Jeff Wise

Note: Several years after I first posted my National Geographic Adventure story about John Graybill (see preceding post) on an earlier version of my website, a reader named Rudy Mallonee wrote a comment describing a remarkable personal encounter with Graybill in his youth. Because I had switched hosting services by this point, it was a long time before I stumbled upon his comment. Very belatedly, I’m sharing the story here:

I grew up here in Alaska and when I was a young man I worked as a heavy equipment operator. I met John in 1970 while digging trenches for the plumbing on a medical building on Lake Otis and Tudor [in Anchorage, Alaska]. John was a plumber on the job. We got to talking hunting and he invited me to go with him that coming winter hunting wolves. So for that winter and the next we flew all over from the Alaska range way out south and east of Petersville to north as far as the Tanana river and west to Tok.

On a January trip back up behind Petersville Lodge in the next valley south from a hunting cabin on Cache Creek, we needed to get out to take a leak. We spotted an old cabin in the narrow valley, and there being a barely visible set of ski tracks on what was room to land on, John says “We’ll land there.” There were maybe two feet of snow over the old tracks and as we touched down there were hard ice ridges underneath the fresh snow. We took a couple of hard bounces and then the left wing dug in and we came to a sudden halt. John had good shock cord in place but no safety cables. At 40° below the shock cord just snapped, causing the wing to drop and dig in as that side collapsed.

I looked up and all the plexigass had broken out of the roof and the tubing was bent down about six inches. We got out and looked the wing over. It didn’t look damaged but the left outer struts of the landing gear were snapped as if cut by a knife and we could move the wing fore and aft about six to eight inches.

So John says “Let’s go down to the cabin and see if we can find anything to fix this with.”

Note: In 2001 I published this story in the now-defunct magazine National Geographic Adventure. The subhead was “Meet John Graybill—legendary bush pilot, notorious poacher in Alaska’s Outlaw Wars, and, at 70 years old, the last of a dying breed.” In 2010, by an eerie coincidence, he died in a plane crash with his wife Dolly while engaging in a dangerous practice called scud-running on the very same day that I published an article on my blog about that very practice and mentioned him by name.

It was a blustery Sunday afternoon in early December 1973, cold and overcast, when John Graybill took off from Alaska’s Kodiak Island. He and his 16-year-old daughter, Teri, had been visiting friends for the weekend, and now they were heading home to Anchorage in Graybill’s tiny Piper Super Cub.

Once airborne, Graybill turned north and flew over the whitecaps of Shelikof Strait. With winter setting in, daylight was scarce, and soon the plane was shrouded in darkness.

The Super Cub had been in the air for less than an hour when the engine started to sputter. Graybill, a seasoned pilot, brought the plane down beneath the clouds and began searching for a place to land.

On he flew through the darkness—until, ahead in the distance, he made out a single point of light, which turned out to be a fishing trawler. Nursing the ailing engine along, Graybill took the plane in as close to the ship as he could and managed a nearly impossible feat—setting down in 20-foot [6-meter] waves without flipping over.

As seawater poured into the mangled cockpit, Graybill and his daughter struggled out into the frigid ocean. Since he rarely flew over open water, Graybill didn’t carry life preservers or survival gear. He hoisted Teri up onto the tail and treaded water, fighting for air amid the pounding waves. As a deadening chill crept through his body, Graybill called up to his daughter to ask if the trawler was turning around. “No, Dad,” she replied. “It just kept on going.”

Gradually, the plane slipped beneath the surface, and the Graybills treaded water together in the darkness. “Dad,” Teri called out to her father. “Are we going to die?”

“Yes, honey, we are,” he answered. “I sure feel awful about getting you into this mess.”

“That’s OK, Dad,” she said. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather die with than you.”

It’s not that Graybill has a morbid turn of mind. It’s just that, after nearly half a century engaged in an impossibly dangerous occupation, you tend to see a lot of untimely endings. At 70, Graybill is one of the last of a dying breed ‑‑ a legendary bush pilot from the pioneer days of Alaskan aviation. In his case, “dying breed” isn’t just a turn of phrase. Once Graybill sat down with a piece of paper and made a list of all his friends who had died flying small planes in Alaska. He managed to come up with 53.

THERE’S A LOT OF DYING in John Graybill’s stories. Usually, the deaths are fast and violent, but sometimes they are long and lingering, and tinged with bitter irony. When the protagonist doesn’t die, he usually disappears for good, or, in the best of circumstances, escapes from imminent death by the narrowest margin. More often than not, the protagonist is Graybill himself.