Chariots of the Gods

Cars driven by boiling drivers roll on dusty highways across brown and barren land, from one barren city to another. They crawl on the yawning landscape of I-90, looking to flatten turtles or to veer toward hitchhikers to "pump their blood a bit." They roll on the flatlands of South Dakota, the no-man's-land of the hitchhiker who ducks the graceful parabola of a flying bottle and faces a more than likely prospect of a night on the prairie.

The hitchhiker's lot from 4000 feet, though, is much more appealing. He glides over one-dimensional drivers crawling back to their slots on noodle highways. He rides an airplane in a multidimensional world where the only limit is the thought of what's below. He is an airhitcher moving through air and over miles--free.

The airhitcher's take-off is exhilirating--a rush of relief and smugness accompanying the first jolt and momentary weightlessness. His dress is required--tie, with an Oxford shirt and pressed pants. His approach is crucial--an earnest, American look-in-the-eye and the words, "Excuse me sir, I'm a college student who must get back east as fast as possible. May I have a ride?" The outcome varies from a 48-hour wait in the burning sterility of the Salt Lake City International Airport to a quick hop across America in three aircraft. On $14.

I began airhitching, the last leg of a summer hitching to-fro' across America, by turning my back on I-90 and following the signs for the Billings, Montana airport. I had grown tired of hitching on a ramrod highway flopped down in dusty desolation and sustaining tin-diner towns. The west's rusticity and bo-hunk spirit sickened me. Two months on a ranch splitting wood, driving cattle, digging ditches, setting up fenceline, chewing tobacco, chasing chickens and pigs, and slaughtering sheep had sapped my pioneering, yahoo spirit. I longed for the sophisticated East, the blue rhapsody of New York. An impressive airhitch home would stifle the culture shock, jetting me back to civilized life.

The airport terminal was a series of concrete blocks set on a butte overlooking Billings. Winds buffetted dead and splayed planes sitting on the cracked runway. A lone, bearded pilot inspected his single-engine Cessna 140. "Excuse me sir, I'm a college student who must get back East as fast as possible. May I have a ride?"

We cruised at 4100 feet. He was a geologist at the University of Cincinnati and pointed out the geological characteristics of eastern Montana, South Dakota and Minnesota. His expertise at pointing out the finer points of the brown and barren land exemplified the extraordinary character of pilots who pick up riders. Like all kind hearted pilots he flew with a placid grin and talked on topics ranging from the future of Teng Hsio-ping to the amount of coal in South Dakota. He was one of the elite of American travelers, who moved not necessarily to see places but to feel things. He was free of the marital problems, heavy loads, and speed ridden sorties of American truckers. He was above the bourgeois cares and compromises of the American family camper that joins its summer type in endless caravans crossing America--those who travel but don't go anywhere.

We landed in the late afternoon in Walmar, Minnesota, a refreshing stop after the dry-rot outposts of the Plains. Walmar seemed typical of those clean, secure, Main Street towns that appear nestled in a green effulgence when you glide eastward over the Missouri. A short, 40 mile hitch by road took me to Flying Cloud Airport, just outside of Minneapolis, where I unrolled a sleeping bag and spent the night.

The next morning, a blazing, mid-west, reverential Sunday, I weaved through the long, tin hangers looking for a plane flying east. I passed a small truck speckled with camouflage paint next to an opened hanger. Inside the hanger a figure with a blue beret, a khaki bush suit and a pipe checked the flaps of his blue and white Cessna. I made my approach. He looked up, checked me over, removed his pipe, grinned, and said, "I went to Groton, where did you go?"

He was a successful Minneapolis banker who said he drove his combination library and duck hunting truck into the marshes to read, not to kill ducks. We drove to the suburbs to his eight bedroom house, swimming pool, and pleasant wife. He had a 23 year old son and an impressionable, fatherless niece, whose wholesomeness vied with the breakfast of eggs benedict.

