Pushed to the Edge: Part Three, The Sky Dive
April, 1978
A parachute jump was to be my third rush, my third try at something that would scare the bejesus out of me if I did it right and maybe kill me if I did it wrong. To the editors, the beauty of the assignment is that they get a story either way, the only difference being in who writes it—a difference that may be small potatoes to most people but is the whole crop to me.
The first two adventures, an ice climb and a ski jump, went well, which is to say I arrived back at my typewriter with motor control in all ten fingers and wits enough to tell the story. I'd done both of them, I told myself, to see if I could, to feel what it would feel like and for the money. But I didn't know what to tell myself about this one. Another gravity game? What in the hell for? No matter how I looked at it, it seemed excessive. Once you've hung by your ax and your hammer on an ice cliff in a nasty storm, you've had all the rush there is and you know there is nothing left to prove, never was anything. That left only the money for a reason and, for a while, I went around saying that was why I was doing it. But nobody believed that, not even me; so by the time my friend Billy Noonan and I climbed into the car and headed for the Pope Valley Parachute Ranch, I was out of explanations and excuses.
"Tell me again," said Noonan. "Why are you doing this thing?"
"I don't know," I told him.
"It's not healthy," he said. "You know that, don't you? There's nothing wrong with a little adrenaline cocktail now and then, but it's an ugly drunk. Give the Lord one too many shots at you and he's gonna take advantage. It's a waterhead play."
Noonan had already said he wouldn't be jumping with me and he pointed to his knees when he said it. He carries those thin vertical scars down there, the kind you sometimes get with your varsity letter in football. That's how he got them, and now, at 36, he sometimes grumbles about arthritis in those knees and calls the surgeon who worked on them a dirt eater. And beyond that, he carries a memory that's enough to keep anybody out of a jumping harness. He told me about it when I asked him to come with me. He was in St. Croix, he said, standing on a runway with a girl whose boyfriend was making his 500th-and-something dive. They watched as he came out of the plane, then saw him tangle in his chute and drop 2500 feet. Seconds later, he was dead, a pile of rags, and they knew it before they got to the body. Noonan says he can still hear the screaming and wailing, still see everybody running around as if there were something to do. He shudders when he tells it, but he said he'd come with me anyway, and bring his camera, just in case.
Pope Valley lies in some classic California hill country, a couple of hours north of San Francisco. The parachute ranch has a motel, a bar, a restaurant, a swimming pool, a tin hangar, an airstrip and several planes, including a DC-3 that can take 30 jumpers up at the same time. The hot dogs and cowboys of the sport go there with their rectangular chutes to do what they call relative work—free-fall stunts involving two or more divers who come together and move apart, sometimes more than once, before their chutes open. Beginners go there because you can pay $75, take four or more hours of training and, if the wind is down, jump that day.
Noonan and I went into the valley about ten in the morning and almost the first thing we saw was a puff of white a few thousand feet up and, just above that, a small plane. We stopped the car and watched as the jumper floated slowly down and toward us. We didn't know it, but he was 300 or 400 yards from where he was supposed to be. We were looking up at him through oak trees and power lines. I could see him pulling on the steering cords and then I saw that he was aiming at a small triangular pasture that flanked us. But first he had to miss the wires and the trees. The lower he got, the faster he seemed to be dropping and, from where we stood, it looked as if his forward speed helped him miss disaster by only about ten feet. As far as we knew, he'd planned it that way. He landed with his feet together and he fell, but not hard, and his parachute collapsed where it hit.
"That didn't look so bad," I said.
"Not from here," said Noonan. "I could watch 'em do it all day."
We found the hangar and when we walked in, it was full of the energy and buzz of a dozen people who had already jumped that morning or were waiting to. Along one wall were floor-to-ceiling bins full of packed parachutes. Along another wall was a clothes rack with 20 or so well-used jump suits hanging on it and, eside that, a rack of jump boots. The man who seemed to be in charge was standing behind a small counter, talking, one at a time, to the jumpers who'd jumped that morning. He was telling them what they had done right and what they had done wrong and then writing it in some kind of log. After a while, the jumper we'd seen land straggled into the building with his chute in his arms. The man behind the counter sang out loud enough for everybody to hear, "What in the hell happened to you? "
"I don't know," said the jumper. "I thought I was doing fine."
