Carrying Bill

What do you do when a widow hands you her husband at a bar in Ensenada?

“Here’s my husband,” she said, slamming a small green box on the bar.

The pilot and I looked at the box amidst the beers and empty shot glasses. “You guys are helicopter pilots, right?” I lifted the box carefully with two fingers and used my napkin to clean off the bar, and placed it back down. “Well, Bill loved the BAJA races and I just know that he would want his ashes scattered over the race course,” she said, knocking back the rest of her Modelo. “Can you do that for me?” And then she was gone.

I tucked Bill in my front jeans pocket as our crew walked down the block to our favorite open grill restaurant in Ensenada. We were famished, the sun would be up early, and we needed to be on our marks for the start of the race. As we sat around the U-shaped cantina, smoke and steam coming off the grill, more ice-cold beers were handed around. Bill was there with us, at the bar, enjoying the best damn tacos in town.

The race started at dawn.

The green plastic box at my feet kept sliding around the dimpled black flooring material. One time, on a particularly hard left bank, I had to use my foot to keep Bill from falling into the chin bubble. Our client, Red Bull, had contracted my company and Corporate Helicopters out of San Diego to film the BAJA 1000, a grueling off-road race through the deserts of Baja, Mexico. The last thing on my list was carrying a dead person’s ashes.

Baja tested man and machine, breaking axles and spirits at every turn, not to be outdone by the local fans who dug pits and threw obstacles in the path of the trophy trucks. Staying alive was the challenge, let alone finding a place to scatter Bill’s ashes. The trucks, 1000 horsepower beasts, could outrun a turbine-powered helicopter on the straightaways. I could hear their engines even through my noise-cancelling aviation headset.

The action-packed day was a circus of adrenaline fused by jet fuel, dust, and the cacophony of powerful engines wailing through the cactus-filled landscape. Finding a place for Bill in this mayhem just didn’t seem right. Didn’t he need a more peaceful place to rest in eternity? The pilot and I just couldn’t bury Bill that day. We made up excuses like “Well, I’m sure Bill would have wanted to see the whole race,” knowing that we just couldn’t toss him out of the helicopter. We landed, tucking the green box back in my pocket, and he sat with us for another round of beers while we shared the bravado of the day.

I headed to bed early that evening, leaving Bill on the table, knowing that he would have stayed until the very end.

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Thank you to Garner Shepard, Mandy Patterson, Ivor and Deann Shier, Osama Shenouda, and so many more from the Corporate Helicopters team. Good times!