The screen door banged against the outside wall of the lodge. The wind hadn’t let up for hours and every time someone walked out to the courtyard the door slapped wide open. The children played outside despite the gusty air. It was a late June day and the air was hot and wild. The swings wrapped themselves in a twist of wood and chain and two sisters ran back and forth against the turning merry-go-round. Claire was the oldest and had been playing with Marianne and their two friends all morning.
Ray and Bernadette Ellis had spent the night at Chico before leaving for the Beartooth Mountains for camping. They had planned this vacation for quite some time and the two girls were excited for the adventure. Before leaving, they planned to spend a night at Chico Hot Springs with friends from Oklahoma. They had soaked in the hot pool earlier and were getting ready to leave when they heard an airplane was due to land in a few minutes. Their friend, John, was a retired Air Force pilot and wanted to see the plane land on the remote highway, so they decided to stay a few minutes longer to see it themselves.
Ray and Bernadette worked opposite shifts at the hospital in Billings and both needed a break from the hectic schedule. They worked in the Intensive Care Unit and dedicated time and emotions to treating critically ill patients. Ray was a Respiratory Therapy and Bernadette was a Critical Care Nurse. They took turns flying with the Billings Life Flight and Air Ambulance and had years of medical experience between the two of them. They weren’t skydivers, they just happened to be there that day.
“Claire, you and Marianne can play for just a minute longer and then we need to say good-bye.” Bernadette hollered above the whistling wind as she walked to the road where Ray and their friends were watching our small airplane turn onto final approach.
“I’m surprised they can land in this wind.” someone commented, “But it doesn’t seem to be affecting him very much. If there is a cross wind up high it isn’t nearly as bad as it is down here.”
Although it took strength to walk in the wind, the four adults were standing in the middle of the road where twenty feet away, the steep plateau embankment made a good shelter from the constant wind. In that shelter, the wind disappeared and the windsock hung lifeless. They stood just beyond the southern entrance of the parking lot with several other guests. As they stood in the road, they helped with traffic detail in case any cars tried to drive down the runway from their end of the road. It was strange and exciting for them to watch the airplane’s headlight as it briefly touched down at the other end of the road and headed directly for them. Once it landed, the plane would pull into the parking lot thirty feet from them.
Off to the right the construction crew working on the new lodge sat on the long porch eating lunch. A couple of cooks were standing outside the back door of the restaurant and the children continued to play in the courtyard. It was a typical beginning to a typical weekend.
Ray held his camera steady as he snapped a shot as the airplane came within a few feet of touching down.
“He’s up again,” John said. “Keep her steady there, Buddy.”
Ray snapped another shot as the plane lifted a few feet off the ground. “Why are
“Why are they landing twice?” Bernadette asked.
“I’m not so sure he intended to.” John said, as the plane left the road for a third time. “It looks like he’s flying pretty hot. He needs to slow down if he is going to make this short landing. He has taken most of the runway and he isn’t even down yet. It looks like he is fighting the wind. I think it surprised him.”
As the aircraft approached the north entrance to the parking lot, the crowd at the end of the runway stood looking head-on into the airplane’s windshield. There was less than a hundred yards between the airplane and where they stood at the narrowing of the road on the southern end of the parking lot. It flew low to the ground, buffeting up and down against the wind. People began to fidget and finally someone said, “Should we be standing here? He’s headed right for us.”
Just as Ray was contemplating where to take cover in case the airplane couldn’t land, he watched through the viewfinder of his camera as the pilot pulled the plane up steep and turned hard to the left. He was sure the picture would show the underside of the plane and make a great story. Ray snapped the shutter button for a third picture and before he had a chance to take the camera away from his eye he heard gasps from the small crowd.
We slammed back into our seats whipping our heads like a shaken ragdoll, then suddenly rose upward as Steve radically pulled the yoke to his chest. “Hang On!” I imagine he screamed into the headset and then a long series of, “Oh, shiiiiit!” as he pled for the plane to maneuver away from the roadblock of cars and people and lodge windows. As he pulled at the yoke and watched the sky fill up the windshield, he looked out of the side window and realized the plane was tilted too far over to the left and the nose was too steep to stay in flight.
“HANG ON!” Steve yelled into the headsets hoping we had missed disaster.
Then, “Noooooooo…,” as our three screams blended to one as we began a horrendous cartwheel.
Ray’s camera had a brief delay as it tried to autofocus. The wings that had been close to the pavement moved through the air until the plane became completely vertical in the sky. The crowd looked at the belly of the plane as the camera shutter snapped catching a blank blue sky; missing the image of the plane entirely. The plane stalled and sliced sideways through the air with the left wing leading the way down to the ground. The wingtip caught earth and impacted snapping entirely off. Bags, headsets, luggage, parachutes and bodies flew violently against the inside of the cockpit then instantly the entire left side of the fuselage crushed pilot and windshield and controls. As it continued to roll, the force of the right wing abruptly hitting hard ground broke seatbelts and cables. In less than an instant the airplane had fallen sixty feet to the ground and flipped itself wing-over-wing across the horse pasture.
What happened in the next three seconds seemed to take minutes. The scream that escaped the crowd was a blend of horrible vowels and. “Oh, GOD, OH, my God!” People ran; others stood stunned at the sight.
The wind calmed as God inhaled and children continued to play. A picture of perfect dichotomy: children’s faces with wide-open giggles and blonde hair flipping back and forth as they leaned their heads back catching the wind of the wooden merry-go-round. And in the background, pieces of twisted fuselage skipped across the area and imbedded at odd angles in the dirt. Men dropped their thermoses full of black, noon coffee.
Then fire flickered from the plane as it finished cart wheeling and fell upside down into the green pasture.
Fear and terror fell across the quiet little resort. Nothing had, or ever would again, impact the people watching that day as intensely as the previous few seconds. What had just happened? The impossible! And as quickly as time stopped, it sped to reality. People did not take the time to consult next steps or evaluate. They did not look at each other with raised eyebrows for cues; they instinctively ran toward the crash not knowing how to do anything but help. Somehow, Bernadette hollered at John’s wife, Diane, to stay with the children and she ran breathless toward the mangled white metal in the field. Camera still in hand, Ray’s long legs carried him past Bernadette.
“Don’t get any closer, it could explode—is there a fire extinguisher?” Ray instinctively shouted warnings as he bolted across the pasture toward the crash. A man ran beside him. As they approached the airplane, Ray could see the fire: small, yet very dangerous. It lit the spewing fuel like a liquid torch. He was stunned to see the man beside him aiming a fire extinguisher at the flame. The airplane fell just a few yards from the new lodge where a construction worker leaned against the fire extinguisher eating his lunch. The man, the first nameless hero to give me life that day, ran directly to the aircraft wing where the fuel spewed to the ground and he tried to douse the fire. The foam from the extinguisher blew into the air like parachuting dandelion seeds as the wind spread it everywhere but into the fire. He moved closer, inches from the flaming torch until he felt the heat on the hair of his arms and the gasoline fumes filled his nostrils. Summer and fire often go together, but this jumbled scent was not the friendly, nostalgic scent of neighboring Yellowstone campfire marshmallows or the welcoming smell of an old farmer burning ditches. The black scars of grass stubble left after all was burned away would remain until winter like the scars of burnt ditches. But ditch grass replaces itself and grows greener afterward; the scars of black grass saturated with traces of gas would stay with him forever, never replenishing itself, only the charred smell of memories would stay. He focused on the fire as it lessened and finally doused under the chemical spray.
