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Hosted by Ruben Navarrete and author/pastor Tri Robinson, The Journey of Gratitude is a deep-dive conversation centered around Tri’s book, A Journey of Gratitude: Traversing Four Seasons of Life. Together, Ruben and Tri go beyond the pages of the book to explore the profound, sometimes messy, and always miraculous ways that God directs our paths. Part memoir and part spiritual retrospective, this podcast is a guide for anyone looking back at where they've been to better understand where God is leading them today.
Welcome to the Journey of Gratitude podcast hosted by Troy Robinson and Ruben Navarret.
Ruben Navarrete:Well, I wanna know a little bit more history about the J three Cub, how you ended up buying an airplane after that story of your first solo flight and how that went. How then that, you know, you transitioned to the College of Idaho after that. So tell me the story of the J3 Cub and how you found that.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, so my idea was, in those days, that possibly my future was about flying, you know? I kind of hoped so.
Ruben Navarrete:So you were thinking like commercial pilot
Tri Robinson:or something? Yeah, yeah, that was my intention. It was funny in those days though, I didn't know it then, but they had a height requirement, and I was an inch too short. So I actually went eventually to Western Airlines simulators and stuff.
Ruben Navarrete:Oh, you did?
Tri Robinson:Yeah. But I didn't, not for a job, but just to For fun? Well, just to explore, and I had a good friend of the family who was a trainer for Western Airlines. Oh, okay. And he let me come and fly the simulators and try to see if it was something I really wanted to do, but that's when I found out I was too short.
Tri Robinson:Not only that, but another thing happened later when I was going for my instrument rating, I had to fly under a hood, and if I could see the ground and the horizon, or, you know, then it was an athletic event, you know, flying an airplane, it was just coordination, and I could land anywhere, I was really But good at once I had to fly by instruments under a hood, my dyslexia kicked in.
Ruben Navarrete:Okay.
Tri Robinson:And I would always end up turning the wrong direction. Good lord. Seriously, I mean, it was really a problem.
Ruben Navarrete:So you were somebody who flew by how it feels.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, yeah, just by an athletic ability,
Ruben Navarrete:really. Instinct.
Tri Robinson:And that J3 just became an extension of my body.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, you have to be strong to, like, pilot a plane like that because you're actually moving them with your physical strength.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, but it's just a feel, you know, and you have to have good depth perception and things like that. But, you know, I got to Idaho and I started renting a plane, and in those days it was cheap, you know? Yeah. But still it was expensive in those days, you know, everything's relative. And one day I had rented this airplane and flew to another airport in the Treasure Valley, and I landed just I was shooting landings, I I landed just practicing, and on the edge of the tarmac was this little yellow cub,
Ruben Navarrete:J three.
Tri Robinson:Mhmm. And it was the same exact plane that my dad soloed in Alaska.
Ruben Navarrete:Okay, I didn't know he soloed on a J-three Cub before.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, he did, on skis.
Ruben Navarrete:So you knew Okay, so you were familiar with that kind of aircraft?
Tri Robinson:Oh, yeah, I was like, I dreamed about it.
Ruben Navarrete:Okay, all right.
Tri Robinson:And there was one, and it had a For Sale sign on it. Okay. And so I taxied this other airplane up and got out, and I went over there. I was looking at it because I'd never had a close look at one. Not really, I guess.
Tri Robinson:Because they were it was a 1944 World War II reconnaissance airplane. Like, it's old, you know? Even then it was old. And I was looking around and this old guy comes out. And he says, Hey, young man, you interested in this airplane?
Tri Robinson:And he had seen that I had flown in, so I must have had a license, you know. I said, Yeah, I am. This is the same plane my dad flew in Alaska years ago, you know, and I've just always been fascinated. And he says, Well, I'll sell it to you, And you I said, How much? And he said, $1,200 now.
Tri Robinson:That plane today very plane, by the way, plane that was my plane is now in an air museum in Southern California.
Ruben Navarrete:Really?
Tri Robinson:Yeah, and it's a collector's item. What would it be worth today? I don't know. I don't know, but
Ruben Navarrete:I'm gonna look it up.
