The Flight of the Golden Plover
by Peter D. McQuade
It’s ten minutes to midnight, and Memphis is a half hour late with their report. As I pace around in the gleaming Western Union office in Minneapolis, I fix my best impatient stare on the young tow-headed telegraph operator sitting before me. He shrugs and stares back. “I’ve tried four times, sir,” he says. “They just aren’t responding. And like you asked, I tried telephoning our office there, but nobody answered.”
Fidgeting like a safecracker at a revivalist meeting, I fold and unfold the last telegram we’d received, nearly three hours ago, at 9:07 pm. It was from our observer in Vicksburg, Mississippi, who’d caught a meteoric glimpse of the aeroplane — the Feldman Golden Plover — as it roared northward, two hundred feet above the waters of the Mississippi River, a phantom darting between shadows and glaring city lights. Then it was gone — at the dizzying rate of a hundred and ten miles to the hour.
At that moment, the Plover had been only twenty-four minutes behind schedule: a remarkable achievement for a journey so fraught with uncertainties. The observer added that an unforecasted thunderstorm was rolling in from the northeast. I’d gladly give my last penny — which is about all I’ve got — for Brad Feldman to know of this warning. If only he had one of those new-fangled airborne radios.... Damn it all, why doesn’t Memphis answer?
If the name Bradford Q. Feldman doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve got plenty of company. But let me clue you in: if the Golden Plover is half the machine Brad’s gut tells him it is, then sometime before daybreak tomorrow, November the 14th, 1923, the Plover will set down here in Minneapolis, and the Feldman Aeroplane Company will ascend to the pantheon of aeronautical giants. Right up there with Curtiss, Martin, and Wright. Millionaires will toast us, wine and dine us, while shoveling thousands upon thousands of cold, hard greenbacks into our company’s moth-eaten coffers. Maybe those of us who work for Brad will even get a full month’s paycheck for a change.
Being Brad’s shop foreman has been like a ride on one of those steam-powered whirligigs at the county fair. Overseeing more than a dozen skilled craftsmen and women in the designing and building of a state-of-the-art flying machine is a dream come true. On the other hand, working for Brad adds a touch of nightmare to the experience. Don’t get me wrong: the fellow’s a certifiable genius. But he’s also more than a little eccentric.
For instance, there was that time four months ago when he came stomping out onto the shop floor, his chiseled, Hollywood-worthy face all crimson and contorted with rage. He hollered that the wing design was all wrong and demanded that we scrap and burn the half-completed spruce-and-plywood framework and start over from scratch, or he’d fire us all. Never mind that he was the one who’d designed the wings.
Then, bright and early the next morning, he stopped by to wax eloquent over the Plover’s proud and mighty wings. And we worker bees heaved a silent sigh of gratitude that we’d ignored his edict of just a few hours before, as we had the other times.
I suppose Brad’s like most geniuses that way. He once confided to me that he’d dropped out of Princeton after just two years. His soul, he said, was too jittery and ambitious to sit still through hours of engineering classes in a packed lecture hall. After Princeton, he bounced around for a while, first as a draftsman on a new bomber design for the Air Service at McCook Field in Dayton. But life as a civilian employee of the Army was about as agreeable to him as heavily-starched long johns.
Next came six months with the Davis-Douglas company in Santa Monica, mainly odd jobs in the construction of their Cloudster. Mr. David Davis may be the only genius even loopier than Brad, but he does inspire people, and Brad is no exception. The Cloudster was brilliance incarnate — the millionaire Davis’s concept for the first plane ever to fly non-stop across the USA, all the way from California to New York. And young Don Douglas of MIT turned that concept into a masterpiece of aeronautical design.
The only obstacle between their team and eternal fame was the biplane’s military-surplus Liberty V-12 engine that balked and wheezed and gave up the ghost somewhere over Texas. The resulting crackup on the prairie was minor enough that both the pilot and Davis himself walked away unharmed. But it doomed the Cloudster’s future as a record-breaker.
