Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  Bill had told us that we’d have a tendency to run in the air. It was a natural reaction, like that of the man in the newsreel who ran to his death. I promised myself I would hold the arch and not run, not give in to the misinformed bleating of instinct.

  It didn’t happen that way. I was first out of the plane. Bill opened the door. The wind howled past. He spotted the area where he wanted to cut me loose, told me to sit down and swing my legs out—they blew toward the hack of the plane with a frightening jerk—then told the pilot to cut the engine.

  I stepped out onto the locked wheel, grabbed the strut, then hung there, arching hard. We were three thousand feet in the air, and everything below seemed to be carved in microminiature. We were going about seventy miles an hour.

  I was supposed to look at Bill, but I didn’t think I did a very good job of that. He shouted, “Go!” I let go of the strut and arched. Everything happened very fast and very slow at the same time. I was supposed to shout out my count—arch thousand, two thousand, and so on—but I was as silent as a stone. Those movies you see with guys falling off cliffs and screaming all the way down have nothing to do with reality. People who fall from great heights have too much to think about. They don’t scream.

  Having blown my count, I arched all the harder, arched, in fact, until I could see the plane overhead. A good sign. I had been possessed of this idiot fear that as soon as I let go of the strut I’d be chopped in half by the tail of the plane. It was no use telling me that if the plane was going seventy, then someone hanging from the strut was also doing seventy, and would drop out of harm’s way well before the tail passed overhead.

  Now, all this happened in the first second. I had held my arch admirably, which pitched me forward so that I was looking straight down, three thousand feet. Some autonomous voice shrieked inside my head. I was falling, I was going to land on my head, I was going to end up as a crimson crater in the field below. Another more conscious voice reminded me that I had promised to hold the arch. So I compromised. I arched from the waist up. Everything below took off at a dead run.

  No one really knows why this happens, why we feel compelled to sprint away from the long fall. We are frightened, certainly; and our instincts tell us, in such situations, to fight or flee. Since there is nothing up there to fight, we run.

  Fortunately, on the static line, your chute will open, you will not die, but giving in to a sprint is hilariously funny to those watching you from the plane. It is rather like one of those cartoons where Wile E. Coyote, having eaten a year’s supply of mail-order pep pills, pursues the Road Runner at speeds he himself can barely believe. The Road Runner and Wile E. are moving so fast they are only a blur in our vision. But then the Road Runner stops—“beep beep”—standing stock still on the edge of a cliff, and it seems as if the law of inertia has no dominion over him.

  Too late, Wile E. Coyote perceives the cliff and attempts to stop. His heels plow twin trenches in the dirt. Nonetheless, he is carried over the precipice, and he experiences that moment in which everything moves very fast and very slow at the same time. He turns back toward the face of the cliff, his horrified eyes bulging in his head. He hangs there, motionless in the void. Absurdly, he begins to run. He gains an inch, two, three. A gleam of hope enters his eyes. Then gravity asserts itself and things begin happening very fast. Wile E. falls more rapidly than one might have thought possible. He falls, in fact, so fast that he leaves an inexplicable puff of smoke in his former position, and he makes a whistling sound all the way down to the mute canyon floor.

  And so, a second and a half out of the plane, I was running like Wile E. Coyote, dancing the fear fandango. Then, suddenly, there was a jolt on the chest strap and I was brought upright under a bright green canopy, a good one I was relieved to note, all round and shaped like a jellyfish. Over the nearest range of hills—in California’s summer they are smooth and golden, looking almost like suede from a distance—there was a great blue lake shimmering in the late afternoon sun. The sky was silent, like the inside of a vast cathedral, and I could hear the beating of my own heart.