It wasn’t long before people frantically moved in closer and were trying to stabilize the aircraft. They wanted to try to do something that felt like the right thing to do. They didn’t know how many people were inside and there was no one around to tell them who we were. Only John had flown an airplane and no one for counties had ever seen one crash. It was a crowd of people who instinctively did the right thing to save a life.
The plane laid upside-down with her propeller and part of the nose buried in the brown dirt. The propeller blades bent at a random angle as we flipped and it dug its fingernails into the fleshy soil. It looked like an awkward anchor that kept it grounded. Fuel continued to pour from a deep gouge in the only wing that was still attached to the airplane body, and the fuselage tottered back and forth from the shock of the abrupt landing. One wing lay underneath the plane, totally severed, and a pool of fuel was seeping into the ground where new clover had grown during the Spring.
There were no officers or first-responders at the scene. Only people frantic, frightened and already scarred with memories of what they were about to undertake. Men with tool belts, chef hats, and camera bags frantically danced around the site trying to see inside the mangled parts. White metal against the black tires was one of the thousand freeze-framed details preserved forever. The cockpit was crinkled into a few square feet of metal. The dashboard wrapped into the small space as though it was neatly folded and corners tucked in tightly. The tail sheared in half was no longer a straight continuous line of flight, only a jagged disjointed elbow bent backward. The windshield had popped out of its casing in several places but hung to the dashboard in random dashes. Broken glass and metal mixed together. Bags and cases had fallen from the wreckage and were laying in odd places. The fuel eventually reduced to a small trickle. There was also silence; freshly decided death with the sound turned off.
Quietness surrounded Steve like an air pillow. Then shouts broke the frozen scene.
“Over here. I can reach him from over here.” Eyes darted in and out of where the cockpit should have been as a man leaned closer into the mess. He saw the fiber of a man’s cotton shirt and the blue webbing of the seatbelt. Steve was trapped upside-down and was still secured to the seat by the seatbelt. His head, face, left arm, and torso were visible through the pilot’s side window. The headset was no longer on his head which allowed organized tufts of hair to fall downward. His arm was positioned as though he had just recently moved it away from the throttle and put it in his lap. His shirt cuff was neatly buttoned around his wrist. The rest of his body was encased in fuselage which molded around his lap and legs. It was apparent that he was the only person tightly wrapped up in the plane.
Ray ran to the side of the plane and joined the man at the pilot’s window. They unconsciously touched shoulders as they both squeezed in to get to Steve. As he reached for him, Ray instantly felt a penetrating remorse that would stain his soul forever. Ray’s heart was big and it was hard to put aside personal feelings for any patient—especially today. Although Ray did not know the dark-haired man who hung before him, he shared a slice of his lazy June-day vacation and that made caring for him very personal and immediate. Ray touched Steve’s neck and found a slight pulse.
The description of Steve will haunt me forever. Even though Ray delicately described Steve’s color as simply “pale” when he found him, I can imagine the color of death as a much darker hue. Perhaps the acute pain of my loss of this dear friend adds to the depth of description. My imagination magnifies the details that Ray omitted. Steve was seat belted to the seat, hanging upside-down, but so tightly held in place that no other people were visible inside the plane. The plane was molded around him, his head and neck were at an odd angle, and the color of good-bye was gray on his face. There was a deep gash on his arm, but little blood. Ray described the scene as through there was no evidence that Steve had been hurt except for the gurgling breaths coming from his chest. Ray had seen many people in respiratory distress and he recognized that Steve would die within minutes.
I’ve come to realize that the descriptions of the crash as told to me were homogenized for my benefit. Now, many years outside of the crash, I have a more realistic image of bodies mangled, sliced and swollen beyond recognition.
By now others were gathered around, Ray looked into the man’s eyes who knelt beside him and as though he was a dear friend, and wanted to say, “His breathing is slow… um, a sign of critical brain damage. I’m afraid he is dying,” but he remained silent and continued to touch Steve’s neck where the pulse stayed slow and steady.
“Can anyone hear us?” Ray heard himself pleading for any kind of sound as the crowd shushed, but there was no answer. Another bubbled breath and a pulse beat was Steve’s reply. Everyone knew they had to get the pilot out immediately. But the body of the airplane was so tightly twisted it was hard to tell where man and airplane began. Every time someone attempted to touch the aircraft it shifted and threatened to collapse on itself.
“We have to stabilize this side first.” Someone had taken control and by now it was evident that if anything was going to be done safely and quickly, they had to work as a team. The white metal was held in place delicately by several people and each time anyone moved or let their hold relax the plane shifted. Several placed themselves on one side then on the other as they did what they could to stabilize the fuselage. Hearts raced but their minds remained focus on what had to be done. Some concentrated on one side that rocked from the weight of the wing while others debated the best strategy to reduce fuel from spilling out. People began calling out damage where they could see it and every few feet people held pieces of engine, wing, and fuselage still.
--
Bob was late getting on the road to the airport that morning and was hurrying to get to Chico in time for our landing. The Livingston newspaper had called him to schedule an appointment for an interview. The paper wanted to do a news article about the upcoming boogie so the reporter asked Bob, and his wife, Julie, to stop by their office before he drove on to Chico. Bob was reluctant to throw another errand into his already busy day, but finally agreed that they would. It took longer than he really wanted so he was frustrated and in a hurry to get to the resort.
“Damn, I shouldn’t have stopped,” he said. “They are going to get there and I’ll still be driving on this damn road,” Bob was losing his patience because he didn’t stick to his original list of errands.
“Don’t land there.” He shouted. He had the big windsock in the truck with him. The little one that always stood in the field near the road wouldn’t do for this kind of wind. It would be hard to see and because it was smaller, it would play down the intensity of the wind.
He drove through the valley, thinking about the high cost of aircraft fuel which was another delay to his day because he had to negotiate a lower price. He and Julie rode silently for a little while, but the closer he got to the turnoff, the more frantic he became. He needed to talk to Steve on the radio before the plane got too close.
“Come on, Steve, listen to me. Don’t land.” Julie listened to her husband plead for his friend to hear him.
“Please, God, let them be late.” The ground winds were way too strong for a landing on the Chico road. The Flying Y was near and Bob was rushing to get to a radio so he could tell Steve to land there instead.
