The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  He had an idea, he said, for selling Stearman wing ribs arranged around a U.S. eagle or shield. He thought people would buy something like that and wanted my opinion. Not really. He wanted me to nod, so I did.

  The wing ribs were built of cheap wood and kid’s school glue to save money, yet to my untrained eye they looked workmanlike and carefully done. This gentleman was one of the builders.

  And he found a great place to spend the summer, here in a hangar amid these beautiful old airplanes, talking to people interested in aviation, watching the Tri-motor come and go with loads of joyriders. Don’t you envy him a little?

  Outside sitting on the grass in the sun was the most beautiful biplane I’ve ever seen, a blue Lincoln-Page wearing a 100-HP Kinner five-cylinder radial. The lines are just so perfect. Rare? This is the only Lincoln-Page I ever laid eyes on, and maybe the only one left. Period.

  I walked back across the grass strip and went through the museum, stopping to commune for a moment with the EAA’s Stearman. This monster was donated or loaned to the EAA by Joe C. Hughes, an airshow stunt pilot. She wears a brute of an engine, a Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp with a governor that limits it to 650 horsepower.

  I saw Hughes and his wingwalking partner, Gordon McCollam, do their act with this plane at the Canadian National Air-show in 1974 or ’75. At the climax of their show Hughes would make an inverted pass down the runway and McCollam on the top wing would grab a ribbon stretched between two poles. Then one summer turbulence or wind shear caught the plane during one of these performances and McCollam was killed. The FAA now forbids inverted passes at low altitudes with wingwalkers.

  McCollam’s death was a tragedy, of course, one that was probably extraordinarily difficult for Hughes to learn to live with. Yet his magnificent Stearman still reeks of that airshow magic that has inspired Americans since barnstormers performed in Jennys on summer weekends in a pasture on the edge of town. Bands playing, balloons and smoke trails aloft in a blue summer sky, the throb of unmuffled exhausts as planes sweep by overhead—these images still stir us deeply.

  Flight is the promise of vigorous life, a life in which infinite possibilities are within the grasp of determined men and women of vision.

  If we pickle the engines and relegate it all to museums in the name of the great safety pooh-bah, we will be a poorer people.

  28

  FROM THE WINDOW OF MY HOTEL ROOM I COULD SEE THE HAZE. Thick.

  I ate breakfast watching the flags on the sidewalk on the banks of the Fox River whip in the wind. A wind out of the southwest.

  The Flight Service briefer summed it up: “Three miles visibility in haze in Oshkosh but improving as you go north. Winds ten to twelve out of the southwest at Oshkosh and getting stronger farther north. Thirty percent chance of thunderstorms across your route of flight today.”

  Winds aloft?

  “At three thousand, southwest at twenty-five, then thirty near Lake Superior.”

  The wind whips my hair as I go through the preflight ritual on the parking mat at the airport. Aviation is full of rituals, even more so than formal religion, which gives it a flavor that is timeless. You begin each morning with sacramental coffee, usually at the same time you are chanting the liturgy with the FAA weather priest.

  Out on the mat, at the altar of flight, you approach your airplane, this mechanical steed that will transport you into the heavens. Every morning you check everything you can see, inspect this, touch that, peer here, look there. You examine the oil level on the dipstick, you swing the prop through to ensure that an oil lock has not developed in a cylinder, you arrange the charts in the cockpit just so, you put every switch in its proper position, you start the engine and listen to the predictable, familiar sound, you examine every instrument for any deviation from the norm, you waggle the controls in the same way you do every time.

  The rituals assure you that the machine and you are both ready. They ensure you are in control, that the flight will go as planned, that this is not your last day of life, that you will sleep in a bed tonight with your health and your hopes and your petty vices safely intact. Ancient mariners used to burn thighbones on the headland and spill wine before they cast off. I perform my solemn rites for exactly the same reasons.

  This morning, with the gods satisfied and my soul prepared, I mumble the holy words to the ground controller and the tower controller in turn and stroke the throttle. The miracle occurs. I fly.

