The rain was falling in rivers down our living room windows. For hours, I laid listening to it hitting the tin shingled roof above our bedroom. Brent wasn’t home from work yet, but soon he would be lying beside me for a couple of hours before we left for the airport. His graveyard shifts were getting harder and harder for both of us to bear. He enjoyed having the days off so he could ride his bike in the mountains around our home, but the nights were lonely for me and we often spent an hour or so talking on the phone while he was at work. It was hard having him gone, we wanted to spend every possible minute together and when he worked a back shift we seldom saw each other for three or four days at a time. He would be returning home while I was going and too often we passed each other in the canyon. It was heartbreaking, we would anticipate each other at every turn, then without much warning we would pass with a too quick wave and a look in the rearview mirror before one of us drove around the next turn.
He quietly undressed and slid in next to me without saying “Good morning,” but I knew it was going to be a good one.
“How was your night?”
“Mmmm.”
“Did you get it changed?” He spent the last two nights fighting with a motor on the conveyor system. He had replaced two in that many shifts and was dead tired from lifting the metal giant in and out. He smelled newly washed and his hair felt damp against my chin.
“She blew as soon…started her up…Roy gets to…greasy…showered at…” Then a sigh and “Mmmm.”
I lay listening to the rain, spooning my front to his back and matching my breaths with his, not wanting to move or spoil the sounds of the day beginning. We slept on and off for the next hour, touching each other’s spots and cooing with contentment when hands passed over a place reserved for early morning lovemaking. His breaths slowed to sleepiness so I slipped out carefully so the cool bedroom air wouldn’t touch his skin.
I showered and watched the rain slow to a moderate spray. We hadn’t packed because we weren’t sure until the day before how much we could take on the airplane. Steve had arranged to have Gary Silver take our skydiving gear in his car so we had enough room to take what we needed on the airplane. We usually had to be conservative about how many pounds we took, but without our rigs in the plane we could take up to 75 pounds each. I packed and finished laundry.
Now, the day seems so clear to me. I remember watching the morning wake outside the living room window. The canyon was bright spring. The rain made the mountain rock dark, a tapestry on granite and slate and the green against the stark cliff shone like tiny waterfalls beginning very near the sky. So many times we stood in that exact place and watched nightfall or sunrise. Sometimes I feel the familiar whisper of that early morning in my dreams and wake wishing that the day would start again, that I would listen to the day’s soft tears telling me to snuggle back to bed with my sweetheart and begin the day again, another way.
“How’s the rain there?” I called Steve to check on weather.
“What rain?” He laughed. “Are you trying to back out on me? There is a tiny cloud above Mt. Ogden, but the rest of the sky is clear sailing. You can drive if you want,” he teased, “but I’m filing my flight plan and I’ll be ready to take off as soon as you get here.”
Forty-five minutes later we met at the executive terminal at Salt Lake International. “Where’s Chris? I was looking forward to having another woman in the plane.”
Chris had committed to teach a class at the college for a friend. It just happened to fall the same week as our Chico trip and she didn’t feel good about canceling her teaching committment. “She said she’d make it up when we get back. We’ll all go to Charlie Chow’s for dinner and brag about how great the weekend was. She’ll regret not coming.”
“And Stewart was so looking forward to jumping your wife!” Steve and Chris had spent their honeymoon at Chico two years earlier. She ended up getting sick and spent most of the time in bed while Steve spent his in the airplane. He managed to sneak away every now and then to “take a nap.” He had promised her that their next trip to Chico would be better. She was even planning on making her second skydive with Stewart, our friend from Canada.
I had flown with Steve a hundred times. His ritual was familiar, the way he stacked his flight bag and tacked his pencil on the clipboard, his scribbles of frequencies, weather reports, weight and balance were always written in the same order. He plugged in three headsets to the instrument console so we could talk to each other during the flight. His boxy black flight bag and emergency first aid kit and blanket were stacked in the back seat behind him.
“Okay, it’s your turn to fly,” I told Brent as we carried our bags to the waiting four-seat Piper. “I’ll sit in the back this time.”
“No way, Kiddo,” Brent teased. “You’re the co-pilot, not me. Besides I think I’ll sleep a little on the way there. I’ll sit in the back.”
“I’m not a co-pilot! And you need the practice.” I really did want to fly but continued teasing him about getting in the front seat. He wouldn’t because he knew I loved to fly and he wanted to please him. I thought he’d want a little more practice because he didn’t fly often. I crawled into the back seat when he turned to load up our last bag.
