by Cahill, Tim
the harness, the rigging, the radio receiver inside the student's helmet, and then—as Mark put it—he would "hurl' the unfortunate student "off the mountain."
'Three, two one, GO, run, run runrunrun," Mark's voice commanded inside the helmet. And then you'd fall down and go scraping through the sagebrush and bouncing off rocks.
Since the launch site is not a cliff, but a steeply sloping hillside, a blown launch results not in instant death but merely excruciating scrapes and bruises, the kind of injuries skateboarders call "a road rash." "Pick up that wreckage," Mark would say, "and get ready for another try." And you'd do it, muttering and cursing and bleeding out of spite.
Frankly, the landing zone had not been entirely kind to me either. I had, on my five previous flights, been so concerned with my launch that I had failed to consider the vicissitudes of touchdown. I had suffered, to date, four crash landings out of five flights. There were half a dozen of us learning the art of paraglid-ing, and we videotaped several launches and landings for instructional purposes.
In the evening, after the flights, we'd watch videotapes of the day. A particular favorite was a calamitous landing by a woman who became known as Crash 'N Splash. The video showed her screaming down to the ground and failing completely to engage the brakes, a pair of ropes, one held in each hand, that pull down the back edge of the chute and stall the glider. In a proper landing the pilot turns into the wind and lifts the ropes, disengaging the brakes to gain speed. At about six feet the ropes are pulled down past the knees, the glider stalls, and the pilot steps to the ground as from a stair step.
Crash 'N Splash had gotten it into her mind that she could shoot along the ground and simply begin to run when the first foot touched the earth. Look, Ma, no brakes.
But the parasail moves faster than you can run. Just so. The video clearly shows that Crash took a step, hit to her knees, flopped onto her chest, and slid facefirst into a marsh. Crash 'N Splash.
On the other hand, I had developed a landing technique that
the others found at least equally amusing. Somehow, the anxiety of the launch combined with the exhilaration of flight conspired to produce a sort of lazy complacency on touchdown so that I neglected to get out of my seat. The seat harness comes complete with a hammocky seat, a plywood board the pilot sits on. I'd brake perfectly, but for some reason I consistently failed to get out of the seat. My feet would be out ahead of me (both of them together), they'd slide along the ground, and I'd land precisely on my tailbone.
This was a matter for continuous hooting and laughter during evening videos. The landing zone for these first practice flights was a cow pasture, and I earned a nickname both for the seat-of-my-pants touchdowns and their unerring accuracy in finding certain squishy elements the cows had left behind.
It strengthens your resolve, a nickname like that. Made you want to touch down perfectly. Who wants to spend five days as the man known as "Cow Pie"?
The first few launches are usually an occasion of minor bloodletting and curses. Soon enough—maybe on the fourth or fifth or tenth attempt—all goes well, and the student pilot lifts off without incident. Steering is fairly straightforward: Pull the right hand brake, the right side of the glider stalls, and the whole affair turns right. The student is never alone in the air. The radio receiver inside his helmet spits out Mark's informed commands—"turn right away from the cliff face, good, good, good, relax, okay, enjoy the flight, that's our best glider you're flying there, you're bulletprooof"—and about halfway through the flight, Andy Long would take over and direct the student into the landing zone.
The first flights from any deadly height were an experiment in terror, and Mark was, by his own admission, "a little hyper." That is, he tended to get excited about conditions and the proper time to launch. With over twelve hundred hours of hang-gliding and paragliding experience, Mark wanted everyone to experience the best flight possible, but the problem was that novices, like myself, often wanted to study the conditions for themselves, which is a way of saying that we were terrified and endeavored to
301 A RISK
put off the moment of the launch as long as possible. Having some nervous fellow hurrying you through your preparations caused a bit of high-altitude resentment. Mark was aware of this. That is why he found it necessary to "hurl people off the mountain." There were some complaints about this.
