On October 10th we had a small, informal celebration of Will in Seal Cove, Prince Rupert. Although not a formal ceremony it was special in that many very close friends joined together after many years to celebrate the amazing life of Will Hilts. The following is my very personal reflection on a once in a lifetime friendship which I wrote and shared with friends in Seal Cove. Since it was also a part of Wills life I would like to share it with you his friends and family.
I first met Will 15 years ago. I was working for Red Lake airways Will for Kenora Air. I can’t specifically say we were friends, it was an occasion meeting while I was there for maintenance and it was only a few times. Other than bouncing a few potatoes off the side of the ferry SS Kenora from with a massive hairspray powered potato cannon the only real memory I have of Will from that time was one afternoon I was southbound from deer lake to Selkirk Mb and Will was northbound in the piston Otter with Norm. Norm was a legend in the north and a master Otter pilot. I think Will was getting checked out with an external load. They had a boat tied to the side and were chugging along on a hot summer day heading really far north. I asked them why they were only at 3000 feet when they were heading so far north to which Norm calmly explained that in a piston Otter 3000 feet was high enough to glide somewhere when you had an engine failure but not too high that you would burn up before getting there.
So officially Will and I met and became friends right here in Seal Cove in October 2003. I showed up to visit my buddy Gord who was working at Inland Air and I planned to ride my motorcycle down the west coast to Mexico and back. I was offered a job and ended up staying and the rest of the story everyone here knows. I look back at the years in Seal Cove with Will and our little circle of friends and I see them as some of the best years of my life. Great friends, great flying, great times. We hunted, we fished, we shared dreams we forged a friendship that would or should have lasted a lifetime.
Eventually the group splintered, Mike Ross left first, then I left, Will left later. Time to chase bigger and better things. I had made up my mind I wanted to live on the Charlottes and I had to find some money to make that a reality. Will was pursuing the means to get hired by Conair. We drifted apart, lost contact and the daily grind of life continued.
I’ve always found that the mark of a true friendship was the inability of time to affect the quality of the bond. Such was the relationship I had with Will. After 3 or 4 years of silence he came back, and we picked up exactly where we left off. Hunting, fishing, long periods of whiskey philosophy by the fireplace. We had finally arrived at the end of the beginning of our dreams.
Tragically and unbelievably all of that ended on May 22. He was a son to my parents, a father to my sons, and truly my best friend. I loved him in every sense of the word. In the void he leaves behind I find myself wishing I could see him one more time because I would say this:
Dear Will;
Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for always being that reasonable intelligent decision maker while we dared the stormy skies around Prince Rupert. Thank you for all those times when being headstrong and impatient I was charging out into the wind and swells and you said "Fuck it lets go drink some more coffee!" Thank you for the times when I couldn’t be swayed and you were my reluctant wing man. Thank you for pointing out every time I was a jackass by telling me simply "Jackass!"
Thank you for defending me when I deserved it, and even when maybe I didn't. Thank you for years of patient friendship, for sharing the rivers, and the woods and the beaches and backroads of Haida Gwaii. Thank you for sharing your books with me, even if I was bad at returning them. Thank you for helping me fill my wood shed and freezer before winter. Thank you for working until midnight the night before I left for Antarctica as we triumphantly raised my wind turbine into the sky to provide power to my family for the winter.
Thanks for being a father to my sons during my long and difficult absences from their lives. Thank you for the 14 hours spent crawling around in my filthy, damp, cold spider infested basement crawl space insulating my floors so that my family would be warm for the winter. Thank you for not killing my wife when after emerging from said basement 14 hours later and being asked "What’s for supper?"
Thank you for keeping my family safe when things went sideways. Thank you doing all of this without ever having been asked or expected to. Thank you for having the intelligence and sense of adventure to see my dreams, my plans and vision for the future when everyone else thought I was crazy.
Most importantly, and from the bottom of my heart thank you for being my friend when it was very difficult to be my friend. I wouldn't be standing here today with a happy healthy family if you hadn't been that friend.
Thank you Will.