24 Hours From 'Frisco: Schooner Days DCXCII (692)

by C. H. J. Snider

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On The Ground Again At Malton After -

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IN the gold rush of 1849 the Lake Erie built barquentine Eureka of Cleveland, Capt. Munroe, was in such a hurry to get to California that all Toronto saw of her was her topgallantsail on the southern horizon of Lake Ontario after leaving the Welland Canal. Fifty-nine Ohio gold-hunters had paid the full building price of the vessel in fares to get them to the Golden Gate. Her 18,000-mile wake washed both sides of two continents and half way across the top of the triangle. It was some twenty-four weeks after passing Toronto that she finally anchored in San Francisco Bay.

In the Victory rush of 1945 the compiler of these Schooner Days came from San Francisco to Toronto in twenty-four hours flying. Not in a beeline, nor in a barquentine. One ship was a blue and silver United Air Lines sky coach named City of Salt Lake. The other was a shining red-and-black lettered Trans-canada flyer on the TCA, with seven ports to a side. The route was three-cornered, via Vancouver, 3,000 miles and a bit no matter how taut you stretch the tape.

WHAT a sight to seethe great city of Vancouver—Canada's Pacific airport—come out in skeins and ribbons of golden points as the green of spring deepens to blue black velvet and the dusk of the May night mantles murmuring ocean and guardian mountains.

The city's streets, outlined by lamps, often in single lines, make an orderly pattern but not a rigid chicken netting of lights. The rectangles do not suggest concentration camps. Graceful loops outline the Lions Heads and other bridges, sweeping harbor curves of Burrard Inlet and proud swell of Shaughnessy Heights. Ruby pinpoints spell tall radio towers and skyscraper tops. Emerald flashes from street signs mingle with the gold and crimson and orange, and the occasional clear white from behind the glass of war factories. It is a vision, a promise, of the Canada we would like—-wide open under the stars, frankly returning Heaven's gaze, welcoming the stranger, nourishing the home-born, orderly comfort for all, regimentation for none, because all freely paying freedom's great price.

A dream, a vision? Yes, One to come true.

On through the mountains, the backbone of a continent, the Rockies. As invisible, in the darkness, as the inside a whale. Lightnings flash, thunders roll, the ship bounces, quivers, jumps, heaves, roars onward. A sudden steadiness, and we are running off, before the gale we cannot climb over, or around, or through. There are no mile posts in the air. In the black darkness outside, there is for the eye neither up nor down, backwards or forward, across or ahead or astern. So we do not know we have turned back, until the stars come out and pinpoints of light drift up from below, and all at once we are back where we started from hours before, in a silent green field brilliantly lighted by electric lights.

INTERLUDE. Spent most comfortably in the Vancouver Hotel, one of the finest on the continent.

Appreciated, for, thanks to it we see, in detail and daylight, the whole mountain flight. Crossing the Rockies is not like skimming coast foothills, with isolated monarchs as Ranier and Shasta lifting snow-crowned brows two miles into the air in comfortable perspective.

Small friendly clouds, like bales of snow-white wool, cluster around so close one expects them to bob and rock and spin as the plane tears through at three miles a minute. They don't, for they are fixed in the air like fruits in a jelly. Propeller blades, whirling invisibly fast, slice them into blind blank whiteness. They are so near you feel you could push them away or pull them in at the windows. Beneath them the myriad fangs of mountains that were old before the first dinosaur was hatched gnash on one another, with horrifying gaps between. All are powdered with snow, some drifted high with age-old acres of it by the million tons, some thinly covered with the black evergreens showing like hog bristles.

In the gaps, 11,000 feet below, tangled strings, white or brown. The whites are mountain streams, seen only by their foam. The browns are mountain trails through the pass.

Sometimes, but seldom, the terrific confusion of the mountain tops, wrinkled as Satan at the end of the thousand years, subsides into one great furrow. Along its bottom slides serenely a ribbon of blue—a mighty river, mirroring the sky above in its level swift-running surface. Or even a mountain lake winks with azure eye. But in the main it is all turmoil, confusion, black and brown and grey, fire-tortured long ago, and only the clouds or the eternal snows left clean and pure and white to offer hope of peace.

