NO FEELING OF FALLING by Dustin Beall Smith
From my current perspective as a college professor, it startles me to remember that in the autumn of 1958, after nine weeks of binge drinking, class cutting, and compulsory ROTC drills, I blew off my first semester of college and took a train back east to live with my parents and two younger siblings in a small town forty miles north of New York City. I announced to my family that I had become an existentialist. In what I see now as penance for wasting my father’s money, I refused to reoccupy my upstairs bedroom and chose instead to camp on a thin straw mat in a corner of the basement. There I would sit in half-lotus for hours at a time, reading Camus and Kierkegaard, drinking strong Darjeeling tea, and smoking unfiltered Chesterfields. My mother, delighted that I was reading philosophy, encouraged me to read aloud long sections of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness while she cooked dinner. My father, on the other hand, seemed to take my new philosophical assertiveness as a threat. When I informed him, for instance, that free love was the cool new thing, he told me, “It might interest you to know that your mother and I kicked up our heels a time or two before you were born.”
Yeah, right, I thought.
My reading had primed me to defy the ticky-tacky, appliance-happy, postwar American zeitgeist. I aspired to and embraced the Beat life – the rebellious, angst-ridden celebration of rootless America – but the family nest gave me little to rebel against. My father made a comfortable living as a commercial artist. My mother was an artist and a homemaker. They each had private studios on the four-acre property. The nineteenth-century house, decorated with their paintings, lithographs, sculptures, and drawings, exuded an atmosphere of creativity and taste. They owned only one car and hardly any modern appliances. The house had no shower, just two small bathtubs. We almost never watched TV, and dinner table discussions resembled seminars, with subjects ranging from presidential politics (Ike shouldn’t have beaten Adlai a second time) to art (photography threatened to replace the canvas) to sports (could anyone ever top that Willie Mays catch?).
This engaged family atmosphere, and my father’s seemingly effortless work-at-home lifestyle, created a problem. I needed him to be a weary, briefcase-toting commuter who went to work in a gray flannel suit every day, and because he wasn’t, I was forced to respond to his constant presence in a rude and petulant way that betrayed, with its clumsy resentment, an underlying love and admiration. Clearly he was leading an enviable life, but I had no clue how he had arrived at it.
After I dropped out of college, I saw that my hard-won life experience – two high school summers spent mimicking Kerouac by hitchhiking back and forth across the country, holding an assortment of odd jobs, hopping freight trains, and getting jailed for vagrancy – had no value on an adult résumé. I was supposed to get a real job now, but the jobs available to high school graduates did not square with my romanticized self-image. How could a Beat existentialist stoop to working as a clerk at Macy’s? I needed a guide to the real world, but my father knew nothing about résumés, personnel agencies, or help-wanted ads. My mother might as well have been living in the nineteenth century. The youngest child of a stock broker, she had never held a full-time job outside the home.
It didn’t help that, having been sent away to private school on a scholarship at age fourteen, I knew almost no one in my home town. My former classmates, most of them from New York City and Boston, had all gone off to college, where, unlike me, they remained. My high school girlfriend lived in New York City, only an hour’s train ride away, but with my confidence gone, my libido was in hiding. I simply couldn’t get off my mat to go see her.
Every night, I assured my parents that the next day I would catch the first train to New York City and ship out to Europe on a freighter, as I had been threatening to do for months. I could count on my mother to respond kindly: “I know you will, dear.” But not my father. Though he made few trips into New York himself – and then only to visit the major museums – he pressed me daily to “buckle down and do it.”
“I’m going tomorrow, Dad. Take it easy.”
“Where have I heard that before?” he would ask. “You said the same thing yesterday! And the day before.”
“Don’t worry, man,” I would tell him. “I’ve scoped it out. I’m going tomorrow.”
It got so that I even convinced myself: tomorrow I would do it. But every morning, I would wake up with a terrible sinking sensation and go right back to sleep. I developed a persistent headache. One day dragged into the next and a new year rolled around. I couldn’t sleep, and I could make no sense of my waking life. I’d been eighteen years old for nine months, legally adult and free, but I couldn’t get out of the basement.
Then, one evening in late January 1959, after I’d been home for three months, my father ventured into the cellar. He seemed more upbeat than usual, or maybe less pained at the sight of me. He wore a sweater and slippers and clenched a lit pipe between his teeth. Approaching my straw mat with the prudence of a lion tamer, he tossed me the most recent issue of The New Yorker, folded open to the “Profiles” page.
