Book Review: Flight of Passage (1997). Rinker Buck.

Hello! As you may have noticed, I’ve been on a mini-sabbatical of sorts the past few weeks. My music and video production activities have been at an unusually high rate recently, which is part of it, but I’ve also been focused on some other personal matters that temporarily took priority. I suppose in the long run this happens to everyone, whether they’re working at a paid job, or just treating a hobby as though it were one!

But just to reassure you – I haven’t gone anywhere, and I haven’t lost interest in writing this blog and posting my reviews yet – quite the opposite. I’ll be back with more reviews in the next couple of weeks, plus let’s not forget that tomorrow is Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache. I’ll have something new for that.

Today though, I wanted to write a review about a book which has been in print for 25 years (so it’s a 25-year anniversary review, right?), but actually I’m reviewing it because it is one of my very favorite books and coming of age stories ever, and I wanted to share it with you.

Rinker Buck is a writer and former journalist who started his writing career as a recent college graduate in the early 1970s. He has gained considerable acclaim over the years for his newspaper and magazine writing, but in the mid-1990s he decided it was time to give his own account of a remarkable episode from his teenage years, back in the mid-1960s, which led him to write this book.

That episode was a several-week-long trip he took across the continental United States with his older brother Kernahan in a tiny 2-seat Piper Cub from the 1940s, which the brothers first expertly rebuilt over the previous winter before setting out on their epic journey. By the end of it, due in no small part to the unsolicited promotional efforts of their father, the trip and the two boys were headline news across the country. It was a lot to handle for a 15-year adolescent, and his 17-year-old brother with a new pilot’s license, and less than 100 hours of “pilot in command” experience.

That’s the core of the story. But there is so much more to it. Not surprisingly, this book and the exploits of the two Buck boys are legend within the aviation community, where pilots of many generations have delighted in Rinker’s descriptions of the challenges of flying and navigating a small, fragile airplane with no radio through terrible weather, high mountains, and across wide plains, using old-fashioned piloting techniques like following roads and rivers, reading paper charts, and using only a simple compass to find their way, without any GPS or modern location-finding equipment aboard. And it is a terrific story for those elements alone, which appeal to the adventurous spirit of all pilots, as well as those of us who love stories of dangerous travel, exploration, individual bravery and overcoming the fear of the unknown.

But wait, there’s more! It turns out that Rinker and his brother were the two oldest brothers in a very large Irish Catholic family, at precisely that time in American history when these sorts of families were inherently interesting to the public, due to the recent prominence of the Kennedy family and the fascination with the JFK presidency. And at the head of their family was an eccentric, larger than life but overbearing father, a disabled survivor of plane crashes, with an epic younger life as a barnstorming pilot in the 1920s and 1930s, and a determination to see his two oldest sons follow in his daring early aviation footsteps.

So Rinker’s story is anything but just the narration of an exciting youthful experience. Instead, throughout, he writes hilarious and moving anecdotes, insightful observations and wonderful smart-alecky dialogue that capture perfectly all the dynamics of his complex relationships with his father and his older brother, as well as other members of his large and lively family.

As the story unfolds, he paints a vivid picture of how the two brothers learned to work together not only to rebuild and fly their plane, and dream up and complete their own defining personal adventure, but also to become the young men they soon would be, both because of and yet also in spite of their father’s hopes and dreams for them.

This is a coming of age story that is truly extraordinary, but also somehow so universal. It captures perfectly that moment where we set out to take on the world, while trying to figure out how to cut ourselves loose from the ties of love and parental expectations that bind us to our parents and families. Flight of Passage is definitely high on my lifetime “best books” list. Very highly recommended.