Drug Run
GREEN TILES OF ALFALFA lay below the plane window as my flight approached the Phoenix airport. I was on a drug run to the Mexican border. My friends and I had chuckled half-heartedly about the mission. They understood that the object was to obtain prescription medicine at a reduced price. But it was unsettling to associate the flight with illegal drugs and to find humor in a prescription-drug bill that amounted to $450 a month.
Beyond its businesslike purpose, the trip was also imbued with desert dust from decades past—a layer of nostalgia for an uncle and aunt now gone, whose home had been a second home, and for a landscape still dry, a contrast to my coastal home.
My cousin Tom Thomasson picked me up at Sky Harbor airport. It was good to see him. We drew closer when his mother, Aunt Ida, became the last of our parents to die. I flew out for her funeral, representing my immediate family as mandated by my mother. Tom returned the visit, coming to Houston a few months later. A reluctant traveler until then, he sealed the bond with zeal and enthusiasm, with pleasure.
As WE UNDERTOOK the land link of our drug mission, I told him about blinking to make sure that the private plane paralleling our commercial one to touchdown was real. My first thought was that Uncle Ed, a pilot who introduced me to adventure, was at the small plane's controls, shepherding us in. Tom said he had recurring thoughts about his dad, too, when he saw a plane.
The highway heading west cut through low mountain ridges and saguaro, the cactus with many bent arms that looks like some funny rubber man. As they disappeared in our mirror, ocotillo took over the desert floor, extending its slender but festive red blooms to the sky.
Tom and I discussed our upcoming purchase at the border. I wanted a year's supply of Risperdal 2 mg. It would stay fresh that long, my psychiatrist said. "Check the color, packaging," he suggested. I was also working on a sample box of a new medicine, lansoprazole 30 mg, for a stomach irritation. These two prescriptions together were $395 of my monthly drug bill in the United States.
Tom checked on supply and legal limits in advance with the pharmacist. He learned that we could legally buy a three-month supply. However, there was a practice of crossing the border twice, an hour apart, with each person carrying the limit. That would get me my annual supply. "No, we'll do it legal," I told my cousin, "and we'll double-check the regulations with the Border Patrol before we cross."
Tom readily agreed with this plan.
It lessened my anxiety. I had heard enough about imprisonment for firearms violations after shells were found in a pickup. And I had been stopped and searched for no apparent reason when crossing back to Laredo on foot several years before.
When we reached Algodones, Mexico, our destination outside Yuma, Arizona, we parked on the U.S. side of the border in a large lot with cars bearing the plates of many states. The U.S. Border Patrol station was across the street. I walked over to an agent and asked how much medicine I could bring in. "Three months supply with a prescription," he said.
With a prescription. That was key. And I had the keys.
We entered the village.
It had more than one drug store, but Tom led me to the one he had traded with and the one with which he had arranged for the supply of Risperdal. We made our way down the narrow streets, passing many stalls with cheap arts and crafts before getting there. At the store, we found the pharmaceuticals neatly displayed and the pharmacist knowledgeable. "That's the generic [for the stomach capsule]," she said, writing out a bill that priced each of the Big Two medicines at $100 less per month. We had a net saving even after travel expenses were deducted.
Tom and I left the drug store, and I relaxed with a beer at Caliente, a bar and racing forum, while he played the horses. The establishment had a prominent street sign but was tucked away, down a shoulder-width alley. His dad Ed would have been comfortable here, relaxing with a beer in a small town in Mexico. Indeed, we had relaxed together on fishing trips in the Sea of Cortez, which forms a shoreline with Baja California, the Mexican state we were in.
Maybe Tom and I were being a little eccentric, maybe less than prudent, but we were doing it his way. After all, he flaunted prescription glasses case and bought "off the rack" at a drug store whatever
seemed to fit his eyes. I found the practice of buying drugs this way a little less of a comfortable fit. I was foregoing U.S. packaging, but I also knew that U.S. standards weren't necessarily the benchmark of quality, that to believe so was arrogant. A wool sweater bought in Paris had lasted a quarter of century, and a medical exam for a torn ligament in Greece was accurate—the injury to the foot was flesh, not bone.
Tom and I headed back to the saguaros, stopping for a date shake along the way. Before he put me on the plane, we drove out to the abandoned hangar and office of Thomasson Dusting Service, an aerial applicator of pesticides on crops. The desert slowly wears at the facility, in the shadow of Picacho Peak.
Not far away, facing the peak from an oasis, Uncle Ed and Aunt Ida rest. The headstone notes she was in Eastern Star and he flew as a captain for the Army in World War II. "He just loved to fly," his son said when we paid homage.
Chapter 24
Thomassons
HIS PASSION WAS PLANES.
As a crop duster in south central Arizona, he would roar down on the rows of cotton so low that the tail wheel of his biplane occasionally would tap a concrete irrigation ditch.
As a sportsman, he piloted single- and twin-engine planes on fishing trips from Baja California to Salmon, Idaho.
As a trendy aviator, he helped bring helicopters to agriculture and dam construction.
Uncle Ed Thomasson did all these things, while letting me join in, immersed in an aura of wealth beyond my means.
After tending to business, which included a hangar of ten planes, a shop, and offices, he usually went up in a Steerman, a biplane painted with the Thomasson Dusting Service colors, blue and white. It held the powdered pesticide in a tank behind the propeller, and an open cockpit followed.
The pilots, including Ed, were at their respective fields by dawn, checking the wind. It was as much a foe as heat, which later in the day caused the chemical to rise rather than fall on the cotton.
I WORKED AS A F L A G M A N to pay my way through college. All of us put in seven days a week from dark to dark, with a break in the middle of the day. Ed and I adjourned to his mother's house at Picacho for home cooking, and napped on the floor in early afternoon.