  The steering toggles were exactly where Bill said they would be and turning the chute was as easy as driving a car. I looked down through my feet to the five-acre plowed field where I hoped to land. A gentle breeze wafted me toward the small target area and I sailed with it, occasionally checking the altimeter mounted atop my reserve chute. At 2,500 feet I was still above the wrong field, one with bulls in it; 2,000—I was coming in over the plowed area; 1,800—a problem was developing. In all that five acres there was one tree, and it was between me and the target. At 1,250 feet I seemed to be hovering, motionless, above that damned tree. The wind was with me—I could see that from the windsock—and my chute had to be making five miles an hour; but still I couldn’t seem to clear the tree that was becoming a very large and distressing sight.

  At 500 feet we had been instructed to turn our chutes into the wind and prepare to land. Bill had said that if there were obstacles, turn to the nearest open space. Never try to fly over an obstacle under 500 feet. And there I was, dropping out of the sky directly into a tree. You land in one of those, you’re supposed to cross your legs. Straddling a branch is no fun for man or woman. You’re also instructed to cover your face and neck. Jagged, upward-thrusting branches can blind you, pierce your throat. I thought about these things and decided, quite definitely, not to land in the tree. I rode the chute to 450, and finally 400 until I was sure I was clear of the tree. Then I turned into the wind.

  The parachute, which was doing five miles an hour, swiveled neatly into a ten-mile-an-hour wind, giving me a ground speed of five miles an hour, backward. I was still tracking toward a target I could no longer see. At about two hundred feet the ground stopped swaying and became hugely immobile. I picked a spot on the horizon and forced myself to stare at it.

  There is controversy about this. Some instructors prefer to have first-time jumpers look at the ground; but Bill insisted that people who stare at the ground tend to do one of two things: they either stretch one foot down to the dirt, like a swimmer testing the water in a pool, or they protect themselves by drawing their knees up to their chests. Both moves break legs. Because Bill had been right about that strange run—the first fear fandango—I tried hard not to watch the ground, which is like trying to walk a mile with your eyes closed. Even though I was staring at a nearby hilltop, I could see the good brown earth looming up under me in the lower periphery of my vision. In a moment, I thought, I’ll hit. I was, understandably I think, apprehensive about that, and so I began barking, a perverse reaction that rather surprised me.

  The sound was something like that made by a sleeping dog when he is partially awakened by, say, the distant backfire of a car. The dog has no desire to investigate, but he feels that he must note the intrusion, so emits a halfhearted, drowsy bark—mmmmm-woof—and drifts back into his dream.

  So there I was, at fifty feet, and I discovered, to my horror, that I was humming in a shaky, scared sort of way. “Mmmm …” The hum went up a notch in pitch: “Mmmmmm …”

  I hit, rolling over onto my back in the prescribed manner and barking like a sleeping dog. “Mmm-ooooffff.”

  All at once, to my utter amazement, I was up on my feet, running around the canopy so the wind wouldn’t drag me across the field. I had landed a few hundred yards from the target, on the very bosom of that sweet, brown, plowed field.

  After my chute had opened, the plane banked, came back around, and dropped Betty. I saw her come in low over my head, turn into the wind, and land closer to the target than any of the other first-time jumpers. Duane was still up there, last one out. We waited for a time, Betty and I, but we never saw his chute. Bill was up there, stunting under his more maneuverable square canopy; but otherwise the sky above the field was empty. By the time we gathered up our equipment and got back to the hangar, the Cessna was landing, ready for another load. Duane wasn’t on the plane.

  Bill clapped me on the back. “Yo
u did about fifty miles before your parachute opened,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I blew my count too.”

  “Well, you did okay for the first time. Give yourself an eighty-five and remember what you did wrong.”

  About that time we caught sight of Duane. He was on foot, pulling his equipment over a fence about a mile away. By the time he got to the hangar, he was sweating profusely and he didn’t seem to want to talk to anybody.

  “Man,” Bill asked him, “what did you do right?”

  “I did all right,” Duane muttered sulkily.

  “All right?” Bill was incredulous. “All right? You wouldn’t let go of the strut. That’s why you landed all to hell and gone. I was yelling at you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Duane said.