  The air is like soup. I climb to 3,500 feet and point the Queen northeast. The wind squirts me along faster than a politician’s promise.

  The first problem is the airport traffic area at Menasha, just north of Oshkosh. I give the tower a call. “Stay clear of the traffic area. The field is IFR with a partial obscuration.”

  Oh, great!

  I could climb, but in this goo I risk losing sight of the ground if I go much higher. I can barely see it now. I’ll circle the Menasha airport to the east, over the edge of Lake Winnebago. I glance east. There’s nothing there. The haze merges with the water and there is no horizon. Nor, looking down, is there much of a surface. Quickly I look left at the land to reestablish my spatial orientation.

  Okay, no over-water stuff today.

  I sneak along the shoreline, a fast sneak with the wind behind me, and then pick up the four-lane toward Green Bay as I talk to Green Bay Approach. They clear me through their airspace.

  The four-lane squeezes down to two lanes north of Green Bay. I have a ten degree crab in and still I’m bucketing along, but the poor visibility keeps me busy trying to stay found. Abrams, Stiles, Lena, Coleman, I tick them off one by one. I also use my pencil to try to measure the distances. It appears I’ve done about 76 miles from Oshkosh to Coleman in 43 minutes. How many knots is that? More than a hundred.

  I’m going under a cloud layer. The gauzy sun disappears and the haze turns gloomy. I decide to go lower. At 2,500 feet I am bouncing in the cockpit. I can see better but the ride is definitely worse.

  Approaching Iron Mountain, Michigan, the clouds are behind and the visibility has improved to about six miles. The wind is fierce out of the southwest at about 15 or 20.

  Runway 18 is as close to the wind as they have, so I get to practice my crosswind landing technique. I get the Queen onto the runway without altering her appearance, but the landing is nothing to brag about. Upon shutdown I check the time—1.4 hours from engine start in Oshkosh. Then I stand up in the cockpit and strip off the jacket. This place is hotter than Mississippi was.

  Well, it was a nice tailwind. While it lasted. Westward from here it’s a headwind.

  Life’s like that.

  Ten minutes after I landed at Iron Mountain I had two spectators photographing the plane. The first man to arrive said he was out in his yard when he heard the Queen. “I knew it was a radial the minute I heard it. Sure enough, a yellow biplane. So I grabbed the camera and came on out to the airport.”

  The second man to arrive had a passenger as well as his camera. He had just finished mowing the lawn of an apartment house when he saw the Queen go over. “I try to take photos of all the interesting planes that land here. This is the only Stearman this summer besides the Red Baron Pizza plane that gave rides to all the grocers.”

  “No,” the first man said. “There was that fellow from Illinois that brought up a Stearman for the airshow.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Good airshow too. Weather was a little crummy but they flew away. The P-51 was the best act, I thought. Boy, I liked the sound of that engine.”

  If ever three guys deserved Stearman rides, here they stood. I watched the wind sock whipping through twenty or thirty degrees and decided not to tempt my luck. Rockford was a sobering lesson. So I paid for the gas and oil, shook hands all around, and taxied the Queen out.

  The three were still on the mat as I lifted off. I turned the Queen to go over them and waved like a man possessed. They waved back with every arm.

  The FAA says the Cannibal Queen is mine. She must be, since every
one sends me the bills. Yet in a larger sense, she isn’t. She’s just mine to fly for a while, for as long as my turn lasts. Like every wonderful old airplane she really belongs to everyone who sees her. Everyone who hears the engine and looks up and catches the sun glinting on yellow wings. Everyone who feels somehow richer, more alive because he saw her in the sky.

  I fly westward at 2,500 feet in a bobbing, corkscrewing airplane that has to be pointed at least twenty degrees south of the desired course. The hot, gusty, malevolent wind is out of character this far north, amid this great hardwood forest that is already showing tinges of fall color.

  The hills roll gently and the forest covers everything. Cold creeks and streams meander through the wilderness. Ernest Hemingway loved these forests and wrote a series of short stories set here for Boy’s Life magazine. These stories were among the first he managed to get published. They’ve been republished in collections and are worth your time, even if you’re politically correct and think you don’t like Ernest Hemingway. The Nick Adams stories will surprise you.