“Listen to me,” he screamed at the windshield, “Go to the Flying Y!”
He wasn’t sure how strong the wind gusts were at Chico, but every few seconds, gusts would rock his truck and he knew it would be a nasty landing. Steve was a great pilot, but the winds were unpredictable at Chico on a good day, so there was no sense taking chances.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, watching police lights far behind him. Montana didn’t have a speed limit and he knew he was driving safely, so he kept his speed steady and continued driving the last five miles to the Chico turnoff. The lights gradually gained on him and his throat became dry accompanied with a foreboding thought: Something’s happened! He needed to get there. The Sheriff passed him going ninety and Bob watched as the car turned onto the county road leading to the resort.
“Oh, my God. Nooooo!” A panic overtook Bob so strongly—so paralyzing—that he was amazed he had made it the last few miles when he found himself following the police lights through the pasture gate.
It took seconds for Bob to get from his truck to the crash, but for the next several years he played the sight over and over as though it were hours. Every tiny, inexplicable detail was branded into his brain. He would never forget how he noticed every muscle grow tight in the men’s arms as they worked together to hold the plane steady. The dark, wet grasses under the wing, the shrill sound of people calling out details, and the regret he instantly felt that, somehow, he should have prevented this.
People were scattered around the white and blue Piper that had settled near the horse coral. Bob ran to the pilot side of the aircraft and found a couple men tending to Steve. Bile filled his throat as he saw his dying friend.
“His name is Steve.” He choked back the burn in his throat and heart.
Two men ran toward the plane, knees and heels kicking high through the tall grass. They each carried two cinder blocks and quickly handed them to waiting men who began stacking them beneath the damaged wing. It took several trips, until they had made a small pile of blocks holding the wing precariously in place.
“Uhh… Mmm… Ohhh.” A cry came from somewhere—somewhere inside the tanglement. More frantic motion around the aircraft began and everyone set to finding the source of the small sounds.
“There are two other people inside.” Bob told them that there were others in the plane. But the tiny space left in the cockpit could not have held any more bodies.
The airplane lay on its back, wheels praying to the sky. The right wing was bent badly, but remained attached and spread out to its side and upward as though it was pointing out shapes in the clouds. The left wing, broken from the body, lay under the airplane.
Bernadette, who had worked herself around the airplane to the pilot’s door left Ray with Steve and ran to the other side of the airplane, peeking and leaning around the wings so she could see where the sounds originated “There is someone alive over here.” she yelled. “There is someone else.”
There was a small space between earth and wing where Bernadette squeezed. She found me tucked up between the seat and the instrument panel with my knees pinned against my chest. My face and arms were wedged against each other and the side of the co-pilot door held most of me tightly in place.
“We are here now. We’re here.” For the first time, Bernadette saw blood in the wreckage. My head was twisted oddly and partially sticking out of the broken side window. She couldn’t see a face, but she saw long blonde hair covering it. She tried to brush the tight tangle from my face but it was caught in the glass and upholstery. She pulled at small tufts until she could see a cheek and chin. The plexiglass slashed through my face.
“What’s your name?” She asked. “You’re going to be okay. I’m just going to move this piece of windshield away from you.” She carefully broke away the sharp pieces and cleared as much as she could. The glass left a two inch long cut down to the chin bone and nearly severed my upper lip. I didn’t answer her question.
Oh, my... she’s so young, Bernadette thought as she tried to find a hand to hold. She reached through the broken window and inched her fingers along an arm trying to find a hand.
She must not even be a teenager yet. My body was now the size of a small child squeezed into the tiny space. There was no room to move arms or legs to make me comfortable so she stroked the part of my face she could see and continued to speak to me.
“What’s your name?”
“What grade are you in?’ She wiped away a few more strands of sun-bleached hair that stuck to the blood-caked mangle that once was my top lip. Locks of it looked like the smooth silky hair of a young girl. And for long moments, only cries answered Bernadette’s reassuring questions.
“Have you turned thirteen, yet?”
“I’ve been to Utah before, what part of Salt Lake do you and your parents live in? Maybe I’ve been there.” She persisted asking questions to try to get some sort of coherent reaction from me.
“Come on, sweetie, can you tell me your name?”
A tiny, “Kelly,” squeaked from my throat, and Bernadette felt a small victory for those trying to save something from this tragic, mutilated scene. “You’re going to be fine, Kelly. You’re going to be fine.”
It had only been a couple of minutes since the plane fell from the sky, but so much was happening that it was hard to know everything going on. Some one drove a backhoe from near the new lodge closer to the airplane. A man was running with a heavy metal chain dangling from his arms. “Here, I have a tow chain I keep in my truck. If we use it, we can lift the plane up enough to get underneath.”
“We have to move this first.” And men started negotiating the best way to maneuver the chain to raise the airplane so they could support it with the cinder blocks.
“Then take hold of that end of the wing. We will lift from this side.” Back and forth people hollered commands trying to stay organized but work as quickly as possible. They were still working against time as fuel continued to stream from the plane. They gathered what they could to prop up the unstable side of the airplane. Someone looped the tow chain around the strut on the wing, and the backhoe driver began lifting. They continued to slide lumber and more cinder blocks under the severed wing.
“Whoa, whoa! Watch the sparks!” A man pulled his hand away from the cinder block, stunned at Ray’s rebuke.
“The chain is causing sparks! It could explode with all that fuel coming out.” Fear and urgency made Ray’s remarks short and bold.
“I’ll be careful.” He started the backhoe again to inch the chain upward in tiny increments. But a few people around the airplane were yelling above the noise of the back hoe and waving to shut it off!
The electricity throughout the airplane was still hot and live and caused occasional sparks. Bob knew that even though the propeller had stopped turning, the magneto was sending electricity to every metal part in the wreck. It had to be turned off before the whole place exploded. As Bob tried to get near the cockpit to find the magneto switch the Sheriff began ordering everyone away from the airplane. He was fearful of the fuel spilling out of both wings. The fire department would be arriving shortly and they could stabilize the fuel leak. “It is just too dangerous. We don’t want anyone else hurt. Stay back!”
“I can do it,” Bob yelled. The crowd reluctantly drew away as the Sheriff tried to gain control. Bob and Ray argued with the Sheriff.
“We have to do something, now!
“Not until I get clearance from the Fire Department,” the Sherriff said.
“We can’t wait for the fire department.” Bob was adamant that he could turn off the power and he moved toward the airplane again.
“Stay back!” The sheriff barked.
Bob turned away from the plane and swore loud enough for the Sherriff to hear his frustration. Walked toward an arbitrary line that the Sherriff had drawn in the weeds. Bob was spitting mad, but he obeyed the officer.
People dispersed to a wide perimeter. Most stood by themselves, casting a shadow of dread, which was beginning to grow a little longer against the early afternoon sunlight. Ray and Bernadette held each other as they watched the silent airplane sit unattended. The metal creaked, fuel continued to spill in a small stream from the wing, and they waited. Quietly; screaming inside, but welcoming the reprieve from the exhaustion of rescue.
