My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  And with that, I abandoned all thought. I continued walking the path, spiraling and spiraling, feeling the bricks cool and moist under my feet, making my way toward the center.

  Chapter Eleven

  The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear, for newer and richer experience.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  As a kid I often dreamed about falling. It was never clear where I was falling from, but it was obvious where I was headed. During these dreams my body would jerk violently, waking me up before I hit the ground. (“You’re lucky,” my childhood best friend had said in a tone of deep certainty. “If you hit the ground in the dream, you die in real life. It’s a scientific fact.”) For twenty-nine years, skydiving had literally been my worst nightmare.

  I thought about all the physical risks Eleanor faced in her lifetime. In 1933, she took a two-and-a-half-mile ride underground deep into an Ohio coal mine. Coal mines were dangerous places, vulnerable to roof cave-ins, explosions, and flooding. When these disasters occurred, rescuing the miners was a difficult and often impossible task. But Eleanor wanted to witness the miners’ working conditions for herself and ultimately deemed them “dark, dank and utterly terrifying.”

  She later attended a meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama. Back in 1938, state law prohibited blacks and whites from sitting together at public gatherings. Eleanor strode into the racially divided auditorium and sat on the “black side” with her friend, civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune. When informed by the police that she was breaking the law and had to sit on the opposite side with the whites, she picked up her chair and placed it in the center aisle. She never stopped fighting for equal rights, even when threats were made on her life.

  In 1958, she was about to fly to Tennessee to speak at a civil-rights workshop when she received a phone call from the FBI. “We can’t guarantee your safety,” they said. “The Klan’s put a $25,000 bounty on your head. We can’t protect you.”

  “I didn’t ask for your protection,” the former First Lady retorted. “I have a commitment. I’m going.” At the Nashville airport she met up with a friend, a seventy-one-year-old white woman. They got into a car and drove off into the night alone, their only protection a loaded pistol placed on the front seat between them. If Eleanor could pack heat and face down a bunch of homicidal racists at the age of seventy-four, I could skydive. Though I knew my skydiving wouldn’t change the world, I did think it could change me. And if I could take this kind of risk, maybe then, if I had a chance to make a difference in someone’s life someday, I’d have the courage to do it.

  Eleanor once said, “It is only by inducing others to go along that changes are accomplished and work is done.” She was referring to leaders like Lincoln, Gandhi, and Churchill, who had to have a following in order to bring about real reform. I’d decided to co-opt this principle and use it as an excuse to make Bill, Chris, and Jessica jump out of the plane with me.

  Matt was so terrified of heights that not only had he refused to skydive, but he couldn’t even handle coming to watch us do it. He did, however, e-mail me an article titled “How to Survive a Skydiving Accident” the night before our jump. It was full of harrowing tales like the first-time skydiver whose tandem instructor suffered a heart attack and died in the middle of their jump, or veteran skydivers whose brains “locked” during the free fall, causing them to forget to pull the parachute cord.

  “Oh, you’re a riot. Thanks a lot,” I wrote back. “Also, how absentminded do you have to be to forget to pull your parachute cord? Who are they letting jump out of planes—Alzheimer’s patients?”

  “Good point,” he replied. “I mean, what else have you got going on in that particular moment? Did you get the photo I attached, by the way?”

  I scrolled down to the bottom of his e-mail and double-clicked the attachment. Suddenly my entire screen was filled with a photo of four stark-naked skydivers beaming at the camera in midair. The picture was a disturbing testament to the bodily effects of falling at 120 miles per hour. The women’s breasts were inverted to the point of resembling upside-down cereal bowls. I e-mailed it to my fellow jumpers with the subject line “Sorry, But You Need to See This.”

  Bill responded almost immediately from his BlackBerry. “Jesus, my eyes! Can we keep this a safe space please, Hancock?”

  “Oh my God,” Jessica added. “What is going on with the boobs?”

  “That’s what’s going to happen to your boobs tomorrow, Jess,” Chris wrote. “Sometimes, they stay that way.”

  “Seriously, you guys cannot make fun of me if I start crying up there,” Jessica replied. “And we’re doing tandem, right? People strapped to our backs?”

  “I recommend doing everything in tandem,” Bill wrote. “I’ve got a dude strapped to me at the drugstore right now.”

  “Yeah, it’s always tandem for your first jump,” said Chris, who’d skydived once before. “I think they do that because some people pass out on their first skydive.”

  “Really?” I said. “I didn’t know blacking out was an option. Do I need to put in a request for that ahead of time or just tell them at check-in?”

  The weird part was, even though this had been a lifelong fear, I wasn’t as anxious as I’d thought I’d be. At the beginning of this project I’d gotten nervous about the mildest of challenges. Haggling with a vendor over a secondhand bureau, going to my first swing dance class. Even thinking about doing something intimidating had been enough to set off butterflies in my stomach.

  But because the project was so big, it forced me to deal with my fear in a new way. As the year had progressed I’d noticed that the more I worried about future fears, the more overwhelmed I felt. I couldn’t conquer one fear while worrying about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and skydiving and whatever else I had coming up, or fear would consume my life. So to make the project more manageable, I took it day by day, focusing only on the challenge right in front of me.

