Flight of Passage: A True Story by Buck Rinker

Author:Buck, Rinker [Buck, Rinker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2013-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

We rose at dawn and trudged back down the piney highway to the cropduster strip. There were already a lot of planes running, their big Pratt & Whitneys rumbling while the tall landing gears of the Stearmans trembled and strained against wooden chocks. Gangs of cropdusters and hopper crews leaned against the wings, grinning like hyenas and smoking, and there was another group drinking coffee around a shiny canteen truck. Stone-faced, we walked down past the malevolent morons and the droning line of planes. Nobody seemed to want to bother us this early in the day. We quickly pre-flighted and propped the Cub, coasted down the hill, and firewalled the throttle as soon as we hit the runway. We never looked back and we never wanted to hear of Brinkley, Arkansas, again.

A lonely stretch of flying lay before us. There was still another sixty or seventy miles of timber barrens to the southwest, as featureless and broad as an ocean, with barely a trace of habitation or a checkpoint to look at. Occasionally there was a bubble in the air from cold moisture rising off a lake, and white tracings of ground fog exposed the outlines of creeks and swamps. But mostly all we could do was follow the rails toward Arkadelphia. Kern and I droned along with the throbbing plane, saying nothing to each other. Finally the pine barrens thinned and were broken by shimmering swamplands that gradually gave way to harder soil, rolling beige and red grasslands.

After Arkadelphia, we entered the pretty, undulating farm country along the Little River. I always loved the sight of agricultural activity from the air. Below us, men on tractors were towing huge agricultural sprayers, and wagons loaded with irrigation pipe, out to the fields. Herds of Hereford and Whiteface were bunched up in the brown-green landscape, massing at feed pens. In the soft, morning light, with the lakes up by Hot Springs glittering like new silver, and the Ouachita Mountains to the northwest glowing purple and black, the Little River was mystical. The far corner of Arkansas is tidy and fenced in, but still it is more western than southern, suggestive of open prairie. It was some of the loveliest country we saw.

Out over the Little River, throbbing along in the Cub, the simplest thought suddenly occurred to me. I wished that my father could see this exquisite piece of country with me. It was a pity not to share it with him.

I was often prone to early-morning bouts of loneliness like this in the air. Still, I couldn’t understand why I missed my father so. Certainly I was still boiling inside about the waterbag, and in the full light of day I felt guilty about lying to my father about it last night. But my concerns about him were much greater than that and in fact were buried deeply in medical trauma. That spring, quite by accident, I had begun facing that. All through our coast to coast flight I was brooding through a sense of foreboding about him without quite realizing it.

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