The following week I taped a statement for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) explaining the uneventful flight. Except for takeoff, which we aborted because Brent noticed a loose cowling which is the metal engine casing, like the hood of a car. Steve powered down the engine, taxied to a prep area and once the propeller stopped, he opened the cowling to check that nothing inside was awry. He clicked the cowling back into place and crawled back into the airplane. My report to the NTSB said that there was nothing exciting at all about the flight. No wind, no rain, no nothing. Not even another airplane for the next two hours. I tried to think of a way I could tell someone about the awful minutes right before the plane crashed. How could I report the little scenarios that floated in and out of my head over West Yellowstone’s high mountains? It wouldn’t be relevant to the NTSB. And at the time I shook it off as paranoia.
Utah is a series of valleys created by mountain ranges that look like stacked figure eights linked arm-in-arm. Pioneer forts were established in the bellies of the figure eights and dot the state with remnants of settler activity. Settlements sprang from the original forts when Indian threats subsided and settlements grew to towns and cities. Cedar Valley is a long span of dry fields within thirty minutes of the major cities along the Wasatch Front. We learned to jump at the Cedar Valley drop zone where you could walk for hours if you exited the airplane a few seconds late or drifted because of the persistent winds. A small set of mountains separate Cedar Valley and Utah Valley where snow from the high Wasatch mountains drain into Utah Lake.
When I started jumping in 1985, small towns scattered in a circle around the lake were just beginning to meld together into a suburb of Orem and Provo. We often flew across the small mountain range that separated the Cedar and Utah Valleys as we climbed to our 9,000 ft. jump altitude. Cedar Valley is a hot, dry place with stubbled wheat fields throughout the long, flat valley floor. In the summer, the air sits still and heavy so jump pilots often flew into the adjoining valley to catch an updraft over Utah Lake. Any little bit of breath Mother Nature can give makes the airplane ride shorter. Lehi is one of those small towns grown big, but still had large pockets of fields and groves of Cottonwood trees along the muddy Jordan River. Until I had a hundred jumps I was afraid to fly in a small airplane and every time we flew over Lehi and the grove of Cottonwoods I would imagine being lost there. The forested patch was actually a small campground surrounded by dry farms of wheat and alfalfa, just a short half-mile from the highway. It was a recurring insecurity. I saw myself crashed and trapped in a mangled airplane or left behind, trying to get out, wandering, wandering in the one square mile of Cottonwoods, where I eventually froze or sweltered to death because I didn’t try hard enough to survive. For a fleeting moment I felt the familiar miniature panic when I watched the lightly snow covered pines just outside of West Yellowstone inch by under our wing. I wondered if I had it in me to eat tree bark to stay alive if we crashed on the mountainside. I wondered if anyone flying by would glance down at the mountaintop in time to see me waving, waving, waving from a clearing at the top of a darkly shadowed crest. I thought how close we were to stark, desolated wilderness, but with a glance ahead and behind, I could see the towns of Gardiner, Montana and West Yellowstone, both laying just outside the border of the national park. Civilization seemed so near from this angle, but I could wander for a hundred times longer than I imagined in the Lehi Cottonwoods and die much sooner if I was lost here, isolated from the world.
As we took off from Salt Lake, Steve told me that I was in charge of the first aid kit and in case we crashed I should reach over and make sure the Emergency Landing Transmitter had automatically engaged so the civil air patrol could find us. Looking at the desolation below, I wondered if I could do that; if I could find the metal lever that would signal the world I was there, lost in the snow; if the plane would let me in or out of its fuselage, its cocoon of metal and paint, its shroud, its comfortable receiving blanket.
My snowy survival nightmare lasted a fleeting second. A million thoughts raced through me, emotion welled and subsided before I could distinguish what I was feeling or what I was imagining. Terror burned in the tear briefly forming in my eye and I absently shook the stream of consciousness from my head and reached forward and gave Brent’s shoulders a quick I-love-you squeeze.
