About Me

February 20, 2025 - In a baño at the dirt mall at Puerto Penasco, MX

Why are you here?

Why do you want to know more about me?

You are a visitor in my house, do I need to remind you of that?

Here, at my address, you will only get to know what I want to tell you except, this will be a little more than an exercise in my own self-constraint. My life is actually bigger than the truth I tell here. If anything, I’ll tone it down as I write. If you know me or grew up with me, then you already know.

I don’t think I’m special.

I do know that I have a unique story, we all do. This is my story, and believe it or not, I don’t care what you believe or think you know about me. I’m a husband, a father and a friend and I really could care less about anything anyone thinks about me, it’s none of my business. What my wife thinks? My sons? My family? That’s what matters. 

They already know who I am.

I am in my mid-sixties and I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. I served in the Army as a combat medic during the eighties. It was peacetime then and I joined because I was in jeopardy of not becoming an adult. I did not know what to do with my life. I was young and had no idea how to grow up. I wanted to be a professional surfer but living in Phoenix, three hundred miles from the coast of California did not allow me to climb the ranks of professional surfing let alone surf everyday. I was skateboarding in empty swimming pools and surfing at Big Surf, the first surfing wave pool in the world and wearing out my car driving to the coast with my friends. I just wanted to skate and surf. That’s all I cared about.

One of my other favorite things to do was to drive out to the different siphons of the Central Arizona Project while it was being built and skate the 22’ pipeline. I surfed and skated quite a bit back then and I took photography classes in high school. My father provided me with an account at a local film lab and I took photographs with my Canon TX, a basic 35mm SLR camera and my Kodak Super 8mm movie camera.

My mom had given me her skateboard back in the sixties, that’s what got me started. She took me to Huntington Beach and my first exposure to surfing was these guys standing up on their canoes way out in the waves, note to self, that is cool, I want to do that. Once I was driving on my own, on a surf trip to Blacks Beach, I saw my first hang glider! Note to self, I AM DEFINITELY GOING TO DO THAT!

But you need money to do things and every time there was a swell, I would quit my job and make my drive across the desert, crash on my friends couches and surf until I ran out of money and had to go home and find another job so I could do that again.

Fun but I wasn’t on a good path and it started to get dark…

I eventually ran out of time, read that as I wore out my family with my surfing and skating as a kid. Problem was, I wasn’t a kid, I just acted like one.

One day, alone, sitting on the coping of an empty swimming pool at a burnt out house on the North side of Camelback Mountain, I remember reading a Soldier of Fortune magazine. I think it was an article about the mercenaries of Afghanistan, I thought to myself…

I’ll join the Army and be a soldier.

I wasn’t too out of sorts, there were a lot of guys like me. We often meet in abandoned houses skating the empty pool, or the new “skate parks” they called them or the surf session at Big Surf. We would ride share to the coast to go surfing. I just didn’t have many successful friends that had amazing jobs and a house, this life at that time was hardly sustainable. Money was hard earned and things I needed to have cost more than I made when I was working.

My life was similar to my peers but I ran out of time…

My father was a heart surgeon, what does a guy like that know? He was always at work! I didn’t want to be like him! (But I really did) He drove a Porsche and if I asked him to drive fast, he would. I looked at his face when he mashed the peddle and I saw what I enjoyed when I skated a pool, that smile of contentment. He took us to Hawaii, he provided for the family but he didn’t surf or understand it, but he really did.

“Adam, you suck at surfing, you are not a professional surfer and you aren’t making any money at it. You have to learn to live by your own means. I’m not going to sponsor give you any more money.”

It really didn’t go down like that but it did. That’s the story I tell myself. My life at the time was much more messier than that. I was mixed up, I didn’t take care of myself, wait, that’s all I cared about, just me. Yeah, I was headed down a bad road and it was the late seventies and early eighties. It didn’t help that I liked Punk Rock music. That’s what I did at night. My friends were in bands. I spent a lot of time drinking, partying, dancing, chasing girls, surfing, skating and that first hang glider my Dad bought me was going to kill me if I didn’t figure it out soon.

To this day, I wonder why he bought me a hang glider back then…

The staff Sargent pulled me out of the long line, I was in the infantry induction line in South Carolina, Fort Jackson. He was screaming at me, “GET TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE!” And in two seconds flat I had a reverse mohawk. In a few more seconds I was a skinhead, no, not that kind of a skinhead.

I was in the ARMY.

What in the fuck did I just do?

I was 23 years old, far away from home and finally on my way to becoming a soldier of fortune!