Tri Robinson:Not $1,200. Not $1,200, but
Ruben Navarrete:then $1,200 mean, it would
Tri Robinson:probably be Especially restored, and this thing was in good shape, you know? And I said, Well, it was a tail dragger. And I had always flown tricycle with a wheel.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, tail dragger's not easy to fly.
Tri Robinson:No, it was a total different experience. Landing especially and taking off, but especially landing was a very, very different experience, because you couldn't see out the front of the plane. Had to
Ruben Navarrete:look outside.
Tri Robinson:Nose up. Yeah, use the nose up. You drug the tail when you land. So I said, Well, I've never flown a tail dragger before. And he says, Oh, that's no problem, I'll teach you how to do it.
Tri Robinson:You come up with the money, I'll give you lessons. And I said, So, okay. So I did the math, like, okay, to get I had to have two hundred hours for my commercial license. And so I had to put in these hours at, I don't know, what, you know, $15 an hour Sure, yeah. So I did the math and I realized it would be a lot more than $1,200.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. So you're thinking buy the plane,
Tri Robinson:fly it, sell it, and it's like free,
Ruben Navarrete:you know?
Tri Robinson:And I would get my commercial license for nothing. So everything was a payphone then, And so I go to the dorm room at the college, and I, you know, dropped my coins in and dialed my parents that night. And I gave them the hard sell. Well, I think because my dad had had so many hours in the J-three coming, I know what was in his mind. If we buy this plane, I can come up and fly it.
Ruben Navarrete:Gotcha. Gotcha, because he had a lot of fond memories from
Tri Robinson:his days. He did, so he said he'd front the money, right?
Ruben Navarrete:I wonder what your mom thought.
Tri Robinson:Well, my mom was a pretty good sport, I gotta admit, I always said in those days, If you really don't love your son, give him an airplane at 17. He'll probably kill himself. Oh my God. Anyway, I go back to this guy, and I said, Yeah, I'll give you And 1,200 so he says, Okay, I'll give you a lesson. So So your dad gave you
Ruben Navarrete:the $1,200 and you were
Tri Robinson:I bought the plane. And I get in it, and this other guy gets with me. He had been a spray pilot, you know, for like a crop duster. He had spray equipment, but he had taken it all off to sell it. And we get out and he walks me through it, I manage to get the thing in the air, and you fly it with a stick, a wheel, and it's a very different feeling than anything I had done, you know?
Tri Robinson:So I'm flying this thing, and so I come around the pattern and set up a landing, and I managed to land this thing without killin' myself. And he's talkin' me through it. And to get on the ground, and I mean it was very different. It's like I was learning to fly all over again in a way. The guy gets out of the plane I have my logbook that says, That particular flight was fifteen minutes, you know.
Tri Robinson:Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes, and he left. He says, Okay, you're on your own. And then I was scared to death. I thought, I was lucky to survive the first landing, you know, because it was
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, but you don't know. How's that gonna
Tri Robinson:No, you're coming in and you're You could have been lucky. Exactly. Yeah. But I go back to the college, and I have a really good roommate that became a very good friend of mine. His name was Johnny Bingham.
Tri Robinson:He says, Hey, take me flying. And I go, You know what? I think I need to do a little flying myself because I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anybody until I figure this out. And so literally I had to teach myself.
Tri Robinson:Nowadays you have to be certified in a tail dragger, it's a big deal. But in those days it was just like get in and fly. And I was terrified for the next, you know, ten hours of flying that thing.
Ruben Navarrete:But you had learned from your earlier stories that you had to overcome that.
Tri Robinson:I did. I did. Mhmm. And I just bit the bullet and I did it.
Ruben Navarrete:So now you're a college student with his own plane, and how old are you at this point?
Tri Robinson:Probably 18. 18. Yeah. And so one day I take off and I realized, even as on takeoff, you always do a walk around on your plane, check everything out, I don't know what, but I missed. I had a low tire.
Ruben Navarrete:And
Tri Robinson:I realized it when I was on the taking off. Right. I thought, you know, I think I don't know why I thought this, but I thought maybe it would be better if I landed on a softer strip than on concrete pavement. So I knew there was this old dirt strip up by the river. Mhmm.