  Later, I ran into Duane as we were both hanging up our jumpsuits, and I couldn’t resist sticking it to him a little. “Had some trouble letting go of the strut, did you?”

  “What?”

  “Geez, you must have landed three miles away.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “You should have seen her,” I said, nodding toward Betty, who was smiling serenely and accepting congratulations. “She damn near landed on the target.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Duane said. He was staring at the ground. “Look, I gotta go.”

  * * *

  In the next couple of weeks I jumped about a dozen more times. By my fourth static-line jump, I was arching well, stable in the air, and pulling a dummy rip cord. On the fifth jump I thought I did everything right, even to the point of not barking on touchdown. The sixth time out I pulled my own rip cord, a bright metal handle—about the size of a Cracker jacks box—located just about on my right pectoral muscle. It was a pretty fair jump. I arched for the thousand count, then looked. You always have to look. Its no good pulling, say, the latch that loosens your harness. The handle was right where it should have been. I pulled and it came out smooth as eggs through a hen.

  On the seventh jump I was instructed to go to a five count before popping the chute. In practice, a five-second delay plus the pull may take up to eight seconds. In that time the sky diver reaches speeds of over a hundred miles an hour and will cover some eight hundred vertical feet.

  The sensation becomes that of flying. You can control it. It’s like standing on the edge of a high diving board. Lean out and you can feel the point at which you will fall, tumbling over in a front flip. In free fall, from the arch position, a simple downward movement of the head accomplishes the same thing. Bring one arm in, under your body, and you’ll do a barrel roll.

  Eventually, such acrobatics become second nature. Aside from flips and rolls, experienced divers can go into an hellaciously fast headfirst dive, or modify that position to track horizontally across the sky. Starting from the classic 7,200-foot level, on a thirty-second delay, they reach terminal velocity—about 190 miles an hour—in about twelve seconds, provided they are in the “slow” arch position. At subterminal velocity, maneuvers feel a bit mushy; but once at terminal, the greater wind resistance makes a well-executed roll feel crisp and controlled.

  Experienced sky divers make a door exit—no more clumsy hanging from the strut—and can track across the sky in a fast dive toward another sky diver who may be in the slower arch position. At some point above his man, the tracking sky diver will flare out into an arch, then “dock” with the first man by grabbing both his wrists. When four sky divers do this, they form a star, and bigger stars and formations may be accomplished with six and eight and even twenty sky divers.

  This is called “relative work,” and it is the highest expression of the sky diver’s art.

  On my eighth jump the rip cord stuck—it wouldn’t come out with a one-handed pull—and it seemed to me that I handled the situation with a good deal of grace. Observers on the ground insist that they heard a loud and obscene word come booming down out of the sky, but I tend to discount this because I remember what I did and what I thought. With no hesitation, I reached over and gave the handle a vicious two-handed yank. Moving both my hands to the right had put me out of position, so I arched hard and was falling stable when the main chute deployed.

  The experience taught me that I will not panic or freeze during an airborne emergency. Consequently, on subsequent jumps, I’ve been able to forget myself a little and take a tiny sip of the rapture of free fall. Experienced divers court this sensation—it is more sophisticated than those first few adrenaline-charged jumps—and often they must remind themselves to pop the chute. Some veterans have run that rapture all the way to earth wearing two good chutes that they never pulled.

  In my case, during that eighth jump with the tight rip cord, fear turned itself inside out and I made the important transition from falling to flying. And if, in fact, I did shout something nasty during that flight, I prefer to think of it not as an obscenity, but rather as the Call of the Falcon.

  Balloon Drop

  The pilot hit the big propane burner and threw fire into the throat of the balloon. “Hold us down,” he called, and half a dozen folks leaned their weight onto the outside of the basket. The pilot wanted plenty of lift. He was going to be hauling two men and a hang glider—five hundred pounds of dead weight—under the basket. “Okay, let go.”