No, not really, that just sounds cool, uhh. I’m just trying to get the point across that I had no clue how I was going to grow up. I knew that I was probably going to not live very long and the life I was living was going to end badly. But I knew people that joined the service were coming out on the other side as adults.

I really wanted to be an adult.

The Army taught me to adult.

I ended up in Hawaii at my duty station, Schofield Barracks. 

My dad had taken us on vacations to the islands. We went at least a few times. Looking back, I brought my board and once I brought a surfing friend! He is dead now, he moved to Hawaii later and was working there, living the life I did before I joined the service, surfing but he OD’d. Ugh, that’s what I was afraid of. But I was in the Army now and had some money and I was on a straight and narrow path adulting and doing what I wanted to do on my free time. 

I was a professional soldier. 

I surfed the North and West shores of O’ahu. I also bought another hang glider and I decided that if I wanted to be get older, I better take some lessons.

I surfed GIANT waves in the sky and pretty big waves in the sea while living in Hawaii.

I became really good at surfing the ocean and the sky and my day job? No, not a mercenary, yes a soldier in the infantry, particularly a combat medic.

My parents visited me in Hawaii, my Mom freaked out at me flying at Makapuu. My Dad passed on a tandem flight. My time in the Army was coming to an end and I went home to start my life as an adult. I was still surfing, skateboarding, snowsurfing and soaring my hang glider, paraglider, I flew ultralights and I was learning to fly sailplanes while in the Civil Air Patrol.

I went to work in Surgery at a local hospital. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was cleaning surgical instruments which meant I needed to know the name of ALL of them. My Dad gave me insight into a company that taught cardiovascular technologies while working, I applied and was hired.

I had to take a pay cut, I made minimum wage but I didn’t do anything. I watched the different machines in heart surgery while I went to school and studied, passed tests and learned hands on with a preceptor and the more I learned, the more I got paid and I started making some money again. 

I learned autologous blood salvage, circulatory assist devices and how to set up and operate the heart lung machine. I also ran blood gas machines and different blood clotting laboratory analyzers as well as running a QC control program on everything. In short, my day job was assisting the surgeons in open heart surgery.

I was growing up and adulting.

On my time off I flew cross country in my hang glider in the summers. In the winter I was snow surfing and I skated too.

My life was super intense!

I didn’t know it at the time, that’s just what I did.

I worked my way into a position where my company flew me to open heart accounts in the west, I would be asked to go to Colorado, California and Nevada to meet with Open Heart teams there and assist. 

I got married, had kids and this travel was not fun.

So I applied at the hospital system I was hired out of to assist in Anesthesiology and learned the operation of the anesthesia machine and I assisted in ALL surgeries in a busy surgery suite.

I was soaring more, skating and surfing less, flying cross country in my hang glider had the highest risk and reward. I placed in a couple of year long contests and I continued on with my intense work and play life.

This story won’t be about my kids or my wife, they are my life yet their story is theirs to tell. I think everyone has a story to tell, no one story more important than another, we are all equal. This is just what I did looking back on my life as I am getting older.

As I was working as an anesthesia assistant, my Mom gave me her Macintosh computer, an Apple LC III. She just didn’t use it and a work friend taught me html or the language of the internet. The year was 1995 and I made my first web site. That same friend and I bought fly rods and we started to learn the ins and outs of fly fishing.

I had made friends with a new hang glider pilot, he was a local news helicopter pilot reporter. It was so cool to see him on the television reporting nightly on the news and then flying with him on the weekends. We became close friends and I spent quite a bit of time with him. We were developing a close friendship. We flew together in our hang gliders but he could dedicate more of his time to soaring. He was advancing quickly and I was becoming more aware that hang gliding was probably the way that I was going to die. We had a common friend that we flew together quite frequently. My kids got to know him too and one beautiful summer day he went cross country soaring and tried to land at Sedona airport and slipped his turn into the ground and was killed.

We recovered his glider the next day and I remember staring at the spot on the ground where he died wondering if this would be the way I was going to go.

My kids begged me to stop flying and I sold my glider to my news helicopter reporter friend and he knew not to call me. You see, the call of the sky is very strong. Once you know its song, it is like a siren calling for you to leave the safe bond of the earth. It is a command of one’s self that is un-earthly. Already many of my friends have died hang gliding and all were very good at it. Some better than me and the pressure from my kids and that internal voice telling me that I was on borrowed time was so easy to ignore. I had a couple of very close calls but ended up walking away unscathed. The first one in Hawaii where I didn’t understand landing in high wind. It was a simple mistake and I survived crashing without breaking any bones. The second one was at Shaw Butte, I took off in a thermal and stalled the wing. I was two hundred feet above the ground but the slow speed stall turned me back over the launch and I piled in between big black boulders.