Tri Robinson:And there was all these old biplanes on it, the old crop duster biplanes.
Ruben Navarrete:In Caldwell? In Okay.
Tri Robinson:Yeah. Outside of Caldwell. Mhmm. Called Hubbler Field. And so I decided to land at Hubbler Field and see if they'll have some air to air up my tire.
Tri Robinson:I did. I landed there and taxied up to this old hangar, all these old relic airplanes, you know, that they were using for fixing up for crop dusting. And this old guy comes out, his name's Lee, and that guy, he just embraced me for some reason. I don't know what. He just said, You need to keep your airplane here, not over there.
Tri Robinson:Okay. And then the guy who owned the field, his name was Bill Hubbler, his Hubbler Field, he came out and he says, You could tie your airplane down right in my backyard, which his house was right there. Okay. So I Wow, you did. And so I did, and I kept it there, and all the pilots that would come in and out of that airstrip were these old guys that had all, their whole life was flying by the seat of their pants, you know, and they had all these stories.
Ruben Navarrete:Like your dad, and they And knew that
Tri Robinson:every night about 05:00, these guys would all gather in the hangar and tell stories and drink whiskey.
Ruben Navarrete:Wow.
Tri Robinson:And I didn't drink whiskey, but I would sit there and just, like a sponge, I was listening to these stories and taking it in.
Ruben Navarrete:Did you ever take any of them in the plane, or did you ever Well, one day
Tri Robinson:I was gassing up my plane there, and Bill Hubbler came out, who was a crop duster. By the way, interesting story. That was I don't even know how many. That was fifty five years ago, and I just did his funeral.
Ruben Navarrete:Oh wow. He lived a long time.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, and a whole another story, but it was really, really an honor, you know?
Ruben Navarrete:And I have one question. It might sound like a diversion, but it's something that you had mentioned earlier. Did your dad ever come up to fly that plane?
Tri Robinson:Yeah, yeah, I got Okay. A great story But those guys embraced me, and they helped me do all of my own mechanics, so it literally cost me nothing to keep that plane. Wow. And one day I went to Bill Hubbler and I said, I want to learn to do a loop and a spin. I'd ever had done any aerobatics.
Tri Robinson:And he just jumped in the plane, you know, and said, Let's go! And he took me up and taught me how to do a spin and a loop, and like, and then he got out, you know, he just relanded, and that was my lesson, you know. It was almost like the first guy, but I don't know, I just I got to where I can fly that plane and land it pretty much anywhere in the backcountry and all And you could
Ruben Navarrete:use aerobatics and Yeah, which
Tri Robinson:which a J-three Cub isn't really known for aerobatics, but it would do these basic things, and I got in trouble a couple times because of it.
Ruben Navarrete:That sounds the same. So let's talk about that a little bit. Did you ever do aerobatics? You did aerobatics when you had other passengers, right? I mean, didn't you?
Tri Robinson:Once in a while.
Ruben Navarrete:Okay, once in a while.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, it depended who they were.
Ruben Navarrete:Okay.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, but, yeah, this one day, well, my dad came up one day. This was another thing. And he loved that thing. And so he'd get in. He hadn't flown since World War II, you know, he jumped in that thing, was like riding a bicycle for him.
Tri Robinson:He just
Ruben Navarrete:He just knew
Tri Robinson:how to fly. He just knew how to fly. And one day we're coming in on an approach, and we're kinda high, and so he cross controlled the plane. It's maneuver called a slip. The plane just almost falls just like a rock, like it just loses altitude really fast.
Tri Robinson:It scared the heck out of me because I thought we were crashing, you know? Right. And then he corrected it and landed perfectly. And I go, What was that? You know, he said, That's a slip.
Tri Robinson:And so he taught me how to do this thing called a slip. And I used it forever after that. You could land, because you could really hit everything on a dime. Well, he told me this one day that, and I don't even know why he told me this, but he says, Listen, something you should know, he says, If you ever get above clouds, or you get in bad weather, and you get, you know, above clouds and you can't see the ground, you can't fly through the clouds. You'll get vertigo and you'll just rip the wings off your airplane.
