Pass the Butterworms Read online

  So … you could drink from the waters of Doot Nur, okay, but you couldn’t bathe there and you certainly couldn’t fish.

  The lake was large, maybe five square miles. Christoph pointed out several dozen tiny specks moving slowly on the opposite bank and handed me his binoculars. The specks were camels: huge, shaggy double-humped animals. They moved up through the green grasses and looked exceedingly strange trudging across the snow above.

  The camels, Lhagra told me, were domestic beasts, not wild, and were used as pack animals when a family moved its ger. Deduct a few dozen karma points from my cosmic account: I rode around the lake, cut out the lead camel, and spent fifteen minutes frustrating his instinct to get back to the herd. I thought, Well, here I am in Mongolia cutting camels in the snow. Arlene said it looked like a cigarette ad.

  And then we were riding up another endless valley that dropped directly down out of Otgontenger. At about nine thousand feet there was a huge ovoo, the most elaborate yet, and I saw it as an appropriate place to offer up several big handfuls of noisy cheese.

  We rode and walked the horses up a steep, rocky slope to eleven thousand feet, where there was a small lake at the base of the glacier on Otgontenger Mountain. We hobbled the horses on a level grassy spot. Mongolians ride carrying a long rawhide rope, attached to the bridle. A Mongolian herdsman may fall off his horse, but he never drops the rawhide rope. A man on foot in the grassland is a dead man. The rope is also used to tie a horse’s two front legs together, and the hobbled animals graze placidly in a series of festive bunny hops.

  It was about five hundred yards over boulder-strewn ground from the grass to the lake. There were mini-ovoos every ten feet: a small cairn, a couple of twigs, each of them worth one, maybe two pieces of noisy cheese. Lhagra advised us to drink from the lake, for our health. The water came from the glacier, which was everlasting. Drink from the lake and live forever.

  Ominous clouds moved over the peak above us. A wind rolled down the glacier. It swirled and whistled over the lake. I could hear the sound of distant muttering voices, which came, I saw finally, from a series of small waterfalls on the far side of the lake. The sun was setting and the place seemed just a bit spooky to me. One man’s spooky, I suppose, is another man’s sacred.

  We rode three more hours, through the dark, to our campsite. Naturally, it snowed. In the morning, the sky was crisp and blue and the sun glittered on the glacier above. The light was very nearly blinding. The wranglers said we must have done okay by the mountain, shown proper respect. Otgontenger had washed its face for us.

  That day, we began retracing our route, riding endlessly and wailing in the saddle about lonely camels. The plan now was to top another pass, dump some noisy cheese at the ovoo there, and ride down through the Ider River valley to the town of Toson Cengel, where we’d catch a flight back to Ulan Bator. Just below the headwaters of the Ider, there was a ring of about eight gers, where we stopped to talk with the people about hairstyling matters. Baggie explained the scientific nature of my request. Followed here much murmured intensity among the Mongolians. They didn’t want me to touch their heads. Their concerns were a complicated amalgam of Buddhist and shamanistic beliefs that I didn’t fully understand.

  But hey, Baggie said, no problem. Or words to that effect. I didn’t want to touch their heads anyway. I wanted them to cut a few strands of their own hair, using their own knives. Baggie said that I feared DNA contamination, which he attempted to explain. The Mongolians regarded me tolerantly, as if to say, Well, there’s no accounting for other folks’ religion.

  So the people cut strands of their own hair, with their own knives, and placed them in separate Ziploc bags for me. One of the families gave us a thirty-pound tub of noisy cheese as a gift. The tradition was to give back the tub, filled with our own gifts. We sorted through what was left of our dwindling gear. Give ’em a couple of rain jackets: We only had a few more days, and the weather might hold. Give ’em a few flashlights: We would be able to set up our camps by moonlight.

  We rode off, my mission accomplished and our packs considerably lighter. Unfortunately, all up and down the Ider River valley, the word was out about the strange Mer-ee-koons who worshipped hair. People rode out to visit with us, and they never came empty-handed. Generally, they carried metal dairy pails full of yogurt. We stopped, visited, ate the yogurt, rinsed the pails, and returned them full of polar fleece jackets. If it got cold, we could wrap ourselves in sleeping bags.

