Good Night Sweetheart — Chapter Two

Chico is a small boogie, different than any other skydiving party where most jumpers play hard and wake with various ailments from the previous night. Families usually come to enjoy the river rafting, horseback riding and the hundred-year-old hot pools that are Chico’s namesake. And if a few skydives are made it’s a perfect weekend. An old sanitarium, Chico Hot Springs was built in the nineteenth century when the West was still infant and Montana mining was raw. It still offers the sick and the well hot healing springs of mineral water. Small rooms with communal baths and halls tucked away in the three story white frame are simple, like the past. The main lodge holds a hundred rooms or so, a restaurant, a hallway library, and a large parlor where anything social begins and sometimes remain. The hotel counter is right in the middle of it all where travelers, skydivers, locals, cooks, honeymooners, anyone really, is instantly checked in to the long Chico legacy of family. A ghost lives on the third floor and out the back door 11,000 foot Emigration Peak divides the northern most border of Yellowstone National Park and the rolling hills of Montana’s Gallatin Valley. It is delightful and we loved to go there.


I had spent several late Junes under Chico’s canopied summer skies. Her romance beguiles the spirit. She stops time; gives beaten souls a chance to mend, remember, and to pray. She is a haven to the heart, and her charm lingers and taunts a tiny part of your spirit to stay, adding to the familiar nostalgia.


Like us, Chico management considered dogs part of the family. There was always a dog or two lounging on the long front porch or trotting through the halls looking for someone familiar. One year someone led Arial, our mutt-terrier, from the four-star restaurant where she begged bacon from their breakfast table. They left her in the parlor knowing she would eventually find someone she knew. That same year Kristin, Jim and I stopped in Mammoth Falls to let Arial do her business. She promptly scouted out a prairie dog who teased her, and us, for an hour by ditching in and out of its multi-tunneled home. We finally coaxed her in the car with threats, and noted to bring bacon bits on the next trip.


I went to Montana each year to skydive with friends from all over the West. I started going when I was with Jim, but Brent and I continued the tradition the summer after we started dating. It was always a special vacation. We’d drive up a day early from our home in Ogden, Utah, taking a route through Jackson Hole, Wyoming or West Yellowstone. It was one of the highlights of the drive to Chico, a chance to see Yellowstone emerge from a deep winter to a new spring. The tourists were amusing (we didn’t consider ourselves tourists because we had been through the Park so many times). Long lines of people in Winnebagos and tent trailers stopped in the middle of the road to watch animals that they’d seen a million times. The stupid ones sent their children too close to get that zoo-like picture of a mangy buffalo. We always laughed about making a kangaroo costume and hiding in the brush just to see how many tourists would stop to take a picture. We never did it because we were afraid an over enthusiastic hunter would start shooting.


Brent and I had stayed in Jackson Hole, Wyoming the month before where we hiked for a couple of days in Brent’s old bear hunting country. It was a marvelous time. We found old, bear bait barrels that once held rancid meat. Brent explained how hunters would sit across the shallow canyon for hours in the very early morning darkness watching the bait. When the painted barrel moved or rolled down the slope, the hunters let loose with their guns and started an adrenaline chase with the bear. Sometimes hunts were successful. Most often the bear won, mixing bait, barrel, adrenaline and mud into a sanguine cheese ball for the hunters to pick over after nightly raids.


Two pictures now stand face-to-face in my library: one of Brent and his old friend Jeff with their cowboy hats, chaps, and horses ready for a hunt — the other of Brent and me in hiking boots and tee shirts. Both photos of a love lost, both taken in the exact spot. In both, Brent stands on the Wyoming side while the other stands in Idaho.


That day we hiked for miles without speaking, yet said every thing. May fog nestled the white Targhee mountains; snow was still deep higher up, but birdsong sang through the new Spring sky. And by afternoon we were headed back down the mountain with steam rising from our sweaty bodies in a drizzle of cool rain. It was a typical day with Brent—so perfectly normal. We shouted long spirited calls to bear ghosts and we quietly vowed to come back again. But never would.


