Pilots and posterity

Take your pick of the style that appeals to you most. In a pair of recent works, two Maine pilots transport readers on stick-and-rudder journeys to remote corners of time and place, painting pointed portraits of what it has meant over time to be known as a “Maine pilot.”

Pilots look for a wow factor when they read about exotic brands of aviation, and they won’t be disappointed in the exploits of North Woods aviators flying on floats, skis, and wheels. But neither is the dark side of this flying life—a harshness and survival battle that’s largely invisible to the casual visitor—spared candid exposure. Posterity demands no less than such firsthand tributes to the pioneer pilots of the Maine woods.

In his novel, One Good Thing, Patrick McGowan presents his audience with an opening metaphor of a near-midair collision between hardworking Maine pilot Mac McCabe’s light aircraft and the private jet of an out-of-state financial titan, teeing up a drama that captures the tense codependence of two perennially alienated subsets of Maine’s population. Against a backdrop of changing economic times and the endangerment they present to a long-established rural Maine way of life, McGowan unfolds a story in which his characters are propelled beyond what Henry David Thoreau might have characterized as their “lives of quiet desperation” to a more aggressive stance against those they hold responsible for their plight.

McGowan bears credible witness to this state of affairs for some rural Mainers and their sense of its causes. With one foot in each of those worlds, the Pittsfield, Maine, native, who is president of PK Floats of Lincoln, Maine, has flown bushplanes over the Maine woods in the spirit of his novel’s main protagonists. McGowan has been immersed in local politics as a lawmaker and—unlike Mac McCabe—moves easily in the lofty company of political power brokers, having run for governor and Congress (twice), served in the administration of former President Bill Clinton as the Small Business Administration’s New England regional administrator, and run the state agency that serves as steward of much of Maine’s wildlands as Commissioner of Conservation.

The nonfiction genre is the realm of Jake Morrel, an engineering school graduate turned math teacher turned bush pilot and Maine lodge operator, who captures the Maine aviation scene in selected anecdotes from the 20,000 flight hours of Gary Dumond, a Maine Warden Service pilot who learned his craft from legends of the Maine flying scene.

In Gary Dumond Remembers Maine Warden Pilots, the reader follows the flying career of a Fort Kent, Maine, native who flew a Piper PA–11 above the North Woods as a high-schooler, and logged 1,400 hours as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam before returning to Maine to become a warden pilot and learn bush pilot skills from renowned figures including Dick Folsom and Andy Stinson—two names that would be essential entries in any historical account of aviation in Maine.

This is not the first aviation-themed effort by Morrel, whose life in Maine flying began when he was teaching math and physics at a school next to an airstrip (with the catchy name of Poverty Flats) from which he flew a 1946 Taylorcraft. Morrel would go on to tow banners and work as a flight instructor before quitting teaching and getting hired on to his dream job with Folsom, flying floatplanes into the North Woods from Moosehead Lake in Greenville, Maine.

His book was preceded by publication of Hardscrabble Lodge: True Maine Bush Flying Stories, an account of the Maine bush pilot’s lifestyle centered on the project Morrel and his wife Beth took on to reconstruct an “old set of logging camps” as a fly-in sporting camp.

Morrel is also the author of Dick Folsom: Bush Pilot, A Legend Reflects, recounting the founding and history of Folsom’s Air Service, which—long before roads reached remote corners of the deep Maine woods—provided unique access to the wilderness for those with a thirst for peace and solitude or wilderness adventure.