  And then, finally, only a few days outside of Toson Cengel, when we were completely out of anything at all that might be construed as an appropriate gift, I saw a pair of yogurt riders, two miles back and a thousand feet above. We fled, thundering over the grassland, galloping where we could, and simply enduring where we couldn’t. We fled in a deafening clatter of noisy cheese. We fled the smiling beneficence of Mongolian generosity.

  When the yogurt riders caught us, as they surely would, we’d give them the shirts off our backs.

  “Help, My Pilot Just Had a Heart Attack and I Can’t Fly a Plane”

  “I think I ate some bad fish last night,” your pilot says.

  You don’t even know the guy’s name. Freddy somebody, and you’ve hired him to drop you off at a remote fishing camp on a lake in northern Wisconsin. You’re in a little tiny four-seater plane, but you don’t know what kind. You know dick about airplanes.

  So you’re sitting next to Freddy, on the right-hand side of the plane. There’s a kind of little steering wheel in front of you and some rudders at your feet. It’s all the same stuff Freddy has in front of him, and you can see your steering wheel move in and out and twist around as the pilot horses the little plane through the sky. It’s a bright, clear day, and the fish you’re thinking about are muskie. They say it takes fifteen hundred casts to catch a …

  “Damn!” Freddy burps out an anemic little burp, puts his hand to his chest, grimaces, and says, “Jesus.”

  You turn to your fishing partner in the backseat. His name is Joe. Anyone who reads any of the hook and bullet magazines knows that everyone’s fishing partner is always named Joe. “Me and Joe,” the articles begin, “were flying up north to hook the monster muskie of Lake Mishikobi …”

  “Joe, you got any Pepto for Freddy?”

  “Unghhhhhh,” says Freddy, whose face suddenly looks ghastly.

  You are developing a very bad feeling about all this. Freddy’s eyes roll up in their sockets and his head drops onto his chest. He pitches forward in his seat and kind of hangs there, restrained by his chest harness.

  Freddy is dead to the world. Freddy may, in fact, be dead.

  “Me and Joe crashed in a ball of flame and were incinerated somewhere a few hundred miles short of Lake Mishikobi and didn’t catch any muskie at all. The end.”

  This sort of thing happens every once in a while. On August 21, 1988, for instance, a small plane went down near Wall township, New Jersey. According to an aircraft accident report filed with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) Safety Foundation, “The private pilot of a Piper PA-28-150 took off with one passenger and a few minutes after takeoff, he became unconscious. The passenger gave the pilot mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: however the pilot was not revived. The nonpilot passenger attempted an off-airport landing and struck trees.” The passenger received serious injuries. An autopsy on the pilot showed “severe occlusion of his coronary arteries.”

  Or: On November 13, 1985, just after takeoff at Fayetteville, Arkansas, a fifty-three-year-old pilot “released the controls and threw his head back.” The only passenger, the pilot’s wife, who had no previous flying experience, “kept the aircraft airborne for almost two hours with help from an airborne pilot that [sic] was talking to her. Both engines quit from fuel starvation and she made a forced landing three miles from the Fayetteville Airport.” The wife was seriously injured. “She later stated that she felt that her husband had died just after takeoff.”

  Or: From another report about an accident in which
both pilot and passenger died: “The autopsy report indicated that the pilot had a ‘patchy healed myocardial infarct’ prior to the accident.”

  The FAA does not keep records for incidents in which there are no injuries or no property damage. Sometimes, however, a pilot becomes incapacitated for some reason, and a passenger with no previous flying experience miraculously brings the airplane in to a safe landing. On October 19, 1991, for instance, sixty-two-year-old Patrick Sharp died of a heart attack while piloting a Piper Cub over eastern Oregon. His daughter, twenty-three-year-old Patti Sharp, who had never flown before, put the plane down safely in a field outside the ghost town of Shaniko.

