The Cold Taste of Adventure: Opening the Final Frontier

Flying North, South, East and West: Arctic to the Sahara, by Terry Reece. iUniverse, Inc. 2007.

Terry Reece has been a pilot practically his entire life, from his first lesson as a teenager in 1958 - given by his cousin after some seat-of-the-pants education, which resulted in a crash landing - to flying cargo in Alaska, Africa and the Middle East from the 1960s through the 1990s, to running his own bush pilot business in Alaska.

In Flying North, South, East and West, Reece tells the story of his life in the air in a series of anecdote after anecdote. It's not a dry, boring tale - the reader feels as if he's not reading, but rather relaxing in a bar or a hunting lodge, with a cheerful blaze in a fireplace, listening over a beer as Reece recounts the various events he shares with humor and enthusiam.

Reece had a connection with both the wilderness and the air since the very beginning.

...Tony, the true professional that he was with five hours of flying time, decided that he would make the takeoff from the cow pasture. We sat for a moment at the end of the field, engine purring.

Smells that would be with me the rest of my life entered my body through every open pore as the sweat began to pour out. I had not thought about being scared. Now a slight gnawing in my gut felt like it had turned into a big hairball. Tony waited until the white and black cattle halfway down the field disbursed to the side, then moved the throttle against the panel. The little Luscombe's engine belched smoke, coughed, then caught and slowly moved forward. Tony yelled as we picked up speed over lumps of cow flop scattered across the field. The tail on the Luscombe slowly rose, then the aircraft leaped into the air, and we were flying.

We banked over the Sauk River that twisted below us and shrank in size as we winged skyward. Freedom! How to describe with words the expansion of your world from twenty square miles of "the only dang place to live," to awareness, but not yet understanding, of limitless horizons; not only of earthly vistas, but of finding out about yourself. Here was the first hint of possibilities outside one's known world.