Truth and Conspiracy. He embraced it all.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to fathom about Ulrich was his fascination with the undercurrents and machinations of society and politics. At one level, you might think he was spoofing you, or you might give him the benefit of the doubt and simply call him a skeptic. Nothing was as it seems for Ulrich. Cabals were operating. International billionaire confederacies were manipulating the economies of the world, pulling the strings of society, bending humanity to their wills. Special interests were leading us by the nose. The natural order was being undermined by self-indulgence. David Suzuki was interfering under the hood of your car, dialling down the power while he whisked away laughing in his private jet. Like a classic Yogi Berra saying, what he said made you laugh. But, like Yogi, what he said always made some sort of underlying and undeniable sense. His warnings, though humorous, ended up rattling your nerves.

Ulrich was a libertarian awash in a three-tiered political system bent on meddling in his cheese-making business. He couldn’t just pipeline the milk from his cows to the cheese factory a few meters away from the pasture. He had to sell it to the milk cabal and buy it back at a higher price. It made no sense.

Dairy farming and cheese-making consumed his energies for a decade, but he never forgot his air force way of thinking. He used to speak about his cows (which were managed by his brother) as a squadron of fighters. Some cows were “operational” (producing milk), some were "hangar queens" (barn queens, likely due to some infection etc),  and some were “off-line” due to battle damage (hoof and other issues requiring a vet) Every once in a while there was a "Cat A" (a dead cow, perhaps from a vehicle collision. In Air Force vernacular, Category A damage meant the aircraft was written off) and some were in for re-fit (possibly calving). Everything he did in life and in particular farming referenced his squadron life. 

He said the CIA had tried to recruit him as an aviator once and when he turned down their advances, it was possible, he said, that they were listening, monitoring, watching. Maybe they were. Maybe he knew too much. Perhaps his suspicions and his knowledge of their goals made them nervous. Maybe he was pulling your leg. Who knew?

Despite his intellectual musings on the puppetry of billionaires and the dangers of the modern expanding gender spectrum, Ulrich was no survivalist nutcase. He wasn’t store-housing MREs and ammunition. He was a clear thinking philosopher who saw some things differently than the masses who partook of the opiates of modern living — social media, political propaganda, fashion, celebrity. Perhaps he had a better, clearer perspective on how the system worked as an outsider. He wasn’t beholden to it, that’s for sure. He did not need to be affirmed, just informed. He knew nothing about social media, could care less. But he was a natural born influencer.

Though he mistrusted governments and found no meaning in the vogue, he put all of his trust in his wife Christiane, his lifelong friends and the pilots he led. They were both the joys and the anchors of his life. Perhaps it was his natural mistrust of the world at large, perhaps it was a Swiss thing, but Ulrich kept his private life private. If you wanted to run off at the mouth about your problems and emotions, go ahead. He wasn’t going to join you. He was enigmatic, yet one of the boys. He was rooted in his land, yet he studied the world outside his fences. There was no one like him.

At the many “safety meetings” convened by Rob Fleck, he would regale the crowd with the ribald stories that were his stock and trade, but every once in a while when someone else had the table, you could catch him in quiet withdrawal, watching like a raptor on high, eyes moving from one friend to another to another. You could read the bemusement on his face, feel the contentment.