Thumbing the Friendly Skies

The tanned young man offered both of us another pina colada. Beneath us the sun played on the Caribbean and then, in front and to the left, the atoll appeared, light green in the distance and rimmed by a pink ribbon of unbroken beach. The light green below resolved into hundreds of gangling palm trees. I smiled at my friend and leaned back for the landing. This, I thought, is air hitchhiking.

For years friends have told me how easy it is to air hitchhike. A cheap way to a suntan, they said, with a chance for adventure besides. In the weeks before spring break my friend and I dared each other and boasted to others until we had no choice: we would drive to her home in New Jersey on Sunday and air hitchhike south on Monday--anywhere south. Easy.

Air hitchhiking does not, of course, mean standing on runways and sticking out your thumb, nor does it demand crawling stealthily into luggage compartments. Instead, you go to private airports, or private hangars in regular airports, and hang out. Hang out, and look friendly, and don't be shy. Eventually (it may take a few minutes, or a few hours) a kindly executive, a bored pilot, a why-the-hell-not sportsman will shrug and smile and take your bags. Easy.

My friend's mother in New Jersey did not share our enthusiasm and tempted us away from danger--first with common sense (you never know when those little planes will run out of gas), then with theatre tickets, and finally, in desperation, with an acquaintance's condominium in St. Thomas that just happened, she said, to be empty. We would pay the air fare, but then paradise would come free. "A view of the gulf", she said. "Available tennis courts. It never rains more than ten minutes a day". Don't be silly, we said. Why enrich Eastern Airlines?

THE NEXT MORNING'S weather--the wind and rain in New Jersey and the occasional tornadoes further south--should have told us all we needed to know. Instead we drove through the drizzle to Teterboro, a town with ten inhabitants, an efficient (as we would discover) police force, and a busy, private-commercial airport with 15,000 employees. That morning, it seemed, all 15,000 had called in sick. Little airplanes squatted in neat rows, roped to the tarmac to brace against the wind. A flag flapped and clanked above us. Nothing stirred on the runway, or in our parking lot, or by the hangars. We hoisted our packs, draped our ponchos over them and set off through what had become a downpour to find St. Thomas.

Near the first deserted hangar, one old man sat in a pickup truck, as its wipers waved like frightened insect antennae. "Sure, some people will fly today", he said. "The crazy ones". We swallowed and thanked him and found the main hangar. Inside, a few corporate jets loomed over the buglike pipers scattered around them. We wandered through the huge building, finally stumbling on a friendly pilot who said finding a ride would be easy. Just go to the operations desk, he said, and ask who's heading south.

The operations desk told us to head west, and fast. Absolutely no hitchhiking. This is a private airport. Clear out. As the employee snarled, a fa executive dressed in blue watched threateningly from the inner office.

We pretended to leave and wandered onto the field. The field attendants were friendly, and thought we were crazy. A man who said his name was Bruce jumped out of a Texaco truck to tell us that corporations owned all the jets, and that they would never take us. "They have no insurance for unauthorized passengers," Bruce said. "If you crashed you could sue them for millions". Still, Bruce said he'd let us know if he heard of anything. That Lear jet over there, he said, is leaving for Miami and Caracas today. They're small, those Lears, he said, but they can make it to Miami in 2 1/2 hours. We said we'd take that, and were wondering whether we'd brought enough suntan oil when the fat blue executive appeared. This time he walked us to the gate.

We were about to attack the next hangar, a smaller one, when an efficient Teterboro policeman drove up, a stocky black-leather trooper who politely said that the blue executive had summoned him and that he would arrest us if we didn't quickly disappear. We retreated to Manny's Cockpit Restaurant, with its bicentennial decor, to dry off and plan strategy and punish ourselves with thoughts of condominiums and never-more-than-ten-minutes-of-rain-a-day. Two dozen yards off, Bruce was pumping gas into the Miami-bound Lear jet, and we couldn't look for its pilot without risking a night in the Teterboro jail, if there was one. Things looked bleak.

Finally we paid Manny's check and huddled in front of the airport gate on a muddy strip of grass. The rain rolled off our ponchos and into our sneakers. As executives back-seated in limousines drove past, we would display a hastily-constructed placard (Two Students Want Ride South) and smile, friendly but humble. Most stared ahead, lockjawed; a few were amused; one tapped his chauffeur, rolled down the window, and offered a ride to Indianapolis. Even New Jersey in the rain seemed preferable.

After an hour or two another efficient policeman appeared. The airport was private property, he said; the street was his property. That didn't leave us much room. The policeman smiled. In his sunglasses we could see the dark clouds racing behind us. As the fat blue executive watched from a steamy office window, the policeman offered us a ride to the highway. The Miami-bound Lear jet still sat, sleek and ready, on the rain-slicked pavement.

Only my friend's mother was cheerful at dinner that night. She showed us pictures of St. Thomas, and encouraged us to sleep late the next morning. But instead we repacked and tried Morristown Airport and Caldwell Airport and, it seemed, every other airfield in New Jersey. We never found the tanned young man. We had bad luck: the wrong weather, the wrong days of the week, the wrong time of year. But it was more than bad luck, everyone told us: in the last two years, hijackers and insurance companies and too much publicity have taken almost all of the wind out of air hitchhikers' sails. Corporate jets won't take anyone, and private planes, which mostly don't go far enough anyhow, usually won't either.

So I can't tell you about the best beach in the Virgin Islands, or where to get a great pina colada. But by Wednesday I knew New Jersey's great airports pretty well. Don't pay a dollar to park in the Morristown lot; there are free spaces fifty yards further on. And try the grilled cheese and tomato in Manny's Cockpit Restaurant. Can't get anything like it on Antigua.