  On November 23, 1983, Jane Turner, of Phoenix, assumed control of a Cherokee when her husband suffered a fatal heart attack. She was in the right rear seat and coached the right front seat passenger, Editha Merrill, a seventy-eight-year-old great-grandmother, in the use of the controls. Mrs. Merrill brought the plane down at Luke Air Force Base. There were no injuries.

  Jane Turner, as it happened, had taken what is called a pinch-hitter course from the AOPA. The course is designed for nonpilots: people who frequently fly as passengers in small planes and who want to know how to land the damn things. If they have to.

  I took the weekend course in Concord, California. There were several hours of classroom work and four hours of actual flying time in company with an iron-nerved flight instructor. I racked up twelve takeoffs and twelve landings. The takeoffs were easy. A few of the landings were not bad at all.

  One day, after the classes were over, I sat with George Rhodes, my classroom instructor, and John Speuernagel, my flight instructor, and I asked what would happen if a pilot suddenly became incapacitated and none of the passengers had any flying experience. I wanted to know what would happen to me and Joe. Now that Freddy’s dead.

  “We’re going to die,” Joe says.

  (This can be either a nightmare or a fantasy of competence and courage. The fantasy is preferable. In it, you’re incredibly cool.)

  “I don’t want to die,” Joe whines. He disgusts you. (This guy’s a dithering simp. I don’t even know why you’d want to go fishing with him in the first place. Let’s make Joe piss his pants and pass out so we won’t have to listen to him anymore.)

  The plane seems to be flying level. You take the little steering wheel in your hands and push in very slightly. The plane’s nose dips slightly. You pull back and the plane levels out. Well now, if you can keep her level, there’s some time to think.

  You are looking down into the Wisconsin forest. There is some kind of settlement in a clearing up ahead. It’s a northern Wisconsin town: one gas station, a general store, twenty-nine taverns. The plane is so high you can hardly see the buildings. So there’s lots of time to think.

  Maybe you should use the radio. Maybe you should try calling for help. Just put the headphones on and pick up the little doodad. Push the button on the side and talk. That’s the way you saw Freddy do it.

  “Uh, hello? Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

  Should you say “mayday” or something? Don’t people always say “mayday” in the movies? Instead, you say: “I’m in trouble up here. I think my pilot just had a heart attack and I can’t fly a plane. Hello? Hello?”

  And a voice comes back over the radio: “Aircraft in distress calling Dulles approach. Say again.”

  It was at this point, as we were constructing the me-and-Joe scenario, that my flight instructor, John Speuernagel, and I had a brief disagreement.

  “Dulles,” I spluttered. “What’s Dulles doing responding to these poor guys up in northern Wisconsin?”

  “Well, I don’t know northern Wisconsin,” Speuernagel said reasonably. “Let’s put them down in the Washington, D.C., area. Just because I know the terrain.”

  “Can’t do Wisconsin at all?”

  “Nope.”

  • • •

  Suddenly, inexplicably, you are somewhere over the Washington, D.C., area. Joe is still passed out—the weenie—and another message is coming through on the radio.

  “Aircraft in distress. This is Dulles approach. Stand by. We’ll coordinate an effort here and see what we can do to help you. I’m going to ask you some questions, and I would like you to give me the answer to those questions as you are able.”

  The voice, which is remarkably calm, asks if the plane is going up or down or if the thing seems to be flying level, which it is. What kind of plane is it?

  “I don’t know.” But wait. Didn’t Freddy have a clipboard? With a partially completed bill on it? Didn’t he put it behind his seat, in a little net compartment?

  “The plane’s a Cherokee 180. Registration number N5330N.”

  “Very good. We’ll refer to you as Thirty November from now on.”

  And then there are a lot of questions about the radio. There seem to be half a dozen radiolike gadgets stacked up just to the right of Freddy. You describe lots of digital readouts, one on top of the other.

  “Thirty November, you have a digital stack. Take a look and see if one of those radios is showing 120.45.”

  The top one does.