The plane flies two miles above the friendly level earth to give the peaks 2,000 feet clearance. To come down among them.—Let us not think of that. The hostess adjusts our oxygen masks with all the deftness of a graduate nurse. She still looks pretty, although she wears one too, and trails fathoms of tubing as she makes her rounds.

IT'S meal time. One may devour scenery, but cannot thrive on clouds and mountaintops, even garnished by an angel in oxygen. Respirators leave the lips free, but as there are no nice, long, dark tunnels up in the air, much good that does.

The angel serves lunch as gently as she adjusts nosh clips. Each receives a large, light cardboard box, which is at once picnic basket, tray, and I spread table. A pillow on the knees brings it to comfortable height. There is a half-chicken roasted, with crabmeat cocktail; tomato juice, potato salad, and lettuce and tomato with mayonnaise; buttered biscuits, crackers, cranberry jelly; ice cream and cake, milk, chocolate milk, and hot tea and coffee, each in a firm container set deep in the tray-table. Yes, and individual peppers and salts.

It is possible to eat through the respirators, but not necessary, for the mountains rise majestically astern, and we fall a mile as softly as stepping from a rug to the carpet. So the masks come off and we are out of British Columbia orchard valleys and Pacific time, and over Alberta and down in Lethbridge, without knowing anything more than that bur watches seem an hour slow.

These station stops are all alike, in daylight, a great green plain with broad runways, a low administration building, wind sleeves, and waiting automobiles. No more sign of city than in mid-ocean. Except Regina, where Parliament buildings loom up over the horizon. Everybody gets out and walks into the station, turns around and walks back to the great silver plane with its black and red lettering.

The angel in airforce blue checks her way-bill at the gangway. Nobody is left behind. The plane ambles down the runway, stops, swings head to wind, roars, rushes along on the new tack, and is unexpectedly off above the treetops, or where they would be if there were any on these prairies.

Long oblong fields below are brown in plough or grey in last year's grass or stubble, or black from the burning which yields blurs of purple smoke. Spring's green seems late. One seeks in vain the forgetmenot blue of the sloughs which gladden the eye from the train windows. Our hostess has sweeter fish-pools of Heshbon.

The sloughs are there, though. Their melted snow water shows merely as dark brown splotches from the air. It is so clear you see through it to the dark brown vegetation at the bottom.

As we wing on, yellow rims grow wider around each dark brown patch. Tom Main, Ducks Unlimited, Canada, in his seat across the aisle, shakes his silver thatch. The snow water is receding in the Caron pothole country. "We lose thousands of young ducks that way each year," he sighs. "The water dries away before they are able to fly to the northern feeding grounds or assimilate the vegetable diet of the adults. They have to have the soft animalculae and larvae of the ponds. We are trenching the potholes so as to join them together and retain the water longer."

International enterprise. Solid security work of our two of the forty-nine United Nations.

As darkness settles long ragged lines of red and orange flame race across below, like surf on a reef. This is more of the burning off, which disposes of the tall straw left by the headers. Too much of it to plough in for food for this year's crop. It wouldn't form humus soon enough. So the nitrogen is wasted, and the good earth turns to dust, and the fertility of virgin soil is lost. In the last half century we are said to have used up thirty per cent. of the growing power which took the Creator thousands or millions of years to implant.

Two hours more and a dip down at Regina, Saskatchewan. Three hours later Ducks Unlimited, Canada, leaves us at Winnipeg, his headquarters. A happy family swallows him at the station. His son is a pilot, but not on this flight. Were talking to him in Vancouver a few hours before. And his brother is an old pilot, now ranking admiral. We knew him when he was in charge at Malton. Air-minded family, these Mains, for Ducks Unlimited takes his holidays skimming treetops at 400 feet in the interest of his feathers.

IT is after midnight when we leave Winnipeg. We have slid from Pacific Time to Mountain Time and Mountain Time to Central and on into Eastern, and lose an hour by the clock with each plunge to meet the sun.

