Free Flight of Passage: A True Story by Rinker Buck Page B

Dusen Aviation Supply in Teterboro. From our first Van Dusen shipment Kern pulled out a package wrapped in manila paper. It was a fresh set of bungees, shiny and black, with the pungent, rubbery smell of a new football.
    “Ah Jeez Kern,” I said. “New bungees ?”
    “Hey, watch yourself. I told you. This is going to be the cleanest Cub in America. Besides, if we have to go down in the desert somewhere, these bungees could save the plane. Even our lives. I want the landing gear to stay on in rough terrain.”
    “Ah shit Kern. If we go down in the desert, we’ll probably ride a bus the rest of the way to California. What good is a new bungee on a Greyhound?”
    “Hey, Rinker, are you listening to me?”
    “Yeah, I’m listening.”
    “Okay then. Suck. We paid for these bungees. We’re putting ’em on.”
    “All right. All right. New bungees then.”
    With a deep, swift swipe of a matt knife, Kern severed the dusty and oil-soaked old bungees. They released with a pallid twang and spilled onto the floor.
    The new bungees—hard and tight—were murderous to get on. They felt strong enough to hold up the landing gear on a Boeing 707. We used a crowbar gripped with an extra length of plumbing pipe for leverage. Grunting and heaving, leaving a fresh deposit of knuckles on the landing gear, we finally secured the bastards. When we screwed down the jack the Cub bounced onto the cement floor, jaunty and a little taller than before.
    That was our winter, more or less. With the big Texan radio blaring with Cousin Brucie and WABC, we worked liked the possessed on 71-Hotel. More than fifty different repairs and part replacements had to be made on the airframe—everything from the brakes and carburetor heat baffles to a new trim tab augur in the tail. We ripped out the entire cockpit, from the floorboards to the headliner, and replaced everything with new materials. Parts that weren’t available in a catalogue we made ourselves. Kern decided that the old baggage compartment, which was made out of burlap, was substandard and wouldn’t hold up in the turbulent conditions we anticipated out west. So we fabricated a new one out of heavy sheet metal that we bought at Sears.
    I had always been mechanically inferior to Kern, and was quite self-conscious about it. It annoyed me that I lacked his ability to repair a bike or a tune a car engine, but I never even attempted to apply myself in the shop because that would just turn me into a tool-geek like Kern. I suffered the common affliction of boys who aren’t naturally adept at mechanics. I thought that there was something inherently complicated and mysterious about it, when in fact all that is required is a lot of patience. Kern never confronted me on this. It was just something that naturally resolved itself over the course of our long winter of confinement in the barn. After he had assigned me a succession of simpleminded tasks that one of the NASA monkeys could have figured out—changing the bolts on the bungee covers, or putting new rubber grips on the control sticks—he slowly graduated me up to more difficult jobs. By the end of the winter I was rebuilding the carburetor and installing new Plexiglas windows in the cockpit.
    I couldn’t wait to get into the shop every night. Mostly I was overjoyed about the way I was weasling out of my homework, but I also surged with new feelings of competence and technical knowledge. Kern was pleased too, because he could see that he had converted me into a dedicated tool-geek. I became increasingly fussy about “my own” workspace, insisting that all of the parts and tools I needed for a particular project be neatly segregated in a corner of the shop, away from Kern’s parts and tools. With the pride of a mentor, Kern detected these nascent indications of compulsiveness in me and decided to reward them. One Saturday morning, at Sears, he decided to blow some of our Cub money on a new Craftsmen tool box, socket wrenches and a top of the