Category: Uncategorized

I got a call from my father a few weeks ago and he told me that Drew, the son of some good friends of theirs, had finally retired from the Air Force and wanted me to give him a call when I had a chance.  I was intrigued because of all my parents friends children that became pilots, 5 or 6 of us by last count, a surprisingly big number, Drew was the only on the get into fighters.  And Drew didn’t just fly any fighter, he flew what I would’ve chosen to fly if given the choice, the A-10 Warthog.  I gave Drew a call and he told me that he was now  living back in Minneapolis, flying for Delta, and bored out of his mind.  I can see that.  After twenty years in the Air Force, living all over the world and flying A-10 during a period that the Warthog REALLY came in handy, I imagine getting plunked back down in the suburbs and driving a bus was a bit of a shock.  Drew told me that he had an 18 year old son that he wanted to spend more time with and two of the things they wanted to start doing together were skydiving and flying and was there any way I could help them?  Skydiving and flying, yep, I can help with that.  His plan was for both of them to come out to my skydiving school this spring and learn how to jump out of perfectly good airplanes but before he signed his son up for lessons on how drive said airplanes would I possibly have time to take the young lad for a short flight to see if he actually like it?  Most certainly I said.  Now you might ask why Drew, who was a decorated combat fighter pilot/airline bus driver needed me, a scruffy looking ferry pilot with questionable morels and personal hygiene to take his only son flying? It’s because like most fighter/airline pilots Drew hasn’t flown anything without a jet engine and a million dollars worth of avionics in years and in Drew’s case ever.  So not only hasn’t he been checked out in anything smaller than the A-10 in years but like a lot of airline pilots, tiny airplanes scare him.

So Drew and his son came out and met me at the local airport where we all piled into a Cessna 172 I’d rented.  I let Drew’s son, I’ll cal him Logan, because that’s his name, sit in the left seat and do all the flying.  Logan did great.  I didn’t have to get on the controls on takeoff and he was smooth and steady on the controls unlike a lot of non-pilots I’ve let take the controls over the years.  We flew a few miles from the airport and I ran him through a series of stalls, slow flight, steep turns, wing overs, and some cloud busting.  Basically I just wanted him to have fun and get comfortable in the air.  Throughout the flight Drew sat quietly in the back taking pictures and generally being a proud papa.  I’m sure he was a bit apprehensive about how Logan would react to being at the controls of a small plane.  It’s every pilot’s nightmare that his son hates flying or it scares him to death because every pilot I know wants to pass the torch of flying to his children, especially his son, yes I’m a little sexist, sue me. All and all Logan did a great job and can’t wait to start flying lessons.

After the flight Drew took me out to lunch where we both had a couple of local Pale Ale’s, to calm the nerves don’t you know, and did what pilots do over a few drinks after flying, tell flying stories.  Drew had his share of good material after 20 years in the A-10 and I countered with my own boring stories of ferry flying.  When we were done Drew presented me with a 30mm shell casing from his beloved Warthog during the 2003 Iraq invasion.  This was a great gift and it turns out a perfect addition to my military hardware collection because I just happen to have a 30mm cannon shell.  How do I happen to have such a shell you might ask?  It’s because back when I was a young lad in college I spent three summers as an intern working for Honeywell where we were building and testing experiential munitions such as the 300mm anti tank shells.  My job was to actually build to rounds and then take them out and shoot them.  That job was a blast. Get it? A blast? Anyway, here’s what they look like.

     It’s now going to live on the fireplace mantel in my man cave.

I’ve always loved climbing but aside from some scary but recreational rock climbing and some serious, and sometimes scary, back country climbing on skis I’ve never had the opportunity to do any “real” mountain climbing.  And by “real” I mean something in the 20,000 foot plus range. The thought of spending a month or more assaulting a mountain, climbing higher and higher, establishing camps and hoping for good weather for a final summit push fascinates me.  It’s one of the few dreams I’ve yet to achieve and I’m not sure I ever will because once I started back country skiing the thought of putting in all that time and effort climbing a mountain and then just turning around and walking down again didn’t make any sense to me.  I mean if I’m going to go to all that trouble to get to the top of a mountain it sure as hell will be because I’m going to get some epic skiing on the way down.  Here’s a couple of photos from past trips.

