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I am feeling oddly lethargic right now, alternately mesmerized by CNN's coverage of Haiti and the reading I am currently doing: the media's inaccurate coverage of the Middle East because it is so easily and willingly manipulated; mountain top removal in the Appalachians because generations of corporate power controls our perception of cheap energy and the lives of those who must submit to their will; women in the Middle East who are lucky to see grade school educations and the Battle of Fallujah which was simply all that is horrible about war.

My editor at Booklist is conspiring with my March column to beat me up, inside and out. That book on Nellie Bly from National Geographic can not arrive soon enough. (Although as she reported from inside an insane asylum I'm not expecting it to be a big happy read either.)

Sometimes the world is an impossible place, although this does all bring a cold dose of reality and reminder that one's own small grievances are not worth the pain we often grant them. In other words, yet again, I note that we should all grow up.

Presently, while not reading or reloading the CNN page, I am blending my two books on Alaska flying into one cohesive title. My agent and I think that perhaps this is the fresh new take on it that might finally push the book into the hands of an excited editor. It will roughly double its length and bring the strongest piece I've written to the opening chapter, which is a good thing. It will also create a blend of history, memoir and fiction. All the flying is true, all the history is true, everything about my father dying is true but I've taken stories from about a dozen guys and given them to seven and also all the conversations are not true as the events occurred so many years ago. That means the book is overall fiction (one drop of fiction makes it so) but still, it's a hybrid.

The first and last chapters are done. I've blended "We Flew Dead Bodies" (fictionalized) and "A Boy and A Gun" (100% true) into one chapter and now I'm blending three chapters on taking chances into one. I've also been slowly weaving the thread of Ben Eielson's story and Russ Merrill's through the whole book - both were iconic Alaskan bush pilots who died in 1929 and their lives and deaths mirror in many ways the actions of contemporary pilots. I wrote about them in both books, now I need to pull it altogether.

So here I sit, back in Alaska and flying. Again. I have to get this right though. I feel like if I don't the next book will that much tougher, that much more impossible. That much more intimidating. I just need to feel like I have made "Map of My Dead Pilots" as good as it can possibly be and reading over it now, I know that still that is not true. Nobody else has written this, nobody else has cared so much about this, and who knows if anyone else is even thinking about this.

But still thinking about all of this after so many years is daunting. Me and Eielson and Merrill. We just keep crashing, but we don't go away.

[Post pic from Flickr member Robert Catalano and available via Creative Commons. It was taken in the Moravian Cemetery in Staten Island.]

When I initially finished Map of My Dead Pilots it started with my life in Alaska and although it included mention of my father's death back in Florida and my trip home when he was dying, it mostly was about Alaska. That's because I thought the book should, well, mostly be about Alaska. (ha!) But my agent said readers would wonder how I got there, especially after discovering that I was from Florida. And then she said they would want to know a little bit more about me. Hearing this made me a bit ill at first because the whole point (to me) was to write about the pilots and not about me - to remove me as much as possible. But I also had to be a reliable narrator and without "knowing" me, I guess it would be difficult for the reader to trust me. So I wrote two chapters about life before AK.

They nearly killed me.

Here is an excerpt - the part about my parents' divorce which was the first significant thing to happen to me and my brother and changed everything - every single moment - that followed:

They got divorced before anyone else did; in 1977 when you might have cheated or drank or smoked dope, but divorce was truly radical. It made things complicated in ways none of us could have known back then, as none of us knew what divorce would do. My mother and father did not come from families that split up and so all of us, and everyone who loved us, flailed around in new uncharted territory after their marriage ended. The easiest thing was just to make a clean break, and so the two sides split right down the middle; my mother’s family never spoke to my father again, my father’s family never spoke to my mother. The only ones still walking the Berlin Wall that divided our world was my brother and I. We were consummate diplomats from the very beginning and over the years that followed, we got even better at it.

We had no choice, really; we were unlucky enough to love them both.

