by Tim Cahill
Living there on the ranch at Poison Creek as I did for some years, I came to understand that the spat in question must have occurred during one of the periodic excesses of the Livingston Wind Festival, which extends from January 1 through December 31, as befits the third-windiest town in America.
Livingston is windy because it is only sixty miles north of—and four thousand feet below—Yellowstone Park. It gets cold down there in the park. In the winter, trees burst in the impossible silence of fifty-below nights, burst with the sound of a rifle shot because sap stored in the trunk has frozen solid and expanded. The park is actually the caldera of an ancient volcano: two million acres rimmed with mountains. The cold air trapped in the caldera is denser, heavier than warm air, and it wants to fall, like water, into lower, warmer regions. The Yellowstone River has carved a canyon out of the northern rim of the caldera. The winds and the water, both propelled by gravity, flow down Yankee Jim Canyon, toward Livingston. The wind, like the water, picks up speed during its four-thousand-foot drop into Paradise Valley, south of Livingston, and this valley, sunk between two parallel mountain ranges, becomes a natural wind tunnel. Just before Livingston, the mountains come together to form a little gun sight of a canyon. Here, the Yellowstone River narrows and flows faster. The same thing happens to the wind, and it bursts out of the confines of the canyon to batter the town, tear branches off of trees, punch windows out of houses, and fray the tempers of Livingston’s ordinarily saintly residents. In Livingston, if you want to see at night, it is necessary to point your flashlight at least ten yards upwind.
The wind is, in fact, so constant that Livingston is the first town in the country to own a wind-powered utility company. True, all those windmills out on the flats are something of a joke around town; but to be entirely fair to the windmill designers, the program is still in the experimental stages, and some failures are to be expected. Even so, I enjoy taking my out-of-town visitors past the wind farm, which sometimes looks like a graveyard for small planes, with its broken propellers and twisted metal shards lying about on the wind-flattened plain. “What the hell is that?” my visitors ask.
“New windmill,” I say, with a surge of perverse pride. “Supposed to withstand gusts of a hundred fifty miles an hour. Blew down Saturday.”
The windmills don’t actually “blow down” but suffer malfunctions from a variety of causes. One was shorted out when struck by lightning. The short caused the windmill to spin on its own, sucking power from the very grid it was supposed to feed. I’d drive by it on a rare, calm day and see the big propeller spinning furiously. The fact that I would eventually have to pay Montana Power for the privilege of laughing at a huge outdoor fan, a Frankenstein fan, spinning madly, expensively, out of control on a godforsaken flat in the middle of nowhere was, ultimately, not such a hot joke.
Another failure happened during a power outage one bitterly cold day. The turbines are designed to stop generating during an outage so that linesmen won’t be fried during repairs. The turbines detach from the blades, which spin free, and a “snubber” mechanism adjusts the pitch of the blades to lose the wind, causing them to stop. Unfortunately, the cold had thickened the hydraulic fluid in the snubber. The propeller spun free, completely out of control, eventually throwing a blade, which put the whole affair out of balance and set it shaking out there on the flats. It shimmied for hours in a dance of wind-driven hysteria until it crashed to the ground, a victim of its own mad polka and metal fatigue.
Lessons learned in the howl of the Livingston winds will, I’m sure, eventually make the wind farm a paying proposition. And if we couldn’t laugh about the wind, we’d be reduced—as many of us often are—to tears, spittle-spewing rages, and arguments punctuated by the boom of shotguns.
The wind here averages sixteen miles an hour; twenty-one miles an hour in the winter, with frequent gusts in the eighty- and ninety-mile-an-hour range. (In the “windy city” of Chicago, by contrast, wind speeds average out at nine miles an hour.) A blow of twenty-one miles an hour is a serious matter: It is perceived by the body as a form of constant and unrelenting attack. This is because we all live inside a little sac of personal air that exists just beyond the flesh, a kind of necessary insulation from the world at large. In a windless situation, our airy aura is about a third of an inch thick. When the wind reaches twenty-one miles an hour, it blows away most of that familiar personal air. In a twenty-one-mile-an-hour blow, a person retains only 1/25th of his or her usual insulation, and that person is subsequently irritable, bad-tempered, thin-skinned.
