Twentynine Palms
Written in mid July, 1988, in southern California.
Thinking back to about a week ago, I wasn't asking this kind stranger to take a week of vacation from his job to fly me all over the southwest, but he volunteered the generous gesture, and out there with so much space between airports and populated towns I wasn't about to turn him down. Not while my two and a half-day stint at the laundromat in Taos, New Mexico that happened two weeks earlier, was still fresh in my mind. That was where I spent the majority of my Taos visit, leaning up against the triple loader, making hours upon hours of calls from the payphone attached to the wall, looking for a pilot with an old plane to come fly me out.
Like many of the other phone numbers I've collected, someone who knew him and knew that his plane was pretty old gave Brandon Gentry’s number to me. I called and told him how I was trying to hitchhike through all of the continental states via vintage aeroplanes, etcetera, and could he take me in his antique plane to, or in the direction of Utah?
He said he'd wanted to fly out to see his step dad in Corona, California, anyway, and had the vacation time coming to him, so why not take it now, help me out and have someone to do some sightseeing with. We planned to meet in person the next day over lunch and talk about the places we'd fly to.
At an outdoor second floor cafe in Reno we planned a tentative schedule to land at St. George, Utah and do some hiking in Zion National Park and to fly over the Grand Canyon into Arizona. He was tall and trim, looked like a bicyclist and it was apparent that he liked the big desert west outdoors; he said he would bring two tents and we could camp out near his airplane.
Three days earlier Ted Contri's P-51 Mustang brought me to Reno Cannon Field so we arranged that Brandon would fly over to Cannon from his home base airfield, just twenty miles away, and pick me up by Ted’s hangar, there the next morning. This way I would be keeping my rule of no car rides or other transportation to get to the next airfield.
Over the next four days, the sweet little red 1959 Aeronca Champ took us from: Reno, to Yerington, Nevada; to St. George, Utah; then into Arizona over the Grand Canyon; and southward down to Prescott; Sedona; and Tucson; then back northward to Scottsdale; and back to Prescott; then we turned westward for Twentynine Palms, California; then Corona, California. Whew!
Between our flights, Brandon and I hiked and swam in two red rock canyons, watched Fourth of July fireworks and explored the Pima Air Museum together. He was a terrific travel companion.
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