Left to fly solo

Published 10:53 pm Saturday, July 28, 2007

ARLINGTON – He soared alone through a sunny July sky.

With just a few clouds and hardly any wind, it was the kind of day meant for flying.

Cameras were rolling as Michael Crowell took off from a small Wisconsin airport. The Outdoor Channel planned to use the footage for a segment on the four-seat Glastar Sportsman plane piloted by Crowell.

Suddenly, the plane swerved: right, left, right. Then the propeller-driven plane rolled on its side and veered left – hard. The engine roared with power, but the plane stalled and fell.

At the time Crowell, 48, died, he was a well-known pilot with thousands of flight hours.

As founder of the Arlington’s Mission Aviation Training Academy, he taught dozens to fly through harsh conditions to deliver food and Bibles to jungle churches across the world.

He taught his eldest son, Jeremy, to fly and the two spent warm summer evenings in the sky, challenging each other to tricky takeoffs and speedy landings.

The father of three knew what he was doing.

Until now.

On that day two years ago Friday, Crowell couldn’t maneuver his way out.

About an hour and a half after he died, the phone rang at the Mission Aviation Training Academy in Arlington.

Lori Crowell was alone in the office. She was in early, “being a good girl” and holding down the fort while her husband was away.

Her pastor, Rick Long, called and told her that he and his wife, Barbara, wanted to stop by the hangar.

She was sitting in front of a computer when they walked in.

“I have something to tell you,” Rick Long said from the doorway. “Mike’s airplane went down. He didn’t make it.”

Lori stared at him blankly.

“What did you say?” she asked.

She couldn’t comprehend the information. Then suddenly, she did. She threw her arms in the air and screamed.

“May many come to know Jesus because of this,” she yelled.

Lori Crowell would later look back on that day – July 27, 2005 – and think it odd that she had no premonition her husband was going to die.

Before he left for Wisconsin, he told her he didn’t want to go.

“I said, ‘I know you don’t but that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to go,’ ” she later recalled.

He asked her for a kiss. They said goodbye.

And that was it.

Lori waved as Michael flew away from the Arlington Airport.

He dipped one wing toward the ground, then the other – his standard goodbye.

He was gone.

In the past, before near-crashes, Lori had a feeling she couldn’t explain, but she sensed that something wasn’t quite right. That last time her husband soared away, she felt he would be safe.

In the 26 years they spent together, Lori and Michael Crowell developed the same memories, the same dreams, the same prayers.

Without him, she couldn’t walk right. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t look through the fog and see her future.

All she had was the past.

Lori and Michael met as teenagers in Kalispell, Mont. They were attracted to each other and shared the same Christian views.

They started dating when he was in college in Illinois, home for winter break. When Lori visited Michael, sitting in his car at a park outside Chicago, he asked her to be his wife. She accepted, and they shared their first, sloppy kiss.

In their marriage, Michael was the head of the household. He earned the most money and made most of the decisions.

As they moved around the country for Michael’s work, Lori found jobs as a secretary and home-schooled their children -Jeremy, now 26, Melissa, 24, and Adrian, 17.

When he came home with a $4,500 plane and wanted to take up flying, Lori, the daughter of a pilot, supported him.

In 1998, when Michael told Lori that God was calling him to open a school to train pilots to fly missionaries around the globe, she didn’t question him. She just followed.

Lori and Michael gave up the reliability of his regular paychecks in exchange for donations.

It wasn’t easy.

During tight times, in order to pay for heat and water, Lori and Michael invited his flying students to sleep on couches at their Arlington rental home. They drove old cars with cracked windshields donated by church members and academy supporters. They ate leftover food from area ministries.

“God talks about how he created Eve for Adam and as he had created Eve, he said, ‘I’m giving her to you as a helpmate; as a helper for you’ – and that’s what I truly felt I was for my husband,” said Lori, 51.

When Michael died, Lori was lost.

Seven hundred people attended his funeral. She recalls sitting in the front row, hugging her children and crying.

She forced her body to go through the actions her mind couldn’t comprehend.

“There’s always going to be a part of me that’s missing …” she said, sitting in the hangar her husband decorated with Bible quotes and a massive cross made of airplane metal. “When your spouse dies, it’s like you’ve been ripped apart. You’re not complete.”

