View from the Sky

The best place in the world is Coeur d'Alene in the summer, says Jim Van Sky, and he knows because he's missed every single one for the last 15 years.

Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder.

But Van Sky - oh that fitting last name - comes back each year by August, in time to catch the last of the season from behind the steering wheel of his helicopter seat.

The sensation inside the helicopter is not flying, Van Sky explains, but being.

Sitting suspended in the air, hovering, and one little nudge shifts you this way or that, and the whole view changes.

"Like a magic carpet ride," says Van Sky, owner of Big Country Helicopters, through his head set as flies above Coeur d'Alene. "It puts me in awe every time."

From high above you can see how the streets connect to subdivisions and the whole region fits together like a puzzle. And sitting there, just sitting there, is the kind of flying Van Sky would do himself if he had super powers.

But Van Sky will miss this summer again because people in Tokyo pay a premium price for cherries.

Yep, those roads that the look like veins from high, high above eventually connect outside of Idaho to the rest of the world and 5,000 miles away there's quite a market for freshly harvested sweet cherries.

Van Sky's not a grower, he's a pilot. The cherries don't come from North Idaho either, rather they're grown in the lush Wenatchee Valley in central Washington. But for the cherries to blossom - that is, reach full market potential - they need Van Sky's helicopter.

Or at least the air it produces.

"It's pretty weird when you think about it," Van Sky says, as he thinks about it. "It's pretty global."

Because if it rains in central Washington during harvest season, farmers need Van Sky to dry their cherry trees with his chopper's propellor. The critical time for cherry growing can be boiled down to a three-week window where everything has to go perfectly. In that window, if the cherries get wet, their skins can't expand enough as they dry, causing them to split. Split cherries don't make it out of the packaging plant, or on the truck to Moses Lake to be loaded on planes at Grant County International Airport and flown to Japan where the market awaits.

"It goes against everything you ever learned in flight school," Van Sky says of the method of flying, which takes his helicopter 10 feet above the tree tops at the dangerous levels of power lines. It's the exact opposite of the first day of pilot training: Stay away from objects and keep at altitude.

But more farmers use choppers, and pilots from Phoenix and Texas go to Washington to help out, Van Sky says. It's come a far way from when he first got a call requesting his services in 1995.

"What?" he remembers was his initial reaction.

But Van Sky always wanted to be a helicopter pilot, and after years of dreaming he finally got his license in 1992. He mostly does tours of Coeur d'Alene, but over the years the cherry contracts have become a bigger and bigger focus of his work. Thousands of acres may need drying, row by row of trees, from the lower Yakima Valley to the Canadian border.

It all depends on the weather, but sooner or later, it rains. The second it stops, Van Sky starts. Before cell phones, Van Sky would wait in a Washington hotel until the farmer, who had Van Sky on standby, called him. So it's gotten better. And flying is flying, anyway.

"If you want to look at things, see things, be able to move and linger," he says, "helicopter is definitely the way to go."

And Lake Coeur d'Alene offers some of the best views, especially in the summer.

And Van Sky, who expects to take off for the orchards around June 1, should be back in town to catch the last of it.