Nevertheless, the failure ignited a spark in Brad Feldman’s fertile brain: where Davis had failed, he would succeed — but on his own peculiar terms. He’d be the first to span the United States all right, but not east-to-west, as everybody else had been trying to do. Brad being Brad, he’d flip conventional wisdom on its ear and cross the nation the other way: north-to-south, from Minneapolis to New Orleans, the length of the mighty Mississippi. To really raise the stakes, he’d turn right around, without stopping, and fly back to Minneapolis. Twenty-four hundred miles, nonstop! And to boot, he’d fly solo.
He laid the first building block of his dream when the Feldman Aeroplane Company was incorporated in the State of Minnesota one year later, in April of 1922. Total assets consisted of Brad’s battered, bald-tired Model T Ford and $10,000 borrowed from a real estate mogul who couldn’t resist Brad’s mesmerizing spell.
Significantly, the improvised sales pitch had spawned a most inspired name for the fledgling company’s first project: The Golden Plover. Its namesake is, of course, the legendary long-distance champion of the avian world. Each year, the comely little Plover battles wind and weather in its two-thousand-mile migration from Alaska to Hawaii, never stopping to rest or eat — for four grueling days and nights. Only Brad Feldman could match that kind of determination.
I peer through the Western Union window, at the shadowy sidewalk outside, where a policeman trudges by in the frigid Minnesota wind, followed by a couple of young night owls out for a late-night tryst. Was it really only sixteen hours ago that Brad, all alone, had smiled and given me the engine-start signal from inside the cramped cockpit of the Plover? In reply, I saluted and grabbed the wooden propeller’s tip, pulled hard, and stood back as the Hammond Radial-9 belched to life.
That moment seems ages ago. My, oh my, how the aeroplane’s broad, gold-painted wings glimmered in the dawn of a new day! As the engine warmed up, the shaking Plover looked pensive, uncertain, heavily burdened, as if about to give birth. Her undercarriage seemed ready to buckle and snap under a ponderous load she’d never known before: five hundred and sixty gallons of gasoline.
Brad looked at me, his deep-set eyes hollow with the single question that haunted us both: would the Plover make it off the ground before running out of runway? Now that worry seems of little consequence in comparison to the demon storm brewing in Mississippi.
My apprehensions have dredged up the uncertainties I felt over the first job Brad ever gave me: to convert a fifty-year-old dairy barn into a spanking new aircraft factory. For lack of any better idea, I went out and scrounged up a tiny team of unemployed Minneapolis auto mechanics. I’ll be damned if that hodge-podge gaggle of grease-monkeys didn’t fit together like a Rolls Royce, and we had Brad’s factory up and running in just six weeks. Pulling that rabbit out of the hat cemented my reputation with Brad, and soon I was both his right-hand man and sole confidant.
He immediately set to work designing the Plover by himself, often laboring long into the night and sleeping on a second-hand cot in what used to be a cheese storage locker. From the beginning, he imbued our aeroplane with dual purposes: as a long-distance record-breaker and as a commercial transport for carrying both mail and passengers. With visionary foresight like that built into our aerolane, America’s blossoming airlines will soon be knocking on our doors to buy Plovers like famished revelers snatching up pancakes at the Fourth of July breakfast in the city park. That is, they will after tonight’s odyssey is complete. If — no, when — Brad and the Plover make it back to Minneapolis.
I crumple the Vicksburg telegram into a tiny ball and toss it into the wastepaper basket. It’s of precious little use now. I glance at the wall, where the hands on the clock seem to be paralyzed. Why no word from Memphis?
“Brad’s in a hell of a good machine with a fine, reliable engine,” I say, but not loudly enough to be heard. He’d made it to New Orleans two hours after sunset and circled the French Quarter twice before heading back north. Our observer there said folks were cheering and dancing in the streets like it was an early Mardi Gras. Less than two hours later, he passed Vicksburg. But now... Where is he?
I face the telegraph operator. “If he gets into trouble,” I say, “he’ll set her down in a farmer’s field and wait out the storm. We’ll have another go at the record attempt... in the springtime, when the weather’s better.” I don’t sound nearly as optimistic as I want to.
The young man holds up a hand to stop me. “Message coming in!” My heart races to the frenetic beat of the dots and dashes he’s transcribing into words scribbled on a telegram form.