"Didn't you see us on the arrow, trying to turn you around?"
"I thought I did, then all of a sudden I was over the roof of the restaurant...."
"I'm glad you're all right."
"For a minute there, I thought I was going to make a tree landing. I had my legs crossed for it and everything."
It was almost noon by the time the man behind the counter was through with his interviews and his bookkeeping. I told him I wanted to take the course. He was still distracted, but he managed to give me a clipboard and a form to fill out. I put down the basic information about myself and then I signed it below the clause that absolved everybody but me of everything. Then I paid my money.
"By the way," said the man I was dealing with, "my name is Frank. I guess I'm your jumpmaster. Would you mind if I grabbed some lunch before we start? I didn't get any breakfast."
The restaurant was just opening for the day and within a few minutes there were about 20 people scattered around the tables. All of them were jumpers, a half dozen were women and the chatter was about sky diving. Around the walls there were photographs and trophies. Pope Valley has a team it sends to the important competitions around the world and by the looks of its awards, it's pretty good. One of the large color photos on the wall shows a world-record 26-man star somewhere over Oklahoma. The shot was taken from above, probably by another diver—26 free-falling bodies holding hands. And if you catch the light at just the right angle, there are fingerprints on the glass over each diver's helmet where unbelievers like me have counted them one by one.
When I asked, Frank said he'd made over 700 jumps in the eight years he'd been at it. He'd never been hurt, he said. Noonan asked him how many first-time jumpers they trained and Frank said they averaged 50 a month, over 2000 since they'd been open. Then he yelled across the room to get the attention of a handsome dark-haired guy in shorts whose name was Charlie.
"Does Maureen want to jump?" Frank asked him.
"I think so," was the answer in a British accent. "I'll ask her. She'll be here in a minute."
"I have another student here and we're going to start class in a few minutes," Frank told him. Then he turned back to us. "He's over here from England with his girlfriend. They're going to be here for a month. He's an experienced diver."
"How many women do this nowadays?" I asked him.
"I'd say it's about three to one, men to women, at this point. It used to be more like five to one a couple of years ago."
And just then, as if to make the point, a lovely, athletic-looking blonde woman walked up, said hi to Frank and sat next to Noonan, who pretty much focused on her the way a jeweler might on a fine opal. Frank introduced her as Sandy and said she'd made 11 jumps in less than a week. She had bangs, blue eyes right out of the movies, and she was wearing the first three buttons on her shirt undone. She lived in South Lake Tahoe and worked at the casinos, she told us. "I just wish I'd discovered sky diving earlier," she said. "This is the end of my vacation." Frank told us she was a great student and had already done six free-fall dives. She smiled and said she loved it.
Frank spotted Maureen coming in the door and called to her. She walked over to her boyfriend's table and Frank joined them.
"Do you still want to jump?" her boyfriend asked her.
Maureen looked him right in the eye as if she might say no, as if there were more to it than just the question of sky diving. She was tall and thin. She had short dark hair, big, round dark eyes and skin the color of milk. She stood there shy but not stiff as she listened to Frank, looked at her boyfriend again, then said a yes that seemed to mean maybe.
After lunch, outside the hangar, Noonan and I stood waiting with Maureen while Frank ran around making sure the rest of the day's activity would go smoothly without him. I asked her where she was from.
"Dublin," she said in an accent that sounded English, not Irish. "But I'm living in Brussels now. I work for the Common Market."
I asked if it was her first trip to America. It was, and when I asked how she liked it, she said, "I really haven't seen much except this place. We stopped two days in San Francisco on the way here. I enjoyed that."
"Let me ask you something," said (continued on page 116)Sky Dive(continued from page 110) Noonan. "Why are you doing this thing?"
"Well," she said, "I don't really know why I'm doing it."
"Must be a man," I said, guessing by what I'd seen in the restaurant.
"No, I'm not doing it for a man," she said quickly. "I'm not at all sure why I'm doing it. We're going to be here for a month, we don't have a car, and there just isn't much else to do, is there?"
"Does it scare you?" I asked her.
"Very much," she said.
"Doing dangerous things for the first time is always scary," I said.