That one should have killed me but I walked away white as a ghost without a scratch.

I had quit flying before, but I ended up ignoring the little voice saying, “don’t do it.”

This time I sold all of my equipment, declaring my divorce to my flying friends telling me not to call, “I don’t want to go flying, actually I do but I can’t say no so don’t call.” I bought a fine Italian Pine dinning room table for our home. Funny, my wife divorced me shortly after that and guess what I did? 

My job in anesthesia was amazing but an old friend called me, “Adam, I want you to help me start up a college within a university. I’m putting together a cardiovascular sciences degree, a degree to operate the heart lung machine and I want you to manage the laboratory and help me,” 

I traded my scrubs for clothes by Kenneth Cole, my new office had my name on the door and I built the laboratory into a cutting edge teaching platform. We taught like 18 or so students to run the heart lung machine that first graduating class. I helped my director to build the first in the world, high fidelity heart lung machine simulation. I used my skills in computing to run a program that the student followed and depending on their actions took them down a possible path in surgery. We had a closed circuit video monitoring that I could watch their habits behind the screen of the patient. If they looked away, I would place a clamp on the arterial line and if they missed the pressure monitoring alarm, the line would over pressurize and blow a connection spraying red dyed water, simulated blood everywhere. In the beginning of their simulation time, we would laugh about it, later not so much. The amazing thing was that our students graduated with built in automatic responses to catastrophic events. The old way was to learn by sitting beside a preceptor during real heart surgery, our new way was much safer and it was amazing and I was a huge part of this new teaching method development.

But teachers did not make much money and I had no degree. I had experience but no diploma to demand that higher salary. At the time I was writing contracts for professors to teach for us and the rate was about $65,000 per year and I made about half of that. 

I remember standing at a slaughterhouse kill room filling a five gallon bucket with beef blood adding gentamyacin (antibiotic) to kill germs, the smell of death, it was a wave of mutilation, I could not stand getting the blood to demonstrate oxigenator efficiency. I was in a dead end, I had to change my job and that was going to suck.

I bought another hang glider and I quit my job. 

An anesthesiologist friend I meet kite surfing asked me if I wanted to head up the anesthesia techs at a busy hospital surgery suite in an outlying city of Phoenix, “sure” and that was my ticket out of academia. I wasn’t a good fit for that job. I could tell why but it just doesn’t matter. That friend turned out to be a brief acquaintance. I’m biting my writing lip now.

I took a job stress testing patients in a busy cardiology practice.

I also got back into hang gliding.

This time I was back in it to win it.

I was voted in as vice president of the Arizona Hang Gliding Association. I had served as the club historian in the past so I knew what to do. Ignore that little voice and go flying. Leave the earth, fly amoung the clouds, forget my cares and be a bird.

It was truly empowering to know the sky and live in it besides, the sky was safe, it was the earth that was out to kill me.

My work life was starting to settle in. I was weak in electrocardiography but weak is relative. I was ACLS certified which made me actually good at ECG yet when you are good at something, if you are truly good, you know that you don’t really know much about your subject.

I was in my late fourties at this time and remarried to an absolutely beautiful woman inside and out. She is perfect for me and she could not stand watching me fly off into the sky. She is deathly afraid of heights and held onto me loosely. “Go, go fly but not one flight without life insurance. You have to take care of us if you die.” 

I got my flight life insurance and quickly got back into a high level of hang gliding. I bought a wing from a guy in Las Vegas. It was owned by Mitch McAleer, a world class hang glider pilot. I went through that wing replacing parts that should have a high level of routine maintenance. I detailed the process as I’m doing here with my life because ALL of my life depended on it.

I’m going to skip forward and hit fast forward for brevity. 

Web sites, blogs should not be these long winded biopics. They need to be brief vignettes, palatable in the confines of wasting time because isn’t that what the Internet is? A big waste of time.

Writing my story in Mexico at the edge of the Sea of Cortez

It was difficult to set the glider up in the lee of the truck on top of Sheba crater. The wind was building and I was so excited to hunt down that upwind wave that I wanted to climb out in. Stuffing battens was the time that I reviewed my flight plan in my head.

