This morning in the midst of waiting for the caffeine to kick in, I started to think about some of my weirder life experiences and how lessons learned from those events influence the things I do in the wood shop. These stories are also things I haven’t really discussed with my kids at length because they are embarrassing or simply seem like I’ve made the story up to make myself look cool. I’m their father; nothing I do is cool!

I WAS A HOT AIR BALLOON PILOT

Back in the late 70’s, (man I’m getting old), I was hanging around with a group of people that were part of a hot air balloon chase crew on weekends. When you launch a hot air balloon, it has no real way to choose it’s eventual landing zone because you move with the wind and the wind moves in different directions depending on your altitude. It’s also interesting to note that when you do land your craft, the FAA classifies it as a “crash landing” because you aren’t in complete control as you touch the ground. You do get dragged or tipped over by the wind. Fun eh?

Because of those flight variables, you need another team on the ground to follow you and try to anticipate where you might land. The chase team needs to be there, hopefully on a soft grass field to help steady the balloon as the pilot collapses the balloon envelope. Softer ground is better so you’re not poking holes in the balloon fabric.

At 19 I had some natural fear of heights. Apprehension over flying in a balloon was made more intense once I saw the basket up close because it was made of wicker. So when I was offered a chance to take private pilot lessons I declined at first. I also needed to scrape the money together for each flight which was substantial. Something about it though, coupled with rave reviews by others who had done it convinced me to try.

Following my passing of FAA ground school test, I took several training flights and quickly got past the fear of being a mile or more up in the air with only a wicker railing preventing me from falling. I also learned some things you won’t read about in any book:

1) Any time you fly over horses or cattle and kick on your burner, they freak out and start to run away in all directions. Those animals can’t look up to see what they hear directly above their heads. That and the sound of a 12 million BTU per hour propane burner is pretty freaking scary.

2) You learn how to face more fear when your instructor hides that he turned off all the tanks to see how you assess the crisis of a total flame out. You have to figure out what the problem is, turn on all your tanks, find your source of ignition, get the pilot flame started and arrest the fall before you hit the ground. He is there to make sure we don’t crash hard or fly into power lines, but you have to use your head to analyze the situation and figure your way out, safely.

3) There is no more peaceful and tranquil experience than flying level across a rolling green landscape in a balloon. You move with the wind so there is literally no noise. If you are low enough you’ll hear tree leaves rustle and a distant barking dog and not much else. If you fly low over a neighborhood, almost everyone who sees you will offer you a beer if you land to say hello. Alas, if they see you overhead it’s already too late. There’s also a good chance you’d crush their car.

What I learned is that anyone can do something new like this. Take a risk and face those fears. Do something that seems out of reach, learn new techniques along the way and enjoy the experience of accomplishing something new and cool.

I LOST A QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS IN VEGAS

My previous work life had me attending user conferences often hosted in San Francisco, New York or Las Vegas. Ah Vegas. What happened in Vegas definitely didn’t stay in Vegas.

One evening, I met up with some other work friends and we were wandering around the strip looking for what we were told was a Krispy Kreme donut shop open 24 hours. During our walkabout, some of the crew headed off for a potty break and I spotted a progressive Elvis slot machine that took quarters. I just happened to have a pocket full of quarters and I thought it was a good time to donate my loose change to the King. Now I don’t really gamble so even though I could bet between one and four quarters at a time, I was just putting in a single quarter, pulling the handle and waiting for my friends to return.

On the fifth pull, I hit three pictures of Elvis across the bar and lights started flashing along with bells and quarters started dumping endlessly into the coin tray. I was thrilled, raking in over $90 in coin, but then I looked up at the progressive dollar amount above the bank of Elvis slots which flashed $217,340. Had I played the four quarter maximum, I would have won the big prize. Just then an 80 year old woman sitting next to me with frizzy hair, sweater pockets filled with fresh packs of Marlboro cigarettes and a voice like jagged gravel angrily yelled at me; “You didn’t bet the maximum? You always play the maximum. You ALWAYS play the maximum!”

