Our good friend, David I. Bush, appeared as a soft-spoken, unimposing, birdwatcher. But there was much more to him than met the eye. Inside this facade was a bold adventurer.

In his youth he was a daring rock climber and sailor. Once, as an introduction to sailing, he and two others crossed the Pacific from California to Hawaii in a small boat — no small feat. In the early 1960s, while serving in the Air Force, David was based in the cold latitudes of Newfoundland — working on the early version of air-deployed cruise missiles. Later, working for Boeing, he engineered miles of wiring on the new behemoth 747s. Retiring early, he built a boat from a burned out hull and sailed from Seattle to Juneau, Alaska. Indeed, he did this a number of times — the last time, aboard his new Robert Perry designed 40′ Vanguard (the first of this beautiful classic line).

Through summers and winters, he lived in his sailboat in a Juneau marina. He told me of the times he would have to chop at the ice forming on the pilings so that the floating docks could stay with the formidable tides. David worked for five Alaska governors — regularly carrying into their offices reams of dot-matrix budget figures, which he would interpret to them. Surprisingly for an adventurer, David was a very analytical guy.

In her Juneau photography store, he met his sole-mate, Rose Mary, and the two of them married. They went on to decades of travel in various motor-homes and campers — seeking bird and scenery photographs and videos.

They were one of the most content couples we had ever met. And they redefined the concept of an active retirement to us. Sadly, their long, glorious ride has come to an end with David’s passing.

Our late friend, Wayne, always embellished the attributes of his friends to other friends. It was a charming, though sometimes embarrassing, quality of his. But, I never knew him to embellish about himself or his experiences. He was not known for tall tales.

A few years back he told me a fascinating story of an averted Montana air disaster. He wasn’t aware himself of its scope until the deathbed admission of a fellow pilot.

Back in the old days of the 1960s, commercial airlines had three working in the cockpit — two pilots and a navigator. Wayne’s first job with Northwest Airlines, after his service in the Air Force, was as a young Boeing 727 navigator. As his story goes: During a blind, fogged-in landing approach to Missoula, Montana, Wayne noticed an anomaly with the flight path. I don’t know the details of how or why. But he told me that upon this discovery, he tapped the co-pilot on the shoulder and showed him his findings on a clip board. The co-pilot immediately pulled back on the yoke and throttled up into a steep, abrupt ascent. They made another go-around, then landed safely. Nothing more was said about this incident until the co-pilot’s confession on his deathbed, decades later.

This is an unknown story and I thought that it should be mentioned as a tribute to Wayne. It turns out they were on a flight path that led into the side of a mountain. Obviously, such a horrible disaster would have been world news, save Wayne’s attentiveness.

An interesting side-note of this story is that the captain of this flight was the same captain of the famous (a few years later?) “D.B. Cooper Hijacking.”