Out of necessity, we moved into a schedule of different parents at school events, of planning so they were never anywhere together; of figuring out who we wanted to see the big moments as they happened, and who we wanted to tell them about afterwards. We learned how to make up for lost moments, to pretend, to lie; to forget. Our family photo albums marked a split the summer I was eight years old; from then on there were pictures with my father and his visiting family or with my mother and hers. The same Disney backgrounds, the same rockets, the same beaches. But always someone missing who we weren’t allowed to talk about, always that frozen moment relived where we knew that everything was not going to be okay ever again.

I didn’t realize in 1977 that I would spend the next twenty years having those same separate conversations and half holidays; or that it would never get easier until my father died. And then that was a whole other kind of impossible difficulty which made everything that came before it seem like foolish pride. There wasn’t enough time then to take anything back, or fill in all the missing moments or ask all the questions children don’t know how to ask. There was just my brother and I, flanking his hospital bed and watching our father be stolen, slowly and painfully, away. Until the very end he knew us though, he knew the ones who had loved him so desperately.

And then it was only the two of us who had all those memories; only the two of us who could remember the details from half of our entire childhood.

I can't believe how long it took me to write just that bit. The two chapters were forever.

My childhood was not rough, not by a long shot. But it was sad sometimes and it was uncomfortable and it was and is difficult to explain. On my shelf I have a framed picture of my mother and father when they were dating and they are sitting on a beach in Spain, laughing at each other and the camera. They are happy.

Even now, so many years after all of it ended, I love that picture. And every time I look at it, I wish for something they never knew; I wish for happily ever after for all of us.

Some parts of you just never grow up.

There have been a few posts around the lit blogosphere in the past few days about the significance of story; that writing in itself is worth the time and effort and something that should be done regardless of hopes for publication. It is all about art I have been reading and I get that - we all get that but at the risk of sounding petulant I must confess that for me, it's not.

I'd like to be published.

I have been writing about Alaska aviation for eight years. At first it was academic articles spun from my thesis but by 2003 I was actively translating my experiences into fiction. The first book, the novel, was done in 2006 and the second, the memoir, was completed just this year. I have spent eight years on this subject and I know it. It is my life. It is, in terms of creatvity, damn near my everything.

It's pretty much all I've been doing for a very long time.

I honestly don't know if this is art anymore. I'm working on rewrites for the novel right now because it is weak (especially when compared to the memoir). But I look at those pages and I know that my memoir is sitting out there somewhere not getting read and I can't help but think that the novel will also sit unread on impressive desks at impressive publishing houses and I wonder what is the point.

The whole create for the sake of creating thing is just not working for me right now.

I am spending too much time on reviews, too much time thinking about interviews, too much time writing things that are not related in any way shape or form to the novel. But when I write these things I get a response - I get instant feedback. I accomplish something measurable and real. It's nice to write something that matters to other people. It's nice to know that I can still write something of quality - no matter how small a piece of writing it might be.

The book - the books, the recently started short story, the set aside YA urban fantasy - everything else is just art. And I'm having trouble justifying time for art when after so many years it shows no sign of being valued by anyone other than myself.

I know that should be enough - that I value it - but it isn't what I need anymore. I have written a lot, I have signed with a good agent at a good house, I have seen my polished memoir manuscript go out into the world and now, as winter sets in, I have nothing left to do but wait. I'm trying to think like an artist but it's hard; it's hard to think of anything but what has yet to be.

The waiting, they say, is the hardest. After the last few months I finally believe them.

I am working on two different writing projects now, the rewrite to the AK flying novel which is not daunting but rather exhausting - I have thought about and considered the stories in this book for so long that I almost feel like they are branded on my brain. Reading the book again now and actively working on it is hard to focus on sometimes. It is - for lack of a better word - work. The other project is a short story based on the crash of a famous Alaska bush pilot in 1943. I ended up leaving his death out of the memoir and novel and wanted to do something with it. If nothing else this is something brand new that is emotionally not close to me at all, so it is much more fun to write.

Thinking about these stories has made me dwell less on the memoir (which is still out on the editor rounds) but then last week, on my son's birthday, an old friend of ours - a very close, very dear friend called from AK. The 16th is a special day for him as well; it's the day he crashed and lived; it's also the last day he flew.

