The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  Flying north from Brunswick I change the plan. I decide to skirt Savannah along the beach and continue the extra 25 miles or so to Hilton Head. So I turn right, toward the sea, and leave the interstate highway behind.

  Along the coast the land becomes water in stages. This low coast is dozens of miles of salt marshes with streams meandering lazily through them. The rare dry land is covered with pines. Only occasionally does one see a road leading down to a shack by the water with a boat dock attached. A few boats are visible all the time, but only a few.

  An hour and twenty minutes after takeoff I am abeam Savannah. The headwind is taking its toll. Savannah Beach is the first beach town I have seen, complete with houses and streets and parking lots. Small crowds are visible on the beach but at 1,500 feet I am too high to wave. I wave anyway.

  Off to the right sunlight breaks through holes in the clouds and falls upon the sea, making the water glisten and shine.

  I fly northeast up Hilton Head Island looking with awe at the houses and golf courses below. Never have I seen so many huge homes or golf courses or yacht basins. I drop down to 1,000 feet to get a better look.

  This place is a sea-level Aspen! The whole island is one giant, manicured estate! And I thought it was just old-money trendy, like Martha’s Vineyard. Ha! Those are big houses down there, friends. And this West Virginia hillbilly can fly at 84 knots—less due to the headwind—a thousand feet above all those rich folks’ homes in a noisy forty-nine-year-old wood-and-canvas crate with a naked floozie painted on the side and they can’t do one blessed thing about it except stand on the seventeenth fairway and shake their fists at me! America is a great country.

  At the airport I park the Stearman right beside a shiny turboprop twin with the passenger stair open. Waiting for Mrs. Vanderbilt, probably. After gassing up and adding oil, I call Flight Service. Looks good all the way to Hatteras, the man says.

  A half hour after leaving Hilton Head I begin to have my doubts. Over the sea the clouds are thickening, leaving no gaps for the sunlight to sneak through and dance on the surface of the ocean. The scattered layer of scud is back at 1,800 feet, and it is also thickening. And the wind—my progress over this chart has slowed to a glacial pace. How slow I am not exactly sure, but it takes me 55 minutes of flying to reach the mouth of Charleston harbor abeam Fort Sumter. (That evening I carefully measure—the distance from Hilton Head to Fort Sumter is 52 nautical miles.)

  To the west readily visible in the haze is the city of Charleston. Above it airliners circle to land. Just off my right a warship is coming up the channel to enter the bay. To the left a tour boat is tied alongside the fort—probably brought a load of day cruisers down the bay from Charleston. From this altitude I can see the Stars and Stripes over the fort standing stiff in the breeze. No doubt tourists are wandering about the ruins thinking about that spring evening in 1861 when the Confederates opened fire with cannons upon that fort, sounding the death knell for slavery and starting the American Civil War.

  Ten minutes later I decide the weatherman was all wet. The murk ahead makes it obvious that I can’t continue to follow the coast to the northeast. But what is going on here? The ATIS at Myrtle Beach Air Force Base says the field is 4,500 broken and seven miles visibility. Either the ATIS is wrong or there is a wall of rain between here and there.

  Staring through the prop arc at lowering clouds and worsening visibility, I ponder my karma. Will I ever get to fly from bad weather into good? Not today, at any rate.

  Georgetown, South Carolina, is northeast along U.S. 17. I give the airport there a call and ask about the weather. They tell me about the wind, out of the northeast at ten and gusting.

  I make a decent landing, considering. The rain starts falling gently as I finish fueling, so I lock the controls and install the waterproof cockpit cover.

  Standing in the lobby of the FBO I study their wall chart. Due to the headwind it has taken 1.8 hours to fly the 100 nautical miles from Hilton Head. That works out to about 25 knots of headwind. For the Queen, that’s a lot, about 30 percent of her performance. That is the equivalent of a 150-knot headwind for a jet airliner.

  The lady at the desk hands me the keys to the courtesy car, but asks that I wait for the two guys from the helicopter just landing and take them to lunch too. I agree readily and watch the chopper settle onto the mat in the gusty wind and rain.

