The nice thing about haze is that, even though you can't see very far, the air is usually smooth. Today is like that: marginal VFR but a rock-solid ride. Somewhere up in Quebec a woods fire has been burning for two weeks, and all over northern New England the visibility is down. Yesterday while flying the Down East coastline, we were on instruments for two hours even though the nearest cloud was on the other side of the White Mountains, more than 100 miles away.
Today we're out of Old Town, Maine, bound for a place called Upper Blackville, in New Brunswick, Canada, to pick up a fisherman who has been plying the legendary Miramichi River in search of the elusive salmon. I've seen Upper Blackville on the chart, but I have never been there before. There aren't many airports in eastern Canada; you look at one like Upper Blackville, out there in the spruce-and-fir willowwacks, and wonder what it's doing there. Peering down through the haze, I see nothing but the endless, rolling wooded hills of New Brunswick, broken occasionally by a slash where the trees were cut down and hauled off to a pulp mill. Snaking "tote roads" twist across the landscape, but most of them aren't on the chart. Before we left Old Town, my young chief pilot, Durwood, gave me some hints for finding the place. But I can tell it's going to be VOR navigation until we lose the signal and then time-speed-distance estimates the rest of the way.
Upper Blackville is about 50 DME from the Fredericton VOR, on the 050-degree radial. But now, 30 miles northeast of the VOR, at 2,000 feet — as high as we can go and still pick up details on the ground — the DME has already gone to hell with the joke, and the lowering afternoon sun is reflecting vigorously off each particle of haze and smoke. Freddie Tower was calling the visibility 5 miles when we flew through its airspace a few minutes ago. Generous, those Canadians. If all else fails, I think to myself, we'll fly west to the Miramichi and hang a right. Or a left. VFR charters are like that.
Fortunately, I've got company on the dead leg, so I'm laid out over here in the right seat of the company Skylane RG, my Halifax sectional draped over me like a blanket, as Mike, one of our mechanics, guides Four-Six-Charlie toward our destination. Mike is always keeping his eye open for chances to build a little complex time toward his commercial ticket. Dead legs fit the bill nicely. At 85 bucks an hour, renting the airplane is out of his league. He'll get three landings out of this flight: the one we made about a half hour ago in St. Stephen, where we cleared Canadian customs; one in Upper Blackville; and another, later tonight, on the dead leg from Bangor International back to the home base, a 10-mile hop. When we get to Upper Blackville, we'll change seats, and I'll fly the paying passenger home to Maine. But he'd be in good hands with Mike at the controls, I think to myself as I scan the instruments and enjoy his smooth, coordinated job of flying.
For me, this is a reunion with Four-Six-Charlie. A few months ago, a renter was climbing out of Lawrence, Massachusetts, when the engine went thunk and quit at 900 feet. The fellow got the airplane back on the ground okay (even remembering to put the wheels back down), but for many weeks, we were without our Skylane.
The airplane was my only link to my roots in suburban Connecticut, the place to which my New York Jewish family conducted a small exodus in the mid-1970s. That's when I moved even farther up the pike, to northern New England, pursuing a love of writing that was then expressing itself through reporter's jobs at various middle-sized newspapers. But the lure of clean air and sunshine was too much to resist, and a few years ago, I had chucked it all for the life of a freelance writer, flight instructor, and part-time charter pilot.
And here I am, peering into the haze over the Canadian wilderness, trying to spot a little airstrip where a salmon fisherman waits to be flown home. Go figure. Tomorrow it will be exactly 15 years since my last ride on the New York City subway. If anything calls for a beer at dinner tonight, that does.
Four-Six-Charlie's new engine sounds and smells young and strong. The airplane, as always, rides stable as a rock. In these atmospheric conditions, you hardly sense the airplane's motion; only the ground inching by outside hints at any movement.