"Oh, this won't be my first time," she said. "I've jumped three times before."
"Did you like it?" Noonan asked.
"I hated it," she said. "I absolutely hated it. I've never had any instruction. All three times were with my boyfriend and his partners and they just sort of pushed me out the door. It was horrible. I can't tell you. The last time we went, I told them I positively couldn't do it. It was cold and it was almost dark and they said they couldn't land the plane with me in it. Then they pushed me out the door." She told the story calmly and shrugged when she was through.
Frank called the three of us into the dumpy back room of the hangar. It was hot and getting sticky. Frank opened his notes. "We are here to turn baby birds into eagles," he said. "To let you know what it feels like to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge." I was sure Maureen didn't need that image, but I liked it. I've always wondered what that felt like, wondered about that plunge and the more than 600 wretched souls who've taken it. You hear people say you'd pass out before you hit the water, but I've never believed that. I've always imagined that those last few moments would probably be the most vivid you'd ever have and that they might even change your mind about life and things. And parachute jumps, after all, are falls from a fatal height that start the same way leaping suicides start but leave the storyteller alive to tell the story.
"A lot of people think sky diving is just for daredevils and fools," Frank said. And then, as if to call us back from that bridge railing, he added, "But, actually, it's very safe. Life insurance is higher for bartenders than it is for sky divers, and that's a fact" (that insurance companies deny). Then he said, "Let's go back out into the hangar and I'll show you the equipment you're going to be using."
There were no planes in the main room of the hangar, but there were unfolded, used parachutes, piles of nylon and cord here and there on the floor. A Marine Corps-looking guy with a big upper body and a crewcut was folding a chute that lay on a long wooden table. He was talking to Sandy as he folded, and she was watching carefully.
Frank got one of the unfolded chutes, stretched it out and then took us through the nomenclature of the thing. First the canopy, which has a round hole in the top about the sire of a basketball, called the apex. Then the modification, a double L-shaped cut in the back of the canopy that gives the descending chute a forward speed of about five miles an hour. The shrouds are the lines that connect the canopy to the harness, and the toggles are the steering cords. Pull down on the right toggle, Frank told us, and you go to the right. The left, to the left. Then he took us over to the bin that held the folded and packed reserve chutes. They are about the size of a rolled down sleeping bag and you wear it on the harness across your belly.
"I want to show you the packer's seal," he said and then opened the front flap and, with one finger, pulled out a red string with a small lead chunk pinched onto it. "Each packer has a seal of his own he puts on here. This tells you the chute is OK," he said. "That way, if someone has used a chute and then, let's say, instead of repacking it he's filled it with a lot of rags, it wouldn't have this little seal. So you always want to check."
"Do you get a lot of that around here?" I asked him. "Guys' filling these things with rags?"
"No, no," he said quickly. "None; we haven't had any of that at all."
•
We took a break. Maureen found her boyfriend in the main room of the hangar where he was talking to the packer and to Sandy, who was smiling and laughing and asking him questions about advanced diving techniques. She was getting ready to jump and he was giving her pointers and watching her blouse.
Noonan had taken off to buy some more film. I got a warm grape soda out of a machine and then wandered out to the runway, where almost everybody was waiting for Sandy and another jumper to suit up and load into the plane. The other jumper was a kid in his 20s who had exactly as many jumps as Sandy but evidently not her talent. He was telling someone that he hoped he'd get it right this time. It was his 12th jump, he said, and on number 11 he'd flipped over onto his back, and when he'd pulled the cord, the opening shock had just about torn him in half. Sandy was in her harness, checking last-minute things and talking to her jumpmaster, a girl named Karalee. Then the three of them loaded into the plane with the pilot and took off. They circled us until they reached about 3000 feet and then dropped a yellow streamer into the wind. There wasn't much, and after the plane circled another time, when it was almost directly above us, I heard the engine stall and saw the left wing tip down. Then a body separated from the plane and fell in that familiar swan-dive arch. I counted: three, four, five, six, then I lost count in the hypnotic effect of watching a body fall a great distance. Somebody said, "It's Sandy," when the body was close enough. She was on her 12th dive, her seventh free fall, and she was supposed to delay for ten seconds before opening. She probably hit it just right, but from where we stood, the whole thing took on a slow-motion quality and it seemed about a minute before the streaming chute left her back and popped like a cotton ball above her. There were some small cheers and some clapping, and two minutes later she landed 30 or 40 yards from the target. At almost the exact moment she hit, the plane overhead sloughed the second jumper into the sky. Whatever he did, he flipped over onto his back again. He, too, was supposed to delay for ten seconds, but when he felt himself upside down again, he pulled his cord. When his chute caught the air, his whole body jerked around as if a vicious puppeteer were trying to teach him a lesson. But he landed well, about the same distance from the target that Sandy had landed.