  They are ready to go thirty minutes later. By now the rain has become steady, like it is setting in for the day. The helicopter pilot, Dennis Taylor, calls Flight Service, then assures me that this is just a shower.

  Sure.

  Sharing a table at the Shoney’s in Georgetown, the three of us become acquainted. Dennis’ passenger is the South Carolina Marine and Wildlife biologist in charge of alligators, Tom Swayngham. He and Dennis have been counting alligator nests all morning and rain or not, they are going to be at it all afternoon.

  On the way back to the airport they compare their Hurricane Hugo survival stories from last summer. “I always wanted to go through a hurricane,” Tom says with a trace of wonder in his voice, “but I done scratched that itch. Never again.”

  They ask if I saw the damage the hurricane caused when I was flying up from Charleston. I didn’t. The altitude and my concern about the weather caused me to miss any damage I could attribute to last summer’s hurricane. I did see visible evidence of the subsiding coast in Georgia and South Carolina south of Charleston—dead trees standing on the beach and lying in the sand, graphic evidence that the beach is eating into the vast pine forest that covers the land to the high-tide mark—and I tell them about it. Someday Atlanta will be a seaport. Won’t the developers love it?

  Dennis wants his photo taken by the logo of the Cannibal Queen; then he snaps one of me. If I get killed in this airplane this summer, that photo he took will be valuable, worth at least a dollar cash money to any reputable collector.

  The rain is still falling when Dennis and Tom fire off their chopper and whop-whop away to look for alligators. I go inside and call Flight Service.

  The weather to the north is excellent—well, good might be a better word. If I could only get there! I read the paper, an article about the WPA back in the Great Depression, and examine the fine collection of turn-of-the-century photographs of Georgetown that are displayed upon the wall. I contemplate investing in a candy bar and examine the state of my cash resources, then decide against it.

  By 2:30 the rain peters out and I have exhausted my tiny stock of patience. Now or never. I ready the Queen and mount up. At the end of the runway I get an unobstructed view of the low gray sky and the scud fleeing across underneath. I merely turn the Queen around and taxi to a spot where I can tie her down for the night.

  Adjacent to my motel in Georgetown is an old cemetery with a large statue of a Confederate soldier. On the pedestal facing Church Street appears the word “Chickamauga.” I wander over for a closer look.

  The cemetery is old and most of the gravestones are gone. Yet the cemetery was once full: everywhere there are slight depressions in the sandy soil where the graves have subsided. The latest death I can find on the stones that remain is 1888. Burials seem to have started in the 1830s. Among those interred are some preachers and a doctor. Some of the markers are marble slabs that lie flat, covering brick vaults into which the casket was lowered. The flat slabs are covered with vegetation and moss. One is broken and has fallen into the vault.

  On one slab I can see extensive writing now mostly illegible, but I can read the words, “Sacred to the memory of…” I can’t make out the name.

  The statue is a memorial to the men of Company A, Georgetown Rifle Guards, 10th South Carolina Regiment of Infantry, Confederate States of America. The names of four battles appear on the pedestal: Franklin, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, and Atlanta. The inscription says the statue was erected in 1891 by “the women of Georgetown” and is “dedicated to the men who died, or faced death, in the war that asserted constitutional liberty and affirmed our ma
nhood.” Our manhood? The women of Georgetown? They must have meant that in the larger sense.

  1891. Now it hits me. That was a hundred years ago.

  “Asserted constitutional liberty.” Now there is a phrase, one of those slippery little devils that likely some politician thought up. Sounds like it would be difficult to get a handle on that one, especially when applied to a war in which the fundamental issue was the South’s ability to protect the institution of human slavery.

  Georgetown, South Carolina, is today a beautiful small seaport town, and likely a relatively prosperous one. On the south end of town are a large steel mill and a pulp mill. A big oceangoing freighter was tied up next to the steel mill pier. Back from the waterfront and old Front Street are block after block of large frame homes beautifully painted and preserved and shaded by giant trees. The residential neighborhoods look like models for those idyllic prints of Americana that sell so well at Christmas.

