Muttering into Float Season

Oddly enough, July has never been a favorite month of mine. Oh, it has its days, and those days have some great moments, don’t get me wrong. Yet as the height of summer looms, I find my thoughts turning to October at least once or twice a day. How goofy is that?

But still…

The wood-stove glowing, a layer or two of wool on, nights cold and dark but not bitter and endless, the dogs running in harness again, and happy — overjoyed, in fact.  Bands of ptarmigan appearing just at dusk, white in the twilight, dropping into the scrub and rock north of the house to settle for the night. Some piano-playing after supper, upstairs. The airplanes off of floats and back on their fat tires, lashed to chunks of angle iron pounded down solid in frozen sand on the little autumn airstrip…

Hold on, it’s nearly July, not nearly November. Float-flying season will accelerate, peak, and fade, all in the next nine weeks, as everybody and their brother and their dog tries to get out, get moved, get picked up, get re-supplied, get dropped off, collect samples of rock or water or what-have-you, find adventure, find treasure or data or a bit of both, or just see the sights. There are six or eight canoe parties counting on me and my flying machines, six or eight geologists who have been planning their forays all winter long, six or eight land-use inspectors with long lists of sites to visit, some biologists, some water-survey people, some hikers, and maybe (although we can hope not) some wildfire crews to haul and smoke-patrol sorties to fly.

I am twitchy. A lot can go sideways in this business, with just a float dinging a rock or a magneto missing a beat, four or five hundred miles from easy back-up and assistance, out where you punch Nearest Airport on the GPS and it flashes up a single word: None. Every day a setting out, every evening a happy return to home or camp or dock. I know I will relax into the rhythm of it, once it starts, but the anticipation is something else. The romance of the mom-and-pop bush-plane business fades in the face of the fact that when all is said and done, well, guess what, it’s still just mom and pop. No fleet, no company, no dispatch, no hangar full of happy mechanics, no eager young dock-hands flinging half-hitches onto ballards. Just a pilot old enough to draw a pension, and his cheerful spouse and better half, and these two little airplanes.

Today it starts. Easy one, a couple of sight-seeing hops for a group of lifelong buddies who gather every Canada Day at the fishing lodge across the bay. Weather is good, waters are calm.

Mom is away right now, overseas,  and Pop’s at the plane.  He’s got his head down. He’s pumping the floats, checking the oil, and from here it looks as though he’s muttering to himself. I thought I caught the word “October.”  How goofy is that?