The pilots loaded more pesticide, and the flagmen went back to pacing sixteen rows for the Steerman and twelve for the smaller Pipers, which sprayed the cotton. Sometimes a power line would cross the end of a field. The pilot might fly under it, and the flagman would either speed to his next post or hit the ground. Our contact with the chemicals has worried me much my life, but my general physician doubts they have had any effect on my health.
Being a relative to the boss begat privilege.
One summer I joined Ed and Don, one of the three permanent pilots, on an excursion to the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Aunt Ida, my mother's sister, stayed behind to tend the books and deal with farmers and personnel. Tom, their son, was like many teenagers and did not share the family interests.
The river ran through the Sawtooth Mountains, which had not yet gained their designation as the first wilderness area in the nation. It was primitive, as attested to by the crude landing strip, dirt with a hump in the middle. We sat down there without mishap, along with another Cessna 182 from Washington state. After setting up camp, the rest of the party fished for salmon while I explored. I had never encountered so much wildness. Walking downstream, I discovered whitewater with salmon leaping up it, heading back to their spawning grounds. And nearby, a fleet of rafts produced new excitement, giving rise to the thought that I could one day return and run these rapids.
When I returned to camp, the others showed me their success, huge fish that another party on mountain bikes had helped land. But I had no feel for the sport, no joy in filling the belly of the plane with something so magnificent in the wild. When we winged home, I did talk of shipping a small one to my college for a dinner with fellow students.
The next major fishing trip with my uncle was to Baja California. We launched two boats and two planes across the Sea of Cortez from Bahia Kino, Mexico. The Piper Apache and Cessna 182 landed on a dry lake bed, while the boats entered a cove marked by a crescent of red sea urchins.
To our misfortune the wind blew a steady forty miles per hour for days. We ventured out in the boats, but even staying close each still disappeared from the other in the swells. Then four of us chose to fly to the other side of the peninsula. We landed at a tiny village on the Pacific Ocean, and the fishermen there were luckier. One of their wooden boats was heaped with lobster. We negotiated and bought gunny sacks full for fifty cents a head. Our camp would not go another night without seafood.
When Ed got into helicopters, he came to North Texas to take delivery at the Bell Helicopter plant. I was in college at North Texas State University in Denton, and he invited me to join him. We discussed his plans. He wanted to spray cotton with the chopper, and to use it in constructing the dam at Lake Powell, a project that incensed environmentalists because the beauty there would be submerged, a place no one knew to be made forever unknowable.
Ed decided to drop me off at school when he flew the helicopter home. It was a short trip to the campus, and, after circling, he chose to land on a parking lot in front of the president's home. 1 stepped out, waved goodbye, and he was off into the sunset. The president's wife was out tending flowers as I strolled past the big lawn on the way to my apartment. Word got out the next day that the president was curious about who came to school in a 'copter.
But it was in Eloy, where Ed and Ida lived, that I got a taste of using a helicopter to get to an office. We flew in the 182 to Flagstaff to meet a doctor-pilot for a round of golf one Sunday. We had a pleasant game on a course nestled in picturesque land formations, although the score was not memorable.
As we headed home from this brief outing, a storm boiled up toward Phoenix and further south toward the airstrip. The doctor invited us to spend the night, and the weather allowed us a swim—the host had swim suits in a number of sizes. I went to bed early, because I needed to go to the office the next morning. I was in a summer internship at the Eloy Enterprise, a weekly newspaper.
Up early, we flew by plane to the Picacho strip for a jazzy maneuver that would assure my getting to work on time. We taxied up to the helicopter and stepped out to change carriages. The new conveyance was like soaring in a bubble, and Ed put her down this time on a vacant lot across the street from the newspaper office, on time.
That could have spoiled me.
Chapter 25
Twilight
THE WIND CHIMES THE sEAsoN as the blue jays return to my patio, with double doors flung open to my study. The flower bed has reverted to forest. Some would say it is unattended, and that is true, but I like the wildness that a straying oak, a triumphant shrimp plant and dinging ferns evoke as lizards sun and dart.
The slender oak was possibly borne on the bountiful tide of acorns from across the fence two years ago. It begets tolerance from crepe myrtles, firmly planted and enduring after twenty years (some with hard freezes) and busily producing green shoots for the delicate lilac blooms.
The shrimp plant, transplanted from my grandmother's wash pot in my parents' backyard, has tripled itself and wears its namesake headdress on all three plants.
The setting whispers when I write.
The words flow from contentment.
I COULDN'T GET THE POST to let me be a full time writer," I said during a Continuing Studies course at Rice University.
"That was our loss," said Jackie Simon, the writing instructor. In her remarks on assignments she said my writing had "accuracy amounting to poetry" and "contained the number one asset of memoirs, honesty."
As I went back over the transcript of The Post trial, I found the references to "lovely writing" and excellently written editorials, virtual raves about my work, yet the editor who fired me held little hope for my diseased mind to contribute more. And I lost hope, only now to dream again, from encouragement and recovery, to produce a few good reads.
My doctor has said I cannot work but has not vetoed the relaxed pace I keep at the keyboard. So I wish to light and hop in perches among friends, among my family. This would provide a geographic tapestry to meld into stories.
The possibilities are generous. They translate into contentment in my sixties. Orange trees flank a house trailer in the Arizona desert, inviting me to sit in a porch swing with a laptop, breezes whipping. In Washington state another writer's haven overlooks the San Juan Islands, with snowcapped Mt. Baker rising thirty miles inland. Quaint cafes serve coffee in Fairhaven, the old town, at the foot of the hill. And yet again, the orange tile roof of a Spanish-style home circled with flowers draws me to the hum of Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, there is the book within.
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