  The population seems to be about half black, half white. I was eating chicken at a Kentucky Fried that evening when a three- or four-year-old black boy began to inspect the ashtrays on every table while his mother’s back was turned. When he saw me watching him he gave me a huge grin.

  After the boy was dragged away by his mother, I got to thinking about this multiracial society that those folks buried in that old cemetery, and those who put up the Confederate memorial statue, were unwilling to even try to envision. Although civil rights activists like to look forward and point out the length of the trail we have still to travel, it seems to me that occasionally we ought to reflect on how far we have come.

  The taste I have gotten of the South this past week or so makes it seem a far different place from the hotbed of hatred I entered in the late 1960s. I remember watching a high school football game in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1968 and listening to the white cheerleader types behind me, the flower of southern womanhood, make bitter, vicious remarks about the “niggers” and “jungle bunnies” who were just then starting to attend their high school under court order. If my samplings can be relied upon, that mean spirit seems to have dissipated. Indeed, this afternoon in a Georgetown barber shop some mouthy local yokel was holding forth about this and that, and twice he referred to black folks as “black,” not “niggers,” although his little audience of three white males would have been, in the past, the perfect forum for derogatory racial references. Those references didn’t come.

  There are people today who argue that the South has the best racial climate in the country. Perhaps they’re right. On Front Street this afternoon a black policeman walking the beat nodded and smiled at me. Black cops don’t do that in Denver or Detroit. I returned that smile with my face, and my heart.

  10

  FIRST LIGHT ON THURSDAY MORNING REVEALS MORE LOW clouds whipping swiftly across the sky from the northeast. At the airport I call Flight Service from a pay phone booth beside the FBO building. Waiting for the electrons to signal a live human that another live human is on the line, I read the notice that informs me that I should call the South Carolina Aviation Commission in the event of an aircraft accident involving death or injury. Presumably if you are butchered on the highway the cops will tell the state, if they are interested.

  The briefer is positively jovial. Fayetteville, North Carolina, north of where I stand, is 4,500 scattered—New Bern is 25,000 scattered, Dare County on North Carolina’s outer banks is clear, visibility unrestricted. And he informs me this low scud will stop coming in off the sea in a couple of hours. “You’re going to have a great day flying.”

  I thank him and carry my bags out to the Queen. Looking north I can see gaps in the scud with light coming through them. Dark and gloomy to the northwest and west. After the Queen’s untied and preflighted and the bags loaded, I light my pipe and watch the clouds.

  The gap to the north is growing. Still some wispy dark-gray scud, but there’s open sky in that direction. I can see it.

  The big round Lycoming engine fires as soon as I switch on the mags. Helmet on, goggles arranged, I taxi out. The ramp is still wet and water thrown from the main tires comes back over the lower wings.

  The tail comes up as soon as the engine reaches full power— this is the kick of flying from these sea-level fields. The Queen accelerates readily as the radial roars its song and the prop takes huge bites of the thick, wet air. After a very short run I lift her off the wet runway. It’s 7:20 A.M.

  I climb to 1,000 feet and fly along just under the scud. My path takes me over Georgetown. I pick up the highway heading north, with the intracoastal waterway on my right. The pine forest that feeds the pulp mills stretches away in three directions, broken only by occasional homes and roads that from this altitude seem to wander aimlessly. To the east is the sea, and I examine the light levels coming through the clouds in that direction. This stuff is breaking up.

  Abeam Myrtle Beach I leave the scud behind. Still a ceiling above me, but it’s thinning perceptibly. I let the Queen drift up to 1,500 feet. Forty-five minutes after takeoff I leave all the clouds behind. Five or so miles overhead a gauzy thin layer of cirrus admits most of the sunlight, making the Cannibal Queen’s wings glow brilliantly for the first time since I left Orlando.

  My daughter Rachael has a phrase and gesture for moments like this, and I indulge myself. “All right!” I roar exultantly and jab my fist aloft into the prop blast. “All right.!”