Back in the sweaty little classroom, Frank began explaining the hard technical facts of what we were in for. He told us that the first five jumps are made with a static line, a strap about eight feet long that is attached to the plane and the chute in such a way as to pull it open automatically. Most military jumps are done with a static line, he said. "These poor guys are carrying guns and packs and they just tell them to get in a fetal position and then they throw them out the door. We do things a little differently around here."
He pulled out a chart that had student responsibilities numbered 1, 2, 3 in big numbers, Arch and Count, it read, Follow the Arrow, Feet and Legs Together for Landing. Then he told us the sequence. "The jumpmaster will tell you (continued on page 180)Sky Dive(continued from page 116) to get out onto the step under the wing. Then he'll say go." He was in a crouch that approximated the ready position and when he said go, he sprang backward, arched his back and neck and spread his arms like wings. "The count is ... arch thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, check thousand," he said. "We have you count so that you will have some point of reference up there. The first jump, especially, has a tendency to be very disorienting. But it's very important to know where you are. Your chute should open around four thousand. If it hasn't opened by six—that is, check thousand—you are going to have to look over your shoulder, like this, and if there is nothing going on back there, you have what's called a total malfunction, at which point you reach down and pull the handle on your reserve chute like this. If you don't initiate emergency procedures at that point, you're in a little bit of trouble, because about six or seven seconds later you'll reach your terminal velocity of 125 miles per hour, and six or seven seconds after that you'll be going zero miles per hour. Any questions?"
No questions.
"All right, let's try it," Frank said, and then slipped each of us into a dummy harness and hooked a dummy reserve chute to the front. He told us to arch on his command and then count in a big voice. I did it a few times. Frank stood behind me to steady my body as I jumped backward into the arch. There wasn't much to it, except it was a little spooky to reach down and then jerk that chrome handle out into the air with nothing attached to it. When it was Maureen's turn, she did a petite little jump backward and then a half arch. She didn't throw her head back and she didn't extend her arms all the way.
"I don't want to fall over backward," she said, when Frank told her what she was doing wrong.
We sat down, sweaty from the exercise, and swatted at the flies that sat down with us. Frank riffled his notes, then said, "When you look up, check to see if the canopy is round and symmetrical. Then look to see if the apex is round and well formed. Then check the modification to see if it's in good shape. Then the lines, to make sure they aren't tangled. If you see a hole in the canopy that doesn't belong there, or maybe more than one hole, you're going to have to make a judgment: Ask yourself if the hole in your canopy is big enough for a man to walk through. If it is, you're going to have to get rid of your main chute and go to your reserve. If there are several holes, add them up and decide if the total is big enough for a man to walk through. The thing is, you're going to have to judge it for yourself."
I sat there, thinking, What? Holes in the canopy that don't belong there? Add them up? Maureen lit a long, thin cigarette and almost burned herself on the match. I looked at Noonan and he looked at me as if to say don't look at me.
I was going to ask Frank what size man he was talking about. A big man with a whip, for instance? A little man with a subpoena? ... But I didn't. He called a break and we took it gladly. Noonan and Maureen went into the hangar, toward the Coke machine. I walked across the field to the outhouse. The air inside was acrid and steamy, and as I stood there, it occurred to me that there was a hole in the classroom wall, a door, just about big enough for a man to walk through, on his way home, to a cold towel, a beer and a joint. Because it's not the fearful things in this life that are hard when you get right down to them. Intense moments pretty much take care of themselves. It's the heat and the insects that get you, that suck the humor out of your spirit, make you lose sight of the goal. I wiped my forehead. Something was walking down it toward my eyes; maybe a fly, maybe a bead of sweat. After a while, you can't tell the difference and it doesn't matter, except you look stupid swatting at your own perspiration. Just before I stepped out of the putrid little box, I found the only piece of graffiti in it. Written on the box that holds those flimsy paper rings you can lay on the seat, it read, "Sky-diving insurance forms; surprise your jumpmaster—make him the beneficiary."
