Coast-to-coast flight

RICHARD SHERMAN

At the Hotel Roosevelt in New York, starting point of a journey which was to end twenty hours and forty-five minutes later in Los Angeles, a pleasantly befuddled gentleman seated himself next to me in the airport-bound motor, waved a frantic goodbye to an invisible friend, 'and said, "Burp." "Burp," be repeated. "Nice night for flying, don't you think? Moon, no clouds, no wind, no fog—really delightful. Really wunnerful. Don't you think?"

He was Number One. Number Two was a blonde; an extraordinarily pretty and well-dressed blonde about twenty-two who carried a volume of Proust under her arm like a weapon. By the time we were speeding from the Jersey exit of the Holland Tunnel the semi-inebriate had sobered and the young lady was thawing from a glacial silence to a discreet but amiable exchange of small talk. She, it seemed, was going to San Francisco, and he to Cheyenne. She had flown a great deal in Europe but never in America; he had never flown in Europe but had made this coast-to-coast trip ten times. She was subject to airsickness, and he had never been airsick in his life. I had been up once before, for a three-hour flight. Wasn't sick.

Our mutual curiosity satisfied, we stared intently at the back of the driver's neck. This was in July of this year, when twenty hours from New York to California was considered good time; a week later, the sixteen-hour run began.

At Newark the airport was laced with broad shafts of light streaming from earth to sky and, incredibly, from sky to earth. In front of the depot, and separated from the roaring, spot-lighted, twin-engined transport by a wire fence, stood a hundred coatless, perspiring spectators, most of them sucking ice-cream cones. A miracle of science was about to take place, but the onlookers, quite understandably, didn't give a hoot about that, or about the romance and magic of air travel either. They were waiting here, at eleven o'clock on a hot night, on the chance that one of the passengers might be Margaret Sullavan. It was on the next lap, from Omaha to Cheyenne, that we encountered the smoothest portion of the trip, and the dullest. As a diversion, however, one cotdd watch the pilot and the mate, who opened the door to the pilot house. It is to the credit of the air lines that they have managed to acquire pilots whose very appearance inspires confidence in the passengers. The average age seems to be around thirty. They are lean, sober men, who radiate efficiency and capability. Now and then the pilot left the controls to the mate and returned to get acquainted with his cargo. Then he proceeded to the rear of the plane to enter into a prolonged conversation with the stewardess; a conversation which, from outward signs, was entirely businesslike. Personally I have concluded that the short stories are wrong.

But no one of them was. There were seven men, none of whom could possibly have been mistaken for a movie star, and the blonde, who could be and was. As she emerged from the depot, a ripple of excitement ran over the throng. "Lilian Harvey/" whispered a hoarse, triumphant voice; and somewhere later that night someone went to bed happy in the misapprehension that she had seen Lilian Harvey plain.

Within the twenty-foot-long cabin, the stewardess—Miss McGinty, R.N.—was distributing little packets of gum to chew (it is said to lessen the likelihood of airsickness) and cotton to stuff in ears. It was obvious that the majority of the passengers were old-timers; nonchalantly, with self-conscious expertness, they notched their seat-belts around them, briskly undid resplendent briefcases, and began to finger what must have been very important documents indeed. When the plane began to move they did not even bother to look up; when it left the ground, they merely settled more cozily into their chairs. Outside, red, green, and white lights receded from a recognizable outline to a collection of pinpoints—hut the gentlemen just yawned and flipped another page. The illuminated letters in the front of the cabin—"No smoking while this sign is lighted''—went out. The passengers settled down to sleep.

From Newark to Cleveland, over Pennsylvania and Ohio, high above the Alleghenies, for 405 miles and three hours, seven men and a blonde twisted and turned in various postures that might be conducive to sleep; with varying degrees of success. Miss McGinty arranged the midget pillows, turned lights on and off, and finally succeeded in lulling most of her charges into some semblance of rest. The others squirmed, looked out of the windows at the black earth below and the white moon above, and read the practically inexhaustible information contained in the booklets attached to the hack of each chair. A fascinating literature, this, which informed you as you flew over Clarion, Pa. (in the middle of the night, 3000 feet in the air) that "Here is located what is claimed to be the world s largest milk bottle plant."