On touchdown, invariably, the resentment was replaced by gratitude. Chirico purely loved teaching this sport and was one of those instructors who derived intense pleasure from his students' accomplishments. No one minded his effusive and entirely sincere compliments on our flights. Hyper is just fine in the landing zone.
Indeed, Mark had endearing qualities. He runs adventure-travel hang-gliding and paragliding tours in New Zealand, Europe, Australia, and Mexico. He was scouting the possibility of running another such tour in Idaho, out of the Twin Peaks guest ranch, south of Salmon. His vision of the tour combined a horseback ride to a suitable launch site, a glide down to the river, and a raft trip back to the ranch. But Mark was raised in Massachusetts, and for all of his world travels, the West was something of a mystery to him.
Once stopping to give the horses a breather, we all heard a familiar and ominous whirring sound. Mark declared that there was something wrong with his camera. He held it to his ear and looked puzzled.
"I don't know why it's on auto rewind," Mark complained, "I still should have ten shots left." The rattlesnake was coiled about four feet from Mark's horse, with the wedge-shaped head up and the tail vibrating rapidly. It was a prairie rattler, about three feet long.
Any other horse of my acquaintance would have been off at a gallop, bucking and kicking on a kamikaze downhill run through the trees. Frank Valbo's horses, trained for dudes who ride them at the Twin Peaks Ranch, do not spook so easily.
"Uh, Mark," another rider said.
We were putting our lives into the hands of a man who couldn't tell a rattlesnake from a Nikon.
Half a mile below the summit of Hat Creek, the Salmon River, swollen and brown with runoff, wound its way through a canyon bracketed on both sides by mountains. On the other side of the river, just past Highway 93 and beyond a lush, irrigated alfalfa field, there were rounded hills, brown buttes, and rocky rims that rose to the jagged, knife-edged snowy peaks of the Lemhi Mountains.
A pair of eighteen-wheelers were barreling south down 93. Having driven that highway, I knew they were doing seventy miles an hour, at a minimum. From where I stood, they seemed to be crawling. It was the first time I ever found slow semis scary: They looked like trucks on tranks.
Our landing zone was a broad, flat field on the west side of the river. I resolved not to overshoot the LZ. There were dangers in that.
Poles carrying high-tension electrical wires lined the highway down there, and it would be best to avoid them. Who wants to get tangled up in the wires and hang there, sparking and flashing for a few hours?
It seemed wise to avoid landing in the river as well. And, let's see, what else to worry about at the moment? I was staring into an empty space hundreds of feet above the valley floor, studying imponderable menace. I was looking for invisible teeth, for can-nonballs, for that darn old deflationary t-t-t-turbulence.
In the history of the world, to date, only one person had ever launched a paraglider off the Hat Creek hill. Andy Long was in position down beside the river, in the exact center of the landing zone, waiting for the second person ever to launch from this site.
The Iceman was up, standing there, sweating in his crash helmet, studying the wind with mortal intensity. If there were big teeth out there, the Iceman would abort.
The Iceman, in fact, was a friend of mine, Tom Berrum, a Montana neighbor who was new to paragliding but had plenty of experience with hang gliders. Tom knew about the hot air that rises from a valley floor in columns hang gliders call thermals. He knew about the areas of turbulence and downdrafts that sur-
303 a RISK
round th
e rising thermals. Before launch he invariably spent at least half an hour wordlessly studying conditions, and the rest of us found his self-possession admirable. He was the Iceman.
It was Tom who impressed on me the importance of launching into a wind that blew directly uphill. "If it's not blowing up, blow it off," quoth the Iceman.
And then he was off, launched, and I could see little whirlwinds kicking up dust devils on the slopes below, but the conditions were good—right now they were still good—and I wasn't quite ready, so of course I heard Mark's radio-amplified voice in my ear telling me to run run run. I was standing there with my arms stretched out, cruciform, the back risers in the crook of my arm, the front ones in my hand, the canopy spread out behind in the approved horseshoe shape, the open leading edge up, the lines untangled, the brakes clear of knots, and then I felt my legs pumping and the chute was up over my head and the ground was beginning to drop away under me but something was dreadfully wrong. Perhaps the wind had shifted. It is possible that I was inept.
