I have had some experience with the saying that there are old bush pilots and careless bush pilots, but no old, careless bush pilots.

Mostly, the bush pilots I flew with were in Maine, both warden pilots and men who had planes that they kept as part of a camp they ran. They were almost always precise men, although when they took a chance, they knew what they were doing. For instance, one of them told me that when he was trying to fly home in bad weather, he came home on the Iron Beam.

The Iron Beam meant this: he found a rail road track he knew, and then he would fly about twenty feet above it.

“But,” he said. “You’ve got to know your lines. There can’t be any tunnels on it.” He smiled here. “And you have to stay to the right, in case someone else is doing the same thing coming from the other direction.”

The difficulty in being a bush pilot, or one of them any way (aside from those times when the clouds were in the trees), was that the water they landed on was never the same. One time, a pond would be perfectly still. Not a thing on it. The next time a tree would have fallen into it and would be out there in the middle, barely submerged. Hard to see, but sticking out of the water just enough to cause what can only be called real trouble.

I made friends with one of these pilots, a man by the name of Jack McPhee, and we went fishing in one of the ponds that he had found when he was flying for the state of Maine. When he was done with his flying for the state, he flew over the pond, which was too small for a landing, and dropped in a canoe. Then, when we came back to go fishing, Jack landed in a pond about a two mile walk away. And when we got there, we found the canoe. I have never caught such brook trout.

Jack had an air of calmness and precision, which wasn’t only a matter of the way he flew, but in everything he did. I stayed in a cabin he had on a pond in Maine, and when I went out to cut some wood for the stove I realized that the edge of the axe Jack had left was so sharp as to look like a piece of Christmas tinsel.

One time I asked him about trouble he had been in and if he had ever been in a plane where there was a fire, and I will never forget the precision and the certainty, the readiness to face real trouble when he looked at me and said, “An on-board fire is a major emergency.”

Jack had a job tracking bears that had radio collars, and I went with him once, and he used to love to find them, to fly in a large circle over where he knew they were, absolutely delighted to find another one was still alive. There was a disadvantage to flying with him for this job because every now and then one of the bears would vanish.

I like to think of Jack as we flew to his camp at dusk. The land was dark, but it looked as though here and there large, circular mirrors had been left, and these, of course, were the ponds. Jack used to cut the engine and drift up to the dock in front of his house, and he did this with the same gentleness you see in a sculler, who drifts his boat up to a dock.

Another pilot used to fly supplies into summer camps, and he told me that the worst thing to fly was a bed spring, tied to one of the plane’s pontoons. “Made turbulence like you wouldn’t believe.”

Yet another pilot told me a story about his service on a grand jury, which was trying to decide whether or not to indict a woman for murder. The woman was married to a man who worked in the woods and who came home every night, drank a half case of beer, and then beat his wife. Finally, she took his deer rifle and shot him.

During the deliberations, the pilot went into the men’s room. Another grand juror came in and stood next to him at the facilities. And, in that companionable way that men discuss things in these circumstances, the juror said to the pilot, “What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know,” said the pilot.

“Let’s let her go,” said the juror. “Maybe she’ll kill another one of these bastards. ”

This, of course, is what they did.

This same pilot had had to put his plane into the trees once, in a crash landing. When I looked surprised, he said, “O, it’s not hard to put a plane into the trees. Not if you know what you’re doing.”

He explained that the way to do it is to put the plane into a stall, just above the trees, and this way, the plane slides down the tree trunks, tail first. “All you have to do,” he said. “Is put your forearm in front of your eyes.”

Well, I never had to do anything like that when I was flying with these pilots, but I can say that I never felt safer or had more fun in an airplane. Every now and then we’d be flying along and one of the pilots would say, pointing down, “You see that pond? Brook trout as long as your arm. Not to your elbow. I mean to your shoulder.” And he wasn’t kidding, either.

Photograph taken by Russell Kaye.

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