Fights and flights

Former U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce is not a guy who talks about dreams or goals. He talks about assignments. That was one of the first things he emphasized in our long conversation about war, flying, public service, and the places where life takes you when you walk through open doors. “I never set out to be anything,” he said. “If the door opens, I’ll walk through it. If it closes, I won’t fight it.”

Don’t mistake that for the path of least resistance.

Sixty years after he first left home for combat in Vietnam, another door has opened. President Trump nominated Pearce—a decorated Air Force C-130 pilot, businessman, and seven-term congressman from New Mexico—to lead the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM oversees more than 10% of the U.S. landmass—245 million acres—holding jurisdiction over vast stretches of the American West and the debates that animate them: grazing rights, mineral leases, wildfire management, tribal relations. It is one of the most consequential positions in the Interior Department. It will not be a quiet nomination: Environmentalist opposition is already well organized.

How was he preparing? He didn’t talk strategy or vote counts. Instead he said, “The storms we’re going through today are simply preparation … for something else. God is always preparing you for the next step.”

That’s not bravado. Pearce distrusts bravado. “Bravado is for yourself,” he explained. “Courage has meaning. Courage says, ‘I’ve got a storm to get into.’”

That brings us to the main reason for our conversation: his book You Had a Good Home, But You Left …, a gripping tale of his 15-day solo circumnavigation of the globe in a single-engine aircraft, undertaken in 2016 to honor fellow airmen who died in Vietnam.

Pearce said he had carried the idea of the flight for decades. “There are names I still think of every week of my life.” Some of the men he served with never returned, and some returned in body only.

If the circumnavigation appears spontaneous on the page, it wasn’t. Pearce spent three years planning, almost entirely in secret. He would finish work in Congress late in the evening, sleep a few hours, then rise at 2 or 3 a.m. to pore over routes, fuel strategies, weather charts, and contingency plans. “I was not wanting to advertise that I was thinking of going—not staff, not my wife, nobody.”

It didn’t last. Pearce’s wife, Cynthia, walked in one night and found the floor covered in maps. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m just looking at places,” Pearce recalled, slightly embarrassed at the memory. “That was weak. But she said, ‘I know what flight planning looks like. What are you thinking?’ I said, ‘I’m thinking I might fly around the world.’”

“She said, ‘I think that’s a bad idea.’”

Pearce told me about their marriage’s “two-zero vote” system for major decisions—both must agree. Pearce folded the maps, assuming the matter was settled. But two weeks later, she surprised him. “I’m not going to vote against you,” she said, “but I’m not going to vote for you.” It was not permission, but neither was it refusal.

Before he left, Pearce and Cynthia attended a ceremony for circumnavigating pilots supported by seven- and eight-person ground teams. Driving home, she asked, “Who’s your team?” Pearce said he didn’t have one—as a sitting ­congressman, the State Department warned him he was a “high-value target” and should keep the flight quiet. “You can’t do this by yourself,” she said.

By the second leg, fighting headwinds over the Pacific, Pearce called home. Cynthia listened—and then, as Pearce put it, “click, she hung up.” Fifteen minutes later she called back with a wind analysis: “It looks like a counter-cyclonic flow is right on your nose. If you drop 200 miles south, you’ll find lesser winds.”

“Without her, I could have never finished the flight.”

Pearce told me he questioned the wisdom of the trip many times, but never his commitment. “When I commit to something, I commit all the way,” he said. He spoke of Mary “pondering” things in her heart and said the long preparation for the flight served the same purpose: a way to burn off second thoughts. “I will not quit because I’m tired or lose heart,” he told me. “I may fail, but I will not quit.”

Storms taught him something about leadership. What matters, he said, is the leadership that’s revealed when the windows shake and the instruments rattle.

Pearce is not a romantic about public service. He is not rehearsing his legacy. He is simply walking through the open door in front of him—again.