Objects in flight amaze me. And sometimes birds, too. One Saturday morning in November of 2025, I needed to walk to our mailbox to fetch a replacement piece for the only Liberty Puzzle Kathryn and I own. The piece belonged to our St. Andrew’s handmade wooden jigsaw puzzle. Ah, the world-famous golf links complex in Scotland. This particular piece arrived broken in the box. We were excited to finally finish it. As I always do, I pressed the button that opens our garage door, and the once dark space became flooded with light. This morning I was greeted with clear blue skies. As I always do, I took three steps to the folding chair where I sat and laced my black Nike Air Maxes. I was ready for the short walk down the street.
Just a step or two out of the garage, I spotted something out of the corner of my eye, fifty feet or so in the air, a large bird flying from the southwest in a straight line. It was clearly going to fly diagonally over our house. I squinted in disbelief. Is that what I think it is, I said to myself. It is what I think it is. That’s a bald eagle!
I froze there on the driveway, my hands stuffed in my coat pockets, my mouth gaping open. The bird’s wings stretched wider than any hawk or crow I’d ever seen—broad, powerful, and almost impossibly steady.
Against the crisp blue, the eagle’s white head and tail flared like polished bone, the dark body cutting through the sky.
The creature seemed almost slow. Each deliberate stroke of its wings was unhurried, as if it had mastered the art of wasting nothing. It wasn’t built for haste but for command of the air, gliding on unseen currents with effortless grace. Yet I knew that same bird, serene and stately now, could become a blur of speed in an instant—a living missile when it tucked its wings and dove for prey.
Years ago, to see my first bald eagle, or rather, I should say eagles, I had to travel all the way to the Chilkat River, nestled within the expansive 48,800-acre Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve near Haines, the hometown of my ex-wife.
Getting to Haines is an adventure all its own. First, there’s the plane ride. Juneau International Airport (JNU) is located just off a channel of icy water, flanked on all sides by towering, snow-loaded, 3,000-foot peaks and glaciers. The fifteen-mile Gastineau Channel is infamous for its shifting and gusty winds and is often shrouded in thick blankets of fog.
In 1971, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 727 crashed into a mountain while approaching Juneau, claiming 111 lives. At the time, it was the deadliest single-plane accident in U.S. history. The National Transportation Safety Board attributed the tragedy to confusing cockpit instruments and pilot error.
The Juneau Airport Wind System (JAWS) helps pilots plan a flight path to safely navigate the terrain; its development was triggered by an extraordinary near-disaster.
On January 30, 1993, an Alaska Airlines 727 lifted off into a strong wind and began its turn when a sudden gust, amplified by a mountain wind wave, struck. Banking thirty degrees to the right, the jet was slammed onto its side, wings vertical, and hurtled toward the ground. The crew regained control with just 150 feet to spare. Remarkably, everyone walked away uninjured.
JAWS was fully tested and put into operational use by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2012, thirteen years after I took my first plane ride to Juneau.
I’ve flown into Juneau’s airport several times, including during the month of December, when it was pitch black, snowing, and the wind was howling. The engines roared against the wind-driven turbulence, the wings shuddered, and every muscle in my body tensed up. Even now, as I write this, the hair on the back of my neck stands straight up. One word comes to mind. Terror.
On approach, the 737s I rode in had to pass over a mountain right before landing. So close that it felt like I could reach out and brush the snow-covered tree tops with my fingertips. And back then, when departing from Juneau, planes had to make an immediate, exciting 180-degree right turn to avoid hitting a mountain.
The 4.5 to 5.5-hour ferry trip on the Alaska Marine Highway from Juneau to Haines is a cakewalk in comparison. Anyway, back to the birds. Every November, the Chilkat River becomes the gathering place for the largest concentration of bald eagles in the nation, thousands of them. They come for the last supper, drawn by the slow, silver churn of the late salmon run. The contrast in my mind was stunning: calm majesty one moment, fierce precision the next.
Back in Rexburg, I stood there, amazed. Our neighborhood was still—no cars, no wind, no dogs barking. Just the solitary bird drawing a silent line above me. The sheer rarity of it pressed on me. What are the odds? Of all the seconds in all the mornings, I happen to step out now. I probably won’t stand in this same spot again and witness something like it—at least not in this lifetime.
And then the eagle disappeared behind our roof. Gone. Forever.