Tri Robinson:You won't know right side from up, but it'll just, you'll tear the plane apart.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, it's a known phenomenon. Isn't that how JFK Jr. Died?
Tri Robinson:Yeah, a lot of people do. Yeah. And you have to have instruments to fly through clouds, and this had no instruments. It had a compass that sorta worked, an airspeed indicator, an alpha- It sort
Ruben Navarrete:of worked.
Tri Robinson:Yeah. And he said, If that happens to you, the thing to do is to go into a spin, and a spin is a maneuver where pull it up, install the airplane until the airplane literally stops, and you kick a rudder, pull the stick in your lap, the thing goes over and starts just spinning like a spiral down. But he says, The beauty of that is it'll always stay in the same attitude.
Ruben Navarrete:The beauty of that. That just sounds the most, like, terrifying experience, so anyway.
Tri Robinson:But I had spun it before because Bill Hubbler had taught me how to do it, you know, so I knew how to do a spin.
Ruben Navarrete:All right.
Tri Robinson:And so he told me, Just spin it and just go all the way through the clouds until you can see the ground again and then you can ride the airplane. And survive. And I don't know why he told me that, but I always remembered it, you know. And one day I took my roommate, Johnny Bingham, he wanted to go fly in, and we took off as a beautiful, crisp fall day.
Ruben Navarrete:That poor guy, he probably
Tri Robinson:didn't realize. Yeah, no, he had some close calls. I scared the heck
Ruben Navarrete:out That of guy was lucky to alive.
Tri Robinson:Yeah. We did a few scary things. But anyway, climb up, and I climb out of the pattern, and I said, Where do you wanna go, Johnny? And he says, I don't care. Let's go flying.
Tri Robinson:And on the dash, you know, the firewall of the airplane, was a little brass plaque. Mhmm. And it says, do not exceed 14,000 feet. Now That sounds like a challenge. And I never knew why that was there.
Tri Robinson:You know? I go
Ruben Navarrete:I guess we're gonna probably find out.
Tri Robinson:And so I said to Johnny, This thing's always plane shouldn't go over 14,000 feet, I can't understand why. And she says, Well, let's find out. So, we start climbing, and a J-three is not a big, powerful airplane, but we just kept climbing, and we get higher and higher. And pretty soon, coming out over the Oahui Mountains to the west, was this big huge bank of clouds. And we were flying, you know, we were circling over the valley, and then we got up to where we were actually higher than the top of this cloud bank.
Tri Robinson:And I said, Maybe if we get over these clouds we can get more lift, because we were about 12,000 feet. And I went over the top of the clouds, and it did. It worked. We got some updrafts, it took us up, and it took us to 14,000 feet. Like it was thirteen nine hundred.
Tri Robinson:And we were watching the altimeter, and it hit 14,000 feet, and the minute it did, the engine just quit. And the thing about these old planes is it has no starter. You have to prop it from outside. Oh, okay. So there's no way to start it unless you you can dive it and hope that it might windmill and start.
Tri Robinson:But I got carb ice, and it just froze up the engine. And I mean, we're sitting up there above the clouds, and I realized I couldn't get back over the edge of this cloud bank glide that far. I had come too far, and I knew I had to go through the clouds. Right. And the engine's dead.
Tri Robinson:It's total silence.
Ruben Navarrete:Is Johnny Beam aware that the? Johnny Beam
Tri Robinson:doesn't know what to think or say. And he goes, What are you gonna do? I said, Well, just hang on. So I remember what my dad said, what my father had said, right? Yep.
Tri Robinson:And so I pull the thing up into a stall, pull the stick back in my lap, press the left rudder, and the thing falls over into a spin, and we start spinning. And Johnny Bingham, I told him this story. I go, Did I tell this story right? And he says, No, you didn't tell it near. Near Near life terrifying.
Tri Robinson:I was screaming, Are we gonna die? Are we gonna die? Because he had never been in a spin before, which is a scary maneuver. So we're spinning, and pretty soon we come into the clouds, and I mean the clouds are just black, dark. Yeah.