“Have you called for the HelpFlight helicopter from Billings?” Ray broke the silence to ask the sheriff.
“They are on standby in case we need them.”
It’s an interesting thing to watch a crowd feel defeated. People detach. A man in faded Levis kicked at the grass over and over, in a rhythmic swing. A woman in a sundress and sandals who had been hauling pieces of lumber stood staring at the airplane. She was not focused on the scene, but at the space between. Her mind wandered for relief. The crowd took a deep breath and sighed in and out every few seconds.
Two minutes later, pump and fire trucks arrived and the sheriff allowed the crowd to resume the rescue.
“Honey, will you go stay with the pilot and make sure any movement doesn’t make it worse on him?” Ray slid his hand off her shoulders and said, “I’m going to see what I can do to get closer to Kelly.” Bernadette went to sit beside Steve. She sat on her knees and held her fingers against his slow, weak pulse.
The cockpit was too damaged for Bob to reach the control panel. He walked his fingers along the dashboard as far as he could. The instruments were smashed and he could not find a space big enough to reach his arm through the shredded metal to find the master switch. He ran to the passenger side where the fuselage had ripped near the cargo door. It was a small door, but he was able to yank it loose enough to fit through. He sat down, lay on his back, and leaned in with his head one shoulder then started to shimmy through the tight slit of meshed seat and metal an inch at a time. Mud, grass, fuel -- another tiny bit farther as he squirmed along to a place where he could move his shoulders. He then squeezed far enough in to grab the metal rail to which the back seat had once been bolted. He pulled his torso through the door was inside the space where we had stowed the luggage and parachutes.
What would have been three feet of space in another airplane was now ten inches of accordion metal. The tail was severed from the main fuselage and parts of the passenger side panels lay wedged into the upholstery. Sparks snapped at random intervals every few feet—it was only a matter of time before they caught hold of a fuel-soaked clump of grass or vapors rising all around the site and ignited into flame.
He still laid on his back, looking up at the ceiling. The upholstery was torn away in spots and right above him the sun peeked through and glared into his eyes. Bob punched around at the laminated wood panel that separated the cargo hold and the inside of the tail. It took him several deep blows, but finally broke through to the tail section. Once he was able to bash in one side of the panel, he slid it back far enough to allow him to squeeze into the tail itself. He wrapped his fingers around the sharp metal seams inside the tail and peeled back the jagged gash. The twelve-foot tail lay bent upward into the sky, and after a few minutes of worming through the gash, he quickly found himself inside and found the rudder cables that stretch from a mechanism near the tail panel he has just punched out and the far end of the tail. One cable felt like it had broken off, but it was still taut. The cables made it harder to move around in the tail. The battery was bolted into place at the very end of the tail so he wriggled along the tail pushing himself along with his shoulder blades and heels an inch at a time. He squeezed his arm above his head and reached behind blindly to find the square battery, it was just beyond reach. He inched his hips farther into the tail and winced as he heard the metallic fabric creak. He took a startled breath and moved a tiny bit more until he found the battery box. Come on, come on, hold steady, he said under his breath. He traced the shape of the battery downward until his fingers found the post and cables. His knuckles ached as his pried the cable from the post with his fingers. Once it was off, he didn’t take time to relax.
“Got it!” he shouted, and he slowly slid back out of the metal cave and ran around to the pilot door to see how Steve was doing.
“His name is Steve. How is he?” Bob softly asked Bernadette as though reverence was appropriate.
“I’m still feeling a pulse, but it is getting weaker.” And with gentle kindness and love for a dear friend and someone she would never meet but to whom she would feel eternally close, Bob and Bernadette cradled Steve’s body as closely to them as they could. They stayed with him until his breaths grew further apart. During those long minutes they talked to him and cried for the people who loved him. No matter how many times Bernadette faced death in the Intensive Care Unit it always touched her heart when there was nothing to do for a dying body. Her gift to Steve that day was a genuine, loving touch to his soul. Bernadette felt comforted with the knowledge that someone, somewhere would have wanted her to be with Steve as he said good-bye to this earth. Reverently, she told Bob the pulse had stopped. They sobbed for their friend.
I do not remember anything from the time we passed over the truck at the end of the runway to the following day. But I remained conscious for most of the rescue. I lay trapped inside the cockpit for many minutes, speaking in soft mumbles and only staying coherent by Burnadette’s and Ray’s prompting.
The group had managed to wedge the airplane level by stacking bricks and wood underneath with help from the backhoe and adrenaline induced strength. The leaking fuel was now only an irritant since the battery was disengaged and explosion was no longer a threat.
Ray lay on the wet ground and squeezed into the tiny space with me. His feet spread on the ground out toward the front of the airplane nose. Above, others finished building up the parts that felt precarious. He lay on his stomach as near to me as he could and held my right hand then slid his other hand under my right shoulder and left it there, patting reassurances while he tried to keep me conscious and make sure any movement didn’t damage me more. Two people pushed debris away to make room to clear me from the plane.
Although everyone paused for a moment while the fire truck was arriving, there was little relief from the anxiety and frantic feeling of tending to victims. More people joined the scene as word got out and people continued to help. A man who had been helping to stabilize the airplane knelt and looked at through the wreckage at Ray.
“I’m the pastry chef.” Ray looked toward the odd comment. There stood Charlie in his chef hat and apron. “I mean I’m an EMT.” Ray laughed months later at the silly comment and Charlie’s tone of voice when he added the EMT part as though it would make everyone feel a little better. Ray writes in a letter describing the rescue, “Bernadette and I have used this to add a chuckle to the middle of our crying.”
Charlie needed to know everyone’s name that was helping to move me. “We shouldn’t move her unless everyone agrees.”
“We’ve got to get this seat out. She is wedged so tight that we can’t ease her out of this mess. Does anyone have tools?”
Someone ran to their car and returned with a set of tools. I was tucked in a ball in the front seat with my knees pinned to my chest. Carefully, but quickly, hands worked the wrench and the seat finally gave away. Bob pulled it from the cockpit which gave them more room to get to my knees. Slowly, delicately, they straightened my legs while Ray held my head and neck securely in place. The ambulance had just arrived and the paramedics handed Ray a neck collar and oxygen mask. As he slipped it over my nose I winced louder because of the pain from my cut lip.
“I think we can get her out over here, but we’ll need to do it slowly.” Someone had placed a backboard at the back of the airplane.
“It looks like about eighteen inches that we’ll need to move her. Let’s lift and move together.”
“It’s pretty tight in here,” Ray said. “I’ve only got about eight to ten inches to work with. If we go all the way, I’ll lose her neck and head. We’ll have to inch our way toward you guys at the back.” Where ever there was a hole in the plane, hands stuck through and slid under my body parts.