At intervals, Miss McGinty bent over to carry on conversation with the more wakeful of the passengers, although nothing that she had to say was worth screaming at the top of her lungs, which was what she had to do in order to make herself heard above the roar and vibration of the motors, fin the faster planes, one may now talk in a more normal tone.) Miss McGinty was solicitous and helpful, and pretty too— though not quite the Venus portrayed as the typical air hostess in magazine short stories—but she was no geographer. Seeing a huge sprinkling of lights, I asked her where we were. She scrutinized the lights carefully, as if she were about to recognize one out of a million, then bent and shrieked, "Cincinnati!" My skepticism was rewarded a few minutes later when we began to descend on Cleveland.

At 1:15 A.M. the exterior of the airport was a network of neon lights, and the interior a reechoing hall where uniformed men walked briskly to fulfill mysterious messages. The fifteen minutes we remained there were notable mainly because, during them, the gentleman who had made the flight ten times consumed a ham-on-rye and a whiskey sour and then proceeded back to the waiting plane where he was immediately very ill, in an unobtrusive and genteel manner, after which he sat up and announced that the ham had been a mistake but that his record for never having been airsick still held, as the plane hadn't yet left the ground. It left it very soon, however, having exchanged four old passengers for three new ones. The blonde returned from wherever she had been, the slight ravages of the journey completely erased. Around her sprawled sleeping and semi-sleeping men with coats off, collars loosened, mouths open, and the first evidences of stubble. She sat among them—trim, neat, still fresh —and registered a victory for her sex.

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From Cleveland to Chicago (only five stops, sixteen hours, and 2295 miles more to go), the booklet pointed out spots of interest, such as Wolcottville, Ind., "the home of Jean Stratton Porter, the author," but few passengers were awake to peer down on them. Sheer boredom, and an inability to sleep, prompted an exploring excursion to the lavatory in the rear of the plane. It proved to have everything one might expect, and also a flyswatter. I don't know why.

After Chicago, where we changed to a duplicate of our present plane and acquired a new pilot and mate as well as our third stewardess, dawn began to break. It started by being a dull red rim behind us, a smoky red rim circling the eastern horizon, but it simply turned into a gray mist. Below, land was barely visible; a flat expanse, monotonous in color and shape.

Were the poets wrong? Was this the sunrise? Surely—and then it became evident that this was no ordinary dawn: we were in a squall.

On the wing outside the cabin window—a thirty-four foot sheaf constructed of a steel and aluminum alloy —rain drove, hard like hail though it wasn't hail. The transport began to bump like a roller-coaster, only oftener. Lightning flashed in the distance and then, miraculously, seemed to flash three feet away from the tip of the wing. It continued flashing, and the only consolation available was the knowledge that no plane has ever been struck by lightning. Clouds swirled menacingly, the rain misted the windows, while the pilot climbed.

The passengers were awake now, all of them, and regarding the storm with varying attitudes. The majority simply lay back in their chairs and tried to look unconcerned, or else sat bolt upright to gaze with scientific and sportsmanlike curiosity at the lightning flashes, the very twist of their heads signifying that it was all in the day's work, come weal, come woe. . . . The man ahead smoked three cigarettes in four minutes. The blonde examined her fingernails with breathless interest.

As swiftly as it had come, the storm disappeared, leaving an atmosphere that was gray but calm. In half an hour we were descending into what first seemed to be the Missouri River but finally turned out to be the Omaha airport. It was now six in the morning. The passengers filed out slowly, with hollow laughter and feeble jokes. They were dead tired, but two of them were home, three were within three hours of their destination, and the others had only 1550 miles and all day to go.

The night flight was over.

Flying from California to New York is pleasanter than flying from New York to California; 1 was to discover that on the return trip. Not only pleasanter, because the transport is assisted by a tailwind instead of being thwarted by headwinds, but smoother and faster; faster because you turn your watch ahead four hours, not back.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the plane—or rather one of the three planes—makes six stops, varying from ten minutes to half an hour. If you don't eat at the airport lunch rooms, then you take what the stewardess gives you on the flight—four waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches, two olives and a pickle, a fruit cup, cake, and coffee or lemonade. At Omaha we ate at the airport. The meal was labeled breakfast, and its ingredients were those of breakfast, but in point of my time it was luncheon.

