Alaska Confidential: Getting in a Plane Crash
Not a big deal. Just a puddle jumper crashlanding
I was nearing kindergarten when my dad chartered a small airplane to take us out to the remote Quartz Lake, ninety miles away, where we stayed in a cabin for two nights, got a little boat with an outboard motor, and spent many hours fishing.
I am not sure why we went, though. We didn't spend a lot of time together because he was working very long hours at driving a truck, so maybe that was his reason or maybe he had some other business out there.
The lake was stocked, meaning the Department of Fish and Game dropped fish into it which would breed and provide an unnatural abundance. I often found fishing to be boring since the Fairbanks area normally isn’t teeming with fish, but we would soon be catching salmon at a rate far exceeding most natural circumstances, basically an enhanced videogame of nature.
We drove out to get onto the chartered plane, in a neighborhood not far from where we lived in North Pole, Alaska. Planes landed directly on the wide streets there and were parked at homes just like a car would pull into any driveway.
The pilot seemed a bit off, but so do a lot of bush pilots, hitmen, bookmakers, and others on the fringes of society. He didn't appear overtly crazy, just a little batty, having told a joke in front of a six-year-old where the punchline was a little more than I could process. This oddball wore a cowboy hat, a mustache and a vest. The typical look that conveys “I have always been single.”
This was my first time in an airplane, and I remember being fascinated with the entire process and leaning out the window as we took off, gliding over the tree line, and eventually looking out over the arteries and veins of the Tanana River in its golden-hued bed, the vastness of it too much for my little head to comprehend. We landed without incident and checked into our cabin.
On the flight back my dad seemed to be in good spirits. I don't know what the limit on fish was, but we had two enormous coolers of salmon, which the next day we would string up over a fire and smoke and put into mason jars to store for the winter.
As the flight home touched down in the pilot's cul-de-sac, I felt a jerking and tearing sound in my neck, followed by a loud screeching and scraping noise as we skidded across the gravel runway, sparks flaring up from the belly of the plane. It felt much different from the first landing, and during these few seconds I looked at my dad, who was totally still and looking straight ahead expressionless, as if he was expecting to die any minute now.
We slid across the unpaved glorified runway over the sound of nails on a chalkboard and finally stopped, plopped in the middle of the street. I looked down and the belly of the plane was misshapen below my feet and there was a hole the size of a football burned into it, and past my feet I saw gravel through the jagged metal.
"I can't believe it," the pilot finally said after much silence, "I forgot to put the landing gear down."
Next, he said something that to this day makes me believe he was a full-on dingbat, "I've got to get my plane into the yard before someone calls the papers."
No apology or anything. But call the papers? What papers? This wasn’t prohibition-era Chicago. The one Fairbanks newspaper, an hour away, didn’t seem to even employ reporters. They published AP articles about Thanksgiving recipes, and the police blotter and obituaries, of which my mom would peruse and say to my dad impassively, “Do you remember Dale Johnson? Dead.” Then she’d sip her coffee.
It seemed entirely delusional to me, even at this tender age, that anyone would be showing up in a trench coat with a steno pad. It seemed more appropriate, even at the time, that he should be worried about the police.
He went and got an old beat-up Subaru station wagon and began trying to secure a rope to the tail of the plane, which was no doubt his entire livelihood. My dad said we had to leave and for some reason paid the guy. He must have just felt bad for him or else been in shock.
As we headed to my dad's truck, the pilot, perhaps for the first time in his life sensing the concept of his reputation, and much like the plane, a damaged one, finally acknowledged that he had almost killed us.
"Hey, I'm real sorry about this. Just embarrassed. I can't believe I forgot to put the damn landing gear down, tell you what, next trip, on me, free of charge." Then he spun his wheels out trying to tow an airplane plane across the raw ground like a jackass as we pulled away.
My dad later recounted the ridiculousness of this scenario to a few of his friends, squinting while he repeated the pilot. "So the guy says, next time's on me! Can you believe that?" which I found funny and still do, but we never talked about the crash.
In the years that followed, my dad developed an aversion to flying, always visibly antsy on the commercial flights. Later in life it appeared to get worse, and he would drink when we flew, both an extremely rare occurrence. In fact, it got so bad that he bought a boat and sailed himself from California to Hawaii once and it was widely expected he was simply avoiding the trans-Pacific airline flight.
He attributed his discomfort of flying to the typical annoying long lines, invasive and pointless search procedures, corporate buyouts which led to much downsizing, but he never once mentioned the plane crash as a possible contributing factor.
Strangely, I'm the same way. I'm not a good flyer, I am frequently antsy and nervous, but I'm not afraid of the plane going down. I know statistically that’s not very likely. I realized many years later that here could deeper reason behind my discomfort. Like that one time I was in a plane crash.
It's strange that my dad didn't seem to hold anything against the pilot.
Maybe he understood the guy clearly didn't do it on purpose. What would be the use in chastising him? Maybe he was embarrassed because he'd almost gotten us both killed, probably by booking a pilot who was thirty dollars cheaper than another.
I always wanted to ask him how much he saved on that flight booking as a joke but I never did. He was too proud and was doing the best he could. After all, we caught a lot of fish, so apart from the plane crash at the end crash, the trip was overall a success.
Quartz Lake full of salmon??