Fifteen minutes from Chico and just as I left behind the wilderness mountaintop, Steve announced our intended landing into the radio and Brent unceremoniously returned the controls to him. My heart remembered the flip it did every time I felt the Gallatin Valley air beneath our wings. The Yankee Jim River meandered beneath in the short canyon and eventually I could see the Yellowstone River which ran near the lodge and hot springs. Fifteen minutes is a long time to remember every moment spent in a place that holds so much magic. Styrofoam coolers, squatty lawn chairs and hellos to friends seen once a year although it seems like minutes since last good-byes. The smell of sage and the prick of cactus. The hot walk to the quarry, the icy splash into her still water, and echoes shifting in and out of the pines up the canyon and down to the hotel courtyard. A kiss to the pilot for the safe flight and Ready, Set, Go. Then a giving-up of breath. Oh, how this place steals your breath and captures your spirit. Like a first kiss that stands as the measure for all others. The quiet walk back through knee-high grass and the little jump to cross the water ditch. The way your head tilts back to watch the clouds roll in at late afternoon, and tears and rain mix making angel kisses roll down your cheeks. Fifteen minutes out, past and forever years roll through me.
The last jump I made was an anomaly. In the previous eleven years I made over 700 skydives and only once used my back up reserve, and that was intentional -- most reserve rides aren’t. In order to qualify for my tandem instructor rating, I needed to demonstrate the ability to cut away my main parachute and use a reserve. Most people had at least one unplanned reserve ride by the time they had a couple hundred jumps, but because of good luck and careful packing, I didn’t. So aside from that one scary time I strapped on three parachutes and intentionally jettisoned a good one away, I had not found myself in a life threatening situation where I needed to use a back-up chute. My second reserve ride, an unintentional one, was my last skydive, and Steve was the last face I saw in freefall.
It was six weeks before our trip to Chico, I met Steve at the Sky Ranch in West Jordan where we occasionally met to air ourselves out. He called on Saturday afternoon to tell me the weather was beautiful and he needed some air. Brent was working and I was up to a jump myself. The winter had been a long one and I hadn’t jumped for a couple of months. Spring hadn’t come to our mountain home yet, but in the valley it was shirt sleeve weather and a perfect day to jump.
The Sky Ranch was Steve’s home drop zone. He learned to jump there and spent most of his time jumping from the Cessna 182 that the local jump school owned. I was considered a visitor whenever I went to the Ranch. Most of the people I jumped with were from the Ogden or Cedar Valley drop zones. But I knew the old-timer crowd and visited with them as we waited for a pilot.
As usual, I was the only girl on the load. I wasn’t necessarily a great skydiver, but I could hold my own. I was usually the lightest person on the load, so I had learned to fall as fast as the heavy guys. Steve and I had made many jumps together and we knew how to fly together. He introduced me to the two other jumpers on our load and we did a quick dirt dive to practice on the ground what we hoped to do in the air. The jump was going to be an easy four-way with lots of quick points. Just the no-brainer I needed to get the summer started. I crawled into the back of the plane, knelt as I looked at the runway and watched the lines disappear under the 182’s nose as we full-throttled it down the runway. I sat up on my heels as the pilot banked left out of our south-bound take-off. We passed over the new high school my son-in-law had worked on and thought I should tell him how nice it looked from the air. Instead of sitting back and enjoying the ride, I knelt watching the valley while we climbed to 9,000 feet.
Never have I been so calm on a skydive. The pilot called, “Jump run,” as I was buckling my helmet and tugging my gloves over my knuckles with my teeth. Steve and I winked at each other as the door flew open and the valley air swirled around us.
“Yee Haw!”
My good-luck mantra was answered by Steve’s exaggerated two-syllable, “Sky…dive!” and we crawled into the 90-mile wind. Two poised on the strut, one on the wheel, and me squatting in the doorway and rocked the count of Ready. Set. Go. We launched a perfect, flat, 4-way star and immediately transitioned to begin our diamond rotation. For the first jump of the summer we flew perfectly smooth points—twelve in all—then ended it with a good-bye kiss and a track, look, wave and pull. It was a near perfect jump—until I opened my chute and I hung suspended from terminally twisted lines. I contemplated my options. I could cut-away and land safely in ankle deep mud or land the twisted, but open and flying canopy. The second was an option I didn’t consider for more than a few seconds. I hung slightly more than a thousand feet from the ground and imagined myself landing the main parachute but sustaining two broken legs and spending a week in the hospital. Missing Chico crossed my mind and safety certainly was first nature to me. Eleven years of safe landings and I hadn’t made a major mistake yet, that day would not be any different. Without fear, just a twinge of regret that my perfect record was gone, I pulled the handle that would release my teal and pink canopy then sent the virgin blue reserve parachute into the sky above me.
