Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, Wade Garrett. My Father. Today is his eighty-forth birthday. He was a B-17 pilot during WWII. For years, we heard the story of one of his last missions in 1944. Returning from a bombing run over Munich, Dad's left wing man took a hit in the front wheel well, igniting a hydraulic oil line. As the cockpit filled with smoke, the pilot became disoriented and his plane begin drifting. Dad's top turret gunner, Fred Yaggi, had just enough time to shout into the intercom, "Captain Mayer, look out!" Killed the engines (all four of them) waited for the plane to settle, then tipped the plane ever so slightly to the left so that wing man and crew slid over Dad's plane with just inches to spare. "I could have reached up and touched him" Yaggi later reported. Just how close I came to not being born.