Who Came Up with This One?
“Better Lucky Than Good” Story
Feeling like my luck was running out in the melee of SoCal, I took a break from the club and moved to Alaska. I started all over with nothing. My first wife Laurel accompanied me, and we began a new life, hoping I could stay out of jail.
Eventually we found a one room cabin to rent. There was no running water, but it had an outhouse. It had electricity and a wood burning stove. We made do. My plan was to get a good paying job on the pipeline, but it never happened. As a dental assistant she made more money than I did. I worked at one construction job after another. That was tough in the winter.
Our first home in Alaska. A borrowed tent.
We struggled for years until eventually she left. Now, on my own again, I was free to chase my dreams.
When I was learning to fly in Alaska, I had already lived a perilous life. First riding with an outlaw motorcycle club in California. After moving to the Last Frontier, I would go into the wilderness on hunting trips, often alone. I probably didn’t realize how risky flying up there could be. At least no worse than my previous life. Maybe I had no idea what normal was.
The Last Frontier
As a new pilot I flew over countless miles of mountains, muskeg forests and tundra, by myself in a small two-seat taildragger. The plane, made in 1946, had no navigation radios and there was no civilization in any direction for hours at a time. An emergency landing out there, if you survived, could turn into an ordeal to say the least. I always carried a sleeping bag and a shotgun, just in case.
My friend Ross Nixon is a very experienced Alaska pilot. His book, Finding Carla, painfully documents what can happen if you aren’t found soon enough. It’s a great book but if I’d read it years ago, I probably would have stayed home.
One of my reasons for leaving Alaska. This seemed to go on for six months.
As a biker, I basically had no future. Now I wanted to be a bush pilot, future be damned. When it came to risk I thought, isn’t this what you do? I was under no illusion that it would be safe. I think I confused danger with adventure.
Then there was the solo journey through the wilds of British Columbia where I was lucky to survive. Hence the name of the book.
I was naive, inexperienced, and too bold for my own good.
Years later after becoming a commercial pilot and swapping flying stories in the cockpit on long flights, other pilots said, “Man, you’ve got to write a book.”
After writing Hangmen, Riding with an Outlaw Motorcycle Club in the Old Days, many readers wanted to know, “How the heck did you go from being an outlaw biker to an airline pilot?”
So, I decided I had to keep writing to finish the story.
Unlike writing Hangmen where I had only newspaper clipping to help me remember dates, my old logbook was very helpful to remember details such as routes, places where I landed and flight times. Reading it brought back the anxiety and the sweat and sometimes the fear.
Somewhere in the Yukon Territory on the flight to California
Reliving those adventures while writing the book was a fun time. Partly because now, I didn’t have to worry about dying. It is a lot different looking back on a story than living it.
The book Hangmen covered seven intense years of my life. Better Lucky Than Good was five. Next month I will explain the making of The Lucky One, which covers six years. My current book will be quite a bit longer. I hope you’ll stick with me till the end of the story. There are a lot more adventures and mishaps to come.
Will I succeed, or will I fail?