Tom at seventeen years old, naïve and optimistic, took a bush-plane flight north to remote wilderness and work at an isolated fishing lodge. Only days into the season, confrontations with coworkers escalates into threats on his life. So a young man makes a stand.

In a later year and having gotten his pilot license, Tom’s float plane is screaming down the lake and won’t lift from the surface. He’s run out of liquid runway with no time to power down. The big forest closing in. He crashes...

Chapter by chapter, these memoir stories move from laugh-out-loud accounts to flushed romances with hearts both swelled and broken to tales of rapid intensification from imminent threats to Tom’s life—some of them self-imposed. Tom doesn’t invite you to glimpse his world, he straps you into the seat beside him, smiles, and pushes throttle to full. Stories like Twain with scenes set to Krakauer backdrops and words on the page in honest prose like Hemingway--an affectionate yet piercing memoir of northern adventure, wilderness, and love.