The chute listed off to the right, dragging me willy-nilly along the ground until I found myself scraping along the rocks with my right forearm.
I believe at this point I voiced some crude malediction. But no, wait. Hey. I was sitting on the ground under a fully inflated sail, which was listing only slightly to the right. I should have pulled the right brake to my hip. The sail would have folded itself into the ground on my right side. Instead, I pulled the left brake to my shoulder and felt the sail lift me a bit to the left. I raised both my hands. The sail was steady, and what the hell, brake to your shoulders, Tim, and hot damn, I'm in the air. Not the world's most perfect launch, but a nice recovery. Cow Pie rising like the phoenix from his own wreckage.
Below, I could see the Iceman under his bright red sail. The gliders themselves are so large that a man in harness seems like an inanimate toy, one of those Masters of the Universe action figures designed for preschool children. The Iceman's canopy shivered slightly, and he was kicked out to the side a bit. The ride was
getting a tad bumpy down there. Then, predictably, he hit it, a rising column of warm air that sent him straight up at about four hundred feet per minute.
It was a pretty good thermal: not one of those uncontrollable cannonballs that can send you screaming into the sky at over a thousand feet per second.
Mark's voice crackled over the radio. "Tim! You see Tom. Wiggle your legs if you see him."
I wiggled my legs.
"Follow the Iceman, catch that lift."
The landing zone was too far away for our chutes to reach on the glide. We needed to catch a thermal, get some lift. That meant penetrating the turbulence that surrounded the Iceman's thermal. I'd be flying directly into a condition Mark called "teeth": the chomping ups and downs involved in the penetration of a rising column of air. I had assiduously avoided turbulence in my previous five flights precisely because I had seen chutes partially deflate in the teeth of turbulence. But the paragliders, Mark insisted, were designed for this problem. There was an open leading edge with ten ports that simply caught the air and automatically rein-flated the chute. The deflated chutes I had seen popped back full of air in a second or so, but I wasn't sure my heart was up to even one second of sure terror half a mile above the surface of the earth.
And then I was in the downdraft and a mass of messy air. I pulled the brakes to my shoulders for some stability, and then I was through it. The lift hit, and it was roller-coaster time. I gained six-hundred feet in just over a minute and saw that I had the landing zone well within range. An experienced pilot could spiral around inside that rising column of hot air and ride it right to the base of the small puffy cloud overhead. As it was, I simply burst through into a bit of mild turbulence on the other side of the thermal where I took a reading on the LZ and dived for safety.
On the radio receiver inside my helmet I could hear Mark turning me over to Andy and Andy telling me to "do a couple of 360s" to lose altitude. And when I came around for the second
305 a RISK
time, I saw the Iceman was down safely. I saw Andy. I saw the video camera, and I thought, No more cow pie.
Put the brake up for speed—there's the camera, do this right, edge out of the seat, legs down, okay, okay, okay—there's the ground ten feet below whipping by at about twenty-five miles an hour, and now, slowly, bring the brakes down to the neck, wait a beat, brakes to the chest, wait a beat, now all the way to the knees. I stepped down out of the sky, took two steps, turned to the camera, and declared in all modesty, and with great dignity, that I was the Master of the Universe. Icarus. Superman.
"It was a lot funnier the old way," quoth the Iceman.
and TV "magazine" stories have appeared on Fly Away, a Las Vegas "recreation center." I wanted to try this glorified amusement-park attraction the first time I heard about it over a year ago. Go to Las Vegas, lose a couple months' worth of work at the blackjack table, and fly like a bird.
Perhaps one of my reasons for driving 869 miles to try Fly Away was subconscious. As I frogged out over the blades and felt myself being slowly lifted five, six, seven, and ten feet off the metal screen, the odd floating sensation began to feel eerily familiar: It was, in fact, the way I fly in my dreams.
