'The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska' - Colleen Mondor

Obviously, I like stories. I read, I write a book blog – take it as a given that stories are important to me. Like any other book Colleen Mondor’s first published book, the creative non-fiction memoir ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska’ is full of stories. She talks about pilots she worked with, when she ran dispatch operations for an Alaskan freight and transport organisation, who loaded dead bodies and sled dogs onto their planes, who chased wolves and crashed into mountains. She reports the history of pilots like Ben Eielson and Russ Merrill who flew during the early days of Alaskan aviation history. Alaskan aviation history and the extreme flying of the present, promise to be fascinating, factual subjects on their own, but the reader of ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ is doubly blessed, because Mondor has decided to wrap the substance of these tales up in a narrative style full of examination and questioning intensity, which encourages readers to critically address the very nature of story telling itself. And while I love stories for themselves, for their inter weaving of plot, characters, description and emotion and the effect that this whole package has on me, I have a special fondness for narratives that nudge me towards a better understanding of how story telling works. Any book that shows me how to take off the back and pull out the layers of the mechanism which powers stories, while continuing to grip me with the material of its own individual narratives, stands a good chance of winning my heart.

‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ is pre-occupied not just with it’s own subject matter, but with the way it will tell the stories it contains, the over arching idea readers will take away from this book and the general act of telling stories. It expresses the problems associated with story creation, even as its author casts a story onto the page. This dissection of the act of shaping stories, through narrative creation is a meta aspect of writing that will probably be familiar to fans of fantasy and lit-fiction, who have watched books like ‘The Virgin Suicides’, ‘The Penelopiad’, ‘Liar’ and many more implicitly critique the way the limitations associated with allowing someone to shape a story. Transposed onto the non-fiction narrative of Mondor’s creative memoir, this method of illuminating the reader’s need to approach any fictional narrative with a certain amount of questioning caution more overtly highlights the need for a similar approach to non-fiction; a genre often portrayed of as containing absolute truth. Throughout Mondor’s narrative readers are subtly and overtly encouraged to engage with non-fiction in an active, inquiring manner, examining it for the slants and biases that are so often present. They are urged to construct new ways of thinking about big subjects like heroism and tragic death, that defeat old, simplistic narrative structures. And all this is going on while the book fires out exciting, devastating, well crafted stories about human life under extreme circumstances. I mean…I really didn’t stand a chance against this book.

Now, how does ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ manage to contain what essentially feel like questions about writing craft and problematic narratives into a non-fiction book about flying in Alaska, without making the inclusion of these lines of examination feel clunky and forced? Well, to me it seems that narrative of flying in Alaska is shaped around those questions. The parts of her story of working dispatch at an organisation she calls the Company, which she selects and presents in this narrative, allow her to discuss particular anxieties about writing and reading the stories of others. The idea that the details of Alaskan aviation which she chooses to includes are selected to fit a structuring narrative about writing becomes evident almost from the beginning of the book. There are places, for example where Mondor includes conversations with people who know they will feature in the book, such as one former Company pilot, here called Sam Beach¹, who is concerned about what she will write:

‘Lately he is asking about what I’m writing, how I am planning to fit his story into it. He’s worried about parts of it, about late night phone calls when he thought he was losing it, about showing up at my door one day after too long in the Bush with no end in sight, about all the times I know he almost crashed.

“Don’t make me sound weak,” he says, and I have to shake my head. How could anyone who flew those kind of hours in that kind of weather ever look weak?’

By the way, every time I reread that conversation I feel it gently tapping at my heart, creating thin fault lines, prepping it for a final shattering at the end of the book.

The use of this conversation quietly illuminates the difficulties of telling the truth and writing about living people, a current hot topic related to memoir, but also an essential question that all writers of non-fiction must consider. It’s also one of the early indications that this book is as much about the way authors construct stories, as the substance of the particular stories the book will go on to tell. In my opinion its inclusion is not co-incidental, neither is the incorporation of episodes which allow the book to address other troubled areas of story creation. The Alaskan subject matter that this book contains is crafted into a shape which allows the author to discuss other, weighty ideas through the medium of Alaskan aviation. To say Alaskan aviation is a metaphor, or a cover for these big ideas feels simplistic to be and to go too far, as the book can easily be read for its surface subject matter alone and the details of Alaskan flying are never shunted aside by set piece, writerly digressions. Instead ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ is a cleverly balanced mix of crafted subject matter which allows the reader to enjoy both subject matter and subtext.