“This might be an interesting avenue of approach,” he said. Without waiting for my response, he returned upstairs to have an evening cocktail with my mother. I stared at the article, titled “No Feeling of Falling.” A crudely drawn illustration depicted a broad-shouldered man wearing a football helmet, bubble goggles, and two parachutes – one on his back and a smaller one on his chest.
Grudgingly I read the first two sentences: “Jacques André Istel, a twenty-nine-year-old French-American with a Princeton education and a distinguished family background of banking and international finance, is the nation’s leading parachutist. It is scarcely too much to say that Istel is the parachute movement in the United States.”
I stood up from my mat and went upstairs to sit on the living room sofa, where the light was better for reading. My sister and brother, when they saw me, began laughing and playing chopsticks on the piano, but I hardly noticed their antics. I learned that Jacques Istel lived with his beautiful wife, Claudia, and his business partner, Lew Sanborn, in a secluded twenty-seven-room hilltop mansion in Bedford, New York, a town that just happened to be only four miles down the road. The writer pointed out that, despite Istel’s family wealth, he had gained real-world experience by hitchhiking, working odd jobs, and getting into trouble. His thirst for adventure had proved nearly inexhaustible, leading him as a youth into all sorts of delinquent and attention-getting behavior. (At age nine, while playing a game he called “bombardier,” he broke all 175 panes of glass in his uncle’s greenhouse.) He later became a Marine Corps lieutenant in Korea, and in recent years, a combination of rebelliousness and fastidious discipline had propelled him past many obstacles, to a position of prominence in the international parachuting world (whatever that was).
As I continued to read, my headache went away and I felt unusually alert. The thirteen-page profile alluded to the military aspects of parachuting and to international parachute competition, and it portrayed the United States as fertile ground for this as-yet-unrecognized sport. The profile writer, Robert Lewis Taylor, concluded that Istel “feels that he is exploring a vast and silent new medium, the deep blue well of the sky, and who knows what may come of it?”
I stood up from the sofa, my head suddenly clear, and joined the family for dinner, then asked my father for the keys to the car.
It is characteristic of all propitious relationships that the moment of first contact seems, in retrospect, inevitable. It happens with love, and it happens with apprenticeships.
It was bitter cold that late January night when I drove to the neighboring town of Bedford. My father had described what he felt sure was the entrance to Istel’s property – a nondescript and narrow macadam driveway marked by a battered black mailbox – a few miles east of town. I found the driveway with no problem. Icy in spots, it wound, snakelike, up a very steep and heavily wooded hillside, and broke out suddenly into a cul-de-sac directly in front of Istel’s stone mansion. I parked my father’s two-door Chevy between a vintage Bugatti racecar, partially covered with a tarpaulin, and a Mercedes 300-sl convertible. A green Volkswagen Bug and a ’57 Ford station wagon were parked in front of the garage.
I killed the headlights and waited for guard dogs to bark, but nothing broke the silent darkness surrounding the mansion. When a first-floor light came on, I stepped out of the car, took one last hit off my cigarette, and blew smoke at the stars. Leaving my ski cap and coat in the car, I walked to the front door.
It opened just as I was poised to knock.
I had expected someone other than Jacques André Istel to come to the door, but there he stood in khaki pants and a white T-shirt, looking just as “simian” as The New Yorker profile had described him: jet black hair, hunched shoulders, jaw and neck thrust forward, as if he were some great ape about to beat his chest at a challenger. A normal person might have recoiled, but I was no normal person that night. Perhaps that’s why I ignored his hostile affect and took a cue from his expression, which seemed both challenging and hopeful, as if he had all along expected someone to show up on his doorstep at just this time of night, though he wasn’t yet willing to grant that I was that person.
“What is it you want?” he asked, his French accent stronger than I had imagined.
“I want to make a parachute jump,” I said, rubbing my bare hands together.
Istel chuckled. “Hey, Lew!” he called over his shoulder. I looked beyond Istel, into the wide but completely bare foyer – no furniture or art of any kind – and watched Lew walk jauntily toward the door. He had a pleasant face – smooth-browed, soft, and as wholesome as a Midwestern farmer’s – and a welcoming smile.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” said Istel.
“Yeah,” said Lew, “I see!” He held out his hand to me. “Lew Sanborn.”