It's hard to explain sometimes how a good pilot can crash because unless you have an unrecoverable spontaneous catastrophic mechanical failure (and I've only known of one flight where that happened), then the accident always contains an element of pilot error which means the pilot screwed up. But he was a good pilot. Right up until the day he crashed he was one of the best. It is hard for me to believe that it has been seven years since he flew and his life since that day has not been what he hoped. Crashing derailed him for far more than a day and far beyond his career.

From The Map of My Dead Pilots:

My friend Adam was a good pilot. One day he was flying into Bethel on a routine cargo run and he crashed. He had this moment he said afterwards, a split second when he realized that the plane was bouncing off the tundra and he realized he was no longer flying but just along for the ride. “The weather had turned to shit,” he said, but it wasn’t really bad – it wasn’t the worst he’d ever seen. “I was bringing it down, shooting the approach just like I knew it and then that was it, I wasn’t flying anymore.”

“You crashed,” I said.

“I was crashing,” he corrected. It wasn’t until the plane stopped moving that he believed he wasn’t going to die. In that sudden stillness after so much chaos, he and his co-pilot sat there, stunned, both of them breathing like there wasn’t enough air left in the world. It was quiet he remembered later, but the noise in his head filled up everything, the noise in his head was enough sound to fill the world.

That moment when Adam realized he survived was the last good thing to happen in his life for a long time.

I think it was hardest for him now just to be the guy he is - the guy who crashed. He is one of those guys. Once he was past the accident part of it and all the responsibility and the first inkling of the impact on his career, then some guys would be okay. But not him - he was just too good of a pilot for that.

“I still don’t know how it happened,” he says. “I mean, I know I fucked up and it was my fault and I should have just gone around. But I didn’t think we were that close. I don’t know how we got there.”

He thinks about that a lot; how you can be flying one minute and hitting the ground the next; how a crash can surprise you. How you can be so wrong without knowing it.

“You know the worst part though – the real bitch of it?” he says. “Now I’m one of those guys that I always used to laugh at; another asshole who couldn’t keep his plane in the air.”

But he’s not; he’s never going to be one of those guys. And that makes it even harder. Because he knows he was better and he still crashed anyway. Even though he was the best on the line, he still destroyed a five million dollar airplane anyway.

And there was this part as well:

“Nobody was flying that airplane,” Adam told me. “I listened to the two of us on the CVR and we were shooting the shit like we were up at 15,000 feet and didn’t have a care in the world and there was nothing to do. I don’t get it – I was there, it’s my voice and I still don’t get it. If somebody told me they did this I wouldn’t understand how it could happen; it doesn’t make it any easier trying to figure that out just because it happened to me.”

That’s the question dead pilots never have to answer: how did this happen to me?

I have dissected this crash endlessly, poured over the accident report, analyzed every line, talked to him again and again and again. The reasons behind it are complicated and all of them pilot error. He was tired, he was distracted over a fight with his wife, his co-pilot followed his lead and didn't ask any questions and more than anything, he really just wanted that day to be done. And maybe he was so sure that he was so good that it didn't occur to him to take it easy, not to push it. Good pilots never think about taking it easy but then again, good pilots never have to.

“I was the best pilot at that company,” he told me and I believed him. And when he said he was still one of the best I believed that too. Crashing didn’t make Adam a bad pilot; it was just learning to live with knowing he crashed that was so damn hard. Everybody has a fight sometimes; everybody gets tired; everybody tries too long to be a company man. But what you can get away with on the ground and in the air are two different things – they’re worlds apart and that’s the biggest part of what makes flying so hard. There’s no room for all those little human faults up there, not when the weather can go to shit so quickly, not when you and the co-pilot aren’t talking enough about flying, not when neither one of you can see the ground. There’s only room for doing the right thing on final approach in a snow shower with a gusting crosswind; there’s only room for knowing that you have to do the right thing.

“I don’t know how it happened,” he said. “How could I do that? How could I crash?”

“Would it matter?” I asked. “If you could explain it, would it matter?”

“It would be something,” he said, looking around at what he has left now, seeing all that was gone. He works in a cubicle in a place where no one understands what it means to be captain of your own aircraft; what it means to be pilot-in-command. “At least if I knew, when I thought about it there would be something to make it clear.”

“If I knew what to remember, there would be something I could forget.”