We had never taken the other dogs to Chico. After we considered the eight-hour drive through Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, we thought better of the three-dog adventure. We usually took Kristin, our then 16-year-old, who had fallen in love with Chico and an old sway-back bay named Beau when she was ten. Chico was her boogie. Her skydiving party. She lived the life, but had never jumped because until then, she wasn’t old enough. She spent every year at Chico with me, made friends with every skydiver and dreamt about free-falling some day. The long Chico weekend was as much hers as it was ours, but that time we wanted to spend time alone so we decided against taking her or the dogs which meant we wouldn’t need the car either.


Steve Gremler, a fellow skydiver, and I hit it off instantly. Steve and I were perfect travel partners and we made even a short flight around the Salt Lake valley an adventure. But our favorite trips were the two- to three hour flights. Our first trip to Montana was to play on the lake with Bob Rux, our Montana friend. We landed in Helena on a beautiful, hot summer day. Bob met us at the little airport and we loaded up our weekend gear for three days of sun and beverage on a fully-equipped pontoon boat. We lazily floated around the blue, pine-lined lake with our feet kicked up, faces to the sun and mixed margaritas and daiquiris in the blender. We didn’t touch shore for three days and never went faster than two knots per hour. By the time the weekend was over we were finely relaxed and ready for the trip back home. The vacation didn’t end with the thought of going home; it ended once we got there.


Steve wanted to fly to Chico that year so he made it affordable for us to tag along.


Brent and I had been looking forward to the flight. I loved the long scenic drive through the Western mountains, but the quick two hours it took us to get to Montana would make the long weekend seem much longer. We planned to check in to the hotel a day early and spend Thursday with Bob before the jumping began Friday afternoon. Bob Rux is the reason the Chico Boogie happened every year. He has organized the party since the Montana boys, a group of rugged, independent and somewhat Maverick-ish guys that started jumping into the resort in the mid-1980s. It was a reason to stop in for a beer. Montana is a big place and if you are looking for a runway it may take awhile. Airports are expensive and the population is few. Even though most ranchers have small airplanes to scout out their land, an airport landing in a small plane is fairly uncommon. Pilots mostly use the highway. Anywhere flat and free of power lines makes a good spot to stop and refuel at a neighbor’s fuel pump. So when you find a plane with a jump door and a place to land an airplane you take advantage of it. The Montana boys had been weathered out of an exhibition jump into the Livingston rodeo one Fourth of July, but they weren’t about to give up a perfectly good skydive once they were all in the plane. So they flew west thirty miles and jumped into Chico for a meal, a couple of beers, and a long soak in the hot springs. Somehow they naturally fit into the roughness of Chico and its history of welcoming pioneers to its door.


Steve was always willing to fly anywhere. His humor and love for adventure always kept me laughing. He was a pilot before we met at the drop zone. His love for the air couldn’t hold him back from getting every license possible. He had a deal with a friend to rent his airplane and he took it every possible chance. He flew every week and used his experience to get him to out-of-the-way places for work. Every few weeks he called and asked if I was up to a trip to Southern Utah. That was one of two dreams we shared: to fly over the sandstone mittens at Monument Valley. He ended up going there often because he had a work contract at the hospital on the Navajo Reservation. I was never able to go, but he always called to tell me how beautiful the sunset was on the bluffs.


Steve was an aeronautic instrument buff. Anything that was electronic, mechanical, or had parts snagged his attention. As owner of a medical equipment repair company, he traveled around the West to various hospitals. Once, long before I met Brent, Steve and I flew to West Yellowstone. We flew over Northern Utah and Southern Idaho and he took the time to point out all the little towns and name them as we flew over them. The West Yellowstone airport is more of a firefighter landing strip than commercial airport. The airport tower, the tall building that houses air traffic controllers was built in the middle of a long swath of green grasses. It was less a control tower and more of a log structure where a fire captain stood to direct air tankers during a fire. The airport was a location for several major movies and it was charming in every sense.


Steve had arranged for someone at the hospital to pick us up at the airport and drive us into Yellowstone National Park where the hospital was located near Old Faithful Lodge. The hospital was a tiny place, only one or two exam rooms, and Steve needed to look at an x-ray machine that had gone on the blink. To him the trip was old hat—to me, it was a thrilling novelty.