For that one moment, I felt small in the best possible way, like the world had expanded in front of me. That single sighting—brief, impossible, perfect—made the ordinary errand to fetch a puzzle piece feel suddenly extraordinary. I lingered there for a second after it passed out of view, my gaze tracing where it had been, my heart still trying to keep up with what my eyes had just witnessed.
Like I said, flight amazes me. One flight I’m quietly envious of belongs to a doctor I once interviewed. He told me that on the days when the skies behave—ten miles of visibility, not a cloud with an attitude—he forgoes the highway altogether. Instead, he straps himself into his immaculate 1959 Cessna 180 and takes to the air. His work sends him to a hospital in Salmon, but he approaches the destination the way most of us approach a hike through the forest: with a certain boyish delight.
Salmon sits nestled in the beautiful Lemhi Valley with the Beaverhead Mountains looming over. Not many commutes in this world can compete with what the doctor sees from his cockpit—towering granite peaks that seem to lean closer the higher he climbs, canyons cut so deep they look like someone took a knife to the map, and forests so thick you could believe no human foot has ever pressed into them. Big game wander the edges of the treeline. Beneath it all runs the Salmon River, bright as beaten silver, moving with the kind of self-possession that makes you understand why explorers once feared it.
This is, after all, the backyard of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Clark himself walked this ground and named the Salmon “The River of No Return,” a label that wasn’t some poetic flourish but a sober conclusion after he watched the water throw itself through the rocks with no regard for human plans. Clark took one look, sized up the danger, and sensibly backtracked. The river hasn’t changed much since then. It still keeps its own counsel.
Listening to the doctor talk about flying to Salmon, I realized his commute was a revival—an invitation to remember that the world is larger and more beautiful than whatever waits in our inboxes. He gets to begin his workday by flying over a slice of America that has stayed stubbornly wild, and when he told me his story, I could hear the gratitude in his voice.
On the ground, for me, the skies hold their own quiet magic.
One flight that fascinated me for the longest time was a small plane that lifted off from the Rexburg–Madison County Airport around 6:30 every evening. I first noticed it on one of my nightly walks, climbing into the amber light of dusk, its body painted white with a faint stripe of blue. Then I spotted it a second night and a third night. After that, I couldn’t not look for it. Night after night, there it was again and again, rising from our expanding town with some steady purpose. For months, I wondered—who was it? Where was it going? What story lived inside that daily ascent? The mystery gnawed at me until I finally asked the doctor from earlier if he knew.
He told me it was a UPS airplane carrying freight. A Beechcraft King Air. It turns out the popular and versatile twin-engine turboprop aircraft has been flying since the 1960s—sturdy, dependable, built like someone designed it after saying, “Let’s make a plane that won’t quit.” A reputation for handling rough weather exceptionally well, according to many pilot reviews. Storm clouds, gusting winds, snow showers, and even wind shear advisories. And a cabin roomy enough for cargo, executives, medical flights, or the nightly UPS departure out of Rexburg.
The plane is part of UPS’s comprehensive hub-and-spoke network with delivery from Salt Lake City. UPS flies to Pocatello, Twin Falls, Idaho Falls, Rexburg, and Jackson Hole. They carry lots of Amazon packages.
The idea charmed me: inside that fuselage were packages that arrived earlier in the day from places I’d probably never visit. Medications. Parts. Maybe someone’s engagement ring. Maybe a birthday gift running a little late. And at the controls, two pilots whose whole routine unfolded like clockwork: fuel up, run the checklists, fire the engines, taxi out at 6:28, and lift off at 6:30 sharp.
That steadiness, almost ritualistic, made me admire the plane even more. In a world that feels unpredictable most days, here was this little nightly promise stitched into the sky. A Beechcraft King Air pushing into the dusk, doing the same routine over and over again: making the world just a bit smaller by going to get more.
One of the most awe-inspiring missions I’ve witnessed, where the sky ends, took place not far from our home, where my family and I lived in Roswell, New Mexico. The day was October 14, 2012.
It was the Red Bull Stratos jump, though at the time it felt less like a corporate spectacle and more like something mythic: a lone man, Felix Baumgartner, carried by a helium balloon to the edge of space so he could fall back to Earth.