I said my name and shook his hand, then belatedly shook Istel’s.
I stood there shivering while Istel launched into a lengthy description of his plans to open the first sport parachuting center in the United States. I hadn’t expected a sales pitch, but I listened politely. When Istel was finished, both men stood there staring at me, Sanborn apparently amused by my impulsive late-evening visit.
“We’re going to open the center in May,” said Istel, his lower jaw thrust forward, as if he were trying to retain a mouthful of water even as he spoke.
“Sounds good,” I said, “but when can I make a jump? I might not be around in May.”
“Are you looking for work?” Istel asked.
“Yeah,” said Sanborn, “are you looking for work?”
Unprepared for the question, I stammered that I was just about to ship out on a Scandinavian freighter headed for a port in Europe. “Going to Brooklyn tomorrow,” I said. “Probably ship out within the week. Might be gone a year or two. Don’t know.”
“Really?” said Istel.
“Hey, that’s great,” said Sanborn. “A year or two!”
They were toying with me, I could tell, but I didn’t let on that I knew. I figured it was a test of some kind.
“Yep,” I said. “Just about to ship out. So . . . when can I make a parachute jump?”
“How much does that pay – working on a freighter?” asked Sanborn.
I’d heard rumors that apprentice seamen on non-union freighters earned two dollars and fifty cents a day. “Two-fifty a day,” I said. “Plus room and board, obviously. Since it’s a freighter.”
“Obviously,” said Istel, looking at Sanborn and nodding.
“Obviously,” said Sanborn, nodding at Istel. “Since it’s a freighter.”
“Okay,” said Istel. “Two dollars and fifty cents a day – that’s what we’ll pay you.” He extended his hand to shake on the deal.
I hesitated. Did he think I was that much of a sucker? I could make two-fifty an hour, even without a college degree.
“Plus room and board, of course,” said Sanborn, holding a finger up to Istel’s face, as if he’d suddenly become my agent. “And the jumps are free, remember that.”
“Of course,” said Istel, his hand still extended. “You won’t get rich working for us,” he added “but I’ll guarantee you that if you work hard and stick with us, you’ll make a name for yourself and have a great time doing it.”
He had me. We all shook hands again. And with that, they moved aside and invited me in.
Two days later, at the wheel of Istel’s green Volkswagen Beetle, I headed north on a mission to tack up parachuting posters in restaurants, ski centers, and college dorms all over New England. Because I had attended boarding school in southern Vermont, I was familiar with most of the ski centers, the roads, and how to negotiate them in winter (no interstates then). My itinerary would take me straight up to Mont Blanc in Quebec, back down through Vermont, with stops at Stowe, Sugarbush, and Killington, and then east into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where I’d hit Dartmouth College and Tuckerman’s Ravine. Istel fronted me cash for expenses and Sanborn loaded the Beetle with two boxes full of bright orange posters announcing the May opening of the Orange Sport Parachuting Center, in Orange, Massachusetts. The artfully painted posters depicted a single-engine airplane silhouetted against a white sun. Beneath the plane, a spread-eagled skydiver fell into empty space. Jumped Yet? It’s Great! read the bold-face copy. It was the most provocative advertisement I’d ever seen, even more challenging than the war bond posters my father had painted during World War II. One of his had depicted three children standing in the shadow of a Nazi swastika. Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them, it warned. That dark challenge had been met. Now it was time for a new adventure, a new test of will. And where better to go than up?
Along with the posters, I carried two main parachutes and a chest-mounted reserve chute. I also packed white coveralls, a pair of thick-soled Corcoran boots, a white football helmet, and bubble goggles.
“Anyone asks,” Sanborn had said, “just suit up and give them a full-gear demonstration.”
I could not imagine giving such a demonstration to a stranger, especially since I had never even been in a small airplane, much less jumped from one. But neither could I wait to try on the gear. I spent the first night in Putney, Vermont, at the home of a former teacher. It snowed the next day and took me eight hours to get into Canada. When a snowplow almost buried the car, I pulled off the main highway just a few miles south of Montreal and stopped at a little roadside establishment called L’Auberge something-or-other. The snow banks in the parking lot were ten feet high.
“How much for a single room?” I asked the middle-aged woman at the reception desk.
“Vous êtes seul?” she asked.
“What?” I asked.