  After another thirty minutes of painstakingly looking for landmarks amid the North Carolina small farms, it occurs to me that I could go higher. After all, the view will be so much better up there. Why am I crawling across the earth at little more than the height at which robins fly?

  Prop to full increase, a little more gas to the engine, then throttle forward to the stop. Up we go into the open sky. I level at 3,500 feet and look around carefully. Oh yes, there’s that town fifteen miles to the north, that lake off to the southeast, that large tower that the map says is right there.

  But it’s cool over North Carolina at 3,500 feet. Clad only in jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, I feel a little chilly. It’s a great feeling for the 27th day of June in the South.

  After a fuel stop in Kinston, my route takes me northeast toward Albemarle Sound. I need to get around the big restricted area that is the Navy’s Dare County bombing range, so I fly eastward on the north side of it, parallel to the southern shore of Albemarle.

  At one point I glance off to my right and pick up a jet coming out of the restricted area toward me at my altitude of 3,500 feet. An A-6 Intruder, like I used to fly. This one passes behind me climbing northward toward Elizabeth City, doing maybe 250 knots. His low-visibility paint scheme is quite evident. I look left and watch the Intruder disappear into the vastness of the sky, still climbing. I wonder if he saw this bright yellow biplane?

  The FBO at Dare County Airport in Manteo, North Carolina, has the nicest FBO office I have ever visited. The building is wood frame with big windows, obviously not the cheapest shack the proprietor could erect. The ceiling of the interior is two stories up, and everything is painted white. The cheery surroundings and comfortable furniture invite you to give your bottom a treat and linger awhile.

  But I have places to go. A six-minute hop across the water is First Flight Airport on the Outer Banks, adjacent to the Wright Brothers Monument and Museum at Kill Devil Hill. The complex is administered by the National Park Service.

  The first shock occurs when I get a squint at the airport, a single strip of asphalt in a woodlot of large, mature trees that seemingly come right to the edge of the runway on both sides. Descending on final to runway 2 is like sinking into a canyon.

  I make an acceptable landing in front of what I know will be onlookers, then taxi to the parking area just off the south end of the strip. There is no FBO, no fuel available, no snack bar or pop machines, just a ramp full of little airplanes and an entrepreneur giving joyrides to park pilgrims.

  I shoot the breeze a little with him, then set off afoot for the monument atop K
ill Devil Hill. Another shock. In all the photos and paintings of the Wrights’ flight experiments, Kill Devil Hill is as bald as Don Rickles’ head. The Wrights went there because the hill and adjacent dunes were devoid of vegetation and the sea wind blew unobstructed. And there were no trees. A wise man who plans to venture skyward in a homemade flying machine should do it in a place without any bothersome trees nearby that would attract his craft like a magnet attracts iron filings. Every person who has ever watched a tree lure and devour kites is familiar with this principle.

  Yet today Kill Devil Hill is covered with vegetation that holds the sand in place. The sandy plain to the north of the hill where the Wrights flew the first successful airplane is similarly covered. Huge trees stand to the west on both sides of the asphalt runway, to the north beyond the marker that shows where the Wrights’ fourth flight ended that fateful December 17, 1903, and to the east toward the park entrance.

  It seems ironic to me—to protect the area from erosion and preserve it for future generations, the Park Service has so altered the place that the Wrights would reject it today if they were looking for a place to fly.

  In the little museum you will get the flavor of what the place used to be—a windswept dune by the Atlantic, two brothers toiling with bits of wood and fabric and wire, trying to coax a twelve-horsepower four-cylinder engine to work reliably while the salt wind blew sand into everything. In the old photographs you will see a few of the locals from Manteo. No tourists, of course: the great American vacation at the seashore had not yet become the annual religious pilgrimage that it is today.

  The Wrights first came to this place in 1900 to work with a glider. They returned in 1901 and 1902 with other gliders, the last big enough to carry a man. Here they analyzed and solved the problem of control. Here they verified the data from their Dayton experiments on the proper shape of a wing. Here they taught themselves to fly. That was their other great insight, which followed as soon as they understood the realities of control—flying would have to be learned.