Duct Tape and Broken Dreams

February 21, 2013

If you eat a king-size Milky Way candy bar while you're on a long bike ride, you're fueling a machine. If you do it on a long car drive, you're a slob. That thought kicks around my head for a couple of minutes as I head south from Seattle. Once it passes I have to fill the space with something else: playing with the knob that controls the wiper on the car's back window, judging farts on a one-to-five scale, going pfft and making weird facial expressions when sports radio talk show callers say something stupid, and so on. By the time I hit Portland two hours later I need a diversion.

A few weeks ago I read that somewhere in Portland there's a strip club located in a jug-shaped building. If ever there was a better reason to hit the blinker and dive off the interstate I haven't heard it. The feeling of anticipation starts to grow as the iPhone's directions guide me closer and I pass through a long series of stop lights. Part of me hopes that jug is a euphemism for something, you know, visually interesting.

Well, it's not. The jug-shaped building is, in fact, shaped like a jug that holds liquid. It has a little handle and even a stopper at the top. It's cute and it's quaint. And both of those things would be more true if it wasn't full of creepy old guys and women with low self-esteem.

It's disappointing, but I'm not ready to give up on roadside gimmicks quite yet. Farther on, somewhere south of Portland on Highway 99, I'm on the lookout for a bomber — a military plane used by the U.S. to drop bombs on countries when we became tired of trying to negotiate with them like normal adults. Somehow I miss it. How do you drive past a 70-year-old Boeing B-17 mounted a dozen feet in the air alongside a suburban highway lined with fast food places, grocery stores, pawn shops, and porn shops and not notice? I'm still not sure, but I did.

The story behind how this old airplane ended up next to a highway in Oregon is unreal. Back in 1947, a guy named Art Lacey was at a party and bragged to a friend that he was going to put a B-17 on the top of his gas station. The friend said Art could never pull it off, so Art bet him $5 and told him he would. Art somehow found another friend to loan $15,000 — about $160,000 in today's dollars — and was off and running. Art went to Oklahoma, started talking to a guy in charge of an air base there, and soon convinced him to sell a well-used B-17 for about $13,000. After they struck the deal, the air base guy told Art to come back the next day with his co-pilot. The plane would be ready then, he told him, and they could fly it home.

But there were a couple of problems with that: Art had only flown small single-engine planes, not four-engined military bombers, and he didn't have a co-pilot. No worries. Art bought a mannequin, dressed it up as his co-pilot, and then, with the airplane's how-to manual sitting in his lap, took off in the plane and made a few laps around the airfield. He almost made it work, but as he was getting ready to bring the thing back down, he realized that one of the jobs of the co-pilot was to drop the landing gear. When he couldn't figure out how to do it alone, he had no choice but to crash-land the plane, taking out a second B-17 in the process.

Most people would give up there. Not Art. The guy who sold him the plane took pity and agreed to sell him another B-17, this time for only $1,500. To avoid a second disaster, Art hired some guys with experience flying B-17s to make sure the plane made it back in one piece. He didn't have money for gas at a fuel stop in Palm Springs, so he wrote a bad check that he covered after he returned home. From there the crew headed north. They had almost made it back to Oregon when the plane crossed paths with a snow storm that forced them down to an altitude of below 1,000 feet. To stay on track and with little to guide them, they chose to follow the bends of a railroad line. One of the guys sat in the glass bubble in the nose section of the plane and would shout out "Tunnel!" when he saw one, which let Art know to pull back on the stick to climb up and over the mountain into which they were about to crash.

The plane landed without a problem at an airport about 20 miles away from the gas station. That left one final hurdle: how to move a giant, World War II-era bomber across town. Even though Art lined up a series of trucks to do the job, he couldn't get the highway department to give him the needed permits. So he took matters into his own hands. He hired motorcycle escorts that normally worked funeral processions and then, in the middle of the night, sent them out in front of the trucks to guide them down the road. Somehow the cops missed the whole scene, so the convoy made it to Milwaukie without a problem, and the B-17 has been there ever since.

When I backtrack and find the thing I feel lucky, because it isn't going to be around much longer. The entire nose of the plane is gone and all four propellers have been taken off. The metal of the fuselage and wings is dull and weather-stained and birds live both inside the plane and out. If the moorings that hold the bomber up were to collapse and send it crashing to the ground, I don't think anyone would be surprised.

The gas pumps that used to sit below the bomber haven't been around for years. In their place, 50 yards farther on from the road, sits a restaurant called the Bomber. I figure that the owners of the place have poured a lot of time and money into the plane to keep it from rotting away entirely, so I head back and grab lunch. Inside the restaurant, the walls are decorated with dozens of B-17 photos. A bomb hangs in a window near the front door. The speakers play music so old that I picture the band playing it in black and white.

After I finish eating, I get back in the car and drive. And drive and drive for hours — through traffic, then rain, and finally darkness. It's better than a punch to the babymaker, but not by much.

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