Looking over at Merrium crater made me remember a flight that affected me psychologically. I’ll detail it below as I recalled the account previously.

From a social media post: It really stressed my family. As I had kids, they got to know my pilot friends and as they would pass away from a crash, the kids just didn’t understand why I would do that. I would quit for a few years, start flying again and the last time, close call high near the Navajo Nation in high wind.

Once, I chose too strong of a day to fly. I took off and immediately went up to ten thousand feet, I was climbing at about two thousand feet per minute in a big booming thermal. In a minute I was at twelve thousand and climbing steady and fast. I was getting cold and worried as I was drifting toward Grand Falls, now over it at fourteen thousand feet. My Volkswagen bus could not cross the Little Colorado, and I started crying.

I could not fly out of the thermal, fifteen thousand and the bar is pulled in as hard as I could to fly fast and increase my sink rate, sixteen thousand and now Im on the other side of Grand Falls, terrified, freezing cold, hypoxic, can’t really control the glider going that fast and it’s making creaking noises I haven’t heard before.

If I flip over, I’ll fall into the aluminum tubes, the frame of the glider and break it. I’ll spin violently down wrapped in the wreckage. I carry a parachute, but it will be difficult to throw but I will have to.

Unless I gain control of my mind, I was going to screw up and break the glider in the strongest conditions I’ve ever flown in so I thought to myself, “gain control over each axis, one at a time.”

I worked on pitch first and stopped swooping, then concentrated on keeping the wing level and flying into the wind, I stopped getting blown downwind. I gained control over the glider and could only affect a glide of about 400’ per minute down. I can’t remember the ground altitude at Grand Falls, but I was at least ten or twelve thousand feet coming down at only four hundred feet per minute.

When the air goes up, it has to go down somewhere so I started to fly at an angle off of straight upwind. Four hundred feet per minute down, eleven thousand feet high, it’s going to take a while to come down.

So scared.

Long story short, I finally got down and it fucked me up so bad. Imagine being terrified for an hour. A solid hour of out of your head fearful, scared. It was a psychological event for me. I didn’t fly for a couple of months.

This time of my life was intense. I was on an open-heart team, my job was tough, learning to fly cross country was intense, everything was pegged.

Toward the end of flying my hang glider, I was also flying early paragliders, and they were not that safe, and I was teaching myself to fly. I knew I had to quit.

My wife would not go with me, she was terrified of it and she made me get special life insurance.

I knew I loved fishing, and I was dabbling in making web sites early on in the timeline of the internet so I quite flying and went the other way, solitude deep in the forest with a fly rod. I gathered a group of writer photographer fishers and we started filling out web sites.

Fly fishing salt water ended up being my favorite and it is just wonderful to be back at it after learning tenkara.

I flew pretty well, placed in some contests, flew in the southwest and off big mountains of Colorado.

My favorite flight in AZ was taking off at Mount Eldon in Flagstaff and gliding to and circling over Humphreys Peak where I used to snow surf.

It makes me smile when I see people get so serious about fly fishing. It’s such a quiet thing to do, little bits of fun, excitement overall but quite sedate in comparison.

I pulled on my new harness from an Italian harness designer. Shouldered my glider and a friend of mine, another who is gone held the wires walking me out into the blast of the wind. The wind was blowing north of thirty miles per hour with blasts much higher. It was no time to goof around, hang check, I’m ready and lifted the glider and leaned forward immediately lifting off and forward.

Long story short, the flight was going well and I was probing back and forth climbing in lift until my harness unzipped all the way from my chest to my feet.

Obviously I’m still here but that was my last flight and I detailed it HERE.

I’m a fisherman, a fly fisherman. I put all my energy into it. The full weight of my mind, detailing it online, building teams of writers, working sponsorships from the best companies and now I’m walking away from it all and it feels good.

The internet is a wonderful place, it’s truly what you make of it but it’s also a horrible place too. My favorite thing to do with it is to learn from others, the worst thing about it is to learn ABOUT others.

In other places in this blog you will learn about me and what I’ve done.

I’m divorcing myself from social media. 

My fishing sites?

Hell yeah, I’m going to maintain them because that’s what I do but I’m not looking for anything in return. I’m sharing my gift, my interests and I won’t write about things I don’t know.

I’m still here, I am very grateful for my life. I love my family with all my being. I love my Lucy of Baja Arcadia, a four year old sheep a doodle. My kids are awesome humans and my youngest is literally a rock star.

I love my father and his girlfriend. He is the reason I made it. I had no fucking idea.

Thank you dad.

FIN