All that being said I’m still fascinated with high mountain climbing and epic stories of survival.  That’s why I got Super Girl (my daughter Claire) one of my favorite books for Christmas. “Epic”  Super Girl has always been an adventurer and just started climbing this year in college. I’m sure she will love this book as much as I did.

What got me started on this post is the fact that Lonnie Durpe guy is attempting to make the first solo ascent of Denali in January.  I went to school with Lonnie and was on the gymnastics team with him.

As many of you might have noticed I haven’t been posting a whole lot lately.  I’d love to say it’s because I’ve been traveling all over the world having amazing adventures, meeting interesting and exotic people and making tons of money but that’s not the case.  You see the problem is that, boy this is hard to admit, I’m an addict.

Hi, my name is Kerry and I’m a deer hunter.

It’s again the time of year where millions of semi-drunk men head into the woods with lethal weapons in search of the elusive, some say fictitious, Whitetail Deer and I’m one of them.  Starting in September I become completely obsessed with hunting and run into the woods every chance I get.  I’ve never added up the amount of time I spend deer hunting from September to January, mostly because if my wife found out she would kill me (she thinks I’m having an affair), but it is safe to say that if I spent that many hours working at Burger King I could retire.  Of course then I’d just spend my time hunting so I’d be back where I started I guess.

Spending a lot of time in the woods doesn’t necessarily mean I’m always very successful.  Hours upon hours spent sitting in a tree stand or sneaking around on the ground rarely result in seeing, let alone getting a shot at a big buck.  After hunting for forty years I’ve shot many decent bucks and does with both rifle and bow but only managed managed to bag 3 what I would call “Trophy” bucks.  That doesn’t mean I’ve only seen that many monsters in the woods, it means only didn’t screw up the opportunity three times.  More times than I care to remember everything fell into place and I managed to get close to a big buck only to have something happen.  The wind shifts and he smells me, I move and snap a twig, or the buck just senses that something isn’t right.  Either way the result is the same.  The buck snorts (the alarm sound they make when they sense danger) turns on a dime and is gone in a flash leaving me shaking with adrenalin and cursing the hunting gods, my poor performance, and overall bad luck.

But the ninety five percent of the time I spend hunting alone isn’t the only thing I love about deer hunting.  Once rifle season starts my father, son, and a gaggle of drunk old Army buddies descend on my hunting cabin for two weeks of poker, scotch, and cigars.  Oh, some of us do manage to get up in the morning and head out to the woods but that’s optional.  This year we were pretty successful. My dad shot an eight point buck, number one son got a doe and passed up a number of small bucks and I managed to drop two nice big does and a beautiful eight point buck.  All in all it was a great hunting season but with the temperature dropping to eighteen below zero Fahrenheit today I guess it’s time to hang up the bow for the year and spend some time with the wife, that and the fact that hunting season’s over.

Day 5.  A nice flight from Rotterdam to Augsburg Germany.  Lee and I spent a lot of the time in the cockpit talking about how just 70 years ago these same skies were filled with young men flying high performance fighters and bombers trying to kill each other.  We could picture massive bomber formations overhead while columns of dark smoke marked the end of someone’s flight.  Looking at the map I saw many familiar names from WWII battles and campaigns on the ground.  When we got to the hotel in Augsburg we were impressed with the quality of the beer but with the internet connection.  Come on Germans get tit together!

Day 6.

Went back out to the airport in the morning but not before going shopping.  Our mission was to find a hand pump for re-fueling the airplane.  In India there are only2 airports with 100LL Avgas and bot of them sell it to you in 55 gallon drums.  How you get into the plane is your business.  Last time I went through India in a Cirrus They took care of it for you.

