Authors: Stanley Elkin
“Maybe we didn’t crash,” I said. He knew too many acronyms and mnemonics, a chap too talky for the stereotype I’d have welcomed. A man in his position, in charge of machinery that can kill you, owes it to the customers to be taciturn, reserved, to play everything close to the chest. To tell you the truth, I don’t even like it when the first officer on a big commercial jet chats up the scenery. His eyes should be on the instrument panel or looking out for traffic. This guy, Philip, took me too much into his confidence altogether. Even while we were going down Philip was hollering information at me.
“Uh oh,” he shouted as the plane swung out of control and lost altitude, “something terrible’s happening! If I don’t get a handle on this situation we’re going to crash and die! The skin of this aircraft’s too thin, it won’t stand up to a real impact. I’ve got to get her nose up over those razor pines. See, in these temperatures the needles on the trees are like swords. All we have to do is just brush against
them gently
and they’ll slash shit out of our gas tanks. Then it’s Pow! Bam! Fuck! I’ll lay you dollars to donuts we explode! We won’t even get the
opportunity
to crash! Goodnight, Nurse, will you just
look
at the glare on that ice? It’s curtains for sure now. It’s too thin. Oh, it’d hold a couple of good-sized boys and girls on sleds and skates, but never the weight of a crashing, runaway airplane. The way I see it, we’ve got this last-minute, split-second decision to make. It’s a question of whether we want to impact in the razor pines, explode, catch fire and die, or go for the ice and drown. Those are the alternatives, but we have to make our minds up quick.”
“
The ice!
” I screamed. “
The ice!
”
And even though we came down in the trees, it was good to know that I wasn’t bad at the nick-of-time, last-minute, split-second stuff. And terrified that what had occurred to me hadn’t to Philip. That the ice may not have been as thin as he thought, and that even if it were there might still have been time for us to scramble out of the plane to safety.
“Wow,” Philip said, as we were set down, the plane’s right wing and tail cradled, resting, hung like a hammock in perfect, miraculous balance between the heavy branches of two razor pines, “did you feel that? A
thermal!
A save-ass, opportune, eleventh-hour
thermal
!”
“God is a mensch.”
“Tell me about it,” the pilot said, “we were going down for the count. Of course I was putting on the back pressure trying to get the nose up, but that updraft came out of nowhere, caught us and set us down again gentle as Mother.”
“He’s a baleboss.”
“A
thermal
!” he said. “In Alaska! At
this
time of year! We’re sitting pretty in the trees. As if we were held in so many palms.” He started to laugh. “In
Alaska
!.
Palm
trees!”
“He got de whole worl’ in he han’.”
Now, an hour or so into the aftermath, we were still cozy. We could have been soldiers before an attack, talking things over, our sweethearts back home, our plans for the chicken farm once the war was over. We could have been brothers sharing a bedroom, boys in a treehouse discussing the mysteries. We could have been crash victims. We could have been warmer.
The plan was to stay in the plane until it was light enough to see. Then, carefully as we could, we would try to extricate ourselves from the cabin, one of us looking out for the other and displacing his weight like a fellow leaning back out over the sea in a boat race.
What Philip had forgotten, and what I hadn’t known, was that though we were only three or four hundred miles north of Anchorage, the threaded latitudes and longitudes of earth were already drawing together, coming to a point, light tightening, geography’s diminished lattices and trellises, actually closing in on themselves, its patchwork weave of time and distance drawing together toward the perfect gathered pucker of the Pole. It was the old deceptive business of altered space I’d first noticed when we were landing at the Anchorage airport. Something happened up here. Time and space confounded each other. Tricks were played. At any rate, first light didn’t break until around noon. We’d been caught in the trees at about six o’clock the night before, stuck in the small plane for maybe eighteen hours, peeing in thermos bottles, jars of instant coffee, pots and pans, like vandals pissing up a storm in your kitchen. And whenever the cramp in our bodies got too great and one of us had to move, the other watched him in the great concentrated dark and compensated for his movements, contracting as he stretched, shifting in mirror image. We were like people crossing a tightrope together.
“I’m yawning on three,” said Philip.
