Scobie Puchtler
Family
Sarah Felstiner (my wife) and I live near Gasworks Park in Wallingford with our 18 month old son Brayden who came to us through an extraordinary open adoption. Oh, and our longtime cat friend, Shadow also continues to receive free room and board in return for her feline affection and undying loyalty.
Education
I'm still convinced that my most important eduction came from helping to build our family's log house in a boreal forest 12 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska when I was three years old. After that fundamentally mind-expanding experience came a ragtag variety of public schools, mostly in central Alaska. Next, I went to four highschools (New Hampshire, Florida, Florida, New Hampshire) then on to Yale College, graduating in 1989. Since then I've started and developed small businesses, worked as a freelance designer-builder, acquired a private pilot's license, and continue to treat learning as a joyful, everyday pursuit.
What is your favorite thing to do in Seattle?
Watching barn swallows dynamic soaring on the back side of the hill at Gasworks Park through a light spring mist at sunrise is right near the top of my list.
When you get a day off from school what do you do?
Spend it with my 18 month old son Brayden. If someone has other plans for Brayden, then I find an enthusiastic passenger and go flying in my little bush plane up into the San Juan Islands
What is the strangest thing you have ever eaten?
I grew up in central Alaska eating moose and caribou meat and not thinking it the least bit strange. I think I can count myself in a pretty small circle of people who have eaten my father's traditional Thai style hot and sour soup made with Alaskan ptarmigan meat. Now removed by time and distance from my culinary roots Alaska, I've stopped bothering to eat meat at all.
What event in the past or future would you like to witness in person?
Future: I'd like to see the first zero emissions airplane flight to cross the continent. Heck I'd like to be the pilot and have designed and built the aircraft.
If you had the choice, would you rather live in a boat or a tree house?
Easy. Tree house. But I should point out that I'd build the tree house overhanging some water... so I could rappel down a fixed rope from a trapdoor in the floor of the front lookout room directly into a fast little sailboat, or a pedal-powered ultralight speed-kayak. Yeah... that'd be good.