I think they heard that the Navajo holds 230 gallons of fuel because they now say “do it yourself!’  Lee and I went to a large hardware store and after using my high school German language skills were still able to find a hand pump (handpumpin?) and a roll of garden hose to make our gas station.

We had the Plane’s oxygen system filled by my old friend Marcus who runs the Beechcraft maintenance shop in Augsburg.  Before we left Marcus told me that he had a brand new overhauled engine for the Navajo that he would sell to the owner for a good price.  I promised to pass that along seeing that I was pretty sure it would need one soon.

Last week my wife and I had dinner with my parents to celebrate my birthday, number 52 if you must know, and my dad gave me a copy of Stephen King’s book “On Writing.”   I’ve been a Stephen King fan since 1980 when I picked up a dog-eared copy of “The Stand” someone left in the rec room at Ft. Rucker Alabama during Crew Chief school so I was looking forward to seeing what the master had to say about practicing his craft.  The book starts out as and autobiography, which is fascinating, but then goes on to the nuts and bolts of how he creates the twisted worlds found in the thousands of book he’s written. (seems like that many anyway)  Some of his tips and techniques I knew, like you need to read a lot as well as write a lot.  When I sit down to write I like to spend at lest a few minutes reading whatever novel I happen to have on hand just to get my mind into the write mode. (get it?)  OK,OK, sorry, won’t happen again.  Anyway, his next tip was to not start editing your first draft right away.  King puts his first draft away for at least six weeks before digging it out and chopping it up.  That might sound like a long time but when I dug out my novel I’ve been working on for the last three years I did find that it wasn’t as hard to cut words or entire paragraphs that didn’t work because I forgot how hard I’d worked on them in the first place, you’ve got to be willing to kill your baby’s.  But the tip that hit home the most is that you need a good place to write.  Someplace quite and free from distractions.  For me that place is not at home, and that is because of the damn internet.  I have no will power when it comes to the web.  “I’ll just check if I have any new emails, might be something important, any messages on Facebook? Any big news happening in the world? New videos posted?  “Oh crap! look at the time! I’ve wasted the whole day!”  I don’t even want to think of the thousands of hours I’ve wasted in front of this damn computer.  But I have a solution, a place to hide from the interweb, my hunting cabin.  It’s the perfect place to write.  It’s only fifteen minutes from my house so I can get there quickly and once there there’s nothing to do except work on the cabin, (meh) go for a walk in the woods, (not much fun without a gun) and write.  I’ve found that when I sit down at the cabin my output triples, OK 3 times not much is still not much but it’s something.  With that in mind the forecast for today is low clouds and rain so with a day off from flying and jumping out of airplanes I’m off to the cabin.  Wish me luck

 Finally, a space ship that lands just like the ones in the science fiction books I grew up reading.  Pretty damn cool.  I wonder how they are planning to enter the earth’s atmosphere?  I would think that if they are planning on riding the engine down it would take a ton of fuel.  I guess we’ll see.

Sorry about the mess at the top, my wife is working on a new look for the blog and so far it’s a work in progress, kind of like road construction.

When I got back home to Wisconsin I had 3 whole days to rest before taking off again.  This time my family forced me to take them to the Caribbean island of the Turks and Caicos.  The sacrifices I make for my family are incredible.  There’s not lot to say about our trip.  As usual we rented a tiny clown car which gave the opportunity for me to practice driving on the left side of the road and my wife and kids the opportunity to yell at me tell me I’m doing it wrong.  Our place on the beach had a fantastic view of the most beautiful turquoise water I’ve ever seen.   Being it’s close proximity to Florida the Turks is the perfect distance for a fuel stop when ferrying a plane to South America and I’ve always thought it offered some of the best views in the world.

Final approach into Providencials International Airport. 

The rest of the trip was pretty what you’d expect, drinking rum, playing football on the beach, and scuba diving with Number One Son and Super Girl.

All in all a pretty good trip.  Now back to the salt mines.