Back in the classroom, Noonan took a couch behind Maureen and me, fell immediately asleep and stayed that way for an hour while Frank explained to us in paralyzing detail the various partial malfunctions a jumper might have to deal with. He drew stick pictures of them on the blackboard one at a time and called them by name. A Mae West: The shrouds foul and the parachute deploys in two sections that resemble a monster bra; it won't hold you up. A streamer: The chute deploys but doesn't open, doesn't catch any air, follows you down like a contrail. Bag lock: You pull the rip cord and nobody's home, nothing happens. Blown panel: The chute deploys, catches air and a seam goes, leaving a hole big enough for a man and his dog to walk through. A horseshoe: another tangled configuration, and very unlucky.
When he was done with his catalog of horrors, he said, "But forget all those names, you don't need to know them. I don't want you looking up at your chute, trying to remember what these things are called. It doesn't make any difference whether you call it a Mae West or a Brigitte Bardot ... it's just bar talk ... forget it."
Noonan started to snord, choked on it, jerked his head up and his red eyes open, then closed them again and dropped back off into his nap.
"Any questions?" Frank asked.
"Yes," I said. "What the hell do we do about bag lock and Mae West and that other stuff?"
"We'll get to that," he said.
I looked at my watch. It was 6:30 and we hadn't even begun to talk about how to maneuver the chute once it was open or about how to land. I had sweated the last of two milks onto the inside of my shirt hours earlier and my stomach was getting mean about it. Maureen looked as if she'd been held prisoner somewhere in the desert for a week.
"We better get going, if we're going to jump today," Frank said. Then he took us outside, put us into harnesses again and had us hang one at a time from a scaffold so we could practice the quick-release technique for partial malfunction. It was a series of steps that led up to pulling two small rings simultaneously to cut the bad parachute loose and make room for the reserve to deploy. We took turns: I caught Maureen as she dropped the two feet to the ground on release, and then we traded places and she caught me. But she wouldn't do it right. She kept skipping a step and no matter how many times Frank made her do it, she never made the correction. There was no stubbornness to it. Mostly fatigue, I think, along with a stoical thing I could see around her eyes that said: If I have to go through a series of perfectly timed emergency steps to save my life up there, I'm going to die and that's all there is to it. But she kept doing the exercise—hang and drop, hang and drop—over and over, until Frank gave up.
On the next break, we went out to the runway, where everyone was waiting for Maureen's boyfriend and his partner (another experienced jumper) to make a dive that was to include relative work.
By the time the plane got over the target area, it was higher and smaller than it had been on the other jumps we'd watched. We craned our heads all the way back, heard the engine fade and saw the wings tip. Then two divers left the plane within a second of each other. I counted five before the two of them caught each other's hands. Then they pushed away from each other, then came together again and this time held the air dance a little longer. When they let go the second time, both of them went out of the arch position into a head-down, high-speed diving posture and exploded away from each other. A few seconds later, both of their rectangular chutes popped. From then on, they might as well have been strapped to hang gliders. The new chutes are that maneuverable and the two of them turned and dipped and soared down onto the target and landed, a few feet from dead center, as gently as gulls. Neither of them fell.
"Nothing to it," Noonan said.
"Not if you napped through the part about blown panels," Maureen said without looking at either of us.
We walked back to the classroom. The sun had only about a half hour left above the ridge and we still didn't know whether or not we were going to jump that day. The uncertainty was gnawing at me. When I asked Frank, he said we still had a lot of material to cover but he thought we might make it; he wasn't sure.