I remember the morning light, that pale, washed-out glow I knew so well. Somewhere far above it, Baumgartner’s capsule, maybe half the size of the tool shed behind our house, was lifting toward the stratosphere. Thirty-nine kilometers. Twenty-four miles.
He stepped off into nothing, and then he was a streak breaking the sound barrier on the way down. Mach 1.25. Eight hundred–plus miles an hour. I watched it live-streamed on YouTube.
The whole thing lasted about ten minutes. The Austrian daredevil deployed his parachute quicker than expected, four minutes and some seconds into his free fall, as if the Earth had decided to tug him back early.
It was something to see a supersonic skydiver fall through our sky—the same sky that hung over my daily work commute and kite flying in the park with my boys.
By the time Baumgartner touched down in the desert outside of Roswell, he had broken records that had stood since before I was born. Highest balloon ascent. Highest jump. First human to break the sound barrier without any form of engine power.
Living there at that moment, it was a reminder that extraordinary things don’t just happen in far-off cities or on television. Sometimes they land, literally, in your own backyard, and you get to say: I watched a man fall from the edge of space. I was there, sorta.
The most peculiar object, or rather, I should say objects, I’ve seen in the sky took place on November 12, 2025. I will call it my first UFO sighting. I was turning the last corner of my evening walk when I saw a train of twenty little dots high in the sky. All in a perfect line.
I stopped dead in my tracks. “Well… that’s not normal,” I whispered to absolutely no one.
Then the panic set in—the excited kind, the I’ve-waited-my-whole-life-to-see-something-like-this kind. I sprinted to the house, burst through the door, and shouted,
“Come outside! You have to see this!
Kathryn didn’t even look up from the couch. “See what?”
“There’s a line of lights right above us!”
She sighed the sigh of a woman married to me, stood up, and followed me outside. We both craned our necks into the dark sky.
Nothing.
Not a single dot. Not even a faint one.
She blinked. “Where?”
“They were right there!” I said, pointing to the exact spot. “A whole train of them! Twenty lights, maybe more!”
She nodded slowly. Too slowly. “Mmm-hmm.”
“I know what I saw!” I just stood there, pointing at the empty patch of sky. “It was right. There.”
“Well,” she said with a laugh, already walking back toward the house, “see you inside, dear.”
After my dignity recovered, I went inside and googled something like: “line of straight dots in sky”.
Turns out, it wasn’t UFOs at all. It was a Starlink satellite train.
SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, regularly launches batches of satellites into low Earth orbit, which are part of the megaconstellation that provides high-speed internet worldwide. When they’re newly launched, they appear as a string of bright, evenly spaced dots—sixty of them marching silently across the night sky.
The satellites climb to their operational orbits 340 miles above Earth, but for a brief time right after launch, they look exactly like the sort of thing that makes a grown man sprint inside yelling for witnesses.
So no UFOs. No invasion.
Like I said, flight amazes me. And nothing in the sky stirs me quite like the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels. They take everything I love about flight—the grace, the danger, the sheer defiance of gravity—and turn it into art. I still remember my first Thunderbirds show at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma. I must have been eight or nine. After watching Top Gun and then seeing that roaring display of precision and American pride high in the sky, I knew at least for a brief stretch of boyhood, that I wanted to be a fighter pilot too. As an adult, I saw them again at Biggs Army Airfield on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, and twice at Hill Air Force Base in Utah; each time, the old awe returned, undiminished.
The Blue Angels, though, their performances carry a different kind of magic. Officially known as the U.S. Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, I’ve watched them fly three times: once in Idaho Falls, another time in Baltimore, Maryland, banking around the downtown high rises and flying low on the Inner Harbor while I stood awestruck on a terrace of the Convention Center, and once more in Twin Falls, Idaho. That last show is the one I remember most vividly.
It was mid-August 2025, a Sunday baked in sun and jet fuel. Cars were moving slowly bumper to bumper on the backcountry roads, snaking through a sliver of the food basket of Idaho (ag epicenter), leading to the Magic Valley Regional Airport. Families hauled folding chairs, coolers, and umbrellas toward the tarmac that stretched for as far as the eye could see. Kathryn and I claimed our spot fifty yards or so away from the fence line.
The announcer’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers. “Now, to the left, Commander Bryan calls smoke on, off brakes, noooww… burners ready now!—and the Blue Angel Diamond is rolling. As they pass before you, you will notice that the smoke is no longer visible while the engines are in afterburner.”