We settle down for the long haul, the last twelve hundred miles to Toronto.

Our hostess (stewardess is her official title) brings us hot drinks, biscuits and sandwiches. We turn out our bright reading lamps and stretch back in the comfortable seats with our heels well up. The thousand horsepowers of the twin engines roar so steadily, and the pillows are so snug, one can sleep. But who would, with the chance to watch the whole procession of the heavenly bodies from a seat in a chariot of the sky?

The spacious firmament on high is quite cloudless, an intense midnight blue. So steady its the plane that the stars are mirrors perfectly in the polished surface of the wing outside the window. Not only is the dark invisible earth cut off by the burnished metal, but a second heaven is opened up, and we seem suspended in the center of a celestial chandelier, an orrery. Cassiopeia draws up her chair, the lambs of the Pleiades gambol, the Great Bear, swings backward around the North Star. Orion hunts with his dogs, Arcturus and his sons, Cetus the Whale, Draco the crooked serpent, are all imaged or imagined in their stately march through the night. If they are not actually visible in the sky their presence is felt in the inverted pictures swimming across the second heaven of the wings.

And then the larboard half of the waning moon heavens up from Lake Superior through the propeller blades, like a parachute spinnaker of a Cup yacht running for the lee mark.

Silent as those colossal Memnon statues which have faced the coming of a million mornings on the banks of the Nile the two pilots sit knee to knee in the darkened cockpit. Only the headphones and a shoulder of the co-pilot are visible. But the captain's profile comes clear against the night sky like a cameo, even to the curve of his long lashes. He is P. D. Haddon, a western boy. Hope he will forgive the reference to the lashes, which even the hostess might envy. Wonder if Big Jim Haddon, known as the Port Hope Baby, the 400 pound master of the Mary Ann Lydon in schooner days, was an ancestor?

Awesome, in their loneliness, the hours of a pilot in the sky. Bulk-headed off from his fellows, not by steel or fabric, but by the demands of his duty. All he has to do is to sit there, touch a button, turn a knob, press a pedal, pull a lever, read his dials, mind his controls.

That is all. And his life and all lives depend on his doing it.

Behind, ahead, above him, space. Below, the earth from which he sprang, to which he will return. Earth which may rush up at him at the speed of miles in seconds.

But he is serene. In fourteen thousand miles by air I have not seen a flustered pilot. Perhaps only the serene survive. Seeing him sit there, alone before heaven, serene and unafraid, reminds one: "For they shall see God." Yes, that is true of pilots. They are among the blessed pure-in-heart.

KAPUSKASING airport might be an isolated police post in the Arctic, so still is all as we dip down before dawn and make our customary excursion to its bright lights. But it is not cold. We go bare headed. There is a faint dusky orange tint under the cedar apple green of the sky to the northeast. Southeast, under the risen moon, a cloudbank climbed after her.

We catch up with it. The dawn dies before it is born. It is buried in a grey pall. A faint brassy light filters through. Below we see lakes, fields, rivers, railways, roads, trees with black trunks, farms. British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, "New" Ontario are all astern now. We are over rain-sodden fields and thickly spread houses in Halton County. And before we know it, down on the ground and pulling up in front of the control tower at Malton, on a dark rainy morning.

Tom Goudie is there with the car, bless him. What an unexpected treat! Luxurious! In go the bags from the Frisco Conference and off we splatter over the wide mud road for breakfast at home.

The sun comes out. As we cross Bay street ticker tape begins to fly, people are stopping and forming little groups and crowded around The Telegram window. Man is working with the 9.36 bulletin go May 5, 1945, that makes history. As the top line comes above the level of the windowsill - "ALLIES ANNOUNCE WAR'S END" - An electric shock sizzles through the air. People cheer, in thin voices that grow to a shout. They jump, and laugh, and clap, and shake hands with everybody. Girls grave airmen lined up for Victory Loan parading. Ticker tape, green pamphlets, white paper, colored flags, shower from the Stock Exchange like a fountain of fireworks.

Word War thus ends in Toronto twenty-four hours after flying from the "peace conference of UNICO in San Francisco, 3,199 miles away.