Well. We didn’t have such smooth sailing. To Moose Lip. Or Bear Claw. Or Seal Shit. Or Caribou Dick. Or Wolf Tit. Or whatever other made-in-its-own-image totemics the municipalities, settlements, campgrounds and wickiups went by in those cold arrondissements along that booming Ice Belt.
We came down in trees. Sergeant Preston and the Rabbi.
“I want you to know,” Skyking said, “I take complete responsibility for this disaster.”
“You do.”
“Complete responsibility. The FAA won’t have to come up with any black boxes on this one.”
“They won’t.”
“Pilot error pure and simple.”
“You’re some up-front guy,” I said, shivering, jumping about, blowing on my mittens and pounding my hands together now we were clear of the plane.
“Mea culpa, Rabbi.”
“Nobody’s perfect, my son,” I said, larky, in extremis the wiseacre.
“I just can’t for the life of me figure what happened,” he said, and launched into a song and dance I couldn’t follow.
“We were never higher than five or so angels,” he said. “Our attitude was always righteous and the artificial horizon might have been turned off for all the pitching and banking it displayed. We weren’t below, and I never busted, minimums. We enjoyed CAVU weather straight up in the civil evening twilight. There wasn’t any clear-air turbulence to speak of, and I never had to crab. I could have used some cultural features certainly, but what’s a fellow to do, make them up? Heck,” he said, “we even had eminence. And no use for a DF steer even if there’d been an FSS on our right wing. I didn’t have to lean and seemed to be greasing it on. My Pop Teases Fat Girls. Everything going so smooth we could have joined the mile-high club if either of us had felt the need or been better looking. We were never close to issuing a pan pan pan let alone a mayday, and if we were even close to coming out of the envelope I never heard about it. I didn’t red line or run scud or catch any lint in my transponder. I topped off in Anchorage so that wasn’t it, and if we didn’t get any pireps, airmets or sigmets, it’s because there just weren’t any weather conditions. True Virgins Make Dull Company? Perfect, A-OK. I wouldn’t have said boo to them over the Unicom frequencies even if I’d had the chance. Hell, my V speeds were good, to say nothing of that nice VASI light effect I was catching from the ice. Red over white, pilot’s delight. I never even needed VOR, and you were with me during the walk around. I’ve got good paperwork, Padre. I can’t for the life of me figure what could have gone wrong. If anything even did. It’s against all odds.”
“Maybe we didn’t crash,” I said. He knew too many acronyms and mnemonics, a chap too talky for the stereotype I’d have welcomed. A man in his position, in charge of machinery that can kill you, owes it to the customers to be taciturn, reserved, to play everything close to the chest. To tell you the truth, I don’t even like it when the first officer on a big commercial jet chats up the scenery. His eyes should be on the instrument panel or looking out for traffic. This guy, Philip, took me too much into his confidence altogether. Even while we were going down Philip was hollering information at me.
“Uh oh,” he shouted as the plane swung out of control and lost altitude, “something terrible’s happening! If I don’t get a handle on this situation we’re going to crash and die! The skin of this aircraft’s too thin, it won’t stand up to a real impact. I’ve got to get her nose up over those razor pines. See, in these temperatures the needles on the trees are like swords. All we have to do is just brush against them gently and they’ll slash shit out of our gas tanks. Then it’s Pow! Bam! Fuck! I’ll lay you dollars to donuts we explode! We won’t even get the opportunity to crash! Goodnight, Nurse, will you just look at the glare on that ice? It’s curtains for sure now. It’s too thin. Oh, it’d hold a couple of good-sized boys and girls on sleds and skates, but never the weight of a crashing, runaway airplane. The way I see it, we’ve got this last-minute, split-second decision to make. It’s a question of whether we want to impact in the razor pines, explode, catch fire and die, or go for the ice and drown. Those are the alternatives, but we have to make our minds up quick.”
“The ice!” I screamed. “The ice!”
And even though we came down in the trees, it was good to know that I wasn’t bad at the nick-of-time, last-minute, split-second stuff. And terrified that what had occurred to me hadn’t to Philip. That the ice may not have been as thin as he thought, and that even if it were there might still have been time for us to scramble out of the plane to safety.
“Wow,” Philip said, as we were set down, the plane’s right wing and tail cradled, resting, hung like a hammock in perfect, miraculous balance between the heavy branches of two razor pines, “did you feel that? A thermal! A save-ass, opportune, eleventh-hour thermal!”
“God is a mensch.”
“Tell me about it,” the pilot said, “we were going down for the count. Of course I was putting on the back pressure trying to get the nose up, but that updraft came out of nowhere, caught us and set us down again gentle as Mother.”
“He’s a baleboss.”
“A thermal!” he said. “In Alaska! At this time of year! We’re sitting pretty in the trees. As if we were held in so many palms.” He started to laugh. “In Alaska!. Palm trees!”
“He got de whole worl’ in he han’.”
Now, an hour or so into the aftermath, we were still cozy. We could have been soldiers before an attack, talking things over, our sweethearts back home, our plans for the chicken farm once the war was over. We could have been brothers sharing a bedroom, boys in a treehouse discussing the mysteries. We could have been crash victims. We could have been warmer.
The plan was to stay in the plane until it was light enough to see. Then, carefully as we could, we would try to extricate ourselves from the cabin, one of us looking out for the other and displacing his weight like a fellow leaning back out over the sea in a boat race.
What Philip had forgotten, and what I hadn’t known, was that though we were only three or four hundred miles north of Anchorage, the threaded latitudes and longitudes of earth were already drawing together, coming to a point, light tightening, geography’s diminished lattices and trellises, actually closing in on themselves, its patchwork weave of time and distance drawing together toward the perfect gathered pucker of the Pole. It was the old deceptive business of altered space I’d first noticed when we were landing at the Anchorage airport. Something happened up here. Time and space confounded each other. Tricks were played. At any rate, first light didn’t break until around noon. We’d been caught in the trees at about six o’clock the night before, stuck in the small plane for maybe eighteen hours, peeing in thermos bottles, jars of instant coffee, pots and pans, like vandals pissing up a storm in your kitchen. And whenever the cramp in our bodies got too great and one of us had to move, the other watched him in the great concentrated dark and compensated for his movements, contracting as he stretched, shifting in mirror image. We were like people crossing a tightrope together.
“I’m yawning on three,” said Philip.
“Go ahead,” I said, “I’ll swallow and cover for you.”
Which stood us in good stead when it finally got light. And we saw just how precarious our purchase really was.
“Christ,” I said.
“Jesus,” said Philip.