“You are alone?” she asked again, apparently disgusted by the need to speak English. Heavy bell-shaped earrings stretched her earlobes to the limit; gravity tugged at her fleshy cheeks.
“Yes,” I said. “A single room, please.”
She looked at me with suspicious, mascaraed eyes.
The room rate did not conform to my strict expense budget, but I had no choice. I signed the register and proudly noted my professional affiliation as “Parachutes Incorporated, U.S.A.” The woman issued me the room key, and pointed to an interior hallway just off the lobby.
“No outside entrance?” I asked, illustrating my question with hand gestures.
“Comment?” she asked. She smelled of tobacco and talcum powder.
“Never mind,” I said.
I unloaded the car and carried everything – parachutes, kit bags, posters – through a set of glass doors, into the motel lobby, and down a long hall to my spacious room. It took me four or five trips, each step monitored by the huffy proprietor. I dumped everything on the bed. After parking the car, I bought a Coke and some peanuts in the lobby and went to my room, eager to be alone with the equipment.
I stripped off my outer garments, and stepped into the jump suit, buttoning it up to the neck. Next, I put on and laced up the spit-polished jump boots, the tops of which came to my midcalves. I pulled heavy rubber bands over the boots, and bloused the cuffs of the coveralls, military style. I stood up, two inches taller in cushioned soles, and admired myself in the large mirror above the dresser.
“Not bad,” I said out loud.
I took the free fall parachute from its kit bag and arranged the harness. Then onto my shoulders I heaved it, like a thirty-pound dinner jacket. Sanborn had told me this particular parachute design was an example of the latest technology – something the U.S. Army was just itching to get its hands on. Gone was the old central release mechanism used in World War II. On this chute, the chest and leg straps each had a foolproof quick-release buckle, and the canopy lines could be jettisoned easily if you were being dragged along the ground in a high wind.
I had rehearsed all this information on the drive north. Now that I was actually suiting up, it began to make sense. Watching myself in the mirror, I tightened the straps, stowing the excess under a special elastic cover provided for that purpose. I snapped the reserve chute to two d-rings on the front of the harness and cinched the whole business tight to my body. I put on the bubble goggles, donned the football helmet, and snapped the chin strap. The smell of dry silk and the linseed stink of canvas made me feel brave.
Completely outfitted, I gazed in the mirror. Captivated by the person I saw standing there, as I had been mesmerized by photographs and paintings of soldiers when I was a boy, I felt like a man about to pass through a turnstile into some mythic world. It would be easy to underestimate the significance of that moment – pass it off as adolescent posturing – but I think it was precisely then that two energies began to interact within me: desire and will. By desire I don’t mean a conscious wanting, as in wanting to be free and heroic, but rather an ill-defined longing – like that of Narcissus – for some satisfactory reflection of myself. And by will, I simply mean intent. I did not have to decide anything. As I stared at myself in the mirror, longing was transformed miraculously into intent. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t jumped yet. At that moment, I had no doubt at all that I would. The proof stood right there in front of me. The commitment was already made. A feeling of warmth spread through my solar plexus, as if I had just swallowed hot soup. I was going to shake off the curse of the college dropout – and escape what I perceived at the time to be my father’s limited world. Soon I would be testing the rarefied air of the parachutist.
Only a handful of Americans jumped out of airplanes for fun in those days. Air-to-air free fall photography did not yet exist. What would it feel like, I wondered, falling all alone through space, free and entirely on my own? “Like lying on a mattress of air,” Istel had said, “no feeling of falling at all.”
I could only barely imagine free fall, but I had no trouble envisioning the reputation that would result from such an adventure. Shamelessly, I held an interview with the press right then and there in the motel room. I positioned myself in profile to the mirror, so that I could glance occasionally at the handsome fellow in the glass and admire his strawberry blond hair and his intense blue eyes. I began addressing a very pretty female reporter who just happened to pick me for a private interview and who chose for some inexplicable reason, to sit cross-legged on the end of the bed, pencil in hand, notepad resting on her otherwise bare knee.
“Am I ever scared?” I said, shooting her a cocky grin. “Well, not scared, exactly. But a modicum of apprehension is healthy when you’re jumping from a height of twelve thousand feet or so. After all, you’re plummeting toward the earth like a rock. At higher altitudes, lack of oxygen complicates the situation . . . Why, yes, actually, I do. I’m glad you ask. I feel it is important that young people have a challenge such as this, but it is not for the faint of heart, as you can imagine . . . Afraid of heights? Me? . . . Do they always send such pretty reporters to cover international championship events like this? . . . Am I free for dinner? You mean tonight? Should we maybe fool around first?”