Science bears me out on this: One study showed that, on the average, the number of schoolyard fights doubled when wind speeds hit forty miles an hour. In Italy, the effects of a hot, dry wind called the sirocco are well known. Lawyers along the Adriatic routinely “plead the sirocco” in cases in which someone has stuck an ice pick into his wife or neighbor for no particularly good reason.
In Israel, the desert wind of the spring and fall is called the sharav. Its physiological and psychological effects have been calibrated by a pharmacologist named Felix Sulman. Examining the urine of wind-sensitive patients under normal conditions and then during the sharav, Sulman found that when the wind blew, one group (43 percent) showed huge increases in the excretion of serotonin, a blood-vessel constrictor. These high levels of serotonin tended to cause migraines, sleeplessness, nausea, and intense but unfocused “irritation.” A second group of sufferers (44 percent) showed a severe drop in adrenaline secretions, which caused apathy, depression, and “exhaustion.” A third group (13 percent) suffered from both exhaustion and irritation. In other words, the wind either pisses you off or beats you like a gong. Or both.
The house on Poison Creek was just down the east side of the Absaroka Mountains, about four miles from part of the new wind farm. When the winds would die for a while you could walk out into the strange stillness and hear them conspiring, regrouping atop Livingston Peak: low, malevolent whispers up there at 9,314 feet. Then the clouds would darken and begin to roll down the flanks of the mountain toward Poison Creek. The wind would hit the house like an avalanche; it would set the TV antenna humming like a giant tuning fork, and the house would vibrate to the antenna’s tune and set the dogs howling in helpless emulation.
It was a siege then, and it could last for days, angering you, beating against you, stealing your insulation and your equanimity. On the third or fourth day of a big blow, I’d find myself lying on the couch exhausted, angry, and I’d think of my predecessors in that house: I could see them lying there, as I was, too tired to rise; I could see them firing angry shells into the wall and screaming, “Shut up, damn you, just shut up!” I could see them bickering over petty matters; I could envision the shotgun aimed at the bathroom door; I could hear its boom over the hum of the antenna, the howl of the dogs, the eternal roar of the wind.
First-time visitors to Poison Creek would be drawn to that splintered door, examine it in respectful silence, and then ask, usually in an awed whisper, “What in God’s name did this?”
Invariably, I’d tell them, “The wind.”
The First Fear Fandango
Last year, at a dinner party, the subject of high-school nicknames came up. I said that I had never had one, but that, if the truth be known—I must have been shithouse at the time—I’d really like to be known as the Falcon. Everyone around the table burst into hysterical laughter.
“Oh boy,” these supposed friends of mine said, “the Falcon.” And that set them all off on another choking orgy of whoops and guffaws.
Well, the fact is, I’ve been doing a little sky diving lately, and when one learns to fly, when one begins to swoop and soar in the wind thousands of feet above the rolling, golden hills of California, then, by God, he’s earned the right to Falconhood.
Not that the first jump was all that graceful. That time Falcon dropped in a kind of terror, and he danced the first fear fandango. The plane banked above, the earth lay three thousand feet below. Instantaneously, all
the gears and levers, all the intricate wiring of the Falcon’s body reached flash point and burst into a magnesium-bright, adrenaline-fueled flame. There was nothing to fight but the wind; and so the Falcon fled, running hard and without hope in the indifferent, empty sky.
It was a long time ago, before we had taxes or bowling or bubble gum, and the theory runs that we lived an arboreal life, swinging through leafy treetops in the equatorial forest. There followed, it is said, a prolonged dry spell, and the forest dwindled. We climbed down from the trees onto the savanna, adopted an upright posture, and became nomadic food-gatherers and cooperative hunters. Later we became farmers, city builders, philosophers, artists, winos, and sex therapists, all of which led, in a straight unbroken line, to the very summit of our culture, the styrofoam coffee cup.
But sometimes in our dreams we fly. We exist above the ground as we must have in the equatorial forest. In our waking moments, when we fall, we startle and grab. At the top of the stairs, when we catch our foot in the rug and pitch forward, a hand goes out to the bannister, the side wall, grandma—anything, seen or unseen. The instinct may be inbred, something we developed in the trees, before we were men.