  That morning we found four seats facing one other on a train out of Penn Station. Jessica and Bill divided up the Saturday New York Times. Chris and I tried to arrange our long legs so that they weren’t knocking against one other.

  “The place is called Long Island Skydiving,” I told the group. “Apparently they specialize in first-time jumpers.”

  “How long does skydiving take?” Jessica asked.

  I cued up the company’s website on my BlackBerry. “It says here ‘Please plan to spend at least three hours with us on the day of your skydive.’ ”

  “Three hours, or all of death’s eternity,” she sighed. “What’s our stop again?”

  “Speonk. It’s about a two-hour ride.”

  “What kind of name is Speonk?” she asked.

  “Actually, as I discovered this morning when I was looking up our directions, it was inspired by a Native American word meaning ‘high place.’ ”

  “It’s also the sound your body makes hitting the ground when your chute doesn’t open,” Bill said, without looking up from his newspaper.

  “Did Eleanor ever skydive?” Chris asked, changing the subject.

  “The first commercial skydiving centers didn’t open until she was in her seventies. But from what I know of Eleanor, given the chance, she totally would’ve skydived. She once took a mile-long toboggan ride at Lake Placid, and those things are no joke.”

  He searched my face. “You look pretty at ease for someone who’s about to face one of their worst fears, by the way.”

  “I know, it’s weird, right?” The last-minute freak-out had always been my specialty. As recently as a year ago I’d been at the front of a long line for an amusement park water slide when I’d suddenly decided I couldn’t go through with it. All the kids behind me, along with their parents, had to make way for me as I trudged back down the stairs past them, trying not
to meet anyone’s gaze. So although I’d felt strangely normal all morning, I knew there was a good chance it just hadn’t hit me yet.

  “Just wait till you get on the plane. Longest fifteen minutes of your life.” Chris grinned.

  Two hours later, when the conductor announced that the next stop was Speonk, Jessica turned to me in a panic. “I need to have sex,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, one last sexual encounter for the road in case I don’t make it.”

  “Well, don’t look at me.”

  “Or me,” added Chris.

  She looked over at Bill, who had folded the Times metro section into a hand puppet, which he was using to conduct conversations with nearby passengers. She turned back to us. “Actually, I think I’m okay.”

  The skydiving company consisted of a small landing strip next to a commune of trailers, one of which had a pirate flag perched on top. A sign out front read “Long Island Skydiving, Drop in here.” Inside, one wall was covered in photos of happy customers in midflight.

  “See, Noelle, look at how not scared those people are,” said Chris.

  “More importantly, look at how not dead they are,” Bill added.

  Chris leaned in toward one picture. “Oh my God. Is that Ricky Martin?”

  “It is,” drawled one of the employees, a sixtysomething man, who had come up behind us.

  We all crowded in. The Latin pop star was frozen in the sky grinning at the camera, clouds lurking nearby like groupies. The wind was flaring his nostrils wide and pushing them up into two tiny parachutes. In a thick good ol’ boy accent, the employee introduced himself as Cody. He contemplated Ricky for a few more seconds. “Some big calves on that feller.”

  We were ushered into a room full of folding chairs facing a TV monitor. There we watched a videotape in which an older man sitting behind a desk explained the risks of skydiving. The grainy production quality and the fact that the room was done entirely in wood paneling suggested it had been recorded in the 1970s, but the defining feature of the video was the man’s beard, which was so long that it fell past the top of the desk. Jessica described the tape as “Professor Dumbledore tells us how we’ll die” and took a picture of the beard with her digital camera.

  “It looks like the kind of a video a group of separatists in Montana sends to the president announcing that they’re seceding from the Union,” Bill said.

  Soon it was time to sign the “If I die, no hard feelings” waivers. As an extra legal precaution, the company insisted that we say our names into a video camera and read the last paragraph of the contract out loud while they filmed us. With a perfectly straight face, Bill recited, “I, Bill Elizabeth Schulz, understand the risks that I’m about to undertake . . .” The general information form asked that we provide an emergency contact person, but cautioned, “Do not use anyone else who will be on the plane with you.”

  “Oh my God,” Jessica whispered.

  The four of us piled into a van that would drive us a few hundred yards down the airstrip to the plane. With the exception of the windows, every inch of floor, walls, and ceiling had been upholstered in gold shag carpeting. Cody swiveled around in the driver’s seat. “Welcome to the Shaggin’ Wagon,” he said with pride as the engine coughed to life. “We bought this baby off some guy for $200.”

  “There’s a lot of DNA on this carpet,” Chris murmured.

  Bill climbed in and admired the seventies decor. “But just think about how many mustaches have been in here!”

  There were no seat belts—in fact, there were no seats. This didn’t inspire a hell of a lot of confidence, especially when he drove us down the landing strip with the sliding door all the way open. When we reached the takeoff area, the instructors taught us the importance of arching our backs during free fall and picking our feet up upon landing to avoid being trampled by the tandem partner strapped to our back.