My small travel group got a laugh and I picked up a quick 90 bucks while they were taking a leak, so win, win. We then found the Krispy Kreme location where I grabbed a dozen to go for my crew. On returning to my own hotel I got some pretty strange offers on the streets of Vegas for a donut. I’ll just leave that part of the story there.

The next night I was waiting in the lobby for a couple of people to gather when two other people I didn’t know were talking about gambling. The first guy had said that he ran into some pretty bad luck but was only down a couple hundred. The second guy then said; “Well at least you weren’t the guy who lost the quarter million on the Vegas slots last night.”

The following week I headed off to a new customer where we already had some of our own people on the ground. I met with the bigger team that afternoon where one of the customer managers had welcomed me and then asked about the conference we just attended. “I hear all you guys had a pretty good time last week”, he said then chuckled. “At least you weren’t the guy that lost the quarter million out there.” “What an idiot”, I replied. So what did I learn?

1) Forget about Andy Warhol and your predicted 15 minutes of fame. Sometimes you don’t need or want the recognition at all. Things are going to happen to you and people are going to say things about you both good and bad and outside your control, so maybe it’s just best to move on.

2) Celebrate the little victories. I mean I won $90! Think about how much hardwood that can buy me! Okay, maybe not too much hardwood if we were talking about Walnut.

I FELL BUTT FIRST INTO A CACTUS

I had connected with a friend one Spring to do a week of desert photography out in the slot canyons of Utah and the deserts of Arizona. Both of us had been photographers for years, trading cool pics back and forth depending on our travels. We chose to stay near Cedar City as a home base, which was close to Bryce Canyon and near the northern Arizona border. It was a good location, close to a bunch of great venues in the American Southwest.

On one of our excursions out to a series of red rock formations, I found that I could find a better angle for a shot I wanted to take with some light rock climbing. I don’t mean real rock climbing with a harness and rope, but more like hiking where you have to find a secure spot for your foot so you can push yourself up to the next rock. In any case, I found a way to get myself up about 40 feet on top of a flat rock plateau for that particular shot. Getting down from there? Well, I hadn’t really evaluated how to do that safely.

For the first 34 feet of descent, it was easy enough to retrace my foot holds, find those little bulges and slots so I could back my way down that group of rocks. The last big rock however was wide and round and I had pulled myself up on it by laying on my belly. Going down that same way would mean I would have to slide down perfectly for my feet to hit a ledge and stop my movement.

Spoiler alert; that didn’t work. I slid down, missed the ledge and then hit the ground with backward momentum that had me falling butt first into a small Barrel Cactus. The thorns of a Barrel Cactus aren’t that long but they are sharp. Many of them pierced right through my Levis, pocket layer and all. The longer ones were relatively easy though painful to pull out, but it was the little hairs, the tiny thorns on top of the cactus that were the biggest pain in the ass. Pun intended.

My friend had himself a pretty good laugh as I tried to get back in our rented Jeep. I wound up sitting or laying mostly sideways to avoid pushing the thorns further into my skin. Somewhere on the road back to our motel, I thought about the sticky properties of duct tape. I wasn’t about to ask my travel partner to help pull little thorns out of my butt with a pair of tweezers, so we stopped at a small hardware store and picked up the tape. In the end (pun not intended), the duct tape actually did a great job grabbing onto those little cactus hairs and removing most but not all remnants of my rocky fall. Not my best moment, but another teaching moment to be sure.

1) Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do a thing. Before taking any action I try to stop and evaluate all sides and all perspectives to a problem before taking any action. Whenever I want to move quickly or short cut a wood shop process, I try to remember the cactus.

2) Always stop to evaluate the danger of a particular situation before moving forward and eliminate those variables contributing to the risk facing you. Had I looked more closely on the formation of the rocks I was trying to climb, I would have seen the impossibility of a clean descent. When in the shop, I try to evaluate risk before using tools, like making sure no other people can walk up or surprise me. I also won’t attempt a cut unless I’m certain about the type of wood I’m working with and the capabilities and limitations of the tool being used. Being careful keeps your butt out of the cactus.

And so ends this blog. I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave me thumbs up or comment, I’d love to hear from you!