Free and Bob,
Although my mother suffered for six months before passing from this vale of tears and now my mother-in-law has lost use completely of her left side my father went quickly in three days.
I hope I can see the end coming and not enrich some health provider but instead check off the last thing on my bucket list which is to park near the Gila National Forest Area and go feed the bears.
I was in a caravan of cars all with hang gliders on their tops and stopped at a railroad track crossing at Lake City, Minnesota. We had just passed the, “Danger, ice conditions change rapidly,” sign on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River a half hour earlier After zigzagging around open holes and big long cracks in the river ice we got a run at the boat ramp since there was a gap of open water to jump to the Minnesota side. Larry Smith, Gregg Ballentine, (sp), Paul Lundguist, others that I can’t recall, made this same crossing.
The train blocked our way because it ran over a pickup truck and killed a guy. Next we would be towing up hang gliders further down river on the ice with cars and living through all that risky goings on.
As we waited for the train to move I couldn’t help but dwell on the irony of this situation.
The guy simply crossing a railroad track and not any of us stupid hang glider pilots crossing the ice in cars and trucks was the one that died.
Paul and I lost our nerve and after we were done flying drove the long way up to Red Wing Minnesota in the dark to cross on the bridge back to Wisconsin. We met the rest of the pilots that took the short cut over the ice back to the Maiden Rock Bar in Wisconsin . The rest of the pilots were half in the bag not waiting for Paul and I to show up a hour later for the “safety meeting.”