by CDR Jack D. Woodul, USNR(Ret), artwork by Carl Snow
In the late fall of the year, a deep yearning for high, cold country returned as it always did to Puresome. Visions of sneaking through aspen groves after great antlered buck deer and memories of backstrap frying in the skillet seemed especially poignant as he considered the jolly green jungle that surrounded NAS Cecil Field where he taught young, manly men the joys of the Skyhawk and the attack trade.
To a resourceful bagger like Puresome, the obvious answer was easy — sign up for a weekend cross-country “proficiency” flight out to deer country. He could grab a bunch of gas chits and launch with the usual Friday afternoon exodus of RAG instructors flying Tinker Toy Airways in pursuit of flight time and exotic happiness hours.
The operations officer just rolled his eyes at his request, but nonetheless yielded to Youthly’s argument that airplanes get all rusty, leaky and otherwise broken if not flown. Puresome made arrangements for a running rendezvous with his father, COL P.A. Puresome, at Chamisaville Air Force Base in the high Southwest, greased up his shooting iron and licked his chops.
It turned out that one of Hornet squadron’s bachelor instructor pilots had a “cousin” at Desert Hole Air Force Base in the same state, so he and Puresome arranged to go together in one of the two-seater TA-4s. Puresome would drop him off on the way and pick him back up for the trip home.
Return to Paradise
And so it was. The weather was hot and dusty, the Scooter was its usual reliable self, and Puresome didn’t even have to brief his passenger about keeping his mask on after landing at Desert Hole Air Force Base. Evidently he had checked the NOTAMS about the wafting cow-lot odors. After the short flight to Albuquerque, COL Puresome was waiting, and all Youthly had to do was secure his airplane.
“Don’t fill the drop tanks, just fill the fuselage tank,” Puresome told the sargento who ran the transient line, “I just gotta go back to Desert Hole.” With the airplane secured, he got his parachute bag out of the centerline blivot, and he and the colonel disappeared northward in a giant pickup truck full of camping gear.
The Pecos wilderness smelled of snow and pine instead of sea-level Florida swamp, and Puresome found himself continually in high blower trying to mountain-goat up big rocks behind his father the colonel, who was used to the high altitude. Far below them, the flat country close to roads sounded like a World War III battleground as crowds of hunters threw lead in all directions. Puresome was glad that their camp was far, far away. He was also glad the colonel had convinced him to don a blaze orange vest over the brown flight jacket of many patches, since he did not want to be mistaken for a woolly bear by those in the domain of Rocky Mountain spring water.
Eventually, COL Puresome did his Indian work and stealthily snuck up on a suitable buck and terminated him with extreme prejudice. It took the two Puresomes most of the day to field dress and transport the deer back down the mountain to camp. That evening, the hot eyes of the caveman glowed and the hunters enjoyed whiskey and camp meat. Outside in the frosty darkness, future chops, roasts, and deerburger froze hard enough to be wrapped in a tarp and transported home.
Too Much Gas
Mission accomplished, it was time to head back to the flatlands. The colonel dropped him off in Albuquerque, and Puresome went into operations to check the weather and file a flight plan. The weather briefer indicated that, while not exactly hot and dusty, the intermediate broken clouds en route should be good enough for a simple, piece-of-cake, blow-and-go visual flight rules flight. So Puresome filed a VFR flight plan and humped his gear out to the flight line.
When Puresome did his preflight inspection, he found that despite his instructions, both his drop tanks were full of gas. When he axed the transient lineman about it, it seemed that another pilot from Hornet squadron had flown in with a broken airplane, and learning that Puresome wasn’t to RTB until Sunday afternoon, had borrowed his airplane until his could get fixed. Naturally, the borrower had specified a full bag of gas when he returned the airplane.
“No hill for a stepper,” thought Puresome, “and besides, you can never have too much gas. I’ve probably dumped enough JP-5 to run Grand Fenwick for a year, so a little more won’t hurt.”