I wish I could help him because he’s my friend and because he was one of the best once, and he deserves better than this; he deserves better than being only the final moment in his career.

You can't imagine what it is like to go from being the senior line pilot, the best on the job, and then just another guy who crashed. What's most interesting is that the physical crash is really only part of it - there are all the other crashes that follow that are the real surprises. Those are the ones that really get you; the ones that keep you down, the ones that make you realize how much you left behind.

The ones that make a conversation even seven years later hard to take and yet you make the phone call anyway; you still find yourself talking about again.

...the full draft of Map of My Dead Pilots is off to my agent.

If I do not think of pilots or Alaska for the next week it will be like a gift from God. (Not that there's anything wrong with either but still....one does need to enjoy the Pacific NW summer for at least a few days. :)

I didn't realize until recently just why I wrote my thesis. Lots of people run into problems in grad school - life problems - that delay their thesis. Several of the people I was in class with had been working on theirs for years. (I can't help but think it was more of a hobby than anything else at that point.) I planned to write mine because it was a requirement to graduate but I've come to understand that in 1999, the thesis was really about much more.

From The Map of My Dead Pilots:

By the end of the month I was back in Fairbanks. By then I'd been gone for a couple of months and was way behind on my graduate thesis. It's been so long now that I can be honest - I was set to graduate in December, the first draft was due in September and I had not written a word, not one single word. All those books I brought with me to Florida, the copies from old newspapers and magazines, had never even left my backpack. I had the chance to postpone my due date, the graduation, everything. But I was afraid that if I didn't write it then I might never write it; I might not care enough about it to even try anymore. I might not care enough about anything.

You think you are thirty and that means you can handle the loss of a parent; that you’re prepared for it better because you are out of the house and far from home. But I was five years old again that summer, it didn’t take pictures to make me remember; it didn’t take anything. I didn’t want anything to make me remember. I just laid on the couch and saw him again as he was so long ago; as we were so long ago. And I tried to see it perfectly, to keep it all close. What did he say about hockey, about how the boys used to come down from Canada as ringers on the local teams; playing undercover, yelling to each other in French, all of them pretending like they knew each other forever and winning for the home team which was still more like Canada than Rhode Island for all of them who missed what they left behind.

Or catch a wave. He said you had to see it coming, you had to hang out there at the breaker line and choose the wave and start ahead of it, get ahead before it rises up to carry you away. You couldn’t wait for it or it would pass you by. Choose your wave he taught us and I was five years old and riding on his back and I listened and I learned.

You crack an egg on a bowl so you can catch any pieces of shell; do the crossword puzzle one square at a time, left to right, take your time; never be without a good book, never let a day go by without reading.

In all the years since the end of my parents marriage we had never strayed from our commitment to each of them; both of them. Separately they lived their lives but together we continued to be their children; we continued to love them. There was no replacing our father; there was no relief from losing him. I taped his library card to my wall; my brother put his last pouch of pipe tobacco in his truck. We watched the Red Sox play and we mourned him. Neither one of us could bear to go back to his beach.

If I said it all over and over again then I would never forget anything; I would never lose his voice beside me, his hand reaching out for mine. I would never lose who he was no matter how long he was gone; no matter how many days went by. I sat on the couch and I tried to remember and that was all I could bring myself to do. They told me I didn’t have to turn in my thesis; I knew that more than anything, yes I did.

It's odd because you know you're parents will die and of anyone I should have been readier for death than most - already several of my friends had died suddenly in crashes. I wasn't expecting anybody I loved to live forever. But still. You just don't know how sad you can be until you lose someone who helped craft your heart. I remember lying in bed for a month and it wasn't until I realized that the thesis had to be written fast if I wanted to graduate that I finally got up and got out (meaning I was up for reasons other than mere survival). The oddest thing is that my brother and I told each other all this time that we were okay - not good, but okay. You'd think we knew each other good enough to have guessed we were lying (and we do know each better than just about anyone) but maybe we just didn't have the strength to save each other at that point. We only had it in us to save ourselves.

And eventually we did. But I don't know what I would have done without my thesis; without all those pilots to talk to I don't know if I ever would have gotten off that couch.

