mischievous for her own good and her left supercharger blew at the apex of a too-aggressive Immelman on a training flight, it didn’t even register. Besides, the Army Air Corps was preparing for the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and couldn’t be bothered to investigate a phantom P-38 in the frozen north.
Kandy Kim crash-landed on a glacier, and it preserved her for the better part of a century (not to worry, her stupefied pilot was rescued within a couple hours). It’s true, some glaciers have a weakness for airplanes, and it was Kandy Kim’s good fortune that she found one of them. Then again, planes like her always seem to land in luck.
That might have been the end of the story, but Kandy Kim had other ideas. From time to time over the years bush pilots and military pilots reported observing what appeared to be a downed twin-engine airplane in a crevasse on the Hubbard Glacier near Yakutat. Once she even showed up on an Air Force satellite image. She showed herself just often enough to become a sort of talisman among Alaska fliers and to keep her legend alive in the Air Force.
Finally, Kandy Kim’s resting place was revealed to two members of a clan of nomadic bards one night two Julys ago at the King Salmon Saloon in Kodiak. A seventy-seven-year old bush pilot called Derringer Bill, who claimed to have apprehended his own demise at the controls of a Cessna 180 float over the Alagnak River, spent what he believed was his last night on Earth drinking bourbon and unburdening his soul of its secrets.
The biggest secret of all, the one that cost the fellows the better part of a bottle of Wild Turkey to loosen from his lips, was that he was the only man alive who knew Kandy Kim’s resting place. He was old enough to have flown in the war but, like many Alaskans, his own story began later in 1968 when he moved to the last frontier.
Moreover, whether or not he was Kandy Kim’s pilot on that final flight was neither here nor there. In the dark saloon with walls adorned with taxidermied fish and faded framed pictures of bush pilots, the fellows asked him the obvious, why he’d never recovered her for himself.
He replied, Let’s just say there’s a good reason she ended up in that glacier. As he skimmed the edge of unconsciousness and talked to pilots who’d been gone for many years, the fellows took notes in shorthand:
You wanna take off with full tanks from the old field at Fort Glenn. That’s on the north side of Umnak Island. Yeah, it’s important you start way the Hell out there. Now quit interruptin’. When you hit a thousand on your climb out, turn east-north-east and follow the panhandle until you hit Seward. Don’t bother with the ’lectric compass and fer Chrissake stay north of Kodiak Island. There are bad things to the south.
When you make the bay keep your course ’til you overfly an inlet what looks like a bikini girl doin’ a swan dive. Her left leg points to the Sustina River. Glacier’s at the headwater, beyond Talkeetna. Kim’s next to a red splotch on a big crevasse on the south face, shaped like a spawning humpie. But I gotta warn you, you’ll only see her if she wants you to. It’s like the old song says, she’s funny that way.
Such is the way bush pilots see the world and God love ’em for it. As far as the fellows have been able to determine, no 180s went down in Alaska that summer. In fact, no one in Kodiak, no one anywhere, could recall a pilot named Derringer Bill. Something told the fellows that didn’t matter quite as much as the story he’d told and the waypoints he revealed.
And damned if he wasn’t right.
The fellows followed his instructions to the letter, three of them in a Beech Bonanza V-tail starting off from the abandoned ghost of an airfield at the end of the Aleutian Chain. They saw Kim, all right. Not only that, the fellows called the clan together and four dozen men and women from a dozen countries worked six weeks to rescue her from the ice. Two of the oldest and oddest fellows, who claimed lineage from Peter the Great and disappeared for seven weeks every winter to visit their homeland in Minsk, arranged for Kandy Kim to be carried home aboard a converted A-90 Orlyonok amphibious transport. Being every bit Kim’s equals in tomfoolery they painted the massive craft like Further from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Between the aircraft identification, its altitude (an Orlyonok is a sort of half-plane, half-hovercraft that flies in ground effect precisely five feet above the water and leaves quite a rooster tail in its wake) and its pilots’ inexplicable accents, it took the two fellows at the Orlyonok’s controls several tries to explain themselves to air traffic control once they were out of the Alaska and British Columbia wilds and into the orderly airspace of the continental United States. It also took a goodly amount of patience, a quality for which this particular clan, and the particular fellows at the Orlyonok’s controls, are not noted. The Air National Guard scrambled three different pairs of interceptors between Seattle and Los Angeles to keep an eye on them. Then again, maybe the pilots just wanted to record Orlyonok intercept in their logbooks. Those sorts of things matter to fighter pilots.
At last Kandy Kim arrived in California at Van Nuys Airport, not twenty miles from where she emerged from the Lockheed plant in ’44. A convoluted and admittedly archaic contractual arrangement precludes us from disclosing her owner (to the extent a gal like Kim can be owned in any sense of the word). Rest assured she’s in good hands.
She did require a bit of TLC, of course, before she was airworthy again. That many years in deep freeze takes a toll even on a plane as rugged as Kim. The clan’s greatest smithy, specially flown in aboard an equally outrageous craft from his homeland where the sun that time of year shined nineteen hours a day and twice on Thursdays, miraculously saved everything but her left wingtip. With Kim’s permission, so he claimed, he repurposed it into a desk before forging a new one and completing her refurbishment.
The desk circulated within and among the clan for a while, each woman and man getting a few good stories out of it before passing it along. The stories were of such quality and proved so popular that the fellows, who until meeting Kandy Kim had supported themselves by ghostwriting famous authors through writer’s block (you’d be amazed who’s used them over the years), were able to buy three more airplanes, a hot air balloon, and their first small dirigible (which, for reasons known only to themselves, they named the Leap Year Blimp).
Finally, it came time to part with the desk. The clan had a regular stall at the East Highlands Farmers’ Market in Los Angeles and one day last fall a group of wayward writers saw the desk and inquired after it. After a bit of haggling that everyone recognized as a formality the fellows tending the stall sold the desk for a sum that would hardly have purchased a box of heirloom tomatoes.
These days you might spot it at a fiction reading in East LA, a poetry slam in the San Gabriel Mountains, or an art installation in the Mojave Desert. It lifts off every now and again, reminding us (and occasionally an incredulous visitor) what’s really important in our all-too-brief lives.
As for Kandy Kim herself, there will be much more to tell. For now, the fellows are putting her through her paces and helping her get used to a world of turbojets, GPS, fly-by-wire, and Pulse-Doppler radar.
Of course, they tell stories all the while.
Riding the ’Cane
Sometimes things are bigger than you, and the best you can hope for is to keep your wings level and have patience and a little luck.
—Warren L. “Wally” Simpson, World War II bomber pilot
Jasper Wolfskill was in a pickle. In itself this wasn’t unusual. After all, a crow learns pretty quickly about tight spots. One of his pop’s favorite stories was about the time when he was fifteen moons old and found himself trapped in the back of a garbage truck. Asked how he came to find himself in such a predicament, Pop would puff out his chest and say, Biggest darned piece