The sound came before the sight—a low growl rising to a deafening roar. They began their takeoff roll in a “V” formation and slid into the Diamond on liftoff, commencing the Diamond Half Squirrel Cage. The smoke came on as Commander Bryan called for deselection of afterburner. Pulling through the horizon, he rolled the formation 180 degrees to the upright position, completing the Half-Cuban Eight, a full, fluid loop. The crowd gasped in unison. Even after all the shows I’ve seen, that first maneuver always catches me off guard—how something so daring can look so effortless.
The number of maneuvers in a Blue Angels show can vary, but a typical demonstration includes around twenty. Before long, I stopped counting. They looped and rolled to the crowd’s delight, sunlight glancing off the sheen of their wings. The air filled with that sharp tang of jet exhaust, burnt metal, heat, and wind. I caught myself grinning, the way a kid does when something unbelievable happens right in front of him.
At one point, while I was still mesmerized by the Diamond’s Left Echelon Roll, four F/A-18 Super Hornets climbing in unison, rolling a perfect circle to the left, then peeling away to the right and sliding effortlessly back into formation, I never saw what was coming next. From the left and from behind, the two solo pilots executed the infamous Sneak Pass at just under the speed of sound. The Lead Solo came in from behind, low and fast, only fifty feet above us. I had earplugs in, but they offered no defense. The sound hit like a Mike Tyson body punch, a rolling thunder that rattled my ribcage. For a split second, the whole sky felt alive and absolutely electric. I had just witnessed firsthand the ability of a tactical aircraft to sneak into a target area virtually undetected at high speed. That’s when I was reminded of one thing: these guys are total badasses.
It was at this stage in the show that I thought of the men inside those jets that cost $67.4 million a piece, who’d trained in ways most of us couldn’t imagine. Now they were flying for us, showcasing the teamwork and professionalism of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. I have the utmost respect for these men and women because they inspire a culture of excellence and service to the country. Every time I watch, tears well up. It isn’t just the spectacle, it’s what they represent. The discipline, the trust. At one point, four pilots flying eighteen inches apart, each depending wholly on the others. It’s the kind of harmony that seems almost beyond human reach. That’s why it always stirs something deep in me.
These demonstration teams hailing from Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, are a testament to what teams can achieve when they pursue perfection with everything they have. And standing there beneath the Blue Angels in Twin Falls, craning my neck toward that furious beauty, I felt it again—the same awe I felt as a boy in Oklahoma, the same reverence I felt years later watching an eagle fly silently over my neighborhood. The same wonder, just dressed in different wings.
Word Count: 3,198
Here are six “writing” takeaways from this chapter:
The Beginning
1. Start small, then widen the lens.
I began with an ordinary moment—a walk to the mailbox—and used it as the doorway into wonder.
Try This: Start your opening scene with something small and concrete (lacing shoes, opening a door, a sound, a smell). Let that detail be the on-ramp to something bigger.
2. Use a single vivid image to hook the reader.
I didn’t offer generalities—I gave you a bald eagle cutting across a blue Idaho sky.
Try This: Open a scene with one sharp image your reader can see instantly. Trim everything else that blurs that picture.
The Middle
3. Let your curiosity be the engine.
The middle moves because I am curious—why the plane flies at 6:30, what the doctor sees, what those dots in the sky could be. The reader follows because I’m following something.
Try This: When writing the middle of a chapter, ask: What question was I alive to in this moment? Write toward that question.
4. Change pace to avoid monotony.
I shift from quiet awe (the eagle), to tension (the Juneau landing), to humor (my UFO sprint). The story breathes because the rhythm changes.
Try This: Look at one of your scenes and deliberately vary its tempo—after something intense, write something still; after something still, write something surprising.
The End
5. Bring the story full circle with a deeper echo.
I return to the original theme—flight—now enriched by fighter jets, a doctor’s commute, satellites, and boyhood dreams. It’s not a summary; it’s an expansion.
Try This: At the end of a chapter, return to your opening idea but let it ring in a new key. Let the reader feel the growth, not hear you explain it.
6. Let emotion come from honesty, not drama.
The ending works because it’s sincere—quiet awe, pride, reverence—not sentimental or forced.
Try This: Write the last paragraph of your scene, then cut any line that tries to be profound. What remains is usually true enough.