Just then there came a loud knock on the door. I froze. “Just a minute!” I shouted, ripping off my helmet and bubble goggles. I began frantically loosening the reserve chute tie-downs. But it was too late. The proprietor, using her own key, opened the door. She gasped when she saw me.
“Je le savais!” she screamed.
“What?” I said.
“Vous n’êtes pas seul!”
“What?”
Her breast heaved and her gullet trembled. “You are not alone! I knew this!”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I hear you talking to her! Je le savais! Where is she?”
I couldn’t decide which was worse, getting caught harboring an unpaid guest or talking to an imaginary woman.
“Who?” I asked.
The proprietor yanked open the closet door, then tore back the shower curtain. She even got down on all fours and peered under the bed.
“I’m alone!” I protested. I started to explain that I was rehearsing for a part in a movie, but she stood up and stomped out before I could finish.
“Really, it’s true!” I called after her. “I am alone!”
I was not alone, of course. Not really. You can’t be self-conscious and alone at the same time. I turned to the mirror again, my heart pounding with shame, my confidence shaken.
Two weeks later, when Istel and Sanborn sent me to live in Orange, Massachusetts, in a rundown farmhouse on the edge of Orange Municipal Airport, I felt as if I’d been assigned to paradise. Already living in the house were Nate Pond and his father, Sebastian “Batch” Pond. Nate, a twenty-seven-year-old Cornell graduate who had recently become a third partner in Parachutes Incorporated, was well on his way to becoming what my father would have called a “rough customer.” What struck me right away was the glint in his eye – at once playful and angry – and his restless staccato laugh. His father was both a gentleman farmer and a pilot. As a young man, Batch had flown the mail in Mexico. He liked his vodka and kept cases of it under his bed. Nate didn’t seem to have fallen very far from the tree, though he favored beer. I was assigned the smallest room in the farmhouse. When I got out of bed in the morning, my knees touched the wall. But it was better than the basement at home.
In the late 1950s, western Massachusetts was a region in precipitous decline, following the departure of the textile industry after the war. The town of Orange, though nicely situated in the foothills of the Berkshires, felt unprosperous and dreary. It reminded me of the coal mining town in How Green Was My Valley, the first movie I saw as a child. Aubuchon’s Hardware on Main Street was the place to be during the day, and you had a choice of three establishments in the evening: Frank’s Bar, which featured pickled eggs and fifteen-cent glasses of draft beer; the smoke-choked Orange Diner, where you could get a pretty good meatloaf dinner for a couple of bucks; or the upscale DiNapoli’s Ristorante, where you could dine in candlelit booths, complete with red-checkered tablecloths, and be served by the owner’s sultry, olive-skinned daughter.
I’d come to view devastated towns like Orange through rose-colored glasses – oh, glorious, rootless America! Since I’d never had to live for any length of time in such a place, I was free to admire decay and ignore the misery of the working poor and unemployed. Beneath my romantic view of poverty lay a thinly disguised arrogance born of privilege. I had a developer’s eye long before I learned to distrust the process of gentrification that has transformed so many American towns and cities; everywhere, broken down brick buildings, non-functioning watermills, and peeling picket fences resonated with potential. It helped, of course, that I was an advance scout for what would become a noisy invasion of skydivers – one followed closely by reporters and filmmakers. I was riding a gust of fresh air that would very soon put the town on the map.
We began building the jump center in February, when Lew Sanborn arrived from Bedford, bringing his expertise in carpentry and construction. We cleared out the large Quonset-style hangar, erected a wall of parachute storage bins, built six long parachute packing tables, and suspended a parachute canopy simulator from the I-beams. Next to the hangar, we converted a little wooden building into a classroom and installed thirty antique flip-top desks (complete with ink pots), a portable projection screen, and a rolling blackboard. Sometimes, during coffee breaks, I would light a cigarette and scribble in chalk cryptic messages on the blackboard, like Cogito ergo sum, or, Beware the philosophical implications of the transcendence of the ego. Nate would snort with contempt. “You asshole! That’s why erasers were invented.”