Indeed, it seems that children are born dreading a fall. Eleanore Gibson performed an elegant experiment that seems to confirm this. Gibson constructed a “visual cliff” consisting of a flat board on one side and a steep drop-off on the other. A solid sheet of glass, heavy enough to support a small child, covered the deep side. Infants old enough to crawl, six months and over, were placed on the center of the board and called by their mothers from different sides. Although they crawled freely over the flat board, the children refused, uniformly, to venture out over the deep side. Gibson concluded that the development of depth perception—at least the sort of self-protective mechanism that keeps us from falling off things—does not depend on prior experiences. Falling is something we fear instinctively, and it may be our oldest and our first fear.
All this relates with devious exactitude to sky diving, the sport of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane with a sack of brightly colored nylon on one’s back. Veteran jumpers refer to their terrestrial brothers and sisters as “whuffos,” which is the first word of the oft-asked question, “Whuffo they jump out of airplanes?”
Well yeah, whuffo?
In the very early stages—the first ten jumps or so—I think we are dealing with junkies—adrenaline junkies. The phrase comes from the mountaineer/photographer Galen Rowell, who uses it to explain why he habitually hurls himself into life-or-death situations. And so it is with sky diving. The sport is a form of staring into the abyss, of confronting our oldest and deepest fear. From the moment you leave the plane until the moment you pull the rip cord—an interminable length of time that usually lasts about thirty seconds—you are effectively dead. It’s all the fun of suicide without the messy consequences.
Those consequences—“You mean that big red spot used to be a guy?”—tend to weigh heavily on the mind when one considers taking up sky diving. It is a risky sport, and while I take risks—especially for money—I spend a lot of time computing the inherent necrological density. To this end, I did a bit of research this summer after a couple of smirking, desk-bound editors insisted that I write a personal account of sky diving. From a parachuting handbook by Dan Poynter: “In the United States, over the last eight years, an annual average of thirty-five people have been fatally injured while parachuting … it is interesting to compare numbers with other activities: last year over 200 people perished scuba diving, 900 bicycling, over 7,000 drowned, 1,154 succumbed to bee stings, and 800 were even hit by lightning.”
I took training for my first jump at the Pope Valley Parachute Center, a drop zone about two hours north of San Francisco. The first order of business was to learn the proper touchdown technique. The landing shock, we were told, would include some horizontal movement and would be roughly equivalent to jumping off a Cadillac doing about three miles an hour.
Our instructor, Bill, a short, sandy-haired man with a dry, almost sour sense of humor, spent a full hour teaching us how to fall from a four-foot platform. It seemed to be his theory that an action, repeated often enough, is stored as memory in the muscles.
There were twelve people in the class, and they ranged in age from the early twenties to late thirties. One young woman was about five feet tall and weighed maybe 150 pounds. She was the sort of blond often described as “perky.” She looked like someone who ought to be named Betty.
Every time Betty jumped off the four-foot practice platform her face twisted into a pinched, apprehensive grimace, like someone who, for some reason, has elected to jump into a vat of vinegar. This was a constant source of amusement to a young gas-station attendant out of a hot, dusty central-California agricultural town. He had driven over a hundred miles to Pope Valley in a hot muscle car and pretty much figured he was going to burn up the sky with his natural ability. He combed his thick black hair straight back from the forehead and looked like somebody who ought to be named Duane.
Every time Betty got up on the platform, poor Duane had to stifle a laugh that invariably came snorting up out of his nose.
We learned the arch: legs apart, arms outspread about shoulder level, spine bowed until you can feel the strain at the small of your back. The arch is assumed upon exit from the plane. It puts all the weight in the stomach and forces the body into a horizontal position, facing the ground. The classic demonstration of the efficacy of the arch involves a badminton birdie. Dropped with the tip down and feathers up, it falls straight to the earth and is stable. The sky diver wants that stability in the air; his arms and legs are the feathers, his belly the tip. When the birdie is turned upside down, it flips over in its fall. A sky diver who arches his back the wrong way, like a hissing cat, will also flip over, and the opening chute may come up, say, between his legs and foul.
