Navy tried to use them as weapons—antisubmarine, and so on—because the Navy was in the weapons business. The future of the airships was settled on false grounds.”
When the Navy settled the future of its airships, Fitzpatrick was there. He had spent the greater part of his adult life in naval aviation. He had grown up in Leavenworth, Kansas (he was an undertaker’s son), and he had joined the Navy when he was seventeen, literally “to see the world.” He stayed in the Navy for twenty-two yearsapprentice seaman, chief petty officer, lieutenant commander. He was a pilot, and he flew heavier-than-air more than forty-five hundred hours. In 1955, he was sent to South Weymouth, Massachusetts, where he helped perform a series of tests that purported to be, in effect, a tribunal for the naval airships. Actually, it was a rite of obsolescence. Conclusions were foregone. Lighter-than-air people were known as “helium heads.” They stood apart from the rest of naval aviation, phase-out-prone pariahs. The epoch of the naval airships was coming to an end. The plausible mission at South Weymouth was to test the endurance of the airships and to determine their operating envelope with respect to weather—things that had by and large been understood since the First World War. The true mission, apparently, was to collect data that could be used to kill the airships. This went on from 1954 to 1957, and the airships did not cooperate. They went out over the Atlantic on radar picket duty during blizzards that stopped all other forms of transportation—highways, railways, airports. They came back carrying ten or twelve tons of ice. Even their propeller blades were so thickly coated with ice that they were like clubs. But the airships flew, did their job, and returned, when nothing else was moving. They proved themselves anew against their supposed enemy the wind, which could not stop them with anything less than the force of a hurricane. And ultimately Lieutenant Commander Fitzpatrick, as power-plants officer, was told to work out the theoretical limits for a long cruise—intended to pass through varying climatic zones, and perhaps to match a record set by the Graf Zeppelin when it flew non-stop from Friedrichshafen to Tokyo. The Graf Zeppelin was one of the last of the great rigid airships, the behemoths of the sky. Fitzpatrick calculated the Navy cruise to accommodate the capabilities of a simple blimp called the Snowbird. Searching the literature, preparing the flight, he became more interested than he had ever thought he might be in lighter-than-air—its history, its potentiality. The Snowbird took off on March 4, 1957, and went to four continents in many weathers and extremes of temperature. There were fifteen in the crew, including Fitzpatrick. The date of departure had been set long in advance so no one could say they had picked their weather. They went through high head winds, snow, heavy icing conditions, tropical storms, deep fog, and desert sun. To conserve helium—and to avoid valving it into the atmosphere—they replaced with seawater the weight of the fuel they burned. They went down to an altitude of two hundred feet and hauled up the water in a big canvas bag. Over Morocco, six days airborne, the skipper asked Fitzpatrick if the Snowbird could make it back across the sea. Fitzpatrick looked over his books, his gauges, and his meters—thirty-five knots, sixty-five thousand pounds of aircraft—and he said yes. In the context of the day, the Snowbird was not using much fuel. Lockheed Constellations—four-engine piston-prop airplanes—were burning two hundred gallons an hour. The Snowbird—as it maintained its equipoise between borne weight and aerostatic helium lift —was burning seven gallons an hour; and that, of course, was one of the points it was making. Its next landfall was in the Lesser Antilles, and it went up the archipelago and would have kept right on going up the east coast of the United States had the Navy not insisted that it land at Key West. The Snowbird, by then, had long since broken the Graf Zeppelin’s record. It had been aloft for eleven days and had flown more than nine thousand miles—the longest unrefuelled flight, in terms of both distance and elapsed time, ever made in the earth’s atmosphere. All th
is notwithstanding, the Navy was with full dispatch about to finish off the airships; but the Snowbird at least deserved an appropriate funeral, and that is what had been prepared at Key West. The Navy had everything from brass bands to Bull Halsey waiting for the ship when it moored.
