north into the wild

after being out of work for a full year, i felt i was going to lose my mind. it was time to undertake desperate measures. i spent all of my remaining money and borrowed what i could to get myself up to alaska. i figured i would knock on doors and beg for a flying job.

the final frontier is legendary for its lack of roads and utter dependence upon aviation, and i thought if there was any place on the planet where i might be able to find someone to pay me to wiggle sticks again, it would be here. of course, i've been feeling the irresistible sirens' call down deep in my gonads for years; it was only a matter of time until a mountain kid like myself did what he knew he must.

my friend rob was in similar financial and mental circumstances, being out of work himself. we met in congo 2 years ago while flying for air serv. rob and i decided it was time to just take a risk....you know, go in whole hog. slap the cojones on the table and see what happened.

we went north together. after arriving in anchorage in the spirit of most people who come to alaska..... with pennies in our pockets.....we managed to convince one outfit to give a couple of american-african bush pilots a chance.

rob and i both landed jobs at grant aviation, and will be based in bethel, a small town of about 6,000 near the southwest coast of alaska. we will be flying passengers, mail, and supplies to these largely eskimo communities.

for those of you who followed my african exploits, you probably know that the blog died when i left chad. i was incredibly frustrated and artistically constipated for the past year, probably due in large part to subsisting against my will on the deep-fat fried american culture of homogenized sterilized security. i need danger, and adventure, and passion and stars and frostbite and heart-breaking wide-open lonely places....

so i went north, just like white fang did, and i hope that it will provide the necessary english-language enema my creative gizzards require. i'm afraid of what shocking impacted material might come out in these initial posts, and you should be too!!

and don't worry, because the utter lack of adherence to grammatical convention, the continued self-indulgent illogical ramblings, and the absurdly irreverent lazy phrasing that characterized my africa blog will still loiter here.....unfiltered and unpasteurized, pipelined from the permafrost to your pigpen of pondering via the modern miracle of the interwebs!!! paddy's blog rises from the ashes like the phoenix!!

just remember that blogging is to literature what pbr is to beer.....

so i'm trading the malarial jungles and burning alkaline dust for frozen tundra.....and the chance to give another incisive eyewitness aerial account of a vastly different, yet still highly marginalized sector of society.... the native alaskan community.



i now walk into the wild...
-alexander supertramp