“Okay, ready? On three. One, two, lift.” All hands lifted and moved a partial inch then put my body down as they repositioned their hands. Slide under, lift slightly, relax, slide under again. In this way they gently shuffled me to the crowd toward the back of the plane.
A man’s strong hands, slid under Ray’s as my head got closer to the opening. “Okay, I’ve got her neck back here. You can let go.” And Ray relaxed and shimmied back out from under the wreck. He could hear another. “One, two, lift,” by the time he ran to the other side of the airplane. With synchronized counts and tiny movements, pairs of hands were able to delicately move me the required distance. Once I was clear of the wreckage, they carefully placed my broken body onto the back board and lifted me into the ambulance.
I could not feel any sensation in my legs and was unable to move them. It was obvious that I was paralyzed, but the extent was not certain so everyone treated me as though a miracle would happen and I would recover and walk.
Everyone stood in silence for a few seconds; a deep sense of fatigue settled over the crowd—the kind of tired that sends you into a deep sleep for a night and a day. Exhausted sighs and suppressed tears choked through each person as they took a moment to rest. Numbness crawled through the crowd and tears of exhaustion, relief and anger started to well up in exhausted bodies. Bernadette had been sifting through luggage, blankets, and gear bags.
“Oh, my. There is someone else.”
There had been so much commotion tending to Steve and putting out fires and saving me that somehow the news that Brent was aboard the airplane hadn’t reached everyone.
“Yes, it’s Brent.” Bob said with regret.
I’ve heard different stories about when Brent was discovered. Bernadette was surprised by finding him. I was knotted up on top of him, hiding him until I was extracted and treated. Bob could tell from the wrangle of metal that Brent couldn’t have possibly lived through the trauma so he concentrated his lifesaving efforts on me. He has since told me that it was very apparent that Brent was killed on impact. “He was pretty beat up,” was the description he told me over a cold beer and a glass of wine years later.
I imagine the scene far removed from anything that has ever happened to me or ever will again. Brent lay twisted under me. And only once I was out from the airplane was he visible. He must have been hidden for over an hour. Waiting to be recognized, just to be acknowledged. The focus was all about me. And I wonder every day, why me? What if he had been found and some sort of first response could have saved him? Sometimes I scream for brief moments when the grief of loss and guilt get too bad. Sometimes surviving feels selfish and irresponsible and unfair. Survivor guilt may possibly haunt me forever and when I think his name, my gut writhes trying to hold the fear that I’ll be found unworthy to live compared to him.
Bernadette tells me months later as I recover in the rehabilitation center. “Now that I look back,” she looks into my eyes with tears streaming down her face, “I remember a pink arm against your face. I thought it was yours, Kelly. It must have been Brent’s and slid away when Ray was straightening your legs. That’s why we didn’t see him at first. You were huddled into his lap with your head protected against his chest.”
I tell friends of those first few minutes, and those last five seconds before we touched down. How the black truck top caught up with its own shadow as we flew over. It was a tiny shadow, only half-an-hour old. It was on the back of noon when shadows pygmy themselves and leave just a hint of darkness. A blink and they’re gone. That’s all it took, a blink, and he was gone too.
I hate myself for being in the front seat of the airplane. I had cinched my seat belt down into my lap and resigned myself to land without speaking up. But in that split second of terror I must have felt when I knew we weren’t going to make the landing, my sweetheart had reached back and pulled me from the back seat into him. During a horrific moment of limbs and airplane tumbling across the grass, Brent saved my life and sacrificed his.
Sometimes when I tell the story to friends, I forget they weren’t there; the details are so clear it feels like I’ve shared the horror with everyone. Sometimes I don’t remember either. I mix up what I know with what I want to know. I want to remember every word, every scream, every whimper, but I’m afraid of the pain. The heart pain. The way we must have shared that final thought. The one that said “I’ll save you.” And, “please don’t leave without me.” Why did I consent? Why didn’t I scream him back? Why can’t I remember his voice the instant he left? Why can’t I feel his arm cradle me as he simply swept away from me? Did he wave, did he give a tiny final squeeze, and did he move my hair out of my eyes with a wispy gesture?
I remember many things. I don’t remember him leaving. I don’t remember the awful separation as our orgied limbs untangled. I can’t feel his last kiss as he reached for whatever body part was near his lips. I can’t remember asking if he was alive that day. But a day later I asked the doctors so they would know I cared. I already knew. I must have given a little resigned sigh, then closed my eyes and slept.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
Good Night Sweetheart — Chapter Four
“Navajo, seven, five, two, niner, Juliet to Chico Ground.”
The radio stayed silent for a couple of minutes then,
“This is Chico Ground. Come again.”
Steve repeated,
“This is seven, five, two, niner, Juliet, descending for landing into Chico. Is Bob Rux around?”
“Hang on, let me take a look.”
Chico Ground consisted of a radio in a room adjacent to the front counter of the lodge and a voice at the other end. Whoever happened to be registering guests or taking dinner reservations also answered any aircraft calls. The lodge staff was trained to use the radio; it’s not hard. If an airplane was ready to land, the pilot called on the radio and asked Ground to prepare the runway. It was Ground’s responsibility to acknowledge the aircraft on the radio and notify the pilot that the runway would be ready in a few minutes. Then they would find someone to drive a truck down the road about a mile and block traffic while the airplane landed.
The runway is a long, two-lane county road about thirty feet wide. The northern end of the road begins two miles north of Chico with the southern end running directly next to the lodge. It ends one third of a mile past the lodge in a narrow box canyon. Both edges of the road drop off into drainage ditches immediately beyond the edges of the pavement. At the one-mile mark, it makes a slight turn and runs parallel to a pasture on the left and a sixty foot tall plateau to the right. At first glance, there’s not much around for miles but fields, a few trees, fences, ditches and graze land. However, landing on the road is dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. There are obstacles on all sides so if you miscalculate your speed or the length of the airstrip, you’ll either crash directly into the second-story floor of the lodge, into the face of a mountain or into the 60 foot plateau on the right. The only automobile traffic that ever travels the road is Chico’s guests or staff. About one mile before the lodge, the road makes a slight turn and is the perfect place to stop traffic to allow planes to land. The road became a runway when Chico became a favorite place for Montana ranchers to stop in for a great meal. The Livingston airport is thirty miles northeast so it isn’t convenient to rent a car and drive the half-hour into Chico for dinner. There is a private airstrip about five miles due north called The Flying Y that we occasionally used if the weather got bad and we needed to land in a hurry. I’ve never landed there but several loads of skydivers have had to use it during summer thundershowers.
“Ground to seven, five, two, niner, Juliet.”
“Go ahead Chico Ground.”
Steve smiled at the woman’s voice coming from the radio. It was the hostess that always worked the weekend of the boogie.
“We haven’t seen Bob yet, but we expect him anytime.”
“Is any other skydiver there?” Steve asked.
