I held the nose low for a few seconds to let the Cub accelerate, then rolled quickly to the right, banking sharply as we climbed over the forest, coming about to a northwest course. The day had dawned gloriously clear, with a fresh southerly breeze; not a cloud was in sight. But that's what the enemy wanted. It was his kind of day, as yesterday had been and the several days before. And as we climbed above the tall pines, I saw that he had struck with a vengeance.
I was stunned by the magnitude of it. A great, towering mushroom cloud loomed ahead on the horizon. I switched on the radio, and excited voices began to boom through my headset. Our ground forces were being mobilized and sent into the fray. Desperate calls were going out for reinforcements. I announced that I was airborne and en route, but no one seemed to take notice. I announced again, and the dispatcher admonished me to hurry. But the Cub was giving me her all, blazing through the sky at eighty-five knots, her top speed.
I pulled out my charts as we drew closer to the imposing smoke column, but I wondered if my presence could make a difference. Normally, my job was to find each of the little pockets of intruders and call one of our ground teams in to repel it. There was little else I could do. The Cub was unarmedfar too small to carry the heavy ordnance needed to attack this determined foe from the air. But our people were already well aware of the enemy's brutal strike at the place known as the Loop. Our advance ground forces were already engaged. So what was I to do?
As we approached the besieged area, the details of the gigantic cloud began to break out. Broom and black smoke thick enough to crash into boiled, rolled, and churned its way upward, carried northward with the winds. Down sun of the inferno the landscape was eclipsed by darkness. Closer still, the orange brilliance of fierce conflagrations began to show beneath it. What an awesome feeling; the Cub was so small and frail against the nefarious thing ahead. I was no more than a mosquito flying toward a roaring campfire.
Finally we arrived and began to scout the battlefield. It appeared that it happened exactly as one of the old-timers had predicted. "Happens every three or four years," he had said. The Loop is a great bend in the railroad, winding its way around a canyon nearly to the point of meeting itself again, like a horseshoe bent inward. Sparks spew onto the railside from the trains' hot brakes, as they enter the Loop. Sooner or later, the inevitable happens. The sparks catch in the brush and explode into rampaging fires racing up the ravines, devouring the lifeblood of this regionits timberand threatening the dwellings of the nearby town.
I circumnavigated the fire, trying to determine its extent and to find possible roads or trails through which the trucks could approach it. The big flatbeds carried bulldozers, but the slow dozers were useless unless they could be deposited at a strategic point downwind and near the fire. I could easily tell the trucks and dozers where best to counterattack, but they had no radios then. I could only communicate with the base station and towers. I watched, frustrated, as the trucks wandered about, the drivers blindly discussing and planning their action.
I was an outsider here, a temporary pilot, flying only for the season, then I would be gone. But the forest rangers down there had lived around these parts all their lives. They knew the land well. And I was a stranger with whom they were guarded, standoffish, and skeptical. I overheard a lookout tower operator once refer to me, in a transmission to the base station, as "that airplane pilot." They really were good people, but from time to time I was the object of their humor, like the time a tower man asked me to check out a smoke sighting. Not knowing the countryside, I relied on highly detailed maps using the section-township-range gridwork system, maps that the tower men and drivers also possessed. But this man insisted that I fly over near the place where the old farmer had been found dead.
"Say, what?" I asked incredulously.
"You know," he responded, "the ole black man, the one they found dead in his pickup truck, oh, five, maybe six, years ago. Out that way"
Luckily, most of the time, knowing that I was unfamiliar with the area, they used map coordinates. But today I folded my map and stowed it. Determined to get into this fight, I dove low over the trucks opposite their direction of movement along the old logging road they had chosen. I wanted them to turn around and approach the fire from another angle, and I had picked out a route they could use. My low pass seemed to puzzle them, although I knew it was an accepted signal. The lead driver opened his door and looked up, as I made a second pass, the Cub's wheels flashing only a few feet over the truck's cab. Then they responded and the trucks began to turn around. I spent the next fifteen minutes herding the trucks toward the worst part of the fire, and I could imagine them talking as clearly as if I were in the truck with them: "I hope that tomfool pilot knows what the blazes he's doin'."
Time and again I flew past the advancing face of the inferno, and with the side window slid back I felt the searing heat on my face. And I watched with utter fascination as the fire down below began to "crown" a frightening spectacle, seeing it jump from treetop to treetop, driven before the wind. On one foray around the leeward side, I climbed high and challenged the smoke column, a supremely reckless deed. But I was loving this time of struggle and combat and started to grow cocky.
I intended only to sideswipe the cloud, to be immersed in it just a few seconds. They were among the most frightening moments of my flying career. At first I felt a bump or two and smelled the burning timber. Then the heat shaft seized the Cub and pitched us violently, as if the raging monster had grabbed us by the throat and was shaking us asunder. I choked from smoke and strained my burning eyes for signs of daylight, hoping that the engine would continue to aspirate. Then, as suddenly as it hit, it spit us out the side of the shaft into clear, calm air.
My watering eyes fluttered for relief, and I filled my lungs with sweet air. Shaking, I radioed the base station that I was recovering for gas at Monroeville, a few miles to the north. I didn't really need gas. There were almost two hours left in the tanks, but I desperately needed a break.
I taxied up to the fuel pumps and shut the engine down, looking back toward the still visible smoke column as I stepped onto the porch. The local gang greeted me and asked about the fire, then allowed as to how they knew the Loop was going to blow up any day now. I grabbed a Coke and strolled to the back room, where my friend Dick Dammon was strumming his guitar as usual, dog sleeping at his side.
Maybe the Chuck Yeager types never need solace, but sometimes the ordinary flier needs to find a confidant upon whom to unload his own nagging inadequacies and shortcomings. I, for one, long for a kindred soul to say (to lie, if need be) that he has been there as well, to say with a soothing chuckle, "Yeah, I know what you mean. I've done that too."
I had come to know Dick quite well in the last several weeks. I enjoyed visiting with him on these stopovers. He worked at night, flying canceled checks in a Cessna Skymaster. He stayed there at the field during the day. They'd given him a cot in the back room. He and I had much in common: we were about the same age, both recently out of the Air Force, and both somewhat outsiders in this rural worldhe especially, being a Yankee and all.