For the next hour, he talked to us about how to steer our chutes, how to use the wind and how to judge our trajectory on the target. He talked to us about the big white arrow that sat in the field not far from the target area. He said an experienced jumper would be running the arrow and that we should face ourselves in the direction it was pointed, no matter what we thought. Following instructions was more important than anything else we would learn, he said. Then he told us how to land in a tree ("First, do everything you can to miss it. If you're going to hit, cover your neck and face with your arms and cross your legs."). And how to land on power lines ("Try to hit one wire, not two"), and then he took us outside to something Noonan described as a makeshift gallows and had us jump off it to practice landing with our feet and knees together. After about ten minutes of that, Frank showed us how to hit and then roll onto the ground so that only the fleshy parts made contact. Then, in the pea gravel that surrounded the platform, we practiced that. I kept thumping the bone around my hip every time I tried it, and then I rolled out of the practice area into the star thistles that were everywhere.
Frank finally said, "The reason you're doing it wrong is you're afraid to let go."
I looked up from where I was in the briars. The sun was gone and the twilight was red. If we did jump, it was going to be in the dark. A tone came into my voice that I hate in other people. "No," I said too slowly and too quietly. "It's not because I'm afraid, Frank, it's because we have been at this for almost eight hours and I'm so goddamn rummy I can't even fall down right. If we jump now, it's going to be a nightmare, and that's not right."
"I guess we have been at it a long time," he said and looked at Maureen.
"It has been rather long." she said. She had her arms folded and she didn't look very good.
Frank took a look at the two of us there in the fading light and said, "Listen, we'll jump tomorrow. We can practice landing in the morning. Let's go back into the classroom and I'll give you the test."
Test? I looked at Maureen and Noonan. Test?
"Just a quiz," Frank said, and a minute later we were back on the ratty couches, he was reading questions to us and we were answering them.
"Toggles," said Maureen.
"A hole big enough for a man to walk through," I said.
"Feet and knees together," said Maureen.
And so it went for 20 or more questions.
"You guys must be tired," Frank said like the captain of a ship who has just seen his crew climbing up the outside of the pilothouse with rigging knives in their teeth. "Go home, get a good night's sleep and I'll see you in the morning."
Outside, Noonan and I said good night to Maureen. "Oh, I doubt I'll sleep a wink," she told us before she started across the field toward her tent.
On the drive back to the Bay Area, I told Billy I thought Maureen was drawing from reserves of strength that were amazing.
"Especially considering the number her boyfriend is into with Sandy," he said.
I asked him what he was talking about.
"Heavy flirtation," he said. "He was damn near drooling on himself every time she went by. Not that I blame him. I got a little spittle on my own shirt here. In fact, while you guys were hanging in those harnesses doing that quick-release exercise, I was over there having a dirty fantasy about hanging Sandy out there naked and——"
"You're out of control," I told him.
"Hell, there was nothing else to do out there," he said in his own defense, "except count the goddamn flies and think about death."
"Were Charlie and Sandy really into a thing?"
"On one of the breaks," he said, "I saw him walk behind her and give her a little hello on the ass. She didn't exactly swat his hand away, either."
"Did Maureen see it?"
"I don't know ... she might have ... she probably did ... women see everything. He had the fever on him and he wasn't exactly being subtle."
"Jesus," I said.
"Little relative work," said Noonan.
When I got home, both of my kids, Rebecca, 13, and Peter, 11, were waiting for me. Their eyes were big and they were excited. Both of them had been worried when I left in the morning and Peter had admitted it.
"How'd you do?" they asked me.
"Well," I told them, "I chickened out ... I just couldn't do it. I got out there under that wing and looked down at the ground and the buildings, like a model railroad set up down there, tiny buildings, tiny people ... there were birds flying around below me ... and I just couldn't let go. They were screaming at me, slapping at my hands, trying to break my grip on the strut, but I just hung on like a moray eel and made 'em land."
"I knew it," said Peter, as if that scenario had played in his head before, with him as the jumper. "I knew it."
"Did you really?" asked Rebecca.
"Well," I said. "No. I had a teacher who spent most of the day telling us what could go wrong, and then it got too late to jump. We're gonna do it tomorrow morning."
"Are you scared?" Peter asked me.
"A little," I said. "But really, the whole system is designed to keep you safe, and the more you know about it the better you feel. I don't want you guys to worry now."
"I'm not," said Rebecca.
"I am, a little," said Peter. And then, "What if you do chicken out?"