Tri Robinson:You know, I mean, can't see anything. I know sometimes when you fly with an airline, or you know
Ruben Navarrete:You'll go through it briefly, and it gets really dark.
Tri Robinson:And you can't see anything. And this is a pretty thick cloud bank and we're, I mean it feels like it's forever. It just feels like it's forever. Then I started thinking, what if I flew far enough to the west and I got over the top of the mountains? Maybe these clouds, I'm gonna hit the mountains before I get out of the clouds.
Tri Robinson:Then that was going through my mind and my imagination, and I had, you know, you totally couldn't see anything, didn't know where we were, we were just spinning through this Falling through the clouds. Falling through the clouds, and I'm holding this thing, and I'm holding this thing, and this stick, know, wanting with everything in me, wanted to ride the plane and fly and try to save myself, but I just remembered what my dad had said. And so I, it was like, later, when I became a Christian, I remember this thing of holding onto the promise of the Father. Like, hold onto the promise of God for your life, don't let go, no matter what, just hang on, and that's what, in my head, I would just hang on to the promise of my Father. At the time I didn't really know the Lord or anything, but what a lesson in life it was.
Tri Robinson:And I hung on and I hung on, and I just was praying that I wasn't gonna hit the top of a mountain before I got out the bottom of these clouds. And then, like, sometimes when you're in an airline, you see, you fly in and all of a sudden there's a little opening and you can see, and then it closes and so that we came down, there was that opening where we could see the ground for a minute, know? And we could see the Snake River below us, way below us, just this little, you know, line, ribbon, and I realized we would be okay, you know, and then it closed again, it was dark again, and then it finally, it opened, and I relaxed the controls of the plane and the plane immediately righted itself, and I could see in the distance Hubler Field, you know, it's long, thousands of feet below, but I could see it, and I knew we were gonna be okay, and then, because if we hit drier air, the engine, the prop windmilled, the engine started, and we flew back. Like, I remember that, like, What did you do? Like, people ask me, What did you do?
Tri Robinson:I said, Johnny said, Let's go do that again! Which is so crazy, yeah.
Ruben Navarrete:And you're thinking,
Tri Robinson:I was just like right then I thought, I'm just glad to be alive right now, you know. There were so many experiences with that old plane like that that I had through those years. Sometimes I wake up in the night, even now, in a sweat, thinking I shouldn't have lived through that.
Ruben Navarrete:Well, in that story alone, there's a lot of lessons, and you talked about the one, just about having trust and faith in what God promises us, and everything that we have in Scripture that tells us that we can hang onto, and we find ourselves in life feeling blind. I like that, descending through terrible times, not knowing if we're gonna survive.
Tri Robinson:Everything's gray.
Ruben Navarrete:Everything's gray.
Tri Robinson:Everything's, you're kind of in this position of vertigo in your life, you know?
Ruben Navarrete:And you don't know what's up and what's down,
Tri Robinson:so
Ruben Navarrete:you have that, but then one of the things that I think is interesting is that you were listening and hearing the words of your father, and I remember after my father passed away, I had pulled, was a leathersmith, and I brought all of his stuff up here to Idaho, and I spent hours, I think, back down days, in my evenings, I was single at the time, didn't have a lot going on, we were very involved in work during the day, but I was at home alone at night most evenings, and so I would go down to that little shop and I would make stuff, and I would often very clearly hear his voice, not his real voice, but the things that he said to me would echo back into my mind as I did the craft, and suddenly when he wasn't there, the things that I needed, he had put in me, and they just needed to be echoed back in my mind as I would work on the stuff, and I would remember the things that he said, and they would be reminders of how to actually do this. Because at the time I really wasn't listening to my dad.
Tri Robinson:I would
Ruben Navarrete:hear the story, and it would go in one ear and out the other, but there at the time when I needed it, it was It
Tri Robinson:was there.
Ruben Navarrete:It was there, sort of like this story. But what that has taught me as a dad in this part of my life that to have conversations with your kids, to talk to them, and just tell them things about your life, tell them about the lessons you've learned, and they may not listen to it, they may act like they're uninterested and don't care,
Tri Robinson:but it will come back. Right. And also the issues of character and integrity, those things are passed on. They are. How you live life.
