By Sujena Soumyanath
oregonlive.com
SENECA, Ore. — When Glenda Maxwell woke up June 29, 1998, she had no idea she would be getting married that day.
She met up with her then-boyfriend, James “Jim” Maxwell, in Spokane. The pair loved racing jet boats and set out that day to repair some narrow water channels that served as a sprint boat track, Glenda Maxwell, 69, remembered.
All of a sudden, in the middle of the track repairs, Jim Maxwell, a pilot, turned to her and said, “Why don’t we just go over to Coeur d’Alene and get married today?”
Some 30 minutes later, the Maxwells were at the Hitching Post wedding chapel in Idaho, saying I do to what would become 15 years of marriage. Even after the couple’s divorce, they remained friends.
“He just had a huge zest for life,” Glenda Maxwell said, remembering their travel- and adventure-filled marriage.
Last week, Jim Maxwell, a 73-year-old father of two, died fighting the now 142,307-acre Falls fire in eastern Oregon when the single-engine air tanker he flew went missing. A massive search-and-rescue mission ensued, with firefighters, deputies from the Harney and Grant County sheriff’s offices and the U.S. National Guard looking for him.
Jason Maxwell, Maxwell’s son and fellow fire pilot, had also been fighting fires that day in eastern Oregon. When he got the news around 6 p.m. that his father’s plane was missing, he joined the search.
“I needed to do something,” Jason Maxwell, 47, said.
As he searched, the younger Maxwell — who learned how to fly from his father — held out hope that his dad would be OK, remembering how gifted of a pilot he was.
“That airplane is a suit he puts on,” he said. “He can do anything with it.”
The next day, Jason Maxwell learned crews had found his father’s body in the wreckage of the tanker plane, just north of the Falls fire.
“We did everything together,” he said, remembering all the hours they spent jet boat racing, flying and camping.
Jim Maxwell grew up in Burns, Oregon, said his close friend Paul Yedinak, 73.
The pair met as teenagers in Enterprise, Oregon, where they fought fires together in the early ‘70s. Back in those days, as they dug through dirt and cleared out brush to build fire lines, the two friends would look up in awe at the fire bombers dropping retardant on the blaze.
“It was like God coming,” Yedinak said, recalling how relieved the two felt knowing a large portion of the fire wouldn’t have to be put out by ground crews.
After getting through college and both becoming pilots, Yedinak and Maxwell fell out of touch for some 15 years.
But wildfires would soon find a way to bring the pair back together. By the early 2000s, both had become fire pilots — with Yedinak flying a big fire bomber and Maxwell a smaller aircraft.
One day, Yedinak heard Maxwell’s voice over the radio as he battled a fire in Texas . He realized it was his childhood friend, and that he too was in a plane fighting fires in the area. The pair reunited and remained in close contact.
Yedinak remembered Maxwell as a pilot with stellar ethics, and said he still didn’t understand how last week’s flight could have gone wrong. Authorities are still investigating the crash, according to the National Transportation Safety Board .
“It’s a shock to all of us,” Yedinak said. “He was always by the book and did everything like it was supposed to be done.”
Glenda Maxwell said that despite not liking flying, she always felt comfortable in a plane with Jim Maxwell . It was his passion, and something he just couldn’t bring himself to give up.
“He loved flying,” Glenda Maxwell said. “He died doing what he wanted to do.”
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