Of all things I now find myself trying to track down the weather at Boeing Field (Seattle) in early January 1943. I'm interested in seeing whether or not it was good judgment on the part of a pilot who departed there for AK that day - the flight ended in a crash with the pilot and one passenger killed. He was rather famous in AK aviation history so the issue of what he should or should not have done in terms of departing SEA at all is significant - but it seems that no one has ever really answered that question. I had no luck at Boeing Field itself so now I'm dealing with the US Weather Bureau. What's funny is I was in a similar boat when writing my thesis concerning weather in November 1929 outside Nome. Ben Eielson took off from that region in dicey weather and crashed in Siberia killing himself and his mechanic. I thought I would be so out of luck finding that weather (Nome weather in 1929?? I mean come on!) but I plugged away and I kid you not - it was stored in the original handwritten ledgers in one of the buildings on the UAF campus. Less than a mile from my house.

Totally surreal.

I went up to the Geophysical Institute, checked my backpack in at the small library there and sat in the librarian's office while she handed me the ledgers for 1929. I really think she thought I was lying when I told her why I needed to go through them. As it turns out the weather was just as bad in that area as other pilots had suggested and Eielson made a bad decision (probably one he had made dozens of times before and survived, so I understand why he did it). The coolest thing though was actually touching that handwriting and knowing that the man who wrote it was there for the huge rescue operation that followed. (Eielson actually flew out of Teller, a tiny village not so far from Nome, but Nome was the closest weather reporting station.) I was literally touching the history I was writing about.

I'm hoping I get some kind of similar satisfaction (or at least the info I'm looking for) this time around.

My memoir doesn't have a lot of history but I do meander back to the original bush pilots from time to time because it was the standards they set which the entire aviation environment up there is based on. No one compares anyone to Eielson or the rest of them, but still - everyone expects certain things because it has always been that way. It's kind of crazy when I see how much aviation has changed in the Lower 48 since the 1920s, but change comes slow to certain parts of the earth and Alaska is definitely one of those places. (And that's not always such a bad thing either.)

I have aviation on the brain lately.

I look at my manuscript as it exists thus far (freshly printed out so I can make sure I don't repeat myself and that kind of thing) and I just don't know if I'm doing something really great or something so out there - so different - so flat out weird - that it might all be for nothing. The first book got me to this book and the first book is still alive but this second book is the one everyone (meaning publishers) wants first. They want to see nonfiction on this subject before they will consider adding fiction. I must prove myself with my genuine memories as you - the reading public - apparently want those truths more than anything else. But I've had to write about so many crashes and tough conversations (and my father again - always I end up writing about losing my father) and the other day it was the finishing touches on a chapter about two boys who blew themselves away with shotguns. Two teenage boys, one I knew, one I knew only through the body bag we brought him back in. One was about 14, the other 16 - maybe. And I just get angry all over about the stupid wanton waste of life that I saw so much.

My friends have all moved on and I'm still in it. They don't remember these names anymore - they have new names in their lives. And I wonder if anyone needs to know these stories - needs to know what I saw ten years ago.

Behind the cut a bit of the job I hated, and I'm still trying to understand. I promise not to dwell on this too much here, but sometimes I just need to believe all over again that there is a place for what I know in the world.

This would be that place.............

The first few times we brought in dead boys I thought it was awful. When they came in after hanging or shooting or stabbing themselves or each other I thought we should find out what happened; we should help them; we should save them. I thought we could. The worst thing about working at the Company was that it made me understand that there are bigger things to dying then just one person caring. If I couldn’t convince a married guy with two kids that flying into solid clouds over the mountains on the chance of finding an opening along the way was a death wish then how could a white girl from Florida hope to convince some Native kid from the bush that he should just walk it off and plan for a better tomorrow? We weren’t living in the same place or even the same century when they pulled those triggers. They were dying over something that happened two hundred years ago to a hunter they read about in a history book. They were dying from the past; it just took them into the present before they could finally do it.

That’s how Johnny and the other dead boys got to fly away.