"I might," I told him. "But I don't think so."
•
Noonan and I didn't talk much on the ride back the next morning. It was foggy and I was afraid it was going to keep us from jumping. I didn't want it postponed again. It takes a certain amount of talking yourself into these things and I was worried that if we didn't jump that morning, I was going to get the daredevil's equivalent of blue balls. But the sun broke through and took the crisp edge off the morning air as we came over the ridge into the valley. It was about 8:30 and nothing much was stirring around the hangar. Then the pilot drifted in, then a few other people. There was no sign of Frank and when I asked, someone told me this was supposed to be his day off. His first in six weeks, someone else said.
After a while, we saw Maureen come out of her tent, squint at the sun and start across the field toward us.
"Good morning," I said.
"I don't know if it's good or not," she said. "I didn't get much sleep."
"Are you still as afraid as you were yesterday?" I asked her.
"No," she said. "Worse. What about you?"
"I don't know," I said. "I figure it ought to be as easy as hanging yourself."
"Oh, don't say that, say anything but that," she said.
"How are you ever going to do a month of this?" Noonan asked her.
"Well," she said in her soft voice, "we had a little talk about that last night. We're going back into San Francisco this weekend and then we'll see."
"Do you remember your lessons?" I asked her.
"Perhaps half," she said. "But we don't really need to know everything we learned yesterday. I never knew any of those things when I jumped before and Charlie told me this morning that I didn't really have to arch, it's not that important. I hope we're not put off again."
"Frank's nowhere," I told her. "But I'm going to start agitating here in a minute."
Just then, Karalee, the jumpmaster with the nice smile who'd taken Sandy up the day before, came over and said she'd jump us. Outside, I told Maureen we were ready to suit up.
"I want to ask you something," she said. "Do you mind which of us leaves the plane first?"
"No," I told her. "Either way is fine with me."
"Oh, good," she said. "I'd like to go first, if you don't mind."
Both of us rummaged through the jump suits and boots until we found a fit. Then we got helmets. Then Karalee helped us into the main chute harnesses and hooked reserves on the front. She adjusted the straps, made connections, cinched us in. She talked and smiled while she did it, asked us how we felt and went over the basics with us.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Where's the packer's seal on the reserve chute?"
"Don't worry, it's there," Karalee said.
"I want to see it," I told her. "This thing could be full of rags." Maureen was smiling. Karalee undid the flap on the reserve chute and popped the seal out.
"OK?" she asked.
"Fine," I said.
Then we were standing there hunched over and starting to sweat in 40 pounds of equipment. Karalee said, "Let's go," and we walked to the door of the little plane that was warming up. The hangar crowd followed us, including Charlie, who was talking to Maureen, reassuring her, telling her to go for it. He'd volunteered to run the arrow for our jump. Just before we climbed into the plane, I heard him tell Maureen, "Remember to arch now; it's important."
On signal, we climbed into the plane and look our positions: I on my knees behind the pilot, Karalee by my right shoulder, near the door, and Maureen next to the pilot, looking out the windshield.
Karalee said, "You remember the routine now—on the step, then look at me, then I'll say go. Once you're sure you have a good canopy, look for the arrow. Land with your feet and knees together."
We taxied slowly for a minute, turned around and then, within sight of a general thumbs up from the small crowd, including Noonan and his camera, we roared off down the runway and took off. We circled up in the bright air. Then the pilot opened the door and Karalee dropped a wind streamer and watched till it landed. I could see Maureen's face over Karalee's shoulder and I kept watching it for signs of terror. My own adrenaline had begun to come up but not violently. Just a small seep that was putting my body on alert. I kept expecting a surge of it when my body and my brain got together and realized what we were really doing, but it didn't come. And whatever Maureen was feeling was deep inside her. At one point, I reached forward and knocked a couple of times on the back of her helmet. She turned around, gave a quick smile and then looked back out the windshield.
Karalee leaned forward and tapped the pilot's shoulder. He cut the engine to idle speed and tipped up the right wing.
"On the step," Karalee yelled, and Maureen climbed slowly out to her place under the wing. She was looking straight ahead and she had a death grip on the strut.
