Bill Bruce on Forest Patrol

by Henry Harley Arnold

The wagon train in actuality was another low-hanging cloud, and Bill had plunged his plane into it before he came back to the present from the past. He dropped down as low as he dared in an endeavor to see the ground beneath, but the mist must have been right on the ground. Then he emerged from the cloud as suddenly as he had entered it. Below them was a small village called Lookout. They were getting fairly well up into the mountains.

He reached Oakridge, the last town along the road. Beyond the town, the valley turned and twisted with almost unbelievable abruptness. Bill had to keep a sharp watch ahead to prevent the plane colliding with the hills along the valley. He followed its broad sweep to the south. Soon he would reach the place where he had planned to leave the Willamette Valley and cut across the mountains to the Umpqua Valley on the side.

The clouds seemed to remain at about the same altitude above the trees, in spite of the general rise in the ground. He reached the entrance to Staley Creek Canyon and hesitated before entering it, for it looked impossible. He made a circle and then started up the canyon. The plane had gone but a short distance up the Staley Creek Valley before they ran into a terrific rain storm. They could not see sufficiently far ahead to insure their safety. Bill turned back and started down the Willamette again.

Once again he found his path barred. The river valley was completely closed ahead of them by a mist that lay right on the ground. Bill knew that the valley had so many sharp turns that it would be folly to try and fly blindly through that mist. He was in a pocket with no chance of getting out. In the meantime there was the added danger of the rain storm driving down into the area in which he was flying.

Bill searched the terrain and saw another canyon leading to the south. He turned his plane into that and found that it was much narrower than any of the others that he had flown through. The fog seemed to hang higher. Perhaps he might get through. The air became much rougher and with the rough air came a slight rain. Bill flew through the rain and found that the floor of the valley was gradually getting closer to the plane. He could not climb any higher, as the clouds were just above his top wing. In fact at times he flew through the lower patches of mist.

Finally he reached a point where he was missing the tree tops by inches and, before he knew it, the ground had started dropping from beneath the plane. They had reached one of the small creeks which empty into the Umpqua. Bill did not even realize it at the time, for he was busy fighting the bumps in an endeavor to keep his plane from striking the mountain sides. Then all of a sudden it seemed as if the flood gates of the heavens had opened on them, and, to make matters worse, the lightning flashed and blazed all around the plane.

Bill hoped that they would escape being hit by lightning. He had never heard of a plane being hit by lightning and did not want to be an interested party in the first of such cases on record.

The rain fogged his goggles so that he could not see. He wiped the water off with his gloves, but was compelled to use one hand continuously for that purpose in order to see at all. At best he could see only a few feet from the plane. There was no place to land anywhere in sight. In fact, he had not seen a place where even a crash landing could have been made for the past forty minutes. His safety and that of Earl Simmons in the rear cockpit was dependent upon his getting through into the open.

The ground was surely dropping beneath them and Bill was certain that they had now crossed the divide. A steep ridge projected abruptly into the valley. Bill had but a few seconds to make up his mind which way to turn to avoid it. If he turned one way, he would run into the main mountain. If he turned the other, he would come out into the clear. He swung the plane around to the right and hoped for the best.

Then he saw that he had taken the right route, for the valley opened up with another creek coming in to join the one they had been following. For several minutes Bill was busy banking the plane in one direction or another to miss the tree-covered sides of the ravine through which they were flying. The rain continued to fall in torrents. There was one consolation: the forest fires would surely be quenched by this downpour. That thought was consoling, but it did not help Bill in his present situation. He did not know how much longer he could continue to see the ridges ahead sufficiently far to miss them with the plane. He hoped that the rain would cease, the clouds would raise or an open space large enough to land the plan would make its appearance while he still had control of the plane.