Perhaps a note on the structure of this book will help to explain what I mean. ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ generally uses an episodic structure; each short chapter relates a new story, or talks about a different aspect of flying, history or addresses a single aspect of Mondor’s personal reactions. The content contained in one chapter does not often develop, or build on the stories in the chapters that have come before it, at least not by adding more details of plot or characterisation. The same people turn up in multiple stories, but each chapter’s content is generally connected to the rest of the book by the context of the Company’s work, by the general subject of flying and by the fact that Mondor worked with people involved in the stories, rather than by a continuous, narrative strand of character examination or linear plot development². There are obvious gaps between the stories, as this book presents a curated collection not an attempt at a complete non-fiction history of a time period. A person in ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ may get their brief, but focused narrative moment of exposure, only to disappear for much of the rest of the book. Beyond building up a picture of flying in Alaska, each new story generally contributes a more thematic development, which allows the book to discuss its big ideas about storytelling and our response to tragic, deaths which take place in epic circumstances. In the choice of structure and narrative emphasis, we see crafted creation working to exhibit both subject matter (people, events) and through that subject matter wider themes (the problems of creating heroic narratives, the limits of truth and knowledge).

So, while obviously using the selective element of the writing craft which makes it possible for human beings to read any kind of narrative (instead of staring helplessly at an empirical timeline of all the information available on a subject) and presenting a very personal viewpoint on the way the Company runs, ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ seems to attempt to eliminate the often fatal simplicity and incompleteness of the single story solution. The book uses craft tools that I recognise from fiction, but which are probably often found in non-fiction as well, like including multiple narrative viewpoints to questions the way we tell stories to others, or to ourselves; to try and make the reader aware of the problems that can come from our (natural and often wonderful) tendency to respond to information, or a lack of information by snipping what we know up until it falls into one understandable, tidy narrative; to encourage the reader to question the notion of one, representative truth.

In a chapter titled ‘What Happened to Bryce Donovan’ for example, Mondor’s pilot colleagues discuss a crash that killed Mondor’s friend and colleague. The crash is a mystery and no one knows what really caused it, but the pilots propose multiple scenarios in an attempt to explain what happened. As each pilot puts forward their interpretation, the reader is reminded that there is always more than one way to construct a story when the reality of a situation is unknown. Each pilot, from Scott who says that while ‘trying to save the aircraft, he forgot how to save himself’ to Sam who suggests Bryce missed the real problem in his plane, because he was focused on what he thought the problem was, reveals a different slant of story telling. Each slant suggests a new way of viewing Bryce, alluding to the idea that story telling is less about absolute truth (no matter what the newspapers might try to convince you) and more about the human need to craft stories, in order to make sense of events. By being shown multiple versions of a story side by side in this chapter, readers are given the chance to realise that often multiple stories are equally possible, or impossible, that sometimes truth is unknowable and that a single story can be just one interpretation of a situation we can never fully understand. And by providing multiple interpretations, in this chapter Mondor gets closer to presenting a full, ‘truthful’ picture of her friend’s mysterious crash than she ever could by including just one possible explanation.

The use of this particular technique advances what I think ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ advances as perhaps the most relevant concern about the way stories of Alaskan aviation are told; the troubling preference people show for simplified, heroic narratives. In exploring this phenomenon, this book talks about dead pilots, such as Ben Eielson, who have been constructed as legends by writers and whose stories have been reshaped by people’s longing for a complete explanation that jives with their personal feelings about tragic deaths in epic conditions. To me, ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ appears to be, in part, an attempt to react against this typical story construction; a story construction which will perhaps feel familiar to those who know a bit about the different stories surrounding early explorers, like Robert Scott who died at the South Pole, in the most epic of circumstances. Even if you don’t know much about that area of history, you probably know the kind of narratives I mean; stories which create a rather forced convergence between the tragic and the heroic, which can end up obscuring genuine mistakes or human frailties. To some people Scot will always be a tragic hero, partly because his death took place in such epic conditions and any suggestion that he was perhaps not that well prepared is edited out of the way they tell the story. So often, single stories are created that turn real people into tidy, tragic heroes and it seems to me that this book tries to kick against that hero creation, by using various techniques to tell its story of epic, Alaskan flying, like multiple versions of a story and set piece dialogues which illustrate the problems of making heroic stories. These techniques, as well as the sustained analysis of past heroic stories, which the novel sometimes compares with episodes that happened to pilots who Mondor knew, contribute to a greater understanding of how story telling collides with Alaskan flying and attempts to subsume… not exactly the truth, but the diversity of experience and the rough edges of pilot’s aviation stories.

‘Map of My Dead Pilots’ aims to avoid perpetuating extremes like the heroic/tragic storyline, or the stupid scapegoat approach (a type of story telling which culpable organisations sometimes encourage) when it talks about the circumstances of individual pilots. Instead it seeks to present people as human beings, who are understandably familiar contradictions; full of strength and frailty; who are both professionally attentive and desperately inattentive at other crucial times. It does this again by trying to avoid single story lines and instead pulling out all the different aspects of a story, for example in a chapter called ‘Onto the Ice’ the book talks about a pilot called Ray Marrs who leaves his job after a desperate crash landing. He is shown to be a well liked man and a good pilot, but also a man who won’t admit his mistake even when it becomes obvious and a man who ran his luck unnecessarily. This kind of multi-layered approach to the depiction of real people doesn’t sound revolutionary, but it still feels if not totally new, then different from a more mainstream approach to writing non-fiction.