  The single engine plane had only enough room for two skydivers and their tandem partners. Dr. Bob told me that the longer you expose yourself to a fearful situation, the greater the reduction in anxiety in the future, so I wanted to go in the second round. Bill wanted to watch me freak out, so he decided to go with me. Chris and Jessica would go first. Jessica was paired up with a blond man named Timothy, who was slight with a gentle manner. He strapped her into a full body harness. Right before they jumped, Timothy would clip his harness into Jessica’s, fusing them together for the skydive. He tested out the strength of the harness now, briefly clipping himself in behind her. Jessica was so petite that when Timothy stood up straight, her feet dangled off the ground. She looked like a child being carried in a Baby Bjorn.

  “Okay, everything looks good,” Timothy said, detaching the harnesses. “First group, we’re up!”

  “I love you guys,” Jessica said shakily as she and Chris turned to follow their tandem partners to the plane. As the plane rolled away, there was an awful moment where Jessica looked at us apprehensively out the window. She suddenly seemed very young. For the first time I felt nervous, not for my own safety but for the safety of those I’d asked to come with me. Why had I brought all three of my closest friends? I remembered how your emergency contact couldn’t be someone on your plane. I should’ve mixed in some lesser friends—spread the field a little. The sky was hazy and glaring; Bill and I squinted as we watched the plane circle higher over our heads.

  “Is that them?” I asked when a speck emerged from the plane. Fifteen seconds later, a second dot followed. As the specks grew, I felt as though I was watching the process of gestation on fast-forward. Within seconds they’d evolved into wriggling human beings. After less than a minute the two chutes bloomed open, revealing their primary-colored insides to the dull, white sky. Chris’s limbs were almost comically gangly next to Jessica’s compact body.

  “Like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell,” I observed as they floated down. Even thirty feet up, I could detect a happy bewilderment radiating from their faces.

  “You guys are so extreme right now!” Bill called out as they landed a few hundred yards away. “You’ll never spell ‘extreme’ with an E again. Just three X’s from now on.”

  “The first words out of my mouth in the air were, ‘Holy crap!’ ” Jessica grinned. “I cursed through the entire free fall and spent most of the parachute ride apologizing to Timothy for cursing so much.”

  Chris was more wild eyed than I would have expected of someone who’d done this before. “There’s something innately comforting about having another human being attached to you,” he said. “But then that person betrays you by hurling themselves out of the plane while you’re still attached to them.”

  “How did this compare to the first time?” I asked.

  “This skydive was more”—he paused, clearly searching for a safe adjective —“extreme than my first one. When I was screaming and plummeting toward the earth, I bet my tandem partner was thinking, ‘Wait, I thought the other guy had the girl attached to him.’ ”

  I inherited Jessica’s instructor, Timothy, as my tandem partner. Bill was teamed up with an instructor named Sebastian, who is what you’d get if the Marlboro Man mated with the Old Spice guy and decided to raise their son in the UK. He clapped his hand so hard on Bill’s slim shoulder that he stumbled forward a bit.

  I leaned over to Bill and whispered, “There’s no way you’re getting through this day without receiving a fist bump.”

  “There is an art or, rather, a knack to flying,” Sebastian said in his rugged British accent. “The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground, and miss.” He grinned naughtily.

  Sebastian was six feet six and dazzlingly handsome, with twelve thousand jumps under his belt to Timothy’s three thousand, but I was glad he wasn’t my partner. As the four of us walked to the plane, I overheard Sebastian telling Bill, “It’s not the dying I fear if me chute don’t open—it’s the livin�
�. Lyin’ there on the ground, staring at my intestines, knowing I’m gonna spend the rest of me life in a wheelchair, communicating via the one eyebrow that still moves . . .”

  When we reached the plane, Timothy pointed to a rectangular piece of metal just above the plane’s wheel. It was a few inches wide and stuck out about two feet. “See this step? When it’s our turn to jump, I’m going to first have you step out of the plane and onto that plank, but don’t look down. When people look down, they tend to freak out. Look at the propeller instead.”

  The propeller? I thought, hoisting myself inside the plane. This was the best alternative focal point they could come up with? (“If you find yourself overwhelmed by the sight of the ground ten thousand feet down, set your mind at ease by focusing on the cluster of revolving blades a few feet away . . .”)

  Again, no seats, just some flaccid safety belts attached to the floor. I scrunched into a ball in my designated spot with my back to the pilot’s chair. Timothy was curled up on the floor directly in front of me, so close that our shins pressed together. I was shoulder to shoulder with Sebastian, who was on my left, while Bill squatted on the floor next to the pilot’s seat where the copilot’s seat would normally be. He was cautioned not to touch any switches on the dashboard or risk turning us into a newspaper headline. Looking out the window to my right, I could see Chris and Jessica waving as we rose from the runway and teetered off into the sky.

  I kept waiting for myself to panic. To start crying and asking to turn back. But I was shockingly composed sitting there in this tiny plane—my third tiny plane this year—knowing that I’d soon be jumping out of it. Being afraid seemed almost . . . pointless. I remembered Eleanor recounting how, when Franklin was assistant secretary of the navy, he had her tour insane asylums and report back to him on the conditions.