But here--in the heart of the Alaskan wilderness--is where she needed to be. She had worked extra shifts at St. Elizabeth’s for the past six months to raise the money for this dream vacation--a four-week guided tour of the wild interior of Alaska. Over the last two weeks, she had camped, canoed, and hiked some of Alaska’s wildest places with a group of 12 other adventurers and three guides. Part of the travel package was an aerial tour of Canada’s Yukon Territory. She wasn’t too fond of flying, but she knew it was a trip that she had to take.
Charlotte knew that she was an environmentalist before she knew what the word meant. She had always had a fierce love of nature. According to her mother, Charlotte’s first word wasn’t "mommy" or "daddy," but "squirrel," not an easy utterance for an 18-month-old. Her second word, "cat," came a few days later, followed by her first sentence, "Cat kiss squirrel," when she saw her second word eating the intestines out of her first on the front porch.
Charlotte didn’t just love nature; she protected it. When she was six she told her dad that her imaginary friend, Frieda, lived in the top of an evergreen in their backyard so that he wouldn’t cut it down. It didn’t work, so at eight she put sugar in the gas tank of his chainsaw to save an apple tree from a similar fate.
That was back in 1980. Ronald Reagan had just been elected to office. During the next 12 years (eight under Reagan and four under Bush--some of the darkest years of U.S. environmental policy), Charlotte developed into one of the most notorious eco-terrorist in the country. When she was 16, she ran away from home and joined Serenity Now, a Seattle-based environmental group known for taking extreme measures to protect the environment. For the next two years, she ate granola, spiked trees and chained herself in front of the occasional corporate office. By 18 she was planning the sabotage of oilrigs, and when she was 20 she served six months in a Texas jail for criminal trespass for breaking into Texaco’s Dallas headquarters in an attempt to sabotage their computer system.
The time in jail sobered her up and made her pessimistic. She came to believe that the destruction of the earth was inevitable. In the long run, no efforts--either legal or illegal--could win out over greed and power. So she went back home, got her GED and enrolled in nursing school. She couldn’t save the world, but maybe she could save a few lives.
But now another Bush was in the White House, and she felt the sting of her old anger. That motherfucker planned on turning Alaska into one huge oil field. She needed to get back to her roots, back to nature. It was time to make that trip to Alaska.
Eddie knew he was a good pilot. Everybody he ever flew with agreed he was the most natural flyer they’d ever seen. He took his first flying lesson on his sixteenth birthday, and was a licensed private pilot within six weeks. His instructor marveled at Eddie’s skill. You only had to show him a maneuver once and he had it down pat. Eddie soloed at ten hours and was doing touch-and-goes in 20-knot cross winds before he had two weeks of lessons under his belt. He got all of his ratings at an incredible pace. Private, instrument, commercial, CFI. He was flying in the right seat of a DC-9, by his 21st birthday, and was in the left seat before he turned 24. Usually you had to be at least 30 to be a captain for United, but they made an exception for Eddie. He was that good.
But airline flying bored the shit out of him. All he did was follow directions. Air traffic control told him when to take off, when to land, how high to fly and how fast. After two years as a captain, he was burned out. So he left United and took a job as a bush pilot in Alaska for a quarter of the pay. He took up anybody willing to pay the $1,000--hunters, environmentalist, geologists--as long as they had the money, he didn’t give a shit.
He was in love with flying again. Bush flying was flying at its purest. Any moron could learn to fly an airliner, but flying bush took a level of skill the average Joe Rudder would never achieve. In six years as a bush pilot he had flown in blinding blizzards and thunderstorms with 80 mph updrafts. He had taken off and landed on streambeds no wider than a highway with potholes that would catch your landing gear and flip the plane in half a second. But he wasn’t a Top Gun pilot. He was cocky, but he was smart. He knew that even a minor mistake, especially over the Alaskan wilderness, could be his last. That’s why he was as surprised as anyone when his plane with six passengers ran out of gas 1,000 feet above the Alaskan Interior.