We examined the jump plane, a red, white, and blue Cessna 182 with room for the pilot, three student jumpers, and the jump master, Bill. We practiced getting into the “go” position, which involved stepping out onto the wheel and hanging from the wing strut. Betty said she wasn’t sure she could hang from the strut since she couldn’t even do one pullup, Duane rolled his eyes skyward so that we could all appreciate how hopeless Betty was. Bill said that nobody should worry about hanging on to the strut. The problem, he said, was getting people to let go.
We learned that our standard, round twenty-eight- or thirty-five-foot canopies would have a forward speed of about nine or five miles an hour, respectively. (More advanced-class chutes do about fourteen, and square canopies can do about twenty.) We learned how to steer the chute with toggles attached to directional lines, how to tell a bad chute from a good one, what to do in the rare case of a water landing, and spent half the afternoon working on emergency procedures. Bill would get a student up in front of the class, strap a harness on him, and yell, “Go.”
The student was to make like a badminton birdie, and count “Arch thousand, two thousand” on up to five thousand. The static line, attached to the parachute, deploys the chute in about three seconds. If, by the count of five, there is no opening shock, the main chute has malfunctioned, totally. You must immediately pull the rip cord on the reserve chute strapped to your belly.
“Go.”
“Arch thousand, two thousand …”
“Bam, opening shock. Whatta ya do?”
“Check to see if it’s a good chute.”
“Its bad. Whatta ya do?”
“I cut away the main chute.” The procedure is to unsnap the capewells—two hinged metal plates near each shoulder on the harness—revealing two thick wire rings. Thumbs go in the rings, you pull, and the main chute goes free. Meanwhile, you look down, sight on your reserve-chute rip cord, and pull.
Betty stood up in front of all of us, nervously arching, which is not the most flattering thing you can do when you have a few pounds to lose.
At this point in his session with each student, Bill
would begin throwing insults—often hitting close to home. Apparently he thought that real anger and confusion were as near as we were going to get on the ground to the feeling of dropping from that wing strut. “God, are you fat,” Bill told Betty. “Do you belong to Weight Watchers? Because if you don’t, you should.”
Duane started off on a series of horsy snorts that lasted for a full thirty seconds.
“Lost forty pounds this year,” Betty said through clenched teeth.
“Who are you talking to?” Bill yelled. “There’s no one up there. You got a bad chute. Whatta ya do?”
Duane was curled up in his chair, head buried between his knees, and his back was shaking like a man in the throes of intolerable grief.
Later, during a break, I talked with Betty. Her face was round, even a little puffy, but it was clear that she would be very pretty a couple-dozen more pounds down the line. I imagined that sky diving had something to do with her weight-loss program, that it was simply another method of demonstrating to herself that she could do anything she put her mind to. Betty was the least physical person in our class, and most of the rest of us, with one notable exception, had come to admire her perky determination.
“The only thing I worry about,” she said, “is if he tells me I can’t jump.” Bill had made it clear at the start that he would allow no one to jump until he felt certain they could handle it. “I told everyone at work that I was jumping,” she said.
“But what if you chicken out?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s fine. People understand that. But to be told you don’t even have the choice … that’s the worst thing.”
I was in the second planeload of students to jump that day. With me were Betty and Duane. No one talks in the plane. The mouth is too dry and there are too many things to think about.
I remembered an old newsreel I once saw of a blimp disaster and its horrifying climactic moments. The airship was in dock, but something happened and it began to lift off. Two workmen grabbed at a hanging line, trying to hold the blimp down with their weight. It rose rapidly, and quite soon both men were too high off the ground to let go without risking serious injury. The camera tracked them as they hung there, helpless on that rope. One man’s arms gave way and he fell, hurtling out of the frame. The other held on for several more seconds until he too fell, but this time the camera followed him as he plummeted toward earth. There was nothing for the man to do, and he must have known, with sickening certainty, that he was dead; but something called on him to live, to do something, and so he ran. The sequence is terrifying: the man flails his arms, then pumps his legs, like a sprinter in a dream. And he ran until he died.