The DME is history now. We're dead reckoning on our watches. Mike has the airplane set up for 23 inches and 2,300 rpm. We're indicating about 140 knots, truing about 150, with about 10 on the tail. If I figure on 3 miles a minute over the ground, the airport will still be in front of us when we declare the time to be up in about another three minutes. A Canadian airport guide we took along shows the airport is situated in a sharp U-shaped bend in the river, which ought to help a little. Our track should intersect the Southwest Miramichi a few miles before it begins to widen out at Miramichi Bay on the west shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. If we haven't drifted off course since the VOR gave up, we'll hit the river right over the airport. God, what beautiful, vast country. It must be my city origins; no matter how much flying I do here, I can't get enough of the openness of it. I think of how people pack themselves into agitated, frustrated masses in cities and suburbs and spend their lives playing Beat the Clock. They would see this landscape as barren and forbidding, not as soothingly untrampled, because they are conditioned to find the adverse side of every situation — an urban survival skill, I suppose. Their life was supposed to be my life, too.
In places like rural Maine, you can still find true freedom, and if there isn't much money in it, it doesn't much matter. The boss called with the charter assignment last night. I was free and happily accepted the flight. This is my first international charter, but clearing customs in St. Stephen, just across the international boundary from Calais, Maine, consisted mainly of taxiing up to a car with two Canadian officials in it and filling out some forms. They were nice fellows and signed us in for an overnight visit "just in case." Now we are on a domestic Canadian flight, officially speaking. Taxiing out again for the second leg of the trip, we held briefly for a Seneca operated by a little airline that flies people out to Grand Manan Island from St. Stephen. You know an airline is little if it uses Senecas. But don't ever ask me to live in a place where you can't book an airline flight in a Seneca, or where you can't catch a salmon in the morning and be home in time for supper without ever walking through an airline terminal or getting stuck in a city traffic jam. Times are hard right now up in the Maine woods — Mike says he's expecting a layoff at week's end — but neither of us would trade this for anything. VFR isn't just a set of flight rules. It's a way of life.
I look at my watch and announce, "We're there."
"You see it?" Mike asks.
"No."
"Okay," says Mike, the unflappable Yankee.
"There." I point to our 11 o'clock. "About a mile."
"Yessir, and there's the river, too, just like it should be," says Mike. "Well there!" he says emphatically, delighted with our discovery of Upper Blackville.
We do the pre-landing drill. Fuel on both tanks, airspeed below VLO, gear down, green light, mixture rich.
"Woody said to look for a white four-wheel-drive vehicle," Mike says.
The car is there, waiting. Mike lands, and we taxi past a small fleet of big World War II-era taildraggers that have been pressed into some kind of forest-industry use. Probably firebombing. There's no other sign of life except the twinkle of some headlights on the road along the river. Up here, people drive with their headlights on, day or night.
We load up. Our passenger declines the offer of the right front seat and nestles down in the commodious rear of the Skylane. I slide into the left seat, and Mike, who had been resigned to riding home in the second row, happily claims the right seat, and we're off. The mains tuck into the airplane's belly with a muffled thud. I level Four-Six-Charlie at 2,300 feet. That's high enough in this mess. Now for a couple hours of haze flying and a night landing in Bangor. We will radio from 50 miles out, so customs will be waiting.
The DME has come alive again. I key my mike. "Good evening, Fredericton Tower. Skylane Niner-One-Four-Six-Charlie is one-five miles to your northeast, VFR Bangor, Maine, at 2,300."
"Cessna Four-Six-Charlie, Fredericton Tower, proceed through the area. Report clear to the southwest."
The sun is almost down. Four-Six-Charlie flies the course like a locomotive riding a rail, leaving me little to do but monitor heading, tune radios, pick out hypothetical emergency landing fields, and check our groundspeed on the DME. Our passenger is asleep, slumped over to one side. Mike, who may become unemployed this Friday, stretches his arms and legs and grins like a man without a care in the world. A flying airplane is like a little universe: It's all you have, and it's all you need. It's a cocoon where troubles lose their sting. Not that you forget your cares. They just don't seem as bad from here, and from here, you can see more solutions. And when you step back onto the ground, the feeling stays with you. Looking over at Mike, I can tell he's thinking the same thing.
"Freddie Tower, Four-Six-Charlie is clear to the southwest."
"Skylane Four-Six-Charlie, roger, have a good flight down to Bangor."
"Four-Six-Charlie, good night."
Dan Namowitz is a multiengine-rated commercial pilot and CFII living, flying, and instructing in Maine.
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