Realizing your Dream can be Hazardous to your Health
In 1969, at the age of 29, I became a crop-duster. I had a wife and four children and had struggled for the last five years to get my ratings. By the time I was thirty-three, I realized my lifelong dream of having my own business in which I flew across the ground at an altitude of five feet and 130 miles per hour.
I have always been a thrill seeker and this one day I was to realize what the saying meant, "Be careful what you wish for, because you just may get it." I had just started spraying for a local chemical company, which made my job easier, since I no longer had to check the fields for insects, or tie up large sums of money on insecticide. I was still servicing the same farmers, plus the chemical company's customers, whose fields had, until then, been sprayed with a ground rig. The application fee was up to four dollars an acre, by then and I was able to spray about a hundred acres an hour. I often sprayed six hundred acres a day, so I was under less, financial stress, although one day, this new collaboration almost got me killed!
This day, Bill - the chemical man - asked me to drive with him up Dark Canyon, in the Guadalupe Mountains. I wasn't even aware that there was a farm in that canyon, but we soon arrived at a picturesque farmhouse of rock construction alongside a mountain stream and forty acres of alfalfa, surrounded on three sides by high canyon walls, which rose about two hundred feet above the canyon floor. Bill asked me if I thought I could get in and out of the place, with the plane. After calculating the distance to the canyon wall, I told him, that I thought I could do it. I was concerned, but I couldn't show fear in front of another man.
After returning to the airport and loading the plane, I took off for the mountains. As I flew toward the canyon, I noticed that I had to climb just to stay a hundred feet above the ground. By the time I arrived, I was indicating six thousand feet altitude above sea level, but still only a hundred feet above ground. This was three thousand feet higher than I was used to spraying.
The air was thinner at this altitude, which meant it contained less oxygen. Thinner air also meant less lift for my wings and less horsepower from my engine. The farm from above looked as if it was in the bottom of a barrel and I was beginning to wonder if I had bitten off more than I could chew. What the hell, I thought. I'm here, now. This is no time to get scared.
I decided to make a dry run at a hundred feet above the field, just to see if I could clear those canyon walls, which loomed ominously about a thousand feet away and a hundred feet above me, with the top fifty feet, being sheer cliffs. Then I broke one of the basic rules of mountain flying. "Never fly up a canyon!"
Upon reaching the other end of the field, I shoved the throttle forward, as was my custom, but instead of feeling the powerful push of the seat, on my back, I felt nothing and only heard the engine rev up, slightly. I pulled back on the stick and entered a climb that felt agonizingly soft and lacked the usual pressure on the seat of my pants. I could tell I was rapidly approaching stall speed, by the sloppy feel of the stick and the stall warning light that was beginning to blink.
That was it. I was at full power, and had maximum back pressure on the stick - without stalling - and that damned wall was right there! In the next instant, this old non-believer said a silent prayer. Hell, it may have been out loud, for all I know. "God, help me out of this mess and I'll get out of here and be more careful in the future!" My stall warning light was solid red now, meaning a stall was imminent.
As I neared the cliff, I saw that it was level on top and there was a fence running along the edge. Just as I was about to smash into the wall, I felt a tremendous push on the seat of my pants and the airplane seemed to jump up, as if someone had goosed it and I was flying over the top, clearing the fence by a few feet. It took me several seconds to realize I was still alive.
Flying back to the airport, I had some crazy thoughts. Is there really a God and did he give me a boost? No, I thought, I was flying with a tail-wind and when the air mass hit the cliff, it shot up and over and carried the plane with it. Anyway, if I had been dumb enough to make that pass at ground level, there wouldn't have been anything in the world that could've saved my sorry butt!
All the way back, I was rushing with adrenaline. I had never in my life, been so excited and filled with the sheer joy of being alive. In my mind, I kept reliving the experience, the way you relive your first sexual experience, or some other stimulating event.
When I arrived home, I realized how much my family meant to me and determined in the future to be more careful with my life and the future of my children.