We spent a lovely, suburban day--the niece's cup-cake breasts and loamy loins glistening by the pool, steak-red and turgidly dripping on the hungry coals, and cooly dropped comments on New York, Harvard, and ocean racing. Early the next morning we joined the lines of commuters heading into Minneapolis. He did not look forward to facing the rest of the bank's directors, he was tired and felt as he had prior to "a previous emotional altercation." A light rain on the windshield mixed the city with the sky, making the outline of the buildings nearly indistinguishable and their colors a forbidding grey. He mumbled of Conrad, of Zen and motorcycle maintenance, of his friend Robert Pirsig and his aircraft. I opened the door at the air terminal and turned to shake his hand and say "Thank you. You've been incredibly kind." But he turned with a miserable smile, "Tuan Jim," he half-mumbled and half-laughed. I slammed the door.

I spent the morning at the private air terminal, watching 747 s rumble and squeal down the runway like the sows at the ranch, flouting nature by moving so much weight so fast. A handsome, twinengine Beechcraft Aztec wheeled out of a hanger, its tall pilot walking behind it in the drizzle. He was dark with a bulky, wool sweater, and brown pants that tapered down to pointed shoes. He had a Gallic look, a black lock folded back from forehead like a bird's wing. I made my approach. He grinned slightly and motioned to the co-pilot's seat.

The plane turned smoothly, cut through the drizzle on the runway and rose into the muffled brightness of the clouds. We sipped coffee, the pilot speaking little but holding true to the ubiquitous grin. He was a flying mystic, spinning yarns about Kierkegaard and the ineffable quality of flying. We dropped from the clouds, touched down the plane at Detroit City Airport.

In the corner of the airport, just off the main runway, stood a trailer converted into the dispatch office of Executive Aviation. EA, its twin-engined carriers and a snaky Lear jet, flew quick-order runs of car parts to GM plants around the country. Everything, from the reined jet to a sharp-boned and muscular Doberman, jutted sleek, Steinberg angles. Everything, that is, but an unshaven guy snoring in a wood chair propped against a wall with his boots on a table. He wore a Beech-nut "chaw" cap and kept a spit tin on the floor next to the chair. The Doberman sat poised as it grew dark outside, pointing to the jet with sleek, black skin and a sharp snout.

"Ahhh Jeff, we've got a few boxes of six-inch gaskets for Long Island. Send Marty out will ya?" a voice said over the dispatcher's radio. The dispatcher poked a pencil into Marty. He rocked back to the floor, grabbed his tin and a piece of paper, and ambled out of the trailer. "Yew comin' too boy?" he said to me with a harkening drawl. "Awright, hop in."

Marty flicked a series of the jet's decks of glowing switches, buttons, meters, clocks, and gyros. He spat into his tin as the jet blew an escalating, piercing whine. "Shit--oh--God--oh--shit," he said, "I jus' luv doin' this." The jet floated toward the runway, gushing Detroit's air in a screeching rumble. "Hold onto your seat boy, or it'll go right up your ass with the rest of the rig," he said with the deep blue lights of the runway shining in his eyes. He drew the throttle back. The lights turned a thinner blue, and the g's shot my head into its rest, as the Lear tore out of Michigan and ripped to 40,000 feet.

Marty hummed "Folsom Prison Blues." He toyed with the lights and switches and slung a thumb-size wad into his mouth. "I love doin' this the most," he said, firmly yanking the wheel toward his gut. The jet bucked to a 60-degree angle, pressing me into my seat. "Thirty degrees more and we'll be a rocket-ship, boy," he said, spittle running down through his grin and back across his bulbous cheek.

He drove it to the edge--toward a blue bowl with silver specks)) a cow hand in the Drby whipping a thoroughbred to the line. Sophisticaiton could not repel spirit. Yang rammed a screaming yin across the night sky. He brought into his gut the paragon of rationality and the pride of corporate innovation and technology and regergitated it all over the heavans with an ass slappin' yell. Western, righteous stuff was taking it eastward home to its staid, straight beginnings, sp.tting and yawping all the way.

Below a diamond white momentarily flashed the clouds. For an instant I thought it was our wing beacons. "Jeesus, what was that," I said as it flashed twice more, much brighter. "Lightinin', damn it. Don't you know what lightinin' is boy?" Lightining. Building in distant flashes, growing in intensity as we moved further east, showing a pearly, limitless vista. Silver veins tearing from cloud to cloud quietly. It clawed below, ripping New York silently.