I landed in a field north of the airport, casually retrieved my gear and walked toward Steve. He climbed through the fence, smile blaring and gave me a welcome-to-the-cut-away-club kiss.
“I found you a present, I said, and handed him three golf balls that were lying in the mud next to my gear.
“Geez, if that’s not an omen for you to take up another sport, I don’t know what is,” he teased. “I can hook you up with a buddy’s bowling league.”
“Right,” I said. “Do you think I’d give up all this fun of wallowing around in the mud?”
By the time I called Brent to tell him about the ride, my adrenaline had caught up with me and I was bursting with a no-shit-there-I-was story.
Months later, during one of those moments when I stared at the ceiling for hours and imagined making a different decision, I marveled at the circle of coincidences. The Sky Ranch, where I made my last jump was also the last place Brent and I jumped together, and the place Patty made her last jump, twice.
When Patty and I met in Chico we were instant friends. Her short red hair blew across her forehead against the strong breeze of the open door. She was not a very big woman, and she looked even smaller as she sat scared to leave the plane, huddled next to the pilot in the tight spot on the airplane floor that we called “student.” It was where first-time jumpers usually sat, protected on one side by the pilot’s seat, the other by a short section of the outer wall of the airplane extending from the instrument panel to the door. Jump planes are modified to reduce weight, thus requiring less fuel and allowing a faster climb to altitude. It’s anything but comfortable. Anything that is superfluous to basic flight is torn out. Interior walls are stripped of padding and upholstery. All the seats except for the pilot’s are removed so the jumpers sit on the floor. If you sit student, you sit against the instrument panel facing the back of the plane. The second person also sits backwards but is resting against the back of the pilot’s seat, the third sits sideways across the back where seats would normally rest against the tail section, and the last person kneels by the side of the door facing student. By the time four jumpers and their gear are situated, it is a sardine can with wings. To make the exit easier, modifications are also done to the door by changing the direction it opens. Instead of opening toward the front of the plane, which makes it virtually impossible to open against the 90 mph airflow, the hinges are moved to the top of the door. That way, when the door is opened, it flies up against the underside of the wing out of the way, making it possible to climb out without forcing your body around the door. The door stays against the wing until after the skydivers have jumped, then the pilot tips the plane on its lateral axis a little and the door swings back down and he closes it.
That June day when I first met Patty, I knelt in front of her with the door slightly ajar. To land where you want, you have to judge where to start the jump. The wind’s speed can push a four-man formation a mile from the landing area if you don’t gauge the right place to leave the plane. A perfect dive can be ruined if have to walk a mile back to the landing area through knee-high weeds. As I watched how fast the plane moved across the fields, I glanced to Patty to see if she was ready.
Her face was drawn white and her eyes screamed, “SCARED!” I closed the door and put my hands on her knees that were tucked up nearly against her chest, and told the pilot we needed a “go around.” He gradually turned the plane to start another jump run and I coached her to breathe so she could relax as we set up for another pass. She had few jumps, and was virtually a beginner in our sport. She seldom jumped with women, there are few of us. In her Canadian home she was considered a seasoned jumper, though her lack of experience showed in her face. That day we rode the airplane down together after the other jumpers crawled across us to make their dive. Her fear was stronger than her desire to jump so we aborted our jump. I helped her shimmy around behind the pilot’s seat so she was facing the front of the plane and she knelt beside me as we made the steep descent. After that we became sky partners. Her deep breathing and my calming hand on her leg were precursors to all of our skydives. “Thank you for your patience,” became her chant after our dives.
“Thank you for jumping with me,” was my standard response.
The last time we made a jump, with the wind blowing her red hair and my blond braid, was at the Sky Ranch. She smiled this time and anticipated the cold air rushing in the door. She ended up being a pretty good jumper and we looked forward to every jump we made together. The last time I saw her was at Chico, we said goodbye two days before they found her cancer had spread to her brain, and the last time I jumped with her was the following year when her boyfriend, Stewart, made the drive from Regina, Saskatchewan, to the Sky Ranch with a beautiful wooden box preciously holding her ashes. Brent watched from the ground as Stewart and I said goodbye to our friend at nine thousand feet above our valley. He opened the door and leaned out with a plain plastic bag cradled in his hands and let the wind catch her wings, we knelt in reverence and necessity, then followed her out of the plane and flew a missing-woman formation with her soaring off into the heavens as we fell toward our earth.
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