We dumped a truckload of sand near the flight line, then smoothed it out and set up a water-filled fifty-gallon drum to serve as a platform for practicing parachute landing falls (PLFs). We designed and constructed a mock-up of a Cessna 182, so students could learn the feel of the open door and rehearse aircraft exits.
Istel had leased Orange Municipal Airport from the Town of Orange for twenty years, in exchange for building an aircraft hangar, on the condition that if Russia invaded America, the airport would revert to its intended purpose as a military evacuation facility. Along with three five-thousand-foot runways, the federal government had built a modern administration building, complete with plate glass windows, Unicom radio, weather indicators, multidirectional loudspeakers, and a large wind sock. Not to mention some pretty nice indoor restrooms and a generous reception area. The large parking lot seemed tailored for our arrival, and, just as Istel had envisioned it, high octane gas was available and would attract the pilots of multi-engine planes, along with wealthier clientele.
By early March, all the planes and vehicles were painted blue and white, and we had stenciled Istel’s company logo everywhere. I began bulldozing a drop zone in the overgrown triangle formed by the intersecting runways. In the evenings – every evening except Sunday, when nothing was open – Lew, Nate, Batch, and I would hit one of the eating establishments and then close Frank’s Bar. It’s hard to imagine, at this remove, how delicious a pickled egg tasted when seasoned with salt and washed down with a glass of flat Pabst Blue Ribbon draft beer. Perhaps it’s less hard to imagine why, instead of buckling down to college life, I preferred coming in from the winter wind after a hard day’s work and hanging out with grown men who talked about dangerous things.
Every single night, after listening to tales of bravery and foolishness, and after nearly choking with laughter about close calls and fatal jumps, I would ask Lew or Nate, “So, when can I jump?” “Maybe tomorrow, if it clears up,” Nate would say. Lew reminded me that the air got two to three degrees colder for every thousand feet of altitude. “Soon. Soon.”
For weeks on end, I acted like one of the men, singing stupid military songs, falling backwards in unison off barstools, and arm wrestling, but I still couldn’t claim to be one of them. I’d been working in Orange for two months, swaggering in front of townspeople, the way I had postured in front of the motel mirror – and answering their questions with the same empty authority I’d displayed for my imaginary reporter in Montreal. Yet I still hadn’t jumped. It began to eat at me: what if I chickened out when the time came? Would I freeze like the airborne jumper Lew told me about, whose knuckles had to be pried loose from the door? That guy was screaming like a baby when they tossed his ass out of the plane. Or, worse, what if I froze and they didn’t even throw me out of the plane, but just brought me back down and said it was okay? Where could I possibly go after that? The tension grew until it was nearly unbearable.
Then, one balmy day in late March, while we ripped eight-foot lengths of tempered masonite through a table saw, Lew suddenly killed the power and asked Nate, “What do you think, should we get it over with?”
“If we have to,” growled Nate, taking off his leather nail belt and throwing it on the tarmac. “Goddammit! I guess we have to, right?”
“I mean, we might as well,” said Lew, looking exasperated.
“Get what over with?” I asked.
“I mean if we don’t, he’ll be nagging us right up to opening day,” said Lew.
“Pain in the fucking ass,” said Nate, spitting a long stream of tobacco juice onto the tarmac.
“If we do it now,” said Lew, “maybe he’ll shut up and we can get some work out of him.”
“Fucking college boys,” said Nate, as if he’d never been one himself. “Always nagging. Should draft his ass, send him to Fort Bragg. That’d shut him up.”
“Shut who up?” I asked, removing my own nail belt. But I knew who, and I could feel a knot tightening in my stomach.
“We’ll give him that old beat-up white canopy,” said Lew.
Nate grinned. “You mean the one I used when I jumped in Czechoslovakia? The one that knocked me unconscious when it opened? Good idea!”
“Either that or the one we took off that dead guy – the one who creamed in down at Stormville. You cleaned the blood off it, right?”
“Sure did,” said Nate. “Fucking college boy. I’m getting hungry. Let’s get this over with.”
“Hey,” said Lew, “looks like Batch is already warming up the plane! I’ll help him take the door off.” He winked at me before he walked away.
“Go over there and get up on that oil drum,” ordered Nate.
Suddenly, I didn’t want to be alone with Nate Pond. I wanted Lew to be my jumpmaster, kind-hearted Lew.
“Do I look like I’ve got all day?” asked Nate. “Come on, goddammit.”
I leapt onto the oil drum and stood there.