"Go!" Karalee shouted, and Maureen did, a little at a time. She let go with her feet first but not her hands, so that she was flying like a flag. I winced. Then she let loose with one hand till she twisted around and lost her grip with the other. She fell away like a suicide. There was no count, no arch. It looked like disaster. Karalee leaned half her body out the door to watch and a few seconds later she leaned back in and said, "She's OK ... your turn."
I moved into the ready position as we circled and when Karalee saw Maureen land, she told me to get onto the step. The engine stalled, the plane tipped and I climbed out. I thought that was going to be the moment of big fright; but when the air hit me, and when I looked down 2500 feet and saw the hangar, the motel, the pool and then the target, I felt, for the first time, cool and light and ready. I looked back into the plane. Karalee smiled at me. Then she put her thumb up and mouthed the word go. I let loose with my hands, jumped backward and arched so hard the helmet dug into the back of my neck. I screamed, "Arch thousand," and then the feeling took me: a rush so complete that I shut my eyes and probably moaned. There was no sensation of falling. The air under me felt as thick as water and the arch position kept me steady on it, though I had no idea which way was up, down or sideways. The whole effect was something like sliding backward at high speed down a watercourse. There was never any question of fighting it or being afraid of it. It was like being sucked into a black hole and if it had meant death, it would have been a good one. I lost the count at arch thousand, so I don't know how long it took the static line to do its work. When the chute did open, there wasn't the wrenching I had expected; in fact, it was almost gentle. When I felt myself hanging, I opened my eyes, looked up and saw a beautiful mushroom shape letting the sunlight through the apex and glowing around the edges. That was the second rush; it fell like being caught in your mother's arms. I looked down for the arrow and when I spotted it, I pulled down on my right toggle until I swung 180 degrees. And then, in the cool air and the quiet, I floated and laughed out loud and my imagination went crazy. First I was the Lord, then a bird, then a map maker whose map had turned to oaks and hills below him and was growing larger and closer as he grew smaller and smaller and I probably would have landed in that fantasy except that I heard someone yelling at me through a bullhorn. It was Charlie. He was telling me to pull on my left toggle. From where I was, it didn't make any sense to turn that way, into the wind, but I did it anyway. Then I saw the barbed-wire fence. I had only a few hundred feet left and everything was coming up faster and faster. I seemed to be trying for the fence and it scared me. Then I saw Maureen standing in the ruins of her chute, waving up at me. I cleared the fence with 100 feet to spare and then I heard Charlie yelling at me to put my feet and knees together. I saw Noonan running toward me with his camera. Then I hit and rolled with my forward speed. There was no more bump to it than diving for a Frisbee at the beach. I jumped up and ran downwind of my chute, which was collapsing on itself in the plowed dirt. Noonan whooped and took a picture. I whooped back at him. Then he said, "Jesus. It looked fantastic. Are you all right?"
"Incredible," I said.
"Well, then lie down, damn it, like you just landed. You missed the target by so goddamn much I couldn't get over here last enough to get you lying down."
Charlie reached Maureen not long after I landed and when I looked over at them, they were hugging each other pretty good. When they finished, Maureen looked over at me and waved. She had a smile on her face so big that she was going Lo ache from it. Charlie helped her pick up the chute and then all of us walked back to the hangar together. Maureen and I said something to each other, but I don't remember what. All I can remember is that smile she couldn't get off her face.
Inside the hangar, there were congratulations all around and then some questions from several people who were signing up for the course. Frank rolled in, rubbing his eyes, and when we told him we'd jumped, he got a proud smile and congratulated us. Then Sandy congratulated us and said, "You see?"
I sat on the floor to take off my boots and a minute later Maureen sat down next to me.
"Going to do it again?" I asked her.
"Well ... I might," she said. "Later this afternoon ... maybe."
"I think you showed a lot of courage up there," I told her.
"You're joking," she said in that accent.
I told her I wasn't and then I said, "I'll send you a copy of the story. As far as I can tell, you're the hero of it."
She blushed.
"Now do you know why you did it?" I asked.
She shrugged her thin shoulders. "For something to do, I guess."
" 'We are here,' he said, 'to let you know what it feels like to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.' "
"I sat there, thinking, What? Holes in the canopy that don't belong there? Add them up?"
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