After two weeks, she returned to the Mission Aviation Training Academy. Other than God and family, the nonprofit organization was the most important thing in her husband’s life.

When Michael died, Lori didn’t want his dream to go with him. And she felt close to her husband in the hangar.

At the academy, she was unable to do much more than stare at the walls.

In the evenings, she took long walks, crying and begging for God to show her the way to a normal life. She read the leather-bound Bible Michael gave her for when he graduated from seminary, underlining passages and praying for healing.

She cried out at night, when the empty spot next to her in bed was more than she could handle. When her body ached for Michael’s strong hugs, she ran her fingers over his clothes and sniffed his half-empty bottle of Dunhill Desire cologne.

Lori says she never got mad at God, but there were times when she blamed Michael for her pain. When her refrigerator broke, she stomped her foot and yelled, “Well, Michael. If you wouldn’t have died you would have been here! You would have fixed it!”

But he wasn’t.

So she learned to lean on other people.

While she grieved, the youth group from Atonement Free Lutheran Church mowed her grass and cleaned her yard. Friends did her laundry and cooked her meals. Her children hugged her when she needed love.

She learned to lean on herself.

For the first time in her 49 years, Lori Crowell was solely responsible for her life. She was in charge of her family, her home, her bills, her future.

She continued to home- school Adrian, but she also picked up more duties at the Mission Aviation Training Academy. A secretary all her life, Lori began doing public relations work, calling potential students and speaking in churches – all things her pastor husband used to take care of.

Late in 2005, she was interviewed by a Wall Street Journal reporter for a story about running a foundation after its “guiding light” has died. Dana Reeve, the late wife of “Superman” Christopher Reeve, was quoted in the same story.

Worrying about her weight and fearing she’d die and leave her kids alone, Lori started eating healthier and exercising.

She attended grief support meetings at a friend’s church.

The fog started to lift. She began feeling emotions other than hurt.

“I have more of a confidence in myself – more of an understanding that I can make decisions and it’s OK,” she said, leaning over her Bible.

Without Michael and the extra money he’d earned as a flight instructor and test pilot, Lori’s income dipped.

Now she needed to decide how to make ends meet. She prayed, then accepted a job at a Curves gym for women.

Working two jobs and home-schooling Adrian, her schedule went from busy to packed.

Her cell phone is constantly ringing.

In the last year, Lori has lost 25 pounds. She is stronger. Friends say she smiles more.

“It forced her to take care of herself a little bit,” said Barbara Long, a longtime friend who was with Lori when she learned that her husband died. “She has made comments about not being able to think straight, but I think she handled it incredibly – incredibly.”

On July 27, 2006 – exactly one year after Michael’s death – Lori Crowell put her wedding band in a box. The ring had been resized over the years and with her new weight loss, it kept slipping off her finger. She was ready for something new.

She slid a size 41/2 diamond flower ring she had bought at a pawnshop onto her ring finger. For her, it represented her relationship with God – and the possibilities of the future.

Around that same time, she began corresponding with a widowed pastor in Illinois. She knew Calvin Willard, 52, as a former parishioner of Atonement Free Lutheran Church in Arlington. After running into each other at two Christian conferences, they vowed to pray for each other.

Almost a year later, they arranged to meet at a Christian conference in Sioux Falls, S.D.

On June 14, Calvin took Lori for a walk in a park and asked her to marry him.

She thought about Michael, about all they had been through and all he stood for.

She thought about the academy and how she would have to leave it to its board of directors if she were to join Calvin at his new home in Roseau, Minn. She thought about her kids, about how much they loved their dad.

She thought about the future.

And she said yes.

The next day, a friend offered to take Lori and Calvin up in a Cessna 182.

Lori urged Calvin, a former pilot, to take the controls.

“I am a pilot’s daughter,” she told him. “I am a pilot’s wife. I am a pilot’s mother. I’m sorry. It’s in my blood. I don’t expect to go the rest of my life out of the air.”

So Calvin climbed into the cockpit.

And within minutes, Lori Crowell was on top of the world, once again.

Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.