So Puresome manned up and blasted off eastward. During the climb-out, he reached over to turn on the dump switch, but queasy memories of full bolter patterns and closed runways made him stop. “Just in case, I can wait ’til the last minute to dump my extra gas. It won’t hurt the cactus, and if I actually fly over a cultivated field, they’ll just think I’m crop dusting,” he thought.
Sure enough, there were intermediate clouds out there. Since he had been briefed that Desert Hole Air Force Base weather was tickedy-boo, he eased into a climb to get above the clouds. He kept easing until he was above 30,000 feet in airliner country, unaccountably above a solid overcast. Since it was nearly time to descend, Puresome turned on his radar in the magical Attack Puke Terrain Clearance mode, stuck his nose over and slud down toward Mother Earth as depicted on his radar screen. He leveled off at the thousand-foot-above-ground line on his set and looked out the window to gray clag. “Well, maybe I can just scud-run on into the clear,” he thought. But sneaking down to about the 500-foot level on his radar altimeter just showed about a mile visibility in snow! Yaaaaa! It was time to come to mama, and Puresome crammed on the throttle and climbed.
At about 20,000 feet, still solidly in the goo, his Tacan locked onto Desert Hole some 86 miles away.
The Taste of Heart
“Um, Desert Hole Approach Control, Alfa Delta 414 is with you on the two-eight-five slash eight-six of Desert Hole Tacan. Uh, please say your weather!”
Thankfully, someone answered. “Roger, Alfa Delta 414, Desert Hole weather is two hundred foot overcast, visibility one-half mile in blowing snow, and . . . (blah blah blah!).” With the report of the grimy weather came worse news — there was a mighty crosswind working upon the duty runway.
Puresome suddenly knew what heart tasted like. Although the TA-4 was equipped with spoilers, if not handled right the crosswind ripping across the runway was enough to tump the Scooter off its long, skinny legs. Puresome was beginning to entertain black thoughts of vengeance against the weather briefer safely back in the metro shack in Albuquerque. But some filthy work had to be done first. And that extra gas he had on board was turning out to be real handy.
“Roger, Desert Hole Approach, you’d better give me one of them penetrations and GCAs.”
Desert Hole Approach Control pointed him down through the clag and GCA guided him to the runway. Puresome popped out of the clouds flying semi-sideways to the runway and pointing into the crosswind that was blowing snow and tumbleweeds. He plonked the Scooter on the runway, chopped the throttle to extend the spoilers, sucked up his flaps and stuck the control stick into the wind. With some creative braking, Puresome managed to stay on the runway. Taxiing in, he couldn’t quite decide whether he was more grateful to be on the ground or pissed at the far-away weather fellow.
Pondering the Imponderable
Once he was shut down and safely in base operations, being pissed won. Puresome rang up the weather chap at Albuquerque and tenderly suggested that he knew not certain bodily orifices from deep holes in the ground.
“Oh, you left right after we issued the special weather observation,” he huffed. He got a lot huffier after Puresome issued his own special observation.
By and by, the weather improved to just nasty, and it was the other pilot’s turn to drive, so Puresome just climbed in the back seat and hung on. They were soon out of the weather, and he had time to look out the window, enjoy “flying along in flight” and ponder great issues — like there were certain fundamental truths that seem self-evident to Puresome but were like the contents of the mind of a spider to others.
He could never explain to weed-and-seed munching Flower Children that if we weren’t supposed to eat animals, why were they made of meat? And to non-aviators, that he wasn’t paranoid because everybody was trying to kill him. Carrier Controlled Approach controllers tried to put his holding radials in the middle of mountains. Air bosses tried to run him out of gas and bingo him to divert fields supposedly manned by grinning foreigners but who instead were at home sucking down grappa or saki.
And not to mention Uncle Gomer taking real pot shots at him.
You might explain that the best defense against the forces of evil lay in what the Training Command called “headwork,” but no feather merchant would understand about the hemorrhoidal sense that often came unbidden to tap Naval Aviators upon the shoulder and save their ass. There were just some things you couldn’t explain to civilians.