I'm finally feeling like I have my head back on straight after my vacation. Two weeks doesn't seem like that long but things do have a habit of piling up, and there has been paper from one end of my dining room table to the other since we got back. Now I just have my "cool reads" for May to write up tomorrow (the two Sy Montgomery nature titles) and I will be back ahead of things. (June's column is already almost completely written and July's is half read.) Still a few things I want to mention here from various magazines and catalogs but that will wait for next week and make for some fun reading (hopefully) for all of you.

I have a phone call into my agent just to touch base and see how things are looking. I was feeling depressed a bit about the whole publishing thing the other day until I got an email from a writer friend letting me know about a friend of hers who waited for THREE years for her agent to sell her book. This wouldn't be such a big deal to me except I am reading that exact book right now (my friend did not know this) and I love it and it will be in my July column. So there you go, perspective was yet again obtained on the writing front.

I did write an unexpected additional chapter in the AK flying novel in the past two weeks. (Just an aside on that book - I have come up with a title that I finally like: "Geographies of Northern Flight". I realize that my working title is relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things but I have loathed "Flying Cold" from the very beginning and wanted to come up with something that I could live with and worked for this book while linking it a bit to "Map of My Dead Pilots". This has the same cartography type angle and more importantly illustrates the physical and inner geography of the pilots that the narrative explores. It might change - you all might hate it - but lordy, am I happy to have it.)

So, anyway. I have been just working on the end which is basically a look at wilderness and the conflict between the idea of that and the reality of wanting to get your butt saved from the boonies when something goes wrong and also how so many Alaskans hated the whole "Into the Wild" ideal. That's the NF way it is written but it's also about the guys in the book and what they thought about wilderness and a class presentation I made with some of the pilots in grad school and how all of this pretty much converged on that spot. In the midst of working on that (which has involved a bit of stopping and starting to remind myself of what some other folks have written) I remembered, out of the blue, an accident from 1990. It was two years before I got in AK and three years before the Company for me. The only reason I knew about it was that the survivors always flew on us afterward so I used to see them and I knew their friends and family, of course. My husband was also downriver when that flight launched (out of Galena for Kaltag for folks who know this sort of thing) and the accident pilot was the only one who flew that day. The ceiling was so low (he claimed it was 500 feet) that he actually put a wing into the Yukon River. He claimed afterward that he had engine trouble and dipped it in the river because of that but the engines never showed any mechanical problem and really - everyone knew he was lying. You couldn't see the damn river and that was a fact. The plane bounced, he tried to turn around, he went into the trees and it burned. A young man on board died and so did the father of the children on board. His wife got out, he helped get their daughters out and then went back for their baby son who was lost inside. They both died. We flew the widow and children in the years that followed. My husband was one of only two pilots at the Company that they would fly with.

He never knew why they picked him; we figure because he was so well known downriver (he lived in Galena for a while working for another company) that he must have been someone they felt they could trust. Mostly I think everyone down there knew he wasn't planning to die for anybody, least of all the people he worked for. (He got that newbie shit out of the way earlier.) And so for the four years I worked at the Company we flew them, always on clear days, always back to the same place, always over the same stretch of river.

They were the only people I ever knew who survived a catastrophic crash and they were scarred - one little girl terribly so. I still remember their last name (their mother's full name in fact) and I can see them in my mind right now. I've wondered lately if I kept that story in my head because I thought I might want it one day - might want to reconsider it all again from a clearer distance. And I wonder a little bit if it is right to do that because this is their story (as vague as I make it in the book - no dates, no names, etc.) and should a writer take that away from someone? Take a moment like that and remember it from your perspective? Not the facts of the crash but the realization that the crash lives on. Maybe it's not right.

The girls would all be in their 20s now. I wonder how much of the story they still keep with them and if I'm treading on ghosts to go there one more time.

Years later there are many things about the Company I have forgotten; that happens with any job, with any place once you’ve moved on. There were so many passengers, so many pilots, so many stories. But the little girl I can see still out of the corner of my eye, as she was that first time, only nine or ten years old, still living that crash because she had to, because her face wouldn’t let her move on.

Do all writers think that way?