“Not yet.”
Steve turned to Brent and said,
“Well, it looks like we are the first ones here this year.”
“Chico Ground, we are about five minutes from you and will continue to descend until you can get a truck out on the runway.”
“Someone just went out. I’ll let you know when he has traffic blocked and I can clear you to land.”
We crossed the valley, over the muddy Yellowstone River, and strained to find the little lodge nestled in the foothills of the tall mountains.
“There she is.” Steve said. “We‘re dead on. I like it when my calculations are right.”
Brent and I lifted up out of our seats and looked out the window to see where Steve was pointing. She was small and hard to find. Chico was nestled in the foothills but to spot her, we had to fly down the middle of the valley and fly toward at her from the north. If you fly too close to the mountains, she ends up sitting right beneath the airplane and is hard to find. Steve had flown here several times and he knew exactly where she was, so we didn’t waste any time zigzagging back and forth across the valley looking for it.
The valley was beautiful. Pastures were green from the spring rains and squares quilted the valley from mountain to mountain. The Yellowstone River was still high from the runoff and ran wide and muddy through the valley. There were no clouds for miles. We were at about six thousand feet above the ground when we passed over the main highway that led from Gardiner to Livingston. Chico is about five miles off the highway. Steve descended the airplane until we were at four thousand feet where we were directly over the runway. No truck yet, but a few cars were driving out of the parking lot. It was about 12:30 p.m. and the day was a beauty.
“Wow, look at that new motel.”
My cheek was pressed against the right passenger window so I could see the new addition to the Chico compound. Since we had been to Chico the year earlier, a fire had devastated the old motel that stood just north of the main lodge. A seventy-yard courtyard lay between the lodge and the new rough hewn log motel that replaced the old one.
“Too bad it’s not finished for this year’s boogie. It looks nice.” Steve answered.
I had shown Brent pictures of the old motel with airplanes parked in front of each door. He hadn’t been there the year we flew five airplanes from the Ogden Drop Zone. He had only been to Chico one other year and had only jumped one day so he hadn’t experienced the whole Chico weekend.
A parking lot and forty yards of grass separated the new lodge and the runway. There are two entrances to the parking lot a hundred yards apart. And there is just enough room for planes to land, taxi past the first entrance, and pull into the southern one to find a place to park. Some years there were so many airplanes parked in the lot there was no room for cars. Pilots pulled right up to their rooms and tied down each wing to secure the plane for the night. One year, we counted twenty planes parked in the makeshift tarmac. Beyond the southern opening of the parking lot lies the courtyard. After that, the runway narrows to a one-lane road canopied with trees and the steep mountainside leading to Emigration Peak.
The plane flew steady and smooth as we began to circle the resort as we descended to land. I sat back, nestled into my seat and thought about the weekend and wished Patty was here. I got to missing Patty every time I made a jump and as we passed over the spot where we decided to ride the airplane down that summer, I wondered how her son was doing without her.
Do not land here.
Inaudibly the words flitted through my mind. Hardly noticing, I disregarded the brief thought and leaned against the window again to look outside. Everything looked fine. I suddenly remembered being twenty-one, and driving through an intersection on Third West in Salt Lake. It was mid-day and I was driving somewhere unimportant now. From somewhere in my peripheral vision I saw a car coming toward me from side traffic. I instantly knew that I was in danger of being broad-sided by the oncoming car. As the car passed through the red light overhead, I tapped on the gas pedal, then the brakes, then the gas—so confused about what to do and wondered whether I should stop or go, that I panicked and froze.
Go!
A very loud voice said clearly. And instantly, I pressed the gas pedal so hard I raced through the intersection as the car missed my back bumper by a fraction of an inch. The voice screaming in my head was so clear I looked to the passenger seat to see who was there. No one sat there, but the voice was so audible and unmistakable I knew someone had ridden through the intersection with me. I pulled the car over and sat and shook and cried until my head cleared and I stopped sweating.
I never forgot the clarity of that man’s voice. I cannot tell you who he was, but the voice was so familiar and so clear. Still, after twenty-five years I can hear every tone of that single word.
I blinked the thought away and look forward through the airplane windshield. It was a calm, beautiful day outside the airplane windshield. I noticed speckled dots of bugs on the blue-sky background of the windshield. Again, louder and more distinct I heard his voice.
Do not land here.
I reached forward to rub Brent’s right shoulder just to let him know I was there. The words I had heard were so brief, so instantaneous, that I remember wondering how I heard that sentence quicker than it could have been said. Then I disregarded it a second time. So many times I have second-guessed myself. So many times I have disregarded a thought that later manifested itself to be something of value—a warning, confirmation, or recognition of a voice or smell. I second-guessed myself and disregarded it again.
Around we went, circling Chico, and the third time,
Do Not Land Here!
We circled the resort one more time. Everyone sat quietly, not moving, just anticipating the next five minutes it would take to be wheels down and taxiing down the runway.
If you have ever had someone talk to you that wasn’t there, you know the feeling I had — rather creepy, but so real. So real the fourth time, and so clear, it came again.
DO NOT LAND HERE!
And for a split second I contemplated reaching over to Steve and shaking my head,
"No, No."
He would have aborted the landing and gone where ever I asked. We trusted each other enough to respect each other’s fears. But I didn’t nod or ask. I just sat there, quiet, wondering what right I had to ask Steve to not land here. I thought that if something was wrong, he would know. I didn’t want to be a whiner or second guess his flying. What if it was nothing? How could I say, “A voice told me not to land here?”
At a thousand feet I looked out the side window again, thinking how calm the trees stood against the hillside. How beautiful the weather was for a June day in Montana, and how great the veal would taste tonight. A stream of a thousand images raced across my brain. Kristin at home, still pouting because she couldn’t come; an English class at the college; our house; the piles of folders at work that needing proofreading; pigs; golf balls; my unpacked parachute inside my gear bag; Patty’s red hair against her teal colored jacket. It would have taken me years to say out loud what passed across my mind in an instant. I saw important days and every unimportant event as though I had remembered every tiny thing that had ever happened to me. I didn’t recognize it as my life flashing. And how trite that would have seemed to me at the time.
I saw my Dad lying on a blanket at Liberty Park reading the newspaper. We had walked there from our house nearby to have a family picnic. The memory looked like a loving family spending time together. Dad would have left a couple weeks later. I saw Mom hollering through the side window in our 1956 Chevy station wagon telling Kevin to pop the clutch. And David’s wry smile as he and I hid in the pyracantha bushes one hot hide-and-seek summer night.
I remembered the red, white and blue jeans that I bought at Grand Central when I was a child. I had saved my allowance and it was the very first purchase I remember making. They were hip 60’s pants that I would wear to the July parade in Salt Lake. The pants flashed to a recent weekend where we celebrated Father’s Day with our kids and Brent’s parents and his white shirt that I wore to bed that night.
Do not land here! Go to the Flying Y.