We only spent an hour at the log cabin hospital. “Ha, just as I thought,” I remember Steve saying only a few minutes after we arrived at the hospital. “Someone needed a little heat.” Steve did some quick troubleshooting and found that a field mouse had made a nest in the machine. It was a cold remote place in the winter and the warmth of the wiring made a cozy bed for a mouse family. He gently moved the mouse nest from the insides of the x-ray shell and trying to keep it intact, placed it in a clump of grasses near the hospital, but far enough away from foot traffic that the mice might feel safe enough to venture back to its nest. The trip was a great way to spend the afternoon and we spent several days going to new places like that. He’d call, and usually at just a few minutes notice I’d be grabbing a jacket and a camera and driving to the airport for an afternoon adventure.


Steve always made a first-class fantasy seem possible. From the day I started skydiving when I was 26-years-old I had dreams about climbing on the fuselage of airplanes. It didn’t matter how big or how small, hanging off the wing of an airplane was one of the most exhilarating feelings I’d ever experienced. The sudden blast of the open door sucks your breath right from your chest. Holding back the urge to climb out until you are right over the target makes the anticipation of the jump almost as good as the jump itself. I dreamed of airplane wings, of the air rushing across my face making my skin ripple and tears drying in a sideways streak from the corners of my eyes. I wanted to fly, in a sustained flight, not downward, but all over the sky, upside down, right side up, just stretch my arms out and relax into the wind until it took me somewhere I’d never been before.




Steve was scheming to make that fantasy possible. We had talked many, many times about life and flight and what we loved most. He knew I wanted to stand on top of an airplane, hands free with my clothes wrapped tight across my front and loose to the back, and it would be even better if it was over those Monument Valley mittens we talked about. We spent many conversations brainstorming the best mechanism to hold me in, and a quick-release system that I could pull to release me when I was ready to end the wing walk. He had devised a way to build a bracket that mounted on top of the fuselage between the wings so I could hang on upside down as he flew loops in a stunt airplane.


I think I day-dreamed of being a barnstormer before I ever new what one was. I have a recurring dream that I really do it. That I actually wing walk. The dream is so vivid I can feel the excitement of climbing out of the airplane as wind rushes in.


You have to be aggressive as you climb out of an airplane. You can’t be timid and let the wind take you where it wants or you’ll fall off and miss your chance. As I crawl out through the small door that has been modified to open upwards instead to the side, all I can feel is thrill. Getting out is like walking through a three-foot-high pipe. You stoop with your heels flat and grab the opening with both hands—first your head, then your foot, then the rest of you follows. I lean into the warm air over the monoliths in the Southern Utah desert and take a quick deep breath, savoring the taste of adventure. My left leg pushes out into the 90 mile-per-hour flood of air and finds the small step that is welded to the tire mount. My right foot follows and lands on the tire as I scoot my hands along the smooth strut that connects the wing to the fuselage of the plane. It only takes a second to make a couple criss-cross steps until I’m situated where I need to be to climb and launch myself on top of the wing. My thoughts flash back to kindergarten as I twirled on the monkey bar in my red gingham dress. The tails of my dress ties flapping behind me as I kick my toes up over my head to get started, then over and up, again and again as the playground dirt kaleidoscopes with the blue sky. Kicking onto the wing 10,000 feet off the ground feels just like it’s only four feet up on the monkey bars. Ready, set, kick hard, then toes hook onto the top side of the wing, hanging in a taco shape with head and feet upward and everything else down. It sounds rather difficult, and is if you don’t have practice climbing on the outside of airplanes. After ten or twelve times it’s like walking on a curb without fearing a fall. Once I’m hanging, I pull myself on top of the plane where I shimmy across the length of the wing, step into the first foot bracket and snap it into place like a ski binding that won’t come loose. My dreams end with me standing erect, feet buckled onto the airplane, while Steve did curly-cues higher and higher above the desert. And when the adrenaline got so hot I would snap the release, just at the moment we hung up-side-down, suspended against gravity. I’d give a smile and a wave to him and fall opened wide to the sky, earth, sky, monkey-barring until he saluted to me and turned the stunt plane away and I made a long curved body arch and opened my parachute for a short eagle-like glide to the below.


But like many life regrets, time stole my dream. Steve’s wife, Chris has probably found the bracket somewhere in the mechanical jungle in her garage and wondered what inspired such a contraption. It will sit somewhere beside Hamm radio parts and ancient altimeters in the next garage sale where someone will see a screw or buckle they could use on an unrelated machine, never knowing the dream that slipped from its clasp.