  I’ve always wondered why the environmentalists and conservationists haven’t latched onto Hemingway’s work. No writer I know of in this century had a more profound love for the outdoors or expressed it better then Hemingway. I guess he played the writer role too macho and that image still gets in the way of what he wrote. Which is a shame.

  After an hour and a half of flying I am feeling the first twinges of airsickness. Not nausea, just a general malaise that will progress to nausea if I don’t get this bucking pig on the ground so that I can give my inner ear a break.

  The first airport ahead is Ironwood, Michigan, but the runway is oriented east and west. I give them a call. Winds 200 degrees at 11 gusting to 21.

  Now that is a cross wind! Fifty degrees off, 11 to 21.

  I set myself up for a straight-in, then decide to overfly the field and get a good look.

  The wind sock is flopping from south to southwest, standing straight out. There is a taxiway pointed straight south that I could use, yet it’s narrow and if I landed on it someone might have a cow unless I claimed I had an emergency. Most of the folks at these little airports wouldn’t care, but you never know.

  I circle for a left downwind and set the Queen up. Coming down final I have in almost full right rudder and left stick. Still I’m drifting right. I lower the left wing. That stops the drift, yet now the wing is down too far. I add power to flatten the glide angle and work on holding her stable.

  I can’t do it. The wind is shifting directions and gusting and the Queen’s bucking like a pony at the county fair. I wave off and tell the Unicom man I’m going on down the road.

  I would try it if I had to, but I don’t. Ashland, Wisconsin, is just 30 miles west and they have a runway pointed southwest.

  The Ashland Unicom man says the wind is blowing at 34 knots.

  Thirty-four?

  Yeah, but it’s within ten degrees of runway 22 at Ashland. I’m flying into the eye of a hurricane. Every wind report is worse than the last one.

  At Ashland I flatten the glide angle with power—I’ve got lots of excess runway—and concentrate on getting her to light on all three at the same time. I don’t concentrate hard enough and the mains touch first. She bounces as I try to pull the tail down. Now the tail touches, then the mains.

  And with the power at idle, she is instantly down to taxi speed. “An arrested landing,” I comment on the radio.

  “Yeah,” said the Unicom man, “but we liked the second landing best.” Then he hastens to add, “None of us could have done it any better.”

  They can’t fool me. They all think they could. If they didn’t think that they shouldn’t be flying airplanes. Flying is an assortment of skills that one must acquire, practice, and try to perfect.

  If you aren’t proud of your skill, you don’t work hard enough at it.

  I’ll be honest—Steve Coonts is the world’s finest pilot still strapping them to his ass.

  Ashland lies on an inlet on the southern shore of Lake Superior. The air temperature in the high 90s is unusual, rare. Sitting in his new log cabin office, the airport manager shakes his head in amazement.

  The log cabin is a piece of work. The logs are big, fitted tightly, and the rafters inside are bolted together. This structure was built to endure harsh winters for a lot of years. The airport manager at Bryce Canyon, Utah, needs an office like this to complement his 1936-vintage log hangar.

  Run your hands over the logs, finger the imperfections in the wood, examine how the logs are notched and fitted together. Built to last, like the Stearman.

  Soon I am on my way again with the freshwater inland sea of Lake Superior on my right. Storms over the lake make it look dark and gray. The lake ends in a point at Duluth, Minnesota, and I fly slowly on, out across the Minnesota lake country, “the land of ten thousand lakes.” I believe it. The flat, forested land is pockmarked with lakes as far as the eye can see (about twelve miles in this haze), dimpled like the surface of a golf ball. There are too many lakes and they all look alike, so it is impossible to use these things for navigation. As usual, I’m stuck with roads and towns and the occasional railroad track.

  The wind is still blowing ferociously and the Queen is still bucking. When I land at Brainerd, Minnesota, the temperature is 96 degrees. Inside the office building the line boy offers to call a motel that will send a car but I ask him to wait a little bit. I’ve had too much flying. I need to sit awhile on something that doesn’t move.