I watched the black truck slow to the curve in the road, U-turn, and a man get out and walk back to a car that had pulled to a stop behind him. I imagined how he told the driver that an airplane was going to land here and saw the driver tilt his head out of the window looking up to spot our white wings. My actions seemed very calculated, slow-like and animated as I shifted in my seat.
“Two, six, niner, Juliet. You are cleared for landing.”
The Chico voice sang through the radio. The depth of the voice and its message felt complicated like several events strung together to create a picture that I wasn’t able to piece together. There was a missing part; the part that explained my reservations; the part that said everything makes sense; the part that made reality possible.
Steve said, “Ready?” Brent and I both nodded and we turned into final approach with a hundred feet between us and the road.
I leaned back against the seat and instantly regretted not saying something to Steve. My stomach churned as I tried to sort out how I could explain to him that a man who was sitting next to me told me not to land here. Was I going crazy? Maybe I was tired. Whatever it was, I thought I could control it by not acknowledging and not reacting. Even now, remembering the turn my stomach took, I hate myself for being silent. It would have been so easy for Steve to just pull up, apply a slight touch to the throttle, and rise up out of the landing pattern. I agreed to this fate whole-heartedly by not squeaking out a resounding,
No!!!!
And I absolutely knew, without any hesitation that it was wrong to stay silent. But I did.
And then with a calmness and surety the voice said to me one last thing:
This will be like no other landing you have ever had.
I glanced over at Steve’s flight bag and the orange Paramedic Jump Bag that sat on the seat beside me. I reached to pull the flight bag between me and Brent’s seat and then thought how silly it was and pulled my hand away. I still feel the coarse weave of the fabric on my fingertips and the familiar pressure of the bag against my leg. Then I slid deep into my seat and for the last time felt my spine settle against the leather upholstery. The slow motion of my hand cinched my seat belt tighter, I leaned my head against the back of my seat, turned to see outside, and sighed.
I accepted.
I resolved to die without even consciously knowing that is exactly what would happen. I accepted my fate instead of changing it and that makes me angry. Then I watched the airplane’s shadow cross the top of the black truck parked forty feet directly below. I relaxed my hands into my lap and thought how nice Brent’s shoulder still lingered in my hand and how much I loved him.
The radio stayed silent for a couple of minutes then,
“This is Chico Ground. Come again.”
Steve repeated,
“This is seven, five, two, niner, Juliet, descending for landing into Chico. Is Bob Rux around?”
“Hang on, let me take a look.”
Chico Ground consisted of a radio in a room adjacent to the front counter of the lodge and a voice at the other end. Whoever happened to be registering guests or taking dinner reservations also answered any aircraft calls. The lodge staff was trained to use the radio; it’s not hard. If an airplane was ready to land, the pilot called on the radio and asked Ground to prepare the runway. It was Ground’s responsibility to acknowledge the aircraft on the radio and notify the pilot that the runway would be ready in a few minutes. Then they would find someone to drive a truck down the road about a mile and block traffic while the airplane landed.
The runway is a long, two-lane county road about thirty feet wide. The northern end of the road begins two miles north of Chico with the southern end running directly next to the lodge. It ends one third of a mile past the lodge in a narrow box canyon. Both edges of the road drop off into drainage ditches immediately beyond the edges of the pavement. At the one-mile mark, it makes a slight turn and runs parallel to a pasture on the left and a sixty foot tall plateau to the right. At first glance, there’s not much around for miles but fields, a few trees, fences, ditches and graze land. However, landing on the road is dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. There are obstacles on all sides so if you miscalculate your speed or the length of the airstrip, you’ll either crash directly into the second-story floor of the lodge, into the face of a mountain or into the 60 foot plateau on the right. The only automobile traffic that ever travels the road is Chico’s guests or staff. About one mile before the lodge, the road makes a slight turn and is the perfect place to stop traffic to allow planes to land. The road became a runway when Chico became a favorite place for Montana ranchers to stop in for a great meal. The Livingston airport is thirty miles northeast so it isn’t convenient to rent a car and drive the half-hour into Chico for dinner. There is a private airstrip about five miles due north called The Flying Y that we occasionally used if the weather got bad and we needed to land in a hurry. I’ve never landed there but several loads of skydivers have had to use it during summer thundershowers.
“Ground to seven, five, two, niner, Juliet.”
“Go ahead Chico Ground.”
Steve smiled at the woman’s voice coming from the radio. It was the hostess that always worked the weekend of the boogie.
“We haven’t seen Bob yet, but we expect him anytime.”
“Is any other skydiver there?” Steve asked.
“Not yet.”
Steve turned to Brent and said,
“Well, it looks like we are the first ones here this year.”
“Chico Ground, we are about five minutes from you and will continue to descend until you can get a truck out on the runway.”
“Someone just went out. I’ll let you know when he has traffic blocked and I can clear you to land.”
We crossed the valley, over the muddy Yellowstone River, and strained to find the little lodge nestled in the foothills of the tall mountains.
“There she is.” Steve said. “We‘re dead on. I like it when my calculations are right.”
Brent and I lifted up out of our seats and looked out the window to see where Steve was pointing. She was small and hard to find. Chico was nestled in the foothills but to spot her, we had to fly down the middle of the valley and fly toward at her from the north. If you fly too close to the mountains, she ends up sitting right beneath the airplane and is hard to find. Steve had flown here several times and he knew exactly where she was, so we didn’t waste any time zigzagging back and forth across the valley looking for it.
The valley was beautiful. Pastures were green from the spring rains and squares quilted the valley from mountain to mountain. The Yellowstone River was still high from the runoff and ran wide and muddy through the valley. There were no clouds for miles. We were at about six thousand feet above the ground when we passed over the main highway that led from Gardiner to Livingston. Chico is about five miles off the highway. Steve descended the airplane until we were at four thousand feet where we were directly over the runway. No truck yet, but a few cars were driving out of the parking lot. It was about 12:30 p.m. and the day was a beauty.
“Wow, look at that new motel.”
My cheek was pressed against the right passenger window so I could see the new addition to the Chico compound. Since we had been to Chico the year earlier, a fire had devastated the old motel that stood just north of the main lodge. A seventy-yard courtyard lay between the lodge and the new rough hewn log motel that replaced the old one.
“Too bad it’s not finished for this year’s boogie. It looks nice.” Steve answered.
I had shown Brent pictures of the old motel with airplanes parked in front of each door. He hadn’t been there the year we flew five airplanes from the Ogden Drop Zone. He had only been to Chico one other year and had only jumped one day so he hadn’t experienced the whole Chico weekend.
A parking lot and forty yards of grass separated the new lodge and the runway. There are two entrances to the parking lot a hundred yards apart. And there is just enough room for planes to land, taxi past the first entrance, and pull into the southern one to find a place to park. Some years there were so many airplanes parked in the lot there was no room for cars. Pilots pulled right up to their rooms and tied down each wing to secure the plane for the night. One year, we counted twenty planes parked in the makeshift tarmac. Beyond the southern opening of the parking lot lies the courtyard. After that, the runway narrows to a one-lane road canopied with trees and the steep mountainside leading to Emigration Peak.