The bulk of my manuscript for The Map of My Dead Pilots is with my agent these days - she's giving it a read and preparing it to make the publishing rounds. I know there are a few gaps still in the narrative though, so I'm working on four different chapters on a variety of subjects one of which is the Summer of 1999.

On June 5th 1999 my father died. It had been a long hard death of fighting cancer every blessed step of the way and the pain he was in, even with all the morphine, was unbearable to watch. The week after he died my brother and I were killing ourselves to get through as much of his house as we could, to prepare for the funeral that we were entirely responsible for, and to somehow cope with the reality of our new lives without him. Who says you get time to grieve after death? We had no time for anything. We just had all we had to do and all we were never going to get done.

Less than a week after my father died I got a phone call and learned that a Company pilot had crashed into the Yukon River. He was a good guy, and I don't say that lightly. This was one of those guys that everyone just liked. He did the job, had a family, had plans for an aviation career. He was careful and kind and a friend to everyone. And for reasons that even now have never been completely explained, he put his plane down into the Yukon and he died. He had a mechanical failure, he couldn't keep it in the air, he crashed. We had never lost a plane at the Company so completely; we had never had a fatality accident. And this was a really good guy.

And so my summer continued.

I went back home to Fairbanks just over a week later - I'd been gone for a couple of months at that point and was way behind on my graduate thesis. It's been so long now that I can be honest - I was set to graduate in December, the first draft was due in September and I had not written a word, not one single word. My committee was very kind and offered to push back the due date, the graduation, everything. But I was afraid that if I didn't write it then I might never write it (something I still believe is true). So I pushed on and that summer I interviewed 100 pilots as the final part of my research. One night in July a bunch of us were out a restaurant, hanging out in the big open bar, talking airplanes. I was interviewing all the pilots I could find there, still working on getting my 100 when I met a pilot who was in town visiting some friends. I didn't know her. I explained the thesis, we all talked about the questions for the interview and then she mentioned a company she used to work for in the Northwest coast. I told her a friend of mine had worked for them there in 1995 but he crashed. And then she put her beer down and said "You knew him". And I said the same thing. She was there when my friend crashed, my college friend who crashed into the side of a mountain, and immediately she started talking about how crazy it was, how it made no sense, how the whole thing was such a huge waste.

And I kept thinking you were there, you were there, you were there. This friend crashed into the side of a mountain on a clear sunny day; trapped in a box canyon that he could not climb out of. And she said sometimes these things just happen and you have to let them go and all I could think was why did this have to come back now, this summer. Why do I have to think about him and how his accident didn't just happen, how it was so preventable, so beyond ordinary, so unbelievably wrong.

The summer of 1999; it was just one wrong death after another.

The pilots I interviewed those couple of months told me the flying was hard or scary or insane. Or they told me it was easy and overrated and nothing exciting. They said their bosses made them fly while the guys sitting next to them said they begged to fly. They were each and everyone of them brutally honest and flagrantly lying. It was the most revealing and disappointing and frustrating experiment I have been part of, interviewing those pilots. I never found out what makes them do the things they do; I only learned that there are dozens of them willing to do it; there are pilots who will fly and die because that is what the job makes them do; that is what happens in the kind of place where we lived.

But none of this helped me live without my father.

I've been writing about that summer, about the irony of discovering someone who brought me back to the 1995 accident at the same time that so many of my friends were struggling with the more recent 1999 tragedy in the Yukon. I knew I would write about my father's death too because it was so recent that summer that it influenced everything I did and wrote then. But I didn't know that it would affect me still so much today; that what I write nine years later would still be more about him than anything else. And then I realized that it was that length of time that was causing it - that nine years was what was tripping me up.

Could it really be nine years already?

The truth is that when I write about my father's death, when I think back to the conversations while he was dying, it is never going to be nine or ten or twenty years ago. It will forever be just five minutes that have passed in my life since he was gone. And so the summer of 1999 is forever frozen there with me, sitting beside me, in all of my present and future.

And so the dead pilots are with me too, all of us together in the summer that will never fade away.

AUUUGGGHH!

He's not in a suit. He's not in a tie. He's not dapper in the least.

It's Lemony Snicket and he's all.... tracksuitty.

I need to go lie down. I can't deal with this today.