  The coffeepot is still on. I pour myself a cup and sit looking out the window at the runways and the treeline beyond and the big sky covering everything.

  The next morning I’m 40 minutes west of Brainerd under indefinite clouds, headed for Fargo and bucking a wind from the southwest, when I spot it. Yes, an airport with three—count them, three—grass runways!

  I quickly check the chart. Yep, it’s a public field, right here at Wadena, Minnesota. And, glory be, they have a runway pointed right into that southwest wind. Now that is a piece of luck.

  Quicker than a pickpocket can snag a wallet I have the power back and am banking into a left downwind for the southwest runway. No one answers my Unicom call, but that’s normal. It’s a public field and there are no cattle on the runway, so here I come.

  The Cannibal Queen likes grass. Invariably she gives me her best landings on the green stuff. She does this time too, a perfect three-point that will be something to think about this winter on cold, snowy evenings.

  Safely on the ground, I look about like a lucky K-Mart shopper. The grass is mowed like a PGA fairway and the areas between runways have just been hayed. The rolls of hay lie safely off the runways, which are outlined with bright yellow markers.

  At the south end of the field is a little office and three or four hangars. I taxi over to the office and the two fuel pumps. Now which is which? One will probably contain 100 octane, which I am feeding the Queen, and the other will contain automobile gasoline—mogas—for airplanes that can use it. The pumps are so old and weathered I can’t tell one from another, so I park the Queen by the one against the building and kill the engine.

  No one comes out. After the unstrapping ceremony, I get out the camera and photograph the Queen with the grass runways in the background. This chore takes a couple minutes. There are two cars behind the building, but still no signs of life.

  Finally I try the office door. It’s unlocked. Inside is a counter with an honor-system snack box, comfortable chairs, lots of flying magazines, a pop machine and a restroom. I use the rest-room and go back outside for a smoke.

  When I have been here a quarter of an hour I go back inside and inspect the place more closely. A lot of flying stories have been told in this room, crops discussed, the fortunes of the high school football team, the weather endlessly. On the wall a half-page clipping from a newspaper published in April 1990 informs me that Frank Pothen, the manager and operator of the Wadena Airport, just turned eighty years old. The story ha
s a photo of Mr. Pothen at the controls of his Piper Colt in which he still gives flight instruction. He first soloed on May 22, 1931, and, according to the FAA, is believed to be the oldest active pilot in Minnesota.

  But he isn’t here. Probably went flying. Or to town for coffee. And left the place unlocked. After all, this is Wadena, not L.A. or the Bad Apple. The folks in the cafe on Main Street will probably tell you—this is God’s country, full of honest folk. Then the waitress will say she hasn’t locked her door in years. And the guy on the next stool will tell you he still leaves the keys in his car. Who would steal it?

  Indeed. Who?

  Rumbling thunder brings me back outside. A storm three or four miles north is tossing lightning bolts at the ground. Some rain is falling up that way. And there’s a boomer to the west. They’re partially embedded in the haze but the lightning flashes give them away.

  I sit listening to the thunder and watching the storms and the wind sock as my pipe smoke hurries away on the wind.

  This hasn’t been a wet summer here. The grass is dry and yellowish and the dirt has the consistency of dust.

  According to the newspaper, Mr. Pothen has managed this airport for over twenty years. That’s a lot of flight students, a lot of thunderstorms, snows in the winter, wet springs, summer afternoons with baseball on the radio, gorgeous falls with touchdowns and halftime bands.

  Sixty years of flying. … I wonder if Mr. Pothen regrets any of it. Does he wish he had flown for an airline, or perhaps farmed a little place ten miles out of town? I wonder …

  Money and material possessions are not the measure of a life well lived. Fame? That’s smoke on the wind.

  Looking at the Queen, almost a half century old, against the grass runways and thinking about Mr. Pothen, I can’t help but take inventory of my own life, my career. As much as I love flying, I long ago concluded that I didn’t want to spend my life doing it. I didn’t like law, which is merely helping people settle disputes, all of which boil down to money—how much? If you help rich people settle theirs you make a lot of it. But.