Tri Robinson:Right. Yeah, those are valuable things, and I know I'm the same way. I'm a storyteller, and I've told my kids stories their whole lives, and I have to believe that it has something to do with the formation of their life.
Ruben Navarrete:I do think so. I do feel like it echoes in their life for eternity, like we live on, like we may pass away, we may die, whatever, but like I still carry my dad's voice in my heart. I still hear the things he said and my mom, I still hear those things and the wisdom that they gave me, and they come back, like Scripture, like if you memorize Scripture, it comes when you need it, and it's there when
Tri Robinson:you're And at that's the promise of the Father.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, exactly. It's so cool.
Tri Robinson:And it's not we may die, it's we will die. Yeah. And when you're in the winter season of your life you start becoming acutely aware that you only have a short time on this earth. Yeah. And I guess it's another message for another time that we want to talk about, but like how would you, in the winter season, how best should you invest what you got left?
Ruben Navarrete:Interesting, yeah. Yeah, that is a good question. Now I have a story back to the J3 Cub, was it Johnny Bingham that was with you when you went and landed on Metin Mesa and lost the tail wing, or
Tri Robinson:Yeah, tail it wasn't him, poor guy. Tail wheel.
Ruben Navarrete:That poor guy, I mean, does he realize just how close he came to losing his life a few times?
Tri Robinson:You know, I reunited with him later in life. It was fifty years I hadn't heard or seen from him, and one day we reconnected, went to lunch, and just started remembering those stories.
Ruben Navarrete:Right, It would be interesting to hear those stories from his perspective, but tell that story because that is Typical an interesting day, took
Tri Robinson:off Hubbler Field, Johnny and I, what should we go do? And I always had some sort of, a little bit of survival equipment in my plane. I had a little 22, you know, and a few things, you know, sleeping bags, and a few things. It didn't have, there wasn't I a lot of think we actually took sleeping bags because we I don't know, I can't remember, but we took off, went out over the Wahi Mountains, and I remember on a previous flight that I'd seen these Indian dwellings in the side of this cliff off of this flattop mesa as it dropped down into the Oahu River. And I said, Let's go see if we can land on this mesa, and we had a rope so we could rappel into these caves.
Ruben Navarrete:It sounds like something from Indiana Jones.
Tri Robinson:So anyway, we get there and I'm flying around the mesa, and it looks pretty good. This grass is like a foot deep or so that made it look pretty steep. What I didn't realize is under the grass was a lot of volcanic rock.
Ruben Navarrete:Oh, okay.
Tri Robinson:And so I came in right on the edge of the mesa. I came in and sat down, and as the plane sat down and there was this huge crash noise and a thud, you know, and the planes came to a pretty fast stop, and I go, Uh-oh, you know, I didn't know what I did, but it wasn't good. We got out of the airplane and the tail wheel had hit a rock and ripped off. So there's this kind of a set of springs, like, you know, that came off the back, kind of drug on that, but the belly of the plane hit some lava rock and ripped open. And I had a, again, I had a patch kit in the plane with, you know, dope, this kind of glue called dope, and you put this enough in case something like this did happen, you know.
Tri Robinson:Well anyways, I told Johnny, I said, Well, go see if you can find the wheel and I'll patch this hole in the belly. But it was cold, it was windy and it was kind of a cold day and the dope didn't set up because of the temperature. And so I go, Man, you know, think we're gonna have to let this set overnight. He found the wheel and he came back, but the bolts that held it were all ripped off and So there's no way to attaching the wheel back on. And so we found an old fence post, an old juniper fence post, and some barbware, and we wrapped it on those springs, so I had it like a Like the old airplanes used to have a tail drag, so I made basically a tail drag.
Tri Robinson:A stick. Yeah, stick hanging off the back of the side. Gosh. Were you
Ruben Navarrete:worried that you wouldn't be able to take off, that it would be too much drag?
Tri Robinson:With the spring, the steel spring.