“Bull Halsey was an extremely gentle little old man, who spoke in low, halting tones,” Fitzpatrick said, and he went back to work with the hacksaw. Grit went on falling into his hair. Finally, the tail pipe dropped away, and now there remained only a small section of it, locked into the orifice of the muffler. Fitzpatrick got out a pair of gooseneck pliers that could have removed a tooth from the Statue of Liberty. He clamped these onto the stub of the tail pipe and pulled with all his strength. The section of piping did not budge. Giving up, he set the pliers down. His face was full of irony and disgust. He began to talk about a personal crisis with God that had come upon him when he was in the Navy and that he had never fully resolved. In war and in peace, he had seen tragedies in naval aviation that he could not comprehend. The disturbance he felt had not decreased in the years after the Second World War but had, if anything, intensified. “I believe in a God. I believe in a Creation,” he said. “I can prove the existence of God without any trouble at all. You can see by looking around you that this is an orderly world we live in.” He glanced at the environment—Hess, Sunoco, Texaco, the Trail Blazer Diner, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Lincoln Drive-In Theatre, Gino’s. “There can be no order without a God,” he went on. “Intelligence is God. The order of the planets follows no Mendelian laws, no Darwinian theories. Call it God if you will—a scheme that knows no limits of size, of place, of power. You will never find a serious mathematician or physicist who is an atheist. In the study of higher mathematics you can sense it. You are finally hearing the language that man and God can understand. Scientists and engineers are the true priests. These are the men who have given us the tools to dominate nature—to reach out to the stars. Practically everything that is noble in man has been given us by these men of mathematics and science. The church has failed totally.” He broke off, was silent for a time, then drifted back to his Navy experiences and the deaths that went past his understanding—“casualties of war, casualties of the air, accidents on flight decks: seeing a man get up and walk ten feet before he discovered that the back of his head was missing.” He said he wondered if God marked each sparrow’s fall. He wondered if man had created God. He wondered even more when his son, who was operated on because he had a double nerve in his spine, died. After the flight of the Snowbird, he said, he was transferred to a Navy unit at McGuire Air Force Base. In the unit, one man he had particularly admired was a chief petty officer who was killed while returning to the base from leave. The chief’s wife was killed, too, and a son was crippled. Fitzpatrick said he had sorted through the man’s effects in bitterness and anger. “There he was, a good man, dead in the middle of the morning, doing everything right—killed by a drunken girl who hit him head on.” Fitzpatrick then tried to set up a memorial service for the chief in the McGuire chapel, with the entire naval unit attending, but an Air Force priest, who happened to be the supreme cleric on the base, pointed out that some of the men were Protestants, some Catholics, some Jews, and the priest would not allow an interdenominational service in the base chapel. So Fitzpatrick scheduled a service in a hangar and asked the Navy to send in a chaplain from somewhere else. The man who came was Monroe Drew, U.S.N.R., the minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton. “I had little use for chaplains,” Fitzpatrick said. “But this one preached a sermon that was not pap. The essence of what he said was ‘We don’t know why these things happen.’ I liked him for it. In the end, he would disillusion, disappoint, and enrage me. This is an understatement—I do not like Monroe Drew.”
The mind of Monroe Drew at around the time of the chief’s funeral, in 1959, happened to be aflame with practical visions of the return of the big rigid airships. His conversations were intense with plans for fresh awakenings and novel departures in the airship field, and to implement his ideas he had actually been raising money. Fitzpatrick was a godsend to him, or so he thought—a man anxious to vindicate the concept of lighter-than-air, an engineer experienced in airships. He could design and build Drew’s dreams. Fitzpatrick, attracted, retired from the Navy. He and Drew formed the Aereon Corporation.
Now Fitzpatrick got out an air-powered jackhammer and went at the Chrysler with ear-ringing blasts. The hammer slipped. Its prong went through one side of the muffler and out the other, destroying the muffler in a single penetrating thrust. Fitzpatrick tried to remove the jackhammer, but it was stuck solid. He said nothing, showed no diminution of composure and not even much interest. “I have an inherent distrust of people who think big,” he said. The telephone rang a few times. He went to it and picked it up. “Neshaminy Esso,” he said. “Yes … . Yes … . No. What you are saying is that the spirit of the law is sometimes different than the letter of the law. I have no way of telling if your complaint is legitimate.”