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At Cheyenne the sun shone brilliantly, the air was dry and hot, and we had still another breakfast. Theman-who-had-made-the-flight-ten-times departed, leaving the blonde and me as the only two survivors of the original passenger list. She was on the verge of giving up now: a misplaced lock remained misplaced. She sat and regarded the ham and eggs before her. "Funny," she said, "I seem to have lost my appetite." Then she looked at her watch; it disagreed violently with the wall clock, which marked eightfifteen. "At seven tonight," she murmured groggily, "I've a dinner engagement. And look at my hair." She shuddered.

At that moment the waitress leaned toward her shyly. "I beg your pardon, Miss," she said, "but—hut could I have your autograph?" Reviving, the blonde smiled; "Of course," she said, and gave it. "Now who," she asked when the waitress had left, "am I supposed to be?" But after that her appetite returned, and when she had finished she announced that maybe she could get a wave before dinner.

At last we were ready to go. I had heard, vaguely, that there was magnificent scenery to look down on somewhere in the west, but no one had explained that it was magnificent because it was largely mountainous. We started to climb, and we kept on climbing. The higher we got, the rougher the ride became. It was as if some cosmic fool were giving the plane a playful push every few seconds, batting it up several yards and then laying bets as to whether it would ever settle back to its normal altitude. Below, if you cared to look at them, were a variety of mountains and no visible place to land. The passengers, uniformly pale, were inclined to shut their eyes, but when the pilot came hack he was grinning. "14,000 feet up," he said.

This lasted for three hours and fifteen minutes by the time table, and for three thousand years by my own personal count. Toward noon the blonde weakly scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it across the aisle to me. "We were due to land at Rock Springs an hour ago." she wrote; "he's lost." We stared at the closed door of the control room. Lost! Lost over the mountains. . . . But shortly the stewardess rose, smiling, and leaned toward my ear. "We're descending on Salt Lake. We didn't stop at Rock Springs."

By now it was clear that T had misjudged the pilot, and that he was either mad or he and the mate were drunk. Salt Lake was nowhere in sight, and we were heading for the biggest mountain we had yet encountered.

And then, elfishly, Salt Lake City peeked around the bend of the mountain. In the distance the lake itself lay blue and endless, with borders of white salt marshes. Finally we were on the ground. Ground, clay; God's clay, of which each of us is made.

Salt Lake is a beautiful city. Others may sing the praises of Paris, Vienna, hut I shall always prefer Salt Lake.

Later, munching a hamburger at the airport lunch counter, the pilot, who had been on the Cheyenne-Salt Lake run for six years, explained that the flight had been unusually rough; he explained why, too, hut in language so technical that only a fellow pilot could have understood him. He shook his head regretfully. "I hate to hand in a record like that," he said.

During the last leg of the journey, the five hours from Salt Lake to Los Angeles, the panorama below demanded not only a camera hut technicolor. The desert stretched endlessly, bisected by long threads that were paved roads, and to the east lay mesas of turquoise and pink and blue. There were mountains here, too, hut by this time a mountain was only a mountain, not a prelude to eternity. Boulder Dam looked like an eggshell. At Las Vegas, where we landed to take on gas and a sixteen-year-old girl, the temperature was 110 at four in the afternoon; the airport itself is ten miles from the town. Around the single small depot grew cactuses; inside there was the indistinguishable drone of voices carrying on a radio conversation from the airport to a plane in flight.

The present plane, a three-motored type and smaller than the others, had room for eight passengers hut only four of the seats were occupied. The Las Vegas cargo, who on hoarding the plane had kissed her father airily and shouted, "Bye, I'll be hack tomorrow," sat in the front seat, where one got the best and most terrifying view, and absently picked splinters from the wooden window-frame beside her. It was evident that the flight was an old story to her.

Gradually the arid waste became spotted with green oases of ranchlands. The plane was flying at a lower altitude now, hut it was still so high that a house looked like a cube of sugar. Then the mountains began to take on the peculiar coloration of Southern California mountains, and the passengers were putting on their coats and reaching for their hats. Very slowly—so slowly that at times it seemed to he not moving at all—the transport glided over a corridor of hills, turned eastward, and soared low over the houses. Ahead was a great space and a roof with "Burbank" printed on it. Burbank meant Los Angeles, and Los Angeles meant a night's sleep.

We were near the ground, we were on the ground, we were taxiing to the depot. Then the plane was stationary, though the motors still roared. The mate came back through the cabin and opened the door.

We were an hour late.