  The controller cautions you not to adjust that. It is the radio. “We don’t want to lose you. Okay,” he says, “now look to the bottom of the radio stack. You’re going to see one of two things. You may see an instrument that has a knob on the left that says ALT or SBY …”

  “I see it.”

  “And you may see four numbers to the right of that knob.”

  “It says 1700.”

  “Good. Go to the numbers on that instrument and adjust them to 7700.”

  “I’ve got 7700.”

  “All right. On that instrument, you will see a button that says IDENT. Have you located that?”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay. Push that button. You should see a light. Do you see a light?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Thirty November, perfect. You just lit up like a Christmas tree on our screen. We’ve now got radar contact. I show you at fifty-five hundred feet. Now, we’re going to turn you around toward Dulles and we’re going to bring you in for a landing. Can you hold level at your heading for a bit?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m going to do a bit of coordinating and get back to you.”

  It occurs to you that they’re probably going crazy down there. They’d have to reroute commercial traffic. Assemble a team of ambulances. Fire trucks.

  “Thirty November. Take a look at the panel in front of you. Do you see the control yoke? It looks like a steering wheel, but it has two handles. Do you see it?”

  And the controller takes you through some easy maneuvers. Push for descent; pull for ascent. Piece of cake. Turn the wheel gently to the right and the plane banks easily to the right. Try it on the left side.

  “Okay, Thirty November. Don’t overcontrol. Just a very light pressure.”

  After each maneuver, the controller has you level the plane so that the whole machine is precisely parallel to the ground. You are going to want to be parallel to the ground when you try to land.

  “Thirty November, you now have control of the plane and we’re going to do a little housekeeping here. Can you locate some fuel gauges?”

  There are two of them. The one on the right says 20; the one on the left, 10.

  “Thirty November, you’re probably flying on the left tank. We’re going to switch to the right tank and give you a little more fuel to get into Dulles.”

  With the controller’s help you locate a bank of switches on the subpanel and snap on the red one that reads FUEL PUMP. You then switch tanks, which is not any fun at all because the switch—actually a large red lever—is on the pilot’s side, on the frame of the plane, next to dead Freddy’s left shin.

  “Thirty November, we’re going to start you down pretty soon. The easiest way to do that is to just reduce the power a little bit. So we’re going to look at the power controls now. They are in the center of the panel between the two
control yokes, and you should see three controls there. The black-handled one is the throttle. The red-handled one is the mixture control. For our landing, I want you to move the red one forward as far as it will go.”

  And when you’ve done that, the controller asks you to locate the altimeter, which is one of six instruments in front of dead Fred. It’s not hard to identify since it’s labeled ALTIMETER.

  “Thirty November, what’s your altimeter reading?”

  “Uh, 4, 9. 4900 feet, I guess.”

  “The big hand is on the four and the little one on the nine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thirty November, you have plenty of clearance. Can you see the ground from there?”

  You can see it just fine.

  “Okay, Thirty November. You’re twenty-five miles northwest of Dulles. In another ten minutes you should be able to see the airport very easily. Now, I want you to go to the power handle. The big black T-handle, next to the red fuel-mixture handle. You got it?”

  You pull back on the handle, just move it an inch or two as instructed. The engine noise decreases a little. There’s a tachometer over near the pilot, and you read off the numbers to the controller.

  “Twenty-two rpm. Good power setting, Thirty November. That will get you into a nice gentle descent. I show you presently at forty-five hundred feet. Now we’re going to arrest that rate of descent. Push gently up on the black power lever.”

  The nose of the plane levels out and the altimeter seems steady. There is a ridge ahead—plenty of clearance—and then you can see a huge airport complex spread out in front of you.

  “Okay, Thirty November. You’re about ten miles northwest of Dulles. Let’s go back to the power control and bring it back to twenty-two rpm and continue our descent. We want to go down to about three thousand feet. Big hand on the three, little hand on the zero.”

  And the plane, indeed, does seem to be very gradually dropping. It takes several long minutes to reach three thousand feet.