There’s so much else we could talk about in terms of the way this book addresses the problems of creating narratives, by making use of writing techniques and just blunt out stating what the novel wants the reader to understand, for example when Mondor writes that ‘It’s always about the story they want to hear.’ and pow, the reader is down, clutching their heart. I hope I’ve convinced you to explore this book for yourself, but let me end by giving it one more shot and tell you about what, for me, was one of the most powerful parts of this novel³. It comes quite close towards the end, when Mondor talks about Sam leaving the Company. At the beginning of this book when the reader meets Sam they learn that:

‘Sam Beach went to Alaska seeking redemption, reflection, a rehearsal fro the rest of his life. He told his family it was only for a year, maybe two and he believed it when he said it. He believed everything about Alaska: the books, the magazines, the endless supply of cable TV shows.

Especially the TV shows.

He fell hard for the myths, even though he pretended not to.’

By the end of the book Sam is aged by his experiences at the Company, where pilots fly with broken equipment and have to go out in weather that has been officially classified unsafe. He goes back to his parent’s house and tries to deal with where he has been, but a huge barrier to his personal recover is that no one understands what he’s seen and no one wants to hear the unedited truth. The book has previously shown that funny stories pass muster with outsiders, the worst are shrugged off as dramatic exaggerations and sometimes people don’t connecting with the right details that allow the pilots to tell the stories they need to tell. Sam’s father asks if his son has ever been scared flying and Sam answered ‘strong and sure’, no, but the chapter goes on to explain to the reader just why he answers no, ‘You cannot have your sudden moment of clarity then…You needed it when it could have saved you, not now, when there is only silence and gravity and prayer.’. At the end of that explanation, the book notes that ‘Sam doesn’t realise his hands have started shaking, that the beer is spilling slowly, gently onto the concrete floor.’ His father quietly covers his hands.

Later, when Mondor visits Sam, they sit telling stories, forgetting that his parents have never heard these stories before. Slowly, Mondor notices that he parents are silently freaking out:

‘Quietly, so quietly, there in front of us they started to fall apart. The truth hurts sometimes, you know, when you finally painfully, realize that what you’re getting you can’t deny. Sam’s parents smiled graciously as we sat and talked, but they were breaking as we told our stories; like the thinnest wine glasses in a sink full of plates, they just broke.’

Both of these stories are overwhelming because of the simplicity they use to evoke emotion. Bring tissues if you cry easily, because I don’t and I teared up as I typed those quotes out. This portrait of Sam, speaks of a man wrecked by outside forces, who the reader desperately tries to imagine a later life for and kind of...can, as long as they imagine it encompassing those shaking hands around a beer, support, troubles, lapses, happy moments, reminisces and the unfortunate necessity of crafting stories for an audience.

In the end ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ can’t avoid being a narrative which shapes the way its reader responds to certain events. It’s a book at the end of the day and it has to be readable, so it has to contain a created narrative. Its style and structure is heavily informed by the techniques of narrative craft and I guess its overall construction mirrors the idea of working for political change by making use of the political system. Even as it critiques and subverts the shaping of narratives, it still makes use of narrative shaping. Finally, it is written from a personal perspective and while it reads as an even handed account to me, it unavoidably (and thankfully) contains a passionate, mildly persuasive slant when talking about the Company, as it projects Mondor’s personal feelings after working for them. There’s an emotional layer in the stories she tells about people who based on colleagues she really knew, which can’t help but potentially direct reader feeling.

I don’t point this out to indicate that ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ is doomed to fail in its endeavour to provide an alternative narrative form; I merely comment on the limitations imposed by text and storytelling as a whole. Most importantly, while working within the constrictions/constructions of narrative ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ reminds us to constantly remember the need to question narratives, to examine the slant of a story and to pay careful attention to our own tendency towards story telling, even our personal ways of curating, or obliterating stories we don’t want to hear. ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ was never an argument against stories; Mondor’s blog makes it obvious how much she also likes stories. Instead it is an eloquent prompt to be aware of narrative shaping, to fight against traditional narratives if they serve us poorly and to expand the act of story telling. It is so exciting to see a non-fiction book make clear the reasonable anxieties we should all have about created narratives which aim to represent people and push real life into a story form. After, seeing these ideas set out with great elegance and explored with an affectionate use of tools from the very craft that the book critiques I hope that there will be another book from Mondor very soon.

Full disclosure: I’ve been reading Colleen’s blog ‘Chasing Ray’ for about five years and occasionally we talk on Twitter, but I bought my copy of ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’.

¹ The introductory note says the names of real people have been changed, with a few exceptions.

² There are exceptions to this general trend, for example Sam Beach reappears throughout the narrative and the ‘plot’ of his life is developed in a linear fashion, but even in his case the parts of his narrative line are distanced from each other and do not show his complete life story.

³Although it creates an abrupt transition in the book, as the narrative changes to focus intimately on just one person.

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