“Go ahead,” I said, “I’ll swallow and cover for you.”
Which stood us in good stead when it finally got light. And we saw just how precarious our purchase really was.
“Christ,” I said.
“Jesus,” said Philip.
We hung by a thread.
“The thing of it is,” Philip said, “we don’t want to go make any sudden movements that would tend to tumble this aircraft out of its tree.” He was whispering. “The thing of it is, we’ll be wanting to wait for a hard solid freeze to come up, then push the son of a bitch while it’s still in one piece out onto the lake ice—see,” he said, “it’s just water—so’s we can take off again someday.”
“Where are we?”
“God,” Philip said, “
I
don’t know where we are. I’m all turned around. Lots of this country ain’t ever been mapped. For all I know
we
discovered this place.”
Making use of all we’d learned in the dark about each other, our close-order drill valences and physics (though neither of us mentioned it—we weren’t the same height; I was taller, he was heavier—I could have told you Philip’s weight to within half a pound; he could have told you mine), it still took us almost two hours to climb down out of the plane. He had lain an open toolbox on the seat and spread out various tools between us like a complicated run of cards. From these we chose iron chunks of ballast to stuff into the pockets of our parkas. Now we moved stiff as figures on a big Swiss clock. He opened his door. I reached for the hammer. He moved his head like a pitcher shaking off a sign. I picked up a wrench and leaned my head against my window. He raised his left leg and swung it slowly toward the open door. I put a hammer and jar of nails into my coat. I opened my door and turned both knees toward it. He reached back and took a pliers and screwdriver into his hand. I drew a file, he drew an ax handle. I picked up a knife. He picked up a chisel and a planing tool. “Can you reach your arm back behind your seat and get my duffel bag?” he said. “Watch it, it’s heavy.”
“Jesus, it is.” I felt the plane rock.
“Wait,” Philip said, “let me help.” Together we brought the big duffel up over the seat and maneuvered it between us. We were practically back-to-back now, poised at our open doors. “All right,” he said, “is that your briefcase back there?”
“About five or six pounds,” I told him.
“Empty it,” Philip said.
I pressed the buttons that released the hasps, overturned the briefcase and let its contents spill out. I handed Philip the empty case.
“Can you get my duffel?”
“I already have.”
“That’s gin then!” Philip declared, and both of us dropped out our opened doorways and fell the ten or so feet to the ground below.
Which is when he went into his rant about angels and attitudes and minimums that remained unbusted. His rap about crab, eminence, and the civil evening twilight. The old Alphabet Soup Rag—all CAVU, DF steers and V speeds. When he didn’t red line or run scud and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Pireps, airmets and sigmets—
that
old black magic. Essentially good news his disacclamation of responsibility. Essentially music to my ears this music to my ears. I knew that by laying our mishap at the feet of magic, he was indicating we might just get out of this yet.
Though I barely heard him, was scarcely listening. Too taken with where I was. (I didn’t
know
where I was.) Studying what I would probably be able to see for only another hour or hour and a half. The queer, mysterious, hidden sun not so much shining as somehow manifest behind a scrim of sky, its light like the stretched-out color of water in a cup. The endlessly repeated shape of the almost colorless trees that seemed, across the lake, to follow the steep curve of the otherwise featureless earth. I had thought of wilderness as a profusion of texture and color and life, some extravagant display, but this, this was what wilderness really was. I couldn’t conceive of such emptiness. Did God know about this place? Maybe Philip was right. Maybe we discovered it. How could it be mapped? It was unmarked. No birds, I was sure, dwelt in its trees. Did fish swim in its greasy, unannealed water? Nothing lived here. Strike the earth anywhere here, with a pick, with an ax, and you’d crack soil permanently frozen, make a sound faintly brazen, some shrill chip of noise. God worked with the political, with the cantons and cities and principalities. With the nations and kingdoms. He needed a side to be on. Someplace populated enough to support a franchise. He’s this through-and-through City-Kid God and never took hold in wilderness. Which is why, counting pit stops in Sinai, it took the Jews forty years to cover the hundred and fifty or hundred and sixty miles from Cairo to Canaan.
