About the Pasturepilot

“Tell me a story…”

You need not twist this guy’s arm.

Don’t tell the folks in his company’s HR department he’s not supposed to be flying jets for a living. They’d break his heart by sending him home.

The Pasturepilot grew up in a poor family, in a poor town where people finished school (usually) before going to work in the textile mills or cutting pulpwood. High school graduates had to sneak out on the first train out of town to escape the pull that kept folks in that place. But by the time graduation rolled around, he had achieved escape velocity.  In middle school, a chance to sit in the pilot’s seat of a Delta jet derailed his previous life’s ambition to be a railroad engineer. Pilot it was. From then on, he devoured every aviation book on the shelf at the school and city library, and once he found a sympathetic mechanic who let him apprentice his way into aviation, he had a toe-hold. He never turned loose.

First flight lesson at age 13. Soloed at age 16. Pilot and mechanic certificates in hand, he flew and repaired all sorts of airplanes. In his senior year of high school, he learned how to lean words against one another in the form of a story, and he found another passion.

The flying and writing intertwine at times, but it’s not always airplanes he’ll tell you about in a flying story. The stories give you a snapshot into the people he works with, the passengers he carries, the places he sees, and a glimpse into the core of what makes us who we are.

The Pasturepilot nickname is borrowed from the late Gordon Baxter. Bax, a Texan whose writing style evokes feelings rather than gushing out numbers when he tells you how an airplane flies, was one of the writers whose books who lived in the Pasturepilot’s locker from Middle School onward. The name stuck when, days before reporting to new-hire class at the airline, Pasturepilot smashed into a cow pie while landing in a pasture in a Piper Cub. The photographer in the front seat got a blast of bovine byproduct to the face, and they got almost all the cowsplatter off the Cub before the owner came out to fly the next day.  That made for some interesting looks from classmates on day one, when the instructor said, “Why don’t you all stand up and tell us a little about yourselves?”