Ruben Navarrete:Okay.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, and well, and I'd rip the baili again because
Ruben Navarrete:it was too low to the
Tri Robinson:ground, and so while we were waiting for the dope to dry, said, Well, we're probably gonna spend the night here, and we heard some checkers off the edge of this cliff, so I got the rope that we brought, and I repelled, we actually tied the rope to the airplane because there's nothing else to tie it to, and I repelled off this cliff and went down, and there's a cave, and the cave was kind of a pretty tall rock, And I thought, well, I'm I'm gonna land on that rock, you know. And and I had this little 22 hanging over my back on a piece of string or something rope, and I got down there and I when I got on the rope, the whole the whole cave erupted in rattlesnakes.
Ruben Navarrete:Now this does sound like
Tri Robinson:a rattlesnake. I guess it does. I never thought that, but, I mean, all these buzzing yoda, and this one snake sticks his head up and I yell at Johnny, There's snakes down here. And he says, Well, shoot one for dinner. So I shoot this snake, and he lowers a tent pole with a tent hook the bottom for a peg to hold the tent down.
Tri Robinson:We had a little pup tent. And he ties that all together and lowers it down to me, and I hook this snake, you know, and fish it out of there. And anyway, rappel further and get out of there and got hiked back around.
Ruben Navarrete:And this is all within an hour same
Tri Robinson:afternoon of you losing
Ruben Navarrete:the wheel, trying to fix the plane, rappelling down into a cave, killing a snake.
Tri Robinson:So we cooked the snake, we built a fire, cooked the snake, up, and, you know, have snake for dinner. The next morning the wind blows up in the night, really starts blowing, and the plane
Ruben Navarrete:starts
Tri Robinson:moving towards the edge of the mesa. The wind picks up the plane and starts hopping it towards the mesa, so we spent most of the night hanging onto the airplane, pushing it back, you know. Oh, gotcha, yeah. And boy, we were exhausted by morning. I said, Let's get out of here, So you he held I said, You hold up the tail and I'm gonna rev up the engine, and then you jump in, you know, and mean the plane's What happens if you didn't get in?
Tri Robinson:Well, yeah, I'd have to stop. But he sits, he jumps in sideways, door's on this one side, and he gets in and just as he does, I mean, this gust of wind hits us, we're just off the ground, and fly back to Hubbler Field. When we got back to Hubbler Field, I remember landing that day in the morning, it was kind of mid morning, landing in that stick just dragging down the runway. Luckily it was a dirt strip, and old Lee, the old guy, he's sitting there looking at me and just shaking his head like, because we didn't tell him we were gonna be gone for the night. He'd spent most of the night anxiously waiting for us to get back, didn't know where we were, you know, and I learned a big lesson from that, too, that, you know, people care about you.
Tri Robinson:Yeah. And sometimes you forget that. And anyway, I had to apologize. But you know, it was a rich, rich, rich season of my life and that airplane added so much to the richness of my youth, to my the springtime of my life, you know.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, it's amazing, you know, there's a lot of other stories in the book about that plane and what it did, and your close calls in that narrow escapes and all of that. And it's amazing I've read that, I've read through that, I'm like, it is amazing that you survived that. I think reading that in with eyes of 2025, it's really, it's a bygone era for sure. The world isn't that way anymore, and I do feel like we've lost something, you know, in a culture where we are spoon fed so much.
Tri Robinson:Too many rules and regulations, and like, it's understandable there's so many more airplanes now, and so many more people, and you know, so you just have to,
Ruben Navarrete:it's a different world. It is a different world, and it's sad, but I feel like there's a way to connect with that by disconnecting from, I think, lot that the world wants to offer. I think a lot of young people have miss out on this type of a life because number one, they don't think it's possible for them, number two, regulations, number three, population and whatnot. But I just think it's important to, you know, live a life that, you know, you can look back on with this kind of like, what do you call it? Just, I don't know, just the reflection on this kind of a life is just, it's just foreign, I think, to a lot of people, and I don't know.
Ruben Navarrete:But thanks for sharing all that. I mean, there's a lot more in the book, of course. I wish we could cover them all because they're great stories, but,
Tri Robinson:you know.
Ruben Navarrete:Ruben. Thanks, man.