Seven stories. One life. No regrets.
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Wild Bill Adventures — Volume One
Seven true stories. Paperback · eBook · Large Print
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He Built His First Scuba Gear from WWII Surplus Parts, Rubber Cement, and a Stolen Fire Extinguisher.
It worked. Mostly. He considered that a solid start.
When Wild Bill ran into a problem, he treated it like a personal invitation. He’d sketch ideas that shouldn’t work, build machines nobody believed could run, and keep pushing until they finally did. That habit took him across nineteen countries, into some of the wildest corners of the world, and straight through situations no sensible person would have signed up for.
Now in his 90s, he’s finally telling them.
Paperback · eBook · Large Print
When Wild Bill ran into a problem, he treated it like a personal invitation. He’d sketch ideas that shouldn’t work, build machines nobody believed could run, and keep pushing until they finally did. That habit took him across nineteen countries, into some of the wildest corners of the world, and straight through a string of situations no sensible person would have signed up for.
Wild Bill Adventures – Volume One is seven of those situations — true stories, told the way he lived them: with humor, patience, and an absolute certainty that if you’re still breathing, the story isn’t over.
Now in his 90s, he’s finally telling them.
The seven stories.
Every one of them true. At least, that’s how he remembers them.
The Strait of Juan de Fuca
Neah Bay, WashingtonBill and his cousin Jack head out into the fog off Neah Bay for salmon. What they hook instead has been sitting on the bottom since Prohibition. By the time they crack the lid on the dock, half the harbor has gathered to watch — and one man has already slipped away to make a phone call.
Catch Me If You Can
Fidalgo Island, WashingtonSomething large and intelligent has been living in the rocks off Fidalgo Island. Bill knows, because it cleaned out his crab pot without disturbing a single latch. The Army Corps of Engineers is about to dredge the whole channel into gravel. He and a broke university student have two weeks, a dented aluminum skiff, and an industrial cooler with a locking lid. They’re going to need it.
Porcupine Island
Lake Iliamna, AlaskaBill flies into a remote fish camp on Lake Iliamna to close it down for the winter. He brings his seven-year-old son Chris — because he wants the boy to see something bigger than sidewalks, and this qualifies. They spend two days reading bear tracks, naming driftwood, and telling stories by the stove. Then an unscheduled floatplane taxis to the dock. Two men climb out. They don’t wave. They’re carrying AK-47s.
Timberwolves
The Cascade MountainsAn elk hunt with his old friend Carm. They bag a twelve-point buck, start down the mountain, and hit a patch of ice in the wrong place on the wrong curve. Bill wakes up at the bottom of a ravine, alone, with cracked ribs, in the dark, in a snowstorm — and something in the timber is moving toward him. That’s only the first problem. The second one is driving a mud-spattered Ford Bronco and wearing flannel.
Germany, In Custody
Munich & Rosenheim, BavariaBill lands in Munich, puts Sinatra on over “Barbie Girl,” and heads to a Bavarian cottage. He doesn’t make it to the plant that night. By morning he has told the same story eleven times.
“Vhere did you hide da body.”
“Not a woman. A mannequin.”
The sergeant wrote something down.
“Und she vas stupid, so did she jump?”
“No! She was plastic!”
“Zen vhat kind of dummy vas she?”
Guatemala: Banana Country
The plantation fieldsBill steps off the plane in Guatemala City carrying his ozone generator — “lightning in a box” — and climbs into a jeep with two men who don’t offer names. The plantation is losing millions in rejected banana shipments. Solving that problem turns out to be the easy part.
Wood River Chain
Alaska, Summer 1972Under the midnight sun, Bill takes six university students into the Alaskan wilderness to build a cabin. They run the research. The porcupines move in, destroy the camp, and refuse to leave. A colorful bit of problem-solving might just do the trick.
A taste of the writing
From “Wood River Chain”
Summer, 1972. Under the sleepless glow of the midnight sun, Wild Bill steps off a floatplane and into Alaska — carrying a rolled tube of schematics and six graduate students who have no idea what they’ve signed up for.
Under the sleepless glow of the midnight sun in the summer of 1972, Wild Bill stepped off a floatplane and into Alaska. The engine wound down to a clicking hush. Gasoline hung sweet and sharp in the cold air. Pontoons hissed against the lake’s skin, and the whole world smelled like iron and time.
Bill pulled his gaffer cap down against the wind, shouldered his duffel, and grinned like a man who had decided to wrestle a legend to see which of them bled first.
His title at the University of Washington was Senior Developmentalist, which told you everything and nothing at once. He was not a professor. He did not lecture, assign grades, or publish papers for other academics to argue about. What he did was make things work. When the College of Fisheries needed a live animal tank built, Bill built it. When a student’s thesis required equipment that didn’t yet exist, Bill designed, engineered, and assembled it by hand. For twenty years, he had been the man behind the research, the one who turned ideas into functioning reality, who kept the science alive with his hands as much as his mind.
Every summer, that work brought him to Alaska.
Lashed to the barge that had nosed its way up the coast was the thing the camp had been waiting for: a full pre-cut log cabin kit, every piece already notched, numbered, and sized. Six-inch diameter logs milled and fitted like the world’s heaviest puzzle. Lincoln Logs for people with graduate degrees and something to prove.
That night, they sat outside under the midnight sun, one last night of roughing it, and nobody seemed to mind. Bill held his tin cup like a chalice.
“To the cabin,” he said.
“Which cabin?” Jake asked. “The one on the barge or the one in your head?”
“Yes,” Bill said, and grinned.
What happened next — the cabin, the porcupines, the science experiment nobody expected to be running — is all in the book.
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Wild Bill Nelson grew up outside Chicago in the 1940s, where resourcefulness was a way of life.
Boeing brought him west in the early ‘60s. From there, his career became an open passport — nineteen countries, a pioneering ozone sanitation system that improved food safety around the world, and enough close calls to fill several books.
This is the first one.
“He’d dream up an idea, declare it true before anyone else had time to doubt it, and then, somehow, make it real. Every time.”— Vanessa Nelson, from the Foreword
“Some of these stories may sound impossible. Maybe a few of them are. But every one of them started with something that really happened — and a man who couldn’t walk away from a good challenge.”— Wild Bill, Author’s Note
Coming soon
Next Stop: Saipan.
The tap water on the island has turned blue. Not from the sky. Wild Bill arrives with his ozone generator, a map covered in questions, and a local driver named Manny who knows the roads that still remember where they go.
Wild Bill Adventures — Volume Two is coming soon.
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