Now night soaring is not the norm for me: I get into it perhaps once every six months, generally following a particularly good day. Most often, I am in a large, sunny room when it occurs to me that I can fly. I rise slowly up off the ground—just testing my wings—and tip forward until I am looking down toward the ground in a horizontal position. In dreams, I never arch my back or frog out. I fly more like Superman than Kermit.
After hovering near the ceiling for a while, I like to swoop slowly down through the open window and glide majestically over the endless rolling green pastures that surround the house. This flight is perfectly silent, and I am Hawk.
Fly Away feels like the first stages of dream flight, but it is noisy, and the prop wash, filtered through a screen, is pretty turbulent, so that stability requires certain small adjustments in position. First-time fliers often don't get the hang of frogging out properly. They end up spinning out of the column of air and plopping down on the thickly cushioned bench that circles the silo.
I had something of an advantage over the other novices in that I've done a bit of skydiving. Unlike Fly Away, which isn't terribly frightening, the first jump from an airplane is a jittery nightmare of fear. More than likely, the act of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane with a sack of laundry on one's back generates more real fear than anything short of armed combat.
The teaching method in vogue when I made my first jump, almost ten years ago, involved crawling out an open cargo door
and hanging from the wingstrut of a Cessna 185. The jump-master calibrated the wind against an airspeed of about seventy miles an hour, figured in a three-thousand-foot drop, and shouted at the student to let go of the strut at the point where all these variables might combine to deposit him or her in the center of the drop zone.
On that first jump I was the second student out of the plane. A young woman went first, and when she let go of the strut, I saw her body simply hurtle down through empty space like a sack of cement. The static line, attached to the plane, was supposed to pull the parachute open for her, but she was almost gone, a tiny speck in the process of disappearing—like the last little spot of light in the center of the TV when you turn it off—before her chute opened like one of those flowers blooming in time-lapse photography on some nature documentary.
The plane circled around, and it was my turn to confront the fear of falling. The jumpmaster had stressed the importance of holding the proper position, which is very much like the Fly Away frog. One hangs on to the strut with the back arched. Let go of the strut and gravity tilts you over into an exaggerated belly flop—arms straight out and slightly above the head, legs held slightly above the butt—a position in which one falls stable. Think of a badminton birdie: Drop a shuttlecock feathers down
, and it'll spin stupidly. Drop it feathers up, and the birdie falls along a perfectly straight, gravity-drawn line. In skydiving, and at Fly Away, you want to arch your back, keep your feathers up.
When the jumpmaster ascertained that I was in proper position —back arched hard—he shouted "Go," a command I obeyed with extreme reluctance. The plane disappeared overhead. I held position from the waist up, but everything below was moving at a ten flat hundred pace. I think, looking back on it, that fear, ignoring the hard facts of physics, was screaming, "Run or you'll die!"
Nevertheless, I didn't go into much of a spin, the chute opened splendidly, and I floated slowly to earth in an utter silence punctuated only by the bass drumbeat of my heart.
No matter that I'd failed to hold position. The point of the first jump is simply doing it. The niceties come later, if the student decides there is going to be a later. Jumping once is about fear rather than skill.
Some of my classmates who went on to further jumps might have been looking to recapture that first incredible adrenaline rush—as I know I was—but this is a process of diminishing returns. As the novice becomes habituated to the fear—as the student learns by doing that death is only a remote possibility—the thought process mutates. First-jump thinking—"I know thousands have done it before, but this time it's me, and I'm going to die"—gives way to a more casual attitude. "Okay, some folks have been injured, some have been killed, but I'm careful, and that'll never happen to me."
My experience suggests that the novice skydiver discovers, over the next few jumps, that one can never feel again that first thrill of pure and primal fear. He or she also learns to appreciate the skill involved in skydiving, and begins to understand that the mechanics of flying are pleasurable in themselves. Which is the reason some people become hooked on the sport. The woman I watched fall off the strut that day nearly a decade ago has now logged over a thousand jumps.