The plane flew steady and smooth as we began to circle the resort as we descended to land. I sat back, nestled into my seat and thought about the weekend and wished Patty was here. I got to missing Patty every time I made a jump and as we passed over the spot where we decided to ride the airplane down that summer, I wondered how her son was doing without her.
Do not land here.
Inaudibly the words flitted through my mind. Hardly noticing, I disregarded the brief thought and leaned against the window again to look outside. Everything looked fine. I suddenly remembered being twenty-one, and driving through an intersection on Third West in Salt Lake. It was mid-day and I was driving somewhere unimportant now. From somewhere in my peripheral vision I saw a car coming toward me from side traffic. I instantly knew that I was in danger of being broad-sided by the oncoming car. As the car passed through the red light overhead, I tapped on the gas pedal, then the brakes, then the gas—so confused about what to do and wondered whether I should stop or go, that I panicked and froze.
Go!
A very loud voice said clearly. And instantly, I pressed the gas pedal so hard I raced through the intersection as the car missed my back bumper by a fraction of an inch. The voice screaming in my head was so clear I looked to the passenger seat to see who was there. No one sat there, but the voice was so audible and unmistakable I knew someone had ridden through the intersection with me. I pulled the car over and sat and shook and cried until my head cleared and I stopped sweating.
I never forgot the clarity of that man’s voice. I cannot tell you who he was, but the voice was so familiar and so clear. Still, after twenty-five years I can hear every tone of that single word.
I blinked the thought away and look forward through the airplane windshield. It was a calm, beautiful day outside the airplane windshield. I noticed speckled dots of bugs on the blue-sky background of the windshield. Again, louder and more distinct I heard his voice.
Do not land here.
I reached forward to rub Brent’s right shoulder just to let him know I was there. The words I had heard were so brief, so instantaneous, that I remember wondering how I heard that sentence quicker than it could have been said. Then I disregarded it a second time. So many times I have second-guessed myself. So many times I have disregarded a thought that later manifested itself to be something of value—a warning, confirmation, or recognition of a voice or smell. I second-guessed myself and disregarded it again.
Around we went, circling Chico, and the third time,
Do Not Land Here!
We circled the resort one more time. Everyone sat quietly, not moving, just anticipating the next five minutes it would take to be wheels down and taxiing down the runway.
If you have ever had someone talk to you that wasn’t there, you know the feeling I had — rather creepy, but so real. So real the fourth time, and so clear, it came again.
DO NOT LAND HERE!
And for a split second I contemplated reaching over to Steve and shaking my head,
"No, No."
He would have aborted the landing and gone where ever I asked. We trusted each other enough to respect each other’s fears. But I didn’t nod or ask. I just sat there, quiet, wondering what right I had to ask Steve to not land here. I thought that if something was wrong, he would know. I didn’t want to be a whiner or second guess his flying. What if it was nothing? How could I say, “A voice told me not to land here?”
At a thousand feet I looked out the side window again, thinking how calm the trees stood against the hillside. How beautiful the weather was for a June day in Montana, and how great the veal would taste tonight. A stream of a thousand images raced across my brain. Kristin at home, still pouting because she couldn’t come; an English class at the college; our house; the piles of folders at work that needing proofreading; pigs; golf balls; my unpacked parachute inside my gear bag; Patty’s red hair against her teal colored jacket. It would have taken me years to say out loud what passed across my mind in an instant. I saw important days and every unimportant event as though I had remembered every tiny thing that had ever happened to me. I didn’t recognize it as my life flashing. And how trite that would have seemed to me at the time.
I saw my Dad lying on a blanket at Liberty Park reading the newspaper. We had walked there from our house nearby to have a family picnic. The memory looked like a loving family spending time together. Dad would have left a couple weeks later. I saw Mom hollering through the side window in our 1956 Chevy station wagon telling Kevin to pop the clutch. And David’s wry smile as he and I hid in the pyracantha bushes one hot hide-and-seek summer night.
I remembered the red, white and blue jeans that I bought at Grand Central when I was a child. I had saved my allowance and it was the very first purchase I remember making. They were hip 60’s pants that I would wear to the July parade in Salt Lake. The pants flashed to a recent weekend where we celebrated Father’s Day with our kids and Brent’s parents and his white shirt that I wore to bed that night.
Do not land here! Go to the Flying Y.
I watched the black truck slow to the curve in the road, U-turn, and a man get out and walk back to a car that had pulled to a stop behind him. I imagined how he told the driver that an airplane was going to land here and saw the driver tilt his head out of the window looking up to spot our white wings. My actions seemed very calculated, slow-like and animated as I shifted in my seat.
“Two, six, niner, Juliet. You are cleared for landing.”
The Chico voice sang through the radio. The depth of the voice and its message felt complicated like several events strung together to create a picture that I wasn’t able to piece together. There was a missing part; the part that explained my reservations; the part that said everything makes sense; the part that made reality possible.
Steve said, “Ready?” Brent and I both nodded and we turned into final approach with a hundred feet between us and the road.
I leaned back against the seat and instantly regretted not saying something to Steve. My stomach churned as I tried to sort out how I could explain to him that a man who was sitting next to me told me not to land here. Was I going crazy? Maybe I was tired. Whatever it was, I thought I could control it by not acknowledging and not reacting. Even now, remembering the turn my stomach took, I hate myself for being silent. It would have been so easy for Steve to just pull up, apply a slight touch to the throttle, and rise up out of the landing pattern. I agreed to this fate whole-heartedly by not squeaking out a resounding,
No!!!!
And I absolutely knew, without any hesitation that it was wrong to stay silent. But I did.
And then with a calmness and surety the voice said to me one last thing:
This will be like no other landing you have ever had.
I glanced over at Steve’s flight bag and the orange Paramedic Jump Bag that sat on the seat beside me. I reached to pull the flight bag between me and Brent’s seat and then thought how silly it was and pulled my hand away. I still feel the coarse weave of the fabric on my fingertips and the familiar pressure of the bag against my leg. Then I slid deep into my seat and for the last time felt my spine settle against the leather upholstery. The slow motion of my hand cinched my seat belt tighter, I leaned my head against the back of my seat, turned to see outside, and sighed.
I accepted.
I resolved to die without even consciously knowing that is exactly what would happen. I accepted my fate instead of changing it and that makes me angry. Then I watched the airplane’s shadow cross the top of the black truck parked forty feet directly below. I relaxed my hands into my lap and thought how nice Brent’s shoulder still lingered in my hand and how much I loved him.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Good Night Sweetheart — Chapter Three
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.
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.
Friday, November 26, 2010
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.
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.
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