Alaska News

Super Cub a super carrier for dad, son

As a kid, I did a lot of flying with my Dad. He owned a Super Cub. In the '50s and '60s, an Alaskan with a Super Cub was a prince of the air, free to explore the territory far from the limited road system.

Fabian bought the plane primarily to travel between Fairbanks and his trap line near Lake Minchumina. Chartering wasn't prohibitively expensive but my Dad was frustrated by the vagaries of charter service, especially weather and pilots who didn't show because another trip was more lucrative.

"Whoever said, 'Patience is a virtue,' never waited for an airplane in Bush Alaska," Fabian warned me.

Fabian's Super Cub had its critics. Not government aviation regulators or fellow pilots but my mother, who saw the Cub swallowing money better spent on our household, and the Internal Revenue Service, which took a dim view of the airplane as a business expense. Every spring, my Dad packed a cigar box of receipts down to the IRS office for a high-decibel debate over his trapping deductions. Fabian liked to quote an Ontario trapper's motto: "Anything you can do to get the better of a fur buyer is moral." I am confident he believed the same thing about dealing with the IRS.

Among the communities we visited were Rampart, Manley Hot Springs, Nenana, McGrath, Flat, Chena Hot Springs and Woodchopper. The word community didn't quite apply to Woodchopper. The airfield of the former mining camp was overgrown with willows. We couldn't land. Instead, we hiked in from a road near Manley.

Woodchopper had been abandoned. And in a hurry. At what had been a roadhouse, bowls, silverware and boxes of cereal on the table gave the impression miners had departed mid-meal. There also was a pool table. Perhaps a game of rotation had been in progress. Striped and solid balls lay scattered across the green cloth. Cues leaned against one end of the table.

I flew more in the summer than in winter. Fabian frequently was away trapping after the snow fell; I was in school. Plus, less daylight in winter, persistent cold weather. An hour and a half in a Super Cub at 20 below is an experience I have no desire to repeat. But flying in Interior Alaska during the summer has its own challenges. We flew only before 9 in the morning and after 8 at night to avoid the turbulence created by rising warm air. Turbulence never frightened me; it made me sick.

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I wasn't the only one who flew with Fabian. He enjoyed taking friends up, especially for short flights around Fairbanks. Veteran dog musher Howard Luke told me my Dad gave him his first airplane ride after they ran into each other on Second Avenue. "What are you doing?" Fabian asked. "Not much," Howard replied. "Let's go flying," Fabian suggested.

I was camping north of Fairbanks with high school friends and we heard a plane approaching. The pilot circled our cabin several times, then flew over at less than a hundred feet. It was my Dad with one of my buddies who didn't make the camping trip. As Fabian pulled away, the door opened and my buddy dropped two paper bags toward earth. One landed in the brush, the other in narrow Colorado Creek. The first contained pastries, the second a six-pack of pop.

We didn't see big game regularly, but once near Minchumina, we flew over 20 moose bunched in a shallow lake. The moose remained steadfastly indifferent to us.

Most of what I remember about my Dad is straight memory. But my memories of flying are supplemented by his log books, which contain dates, locations, time in the air -- and numerous notations of "w/Michael." He was w/Michael on April 21, 1958, when the engine quit after we took off from a frozen lake near Minto where we had spent a night with a muskrat trapper. I was 13. Fabian said, "Hang on." I did. We were on skis and landed smoothly on a lake several miles distant.

I blurted out some version of thank you but my Dad was too hyper to pay attention and talked nonstop for 10 minutes as we walked around the lake under a leaden sky. Then Fabian checked out the ship, discovered ice in the carburetor, warmed the engine properly and we flew home.

I don't remember feeling scared. I do recall awe: We were flying without any sound except the rush of wind and the propeller was revolving slowly, haplessly -- like a toy.

I dreamt about this incident well into adulthood in New York. The dream was far more disturbing than the actual experience and I would awaken in my apartment shaken, fumbling in the darkness to understand why I had been dreaming about a vanished world and a father dead. After a while, I would stare out the window toward New York Harbor and tell myself: "I don't know what Sigmund Freud would say, but I'll bet he would grant me this. Six million people are sleeping in this town. Only one is dreaming about flying over the Minto Lakes in a Super Cub."

Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

MICHAEL CAREY

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Michael Carey

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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