THE DELTOID AEREONS Were not conceived until 1966. Before that, an aircraft of a different shape was slowly put together, and it was an authentic wonder. The company was less security-minded in those early years—no shrouds, no Sheetrock boxes—and people who happened by the hangar at Mercer County Airport saw something in plain sight that they were unlikely to forget. Poised in the air over tricycle landing gear was a Siamese-triplet dirigible: three rigid cylindroid hulls, each eighty feet long, parallel to one another, welded together at their longitudinal equators, and covered with a milk-white skin that was dazzling even in the hangar’s gloom. It was as if the Akron, the Macon, and the Los Angeles—the last of the Navy’s zeppelins—had been scaled down to eighty feet, placed side by side, and united as a single aerial catamaran. If the thing had been created somewhere else, it might have received more attention than it did, but this airport was only five miles from the center of Trenton, and in Trenton civic humility was the most becoming aspect of metropolitan life. People in Trenton seemed to have newts’ eyelids that had lowered over the suggestion that anything in Trenton could be interesting. One autumn Sunday in 1962, the filmmaker Tom Spain, who lived elsewhere in Mercer County, was driving around with a friend and went by the airport. In idle curiosity, he stopped his car, got out, and peered through a hangar window. He saw the triple hull. “Jesus!” he said. “What in the name of God do you suppose that is?” He thought it was extremely beautiful—a sculpture of converging lines and myriad triangles. In days that followed, he asked around Trenton: Could anyone tell him what he had seen? Oh, everyone knew what that was. “That’s Monroe Drew’s airship.” The reply was as flat as it might have been had Spain asked why there was a gold dome on a large building near the heart of town. Spain, at the time, was filming television commercials depicting Marlboro Country in wild pockets of the megalopolis outside Trenton. No one in Trenton thought that was remarkable, either.
Monroe Drew’s range went some distance beyond the pulpit of the Fourth Presbyterian Church and the chaplaincy at the Naval Reserve Training Center on Lamberton Street. He was, for example, the author and originator of Teleprayer in Trenton. You dialled LYric 9-4574 at any time of the day or night and you got thirty seconds of recorded spiritual assistance, in prayer form. The prayers changed daily. They were sixty words long, and the Reverend Mr. Drew composed them carefully, running, as he put it, “the general gamut of human needs.” Sometimes, Drew said, the Teleprayer attracted fifteen thousand calls in a single day. Drew had a deep conviction that the extraordinary novelties of contemporary technology ought to be used in all possible ways to shape the world in the way of Christ, and he felt that this potentiality was being absurdly neglected. Teleprayer’s fifteen thousand calls in a day were a small example of what he meant. He meant that Martin Luther had used the printing press to effectuate the Protestant Reformation. Power of that kind, freshly generated in the technological outbreaks of the twentieth century, was waiting for a new Luther. Motion pictures we
re the most obvious medium. Drew had made religious films during eight years he had spent on active duty as a chaplain in the Navy, and he had later been a high functionary within the audio-visual precincts of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. In both situations, he had become frustrated and somewhat embittered by the indifference he reaped and by the absence of large-scale distribution of his films. In Trenton, in 1958, a son of his came home from grade school one day with a copy of My Weekly Reader that contained an article about the phasing out of the naval airships. The boy asked how the airships worked, and Drew—who was not a pilot of any kind, but who had been around naval aviation a great deal—outlined the elementary principles of lighter-than-air flight. That evening, when he went to his study to compose a Teleprayer, he developed writer’s block. He doodled for an hour and was unable to line up so much as three words in a row. Eventually, his thoughts were diverted toward dirigibles. Why not use exhaust gases to heat the helium and increase lift? He forgot the prayer and sketched a zeppelin. Why not build lighter-than-air vehicles big enough to carry awesome loads? Houses, ship screws, industrial generators. Why not use lighter-than-air to revolutionize missionary aviation? Why not create a Faith Fleet, a Christian Freight Line marked with the insignia of the National Council of Churches, to carry food, goods, and Bibles to people in what the church called the opportunity countries? Fifty transformers to the Voltaic Republic, a hundred thousand Bibles to Nigeria, a million peaches to the Haut-Katanga. Why not bring the world’s underdeveloped nations into the transportational forefront of the twentieth century in a single leap, by eliminating the need for roads, railroads, tunnels, bridges, airports, storage facilities, and prepared harbors? Enormous warehouses in the sky would move from place to place, landing lightly on grass fields. Why not operate the Christian Freight Line in the United States as well? This prodigious advance in the airfreight business would result in the acquisition of millions of dollars, with which a foundation, not unlike the Ford Foundation, could ultimately be established. Why not allocate some of the foundation’s funds to the making of films and other audio-visual devices communicating the word of Christ in modern terms? And why not spread these films and audio-visual devices throughout the world in the airborne hulls of the Faith Fleet? Why not? Why not? With contemporary materials, with modified designs, why not bring back the rigid airships?