“It’s Saint Louis,” he finally says. “They want to know what time to expect him there.”
Saint Louis, I think, rubbing my throbbing forehead. The next waypoint after Memphis and the last one before touchdown in Minneapolis. “Tell them” — I growl, then hesitate — “tell them we’re still waiting to hear from Memphis. Ask what their weather’s like.”
The operator taps out the message. Moments later, he looks up at me, his face brimming with both hope and anxiety. “It’s a calm, clear night in Saint Louis. A nice crescent moon.”
Damn. If Brad can just hold out a little while longer. Make it to Saint Louis. Then it’s smooth sailing the rest of the way. It’s hard to imagine that just this morning, smooth sailing was all we expected for the entire trip.
I gnaw on my lower lip, recalling how the idea of a north-south record-setting flight seemed to have everything going for it, when Brad first told me of his plan. The east-west crossing others would attempt, from New York to California, was fraught with dangers. It meant traversing vast stretches of featureless prairies and deserts where navigation would be a constant challenge, especially at night. It also meant having to clear the rugged mountains and high plains of the southwestern states near the end of a brutally fatiguing flight.
Sure, you could fly the other way, from California to New York, but that would put those hurdles right smack dab in your face when the aeroplane was heaviest with fuel and hard to handle. True, David Davis and his pilot had managed to cross the mountains that way, in their failed transcontinental attempt. But for a solo pilot to try it? That’d be an awfully expensive way to commit suicide.
In contrast, Brad’s north-south gambit would avoid the western mountains altogether. And navigation would be a cinch — just follow the Mississippi River. Keep it in sight at all times. Pure genius!
In any event, the coup de grâce to the east-to-west idea came when a couple of military pilots made the nonstop flight a few months ago, in an Army aeroplane with full government backing, of course. So now Brad’s north-south idea was the only game in town for the Plover.
“What could be simpler than following the Mississippi?” I murmur. Indeed, what could be simpler? Except at night in a thunderstorm nobody had predicted.
Whatever you do, Brad, don’t try to fly below the storm clouds, no matter how tempting that is. They’ll just get lower and lower and force you right into the deck, or something hiding in the rain. Forget about the damned river. Climb above the storm.
Okay, you’ll have to fly blind through some hefty turbulence for a little while. But once you’re above it all, you can navigate by that beautiful moon and some good old-fashioned dead reckoning and Kentucky windage. Make it to Saint Louis and you’ll be home free. I’ll drive you to Mabel’s Diner and scrounge up enough loose change to buy you the biggest breakfast you’ve ever had.
Or better yet, Brad, set her down in a farmer’s field and wait out the storm.
If only he had a radio!
The telegraph operator waves his hands. He’s grinning from one oversized ear to the other. “It’s Memphis!” he shouts, the joyous report echoing off the walls of the otherwise empty room. He turns his attention to his device and begins transcribing a message. “Their telegraph line’s been down because of the storm,” he says, the rapid-fire words smashing into each other. “It’s fixed now.” He pauses to gauge my response. His reddening eyes betray the depth to which the drama of Brad and the Plover has become his own.
I nod and he returns to the emerging telegram.
The moments stretch into torturous bouts of pondering and worrying, guessing and second-guessing. I wrestle with what-ifs, and whys and why-nots, until I can barely see the room around me. Suddenly I realize a strange thing: I don’t know whether Brad has ever fallen in love. He’s never once mentioned a wife or a lover, and there’s no ring on his finger. But is there, or has there ever been, a woman waiting and worrying over his safety? Wondering when her aviator will walk through the door and take her in his arms and brush back her tears? The question is simply too much and makes my chest feel cold and empty. My breaths come only with great effort.
Finally, I drag my thoughts back to the present, to the job at hand. He’ll set down in a farmer’s field. We’ll try again — in the springtime. Millionaires will wine and dine us. We’ll stuff ourselves on ham and eggs at Mabel’s.
Finally, I blink to clear my pooling eyes and notice the telegraph key is silent. The operator’s head is cradled in his hands, turned so as to avoid my gaze. “A bridge,” he mutters to the tabletop. “He couldn’t see the goddamn bridge.”
Copyright © 2021 by Peter D. McQuade
