Monday, January 7, 2019

Flying the Seward Peninsula


Round and round and round she goes! Where she'd stop, we didn't know. I was the co-pilot on this flight where we crashed on take-off from Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island. I had eight of my eighth graders with me. Long story, and there was luggage flying all over as we spun down the runway. The kids were crying, but none of us were hurt. Vic Olsen, our pilot, thanked me for not grabbing for the wheel. "What would I have done with it?" He said he'd had to cold cock people for that in the past. I was too busy digging my toes into the floor to think about grabbing the wheel. (No, I am not a nervous flyer. I've flown and crashed with some of the best of them.)

My friend Kitty Delorey Fleischman posted this and the picture on facebook today.

My comment was, "I've never had an uneventful flight on the Seward Peninsula, which is the general area she's writing about.

So, I thought I would relate the story of a flight I took there. It was during the 1981 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. I had paid to join a flight along the whole race with a TV reporter and cameraman. This was in another small airplane, a Cessna 206 as I recall. With the racers heading toward the finish we had landed at Elim on the south coast of the peninsula for an hour or so before heading west toward Nome. As we progressed, the weather began to deteriorate until we flew into not quite a white-out, but a pretty thick gray-out. Darrell, the pilot, had never flown along the peninsula before so he handed a chart to the reporter who was sitting in the co-pilot seat. We had to pass three major geographic promontories along the way named Topkok, Bluff and Cape Nome. We passed over the village of Solomon and the reporter identified it. I added the quip, well it's Solomon or Savoonga, which as Kitty noted is on an island quite a way to the west in the Bering Sea.
Summers in those days I earned my living as a boat captain so I had a fair knowledge of navigation and I was the only one in the airplane who had ever flown along this coast before, so I kept a close watch and listen to what was going on in the pilot seats. I am not going to name him because this reporter went on to do several nationwide reports on a major network and there's no sense embarrassing him. He got one land mark ahead of himself. I thought he had named the first one too soon but held my tongue as we proceeded into the gray. But as we passed the second one, he told the pilot that was Cape Nome. An airplane flying to Nome on a westward course rounds the cape and then turns northwest toward the town.
Darrell started to make that turn and I couldn't stand it any more. I tapped him on the shoulder and when he pulled his headphone back I said as calmly as I could, "Darrell, we have not passed Cape Nome yet." He reacted the way you hear pilots react to an order from an airport controller. He immediately banked to the left and flew farther out over the water. The minute he righted the airplane again Cape Nome came into view. We had been within a mile or two of the huge rocky bluff and heading straight for it.
Once past the cape we turned toward Nome and landed without further event. As we descended from the airplane Darrell and I stared at each other for the briefest instant and said it all with our eyes and raised brows without a word. We both knew we came damned close and nothing more had to be said.

 Another one: I am thankful we survived this flight
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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”―Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

I realized today how many of my stories start out "years ago." What's next? Once upon a time?"

“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

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Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

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Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

Sports malaprops

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"… there's a fearlessment about him …"

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This is why you get to hate sportscasters. Kansas beats Texas for the first time since 1938. So the pundits open their segment with the question "let's talk about what went wrong." Wrong? Kansas WON a football game! That's what went RIGHT!

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A good one: A 5'10" player went up and caught a pass off a defensive back over six feet tall. The quote? "He's got some hops."

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