Dear Rabbi Petch, I thought in my letter. How are you? I am fine. Who owns the North Pole? The whiteness of whales indeed! Yours truly, Jerry Goldkorn.
“Hey,” Philip said, “we’ve got to figure some way to get that plane down from out of them trees before some big wind comes up and does it for us. Did you ever use an ax?”
I explained how certain classes of men contracted heart attacks just mowing their lawns.
“Oh,” Philip said.
“Not me,” I said. “I don’t mean me. Did you think I meant me? Give me a break. I’ve split kindling and made little balls out of newspaper. I’ve built fires in fireplaces.”
We chopped at branches and felled trees until full dark when it became too dangerous to continue. That night we lay together under the branches and pine needles for warmth.
And worked until dark again the next day and slept once more under our wooden blanket, developing in those odd, four-hour daytimes a curious, exhausting jet lag, time flip-flopped, bringing me awake at one and two in the morning with a terrible urgency to crap in half-dozen-ounce increments the twelve-ounce-per-person provisions it was actually state law in those days that pilots carry aboard their planes in the event of just such emergencies. Philip was different. He felt the urge as soon as it got dark at three-thirty in the afternoon.
And were at it again at the crack of noon on the fourth day too. Chopping until we had enough wood to make a six-foot wooden hill beneath the airplane and enough left over to build a blanket.
Then, close work this, we filed and sliced at the trees in which our plane was cradled, cutting away at boles and projecting branches like butchers trimming fat.
With long levers we carefully poked and pried the plane loose from out of the smoothly forked branches we had molded for it, and lowered it gently onto its new wooden base.
Somehow it struck me as a very biblical and oddly satisfactory solution.
Now, kept from the wind, we could sleep in the plane. Though I must be frank and tell you it wasn’t easy that first night. We dozed on and off. We were, of course, both of us gamy. But that wasn’t it. Though perhaps, in a way, it was.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m talking here of some dark, masculine nostalgia. My sense that night of my own and Philip’s rough stubble and all the soured perfumes of our decay. Each other’s proximity a vouchsafe of the mortal. Oh, oh, this is hard. I’m looking for the clay equivalencies, some queer mix of broken exhalation and busted wind at close quarters on a haimish plane. The knowledge between us of our seasoned, salty flies and marked underwear. Never all night to be without the strange assurance that all men are fleishik and stand contrary to the principles of such a clean, inhospitable geography of raw phenomena, human finger-food in all that ice and in all that darkness against the disproportionate strength of the bears. Suddenly realizing the wind hadn’t blown once during those four nights when we required calmness to keep the plane slung snug and orderly as a hammock in its trees. Yea, oh yea, I thought, grateful to a God Who answers the rough rabbinics of even unasked prayer, and wondered:
Hard? Hard? What’s
so hard? There are no difficult davens. Ain’t it just like I told Philip? Don’t he do
too
got de whole worl’ in he han’? Forgetting for the moment to remember where we were, where we were
really,
unconscious of all those raw, difficult, powerful phenomena—the tundra and temperature and true magnetic north. Out of my rabbi mode and chatting away with Philip, who couldn’t sleep either. In the fetid cabin of the grounded airplane recruited yet once more into the sedated collegiality we’d shared after the initial excitement of the crash, Philip just beginning to tell me something about his duffel bag when both of us noticed that other wonder—the crack of the noonday dawn. To see—talk of mortality—that we’d been caught with our pants down.
The wind hadn’t blown. It had remained calm, had it? Yes? God answers even unasked prayers, does He?
Two huge black bears, drawn great distances through the crystal neutrality of the calm, windless air, by our poor scat, stooped to sniff where we’d squatted on either side of the airplane; then, standing upright, looked up at the machine in which we were sitting and made a face.
“Oh, Jesus,” Philip murmured. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“Surely,” I whispered, “they’ve seen airplanes before.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“They
must
have.”
“Sure,” Philip said, “lots of times. Maybe what interests the sons of bitches is that they ain’t never before seen one that could throw down one or two dozen razor pines, saw them up into manageable logs, knock them into a roost, then fling its shit out of the nest after it was done with it.”