The Pilot Whose Name Was on the Maps

Pete and his dad

Pete went out to the strip the next afternoon while I sat under the wing waiting on the wind. He was in the office forty minutes. He came out with his jaw tight, sat on the tire beside me, and handed me a can of pop out of the cooler.

“He says he’s going to sell,” Pete said. “After this season or next. There’s a man from over by Crookston who’s interested. Wants the plane, the strip lease, the customer list.”

“And the customers are buying Don Olheiser,” I said.

“That’s what he says. If they find out he hasn’t flown in over a year, the list isn’t worth anything. He says it’s forty years of his life.”

“And me?”

Pete rolled the can between his hands. “He says you’ll get yours someday. He says it all comes to us in the end anyway.”

“The service is being sold to a man from Crookston,” I said. “It isn’t coming to anybody.”

Pete didn’t answer that. There wasn’t an answer for it.

I want to be fair to Don, because Pete loves him, and in my way so did I. He was sixty eight. He had built that outfit from one used plane and flown through hail and drought and the year the river came up over everything.

He was afraid, is what it was. Of being the old man at the café table everybody is kind to. Of the phone not ringing. He wanted to walk away with his name still on it.

None of that made it right. He was billing men he’d known forty years for work he didn’t do, and paying the woman who did it like a kid sweeping the shop. But I never thought he was a monster. I thought he was a scared man doing a wrong thing.

“Did he say anything else,” I asked.

Pete took a long time. “He said you should be grateful he gave you a seat.”

I looked out at the strip. The windsock was hanging straight down. The wind had died.

“Well,” I said. “I’d better go use it.”

The sunflower question

It was a neighbor’s sunflowers that started the end of it.

Vern Schaeffer farmed twenty two hundred acres west of town and was one of the service’s oldest customers. He was fifty nine, a big quiet man with a gray beard and a seed cap I never saw him take off.

He kept a quarter mile grass strip along his home section from back when his dad had a little plane. We used it as a satellite strip on the west side. Nick would bring the mix trailer and we’d load right there.

The third week of July, Vern’s neighbor to the south, a man named Leon, called him about some curling leaves on his sunflowers along the line fence. He thought maybe some fungicide had drifted off Vern’s wheat.

It hadn’t. Fungicide doesn’t curl a sunflower, and I’d flown that field in a five mile north wind and shut off a swath short of the line. But Vern wanted paper to show his neighbor, so he called the service for the spray record.

Don took the call. I was standing in the hangar door. I heard him say, “I’ll get you a summary, Vern. I flew it myself, there was no drift, I promise you that.”

Don typed up a single sheet that afternoon. Field, date, product, rate, wind, and at the bottom, applicator, D. Olheiser. He folded it into an envelope to drop off on his way to town.

That evening, with the sun still on the hangar door, I sat in the plane with the master switch on and the screen glowing, and I pulled the whole season off the guidance unit onto a memory stick.

One hundred and four maps, every field since the twentieth of June. Every header said L. Olheiser, Pilot in Command, written there by the machine itself, with the minute I opened the valve and the minute I closed it.

I printed them at home. The printer ran out of ink twice. Pete drove to town for cartridges at seven in the morning, set them by the printer, and went out to the shop without a word.

I put the maps in a three ring binder by date and tabbed Vern’s. Nine fields, eleven hundred and fifty acres across the season. In the front pocket went a photocopy of my logbook pages, every field in my own hand.

I did not write a letter. I did not write anything at all. I gave the binder to Nick that evening and asked him to bring it out in his pickup with the mix trailer in the morning.