The Pilot Whose Name Was on the Maps

How a farm girl ends up flying

My dad farmed sugar beets and wheat west of Minto, and on the side he flew a little cloth winged two seater off a pasture strip behind the machine shed. He took me up the first time when I was six.

He let me hold the stick while we crossed our own shelterbelt, his hand loose over mine. The whole farm went by under us like a map drawn just for me.

I soloed at sixteen and had my commercial certificate at twenty seven. I went south to ag school for the low level work, then flew a season in western Minnesota for men who had been at it longer than I’d been alive.

Ag flying is not like other flying. You work ten feet off the crop at better than a hundred and twenty miles an hour, watching for wires, towers, pivots, deer, and the farmer’s new grain bin.

At the end of every pass you pull up, turn back on yourself, and drop in again exactly one swath over. Mine was sixty five feet. Two hundred times a morning, and you do not get to be wrong once.

I met Pete Olheiser at a wedding dance in Park River the summer I was twenty eight. He danced like a man whose mother had told him to. When I told him what I did, he laughed and said, “Well, you’ll have plenty to talk about with my dad.”

We married the next fall. Pete farms six hundred acres and hauls beets every harvest. He is slow to talk and slower to judge, and in twelve years he has never once made me feel smaller than I am.

His dad ran the flying service off a grass strip four miles out of Grafton. One plane, one hangar, a fuel tank, a mix pad, and an office with a wood stove. Don built it in 1986 and flew every acre himself for thirty years.

When we married, Don offered me a seat. That was how he said it. “I’ve got a seat for you, if you want it.” I did. It meant I could fly from home and sleep in my own bed in July.

For the first years he paid me a pilot’s share of what each job brought in. Then, a year before the summer I’m telling about, he failed his flight physical. His heart had a rhythm the doctor did not like.

Don came home from Fargo that day and sat in his pickup in the yard for an hour. Pete’s mother had passed by then, so Pete went out and sat in the truck with him. Neither of them ever told me what was said.

After that, I flew everything. Every acre the service sold, I flew. And that next spring, Don sat me down and told me the money had to change.

“It’s family now,” he said. “It’s all coming to you two someday anyway. I’ll put you on wages, same as Nick. Twenty two an hour, and the business stays healthy.”

I said yes. He was Pete’s dad, and he had just lost the thing he loved most after his wife. I was not going to haggle with him over it.