  The balloon rose a foot or two, then moved gently to the northwest, so Barney Hallin and I had to walk a few steps with the glider to avoid being dragged. And then we were off the ground, rising rapidly. Double loops of nylon webbing, tied inside the basket and to the king post of the glider, held us fast.

  The baseball diamond below began to shrink in the silence of the sky, and people who’d parked alongside the road to watch honked their horns in applause. The Gallatin Valley, an agricultural area just outside Bozeman, Montana, was a green checkerboard sprawling among mountain ranges on three sides. The morning sun, low in the sky, pierced dark clouds to the south and east, sending shafts of slanting light to the hayfields below.

  We were at one hundred feet now—not really high enough to use the parachutes—and terror lent a sharp edge to the beauty of the green world, hard and flat below. Barney was hanging beside me inside a triangle of aluminum tubes called the control bar, centered under the long boomerang wing of the glider. He’d fly the beast. I was along for the ride.

  In 1982, Barney Hallin set the Montana distance record for hang gliding.

  “It was only eighty miles,” Barney said, as if to dismiss the record. “People soar eighty miles every day down in the Owens Valley.” Hallin was too modest. The thermals of the Owens Valley provide perhaps the best hang-gliding conditions in the world.

  Barney’s achievement, in far from optimal conditions, had fascinated me for two years. He started in the wind tunnel known as Paradise Valley, passed through a gunsight canyon along the Yellowstone River, flew almost directly over my house, then skirted the east side of the Crazy Mountains, where he caught some lift at the base of a flat cloud and rose to fifteen thousand feet. His route took him over the eleven-thousand-foot-high ridge of the Crazies.

  “There are all these glacial lakes up there,” Barney said. “You get above the meadows and the wildflowers, up to the gravel and talus, and the Crazies are dotted with lakes. Some of these lakes were blue, but some were yellow, some were shades of red and orange. I don’t know where the colors came from. Maybe it was the position of the sun or reflections off the canyon walls, but they were beautiful.”

  Listening to Barney talk, you wanted to be up there with him, gliding in the silence of the wind at fifteen thousand feet, looking down into the emerald and ruby lakes, all those shimmering jewels, up there on top of the Crazy Mountains.

  It’s not an impossible dream, just a damn difficult one. Ten years ago I took a hang-gliding course. Every Saturday morning for a month I drove one hundred miles to a seven-hundred-foot sand dune, spent an hour assembling a rental glider, then carried the thing up the sand, on my back.

  Every Saturday, I blasted off the
top of the dune at a dead run, and felt a sudden thrill on that last light step before the kite left the ground. Then I was airborne, and the glider would list to the left or the right and catch a wing tip in the sand. There was a long, abrasive slide during which I discovered such things as sand burns. In the four Saturdays I spent trying to learn to soar, my longest flight was a minute and a half. I never failed to crash spectacularly upon landing.

  “It’s easier now,” Barney told me. Like any religious fanatic, he was out to convert the world. “We have better gliders, better harnesses. Quick-deployment chutes have made the sport a lot safer.” Even so, you can’t just strap yourself into a glider and fly. You still have plenty of dues to pay in the form of time and bruises.

  “I could fly tandem with you,” Barney said. “You could get an idea of what it is to soar. ” He wanted to convince me that another round of black-and-blue Saturdays would be worth the pain and frustration. “We’ll do a balloon drop,” he said, and here we were, at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, rising into a cathedral of light shafts with the ground receding below us.

  Even at the supposed safety of 150 feet—hang gliders have been saved by the new chutes at that height—I had a vision of cartoon catastrophes. The parachutes, 24 feet in diameter, were packed in little bags inside a Velcro pocket on our chests. To deploy the chute, you yank it out of the Velcro by a nylon loop, then toss the bag into the sky. The chutes were attached to our chest harnesses by 30 feet of nylon webbing, and when they reached the end of that, they’d pop open like those huge nylon flowers that blossom out behind speeding dragsters at the track.