“Now put your hands up over your head, like you’re holding the parachute suspension lines,” said Nate. “Good. Now jump off sideways and do a PLF.”
I leapt sideways into the air and landed with my feet together in the sand. The momentum caused me to fall onto my left side, and it carried my feet over my head so that I ended up lying on my right. This absorbed the energy of the fall; I’d been practicing it for months.
“Good,” said Nate. “You’re ready.”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“More than I got before my first jump. Fucking Istel. All this pansy-ass training. Come on, get suited up. You already know all this shit.”
Ten minutes later, I was sitting on the floor of the Cessna, with my back to the instrument panel, watching Batch adjust the trim tabs after takeoff. I could hardly believe it was finally happening. When I think about it now, from the perspective of a man even older than Batch was back then – when I put myself in the pilot’s seat and look down at the kid that was me sitting in the open door – I see a boy struggling with second thoughts. I knew already how to be brave – well, I knew the face of bravery, the affect required – but I also knew too much about the messy consequences of a parachute malfunction. I’d heard a lot of scary jump stories at Frank’s Bar. As I gazed down at the sparkling springtime landscape, where newly-melted snow was beginning to pool around yellowing willows, the notorious paratrooper song written to the tune of “Beautiful Dreamer” riffed in my head: “Beautiful streamer, open for me./ Blue skies above, but no canopy.”
Just before takeoff, Nate had attached my static line to a D-ring on the floor. As we ascended in a widening spiral above the airport, he double-checked the seating of the ripcord pins on my reserve chute. I experienced a surge of apprehension as I watched his cheeks jiggling in the cold air. My stomach felt suddenly bottomless. We made our first pass over the target at twenty-two hundred feet. Nate determined that because of high winds aloft, my exit point would be more than a mile distant from the drop zone, greatly reducing my chances of hearing instructions from Lew, who was waiting down there to guide me to an accurate landing. We soon climbed to twenty-five hundred feet. Batch banked the plane steeply before leveling out on jump run, and again I felt the bottom drop out of my belly. Apprehension threatened to mushroom into fear, but when I took a deep breath, it subsided. As we passed over the target a second time, I swung my legs out into the wind, positioned myself in the doorway, and looked straight down. I saw Lew, half a mile below, staring up at us, his eyes shaded with his right hand, a bullhorn at the ready in his left.
The plane droned on until all the familiar landmarks passed and bare forest was all that was visible below. After shouting a few last-minute course corrections to Batch, Nate put his hand on my shoulder and yelled that I should reach out and grab the wing strut with both hands. He hollered, “Cut!” Batch throttled back, and the plane seemed almost to buck as it slowed to near stall speed. I placed my left foot on a metal step and my right foot on the landing wheel, and I pulled myself out there in the wind. From my perch beneath the high wing, I glanced over my shoulder at Nate and his father; their mouths were pulled back in identical tight-lipped smiles. Suddenly, it felt perfectly natural that I should kick my feet out behind me and push off with both hands.
It felt right to let go.
With a static line, it takes only three or four seconds before the chute opens. A bright red canopy suddenly blossomed above me, and when I looked down I found myself transfixed by the sight of my own two feet dangling so totally free above the earth. This was me alone up here! Gone was the airplane, gone the obnoxious sound of its engine. Through the ear holes in my football helmet I heard only the flapping of nylon in the breeze. A full minute passed before Lew’s amplified voice broke the silence, warning me to turn into the wind to avoid landing in the woods – a precious minute, during which I simply drifted in a self-amazed ecstasy of accomplishment. It was the most intensely private moment of my life up to that time. If only Dad could see me now! I thought. I couldn’t wait to get down and call my family.
Fifteen months later, in August 1960, a red and yellow bi-plane landed dead-stick on the tarmac, right in front of the airport administration building. Its engine off, the plane touched down silently, bounced once, and then careened wildly between two parked aircraft before screeching to a stop at the gas pumps. A few dozen spectators who had gathered to watch the parachuting let out a collective gasp, as if they’d just witnessed a stunt at some Sunday air show.
Since I was now running the parachuting operation, it was my job to reprimand the pilot. I’d been standing on the flight line, answering some student jumpers’ nagging questions about the wind and when it might die down. I excused myself and walked over to the fueling area. With upturned palms, I gave the pilot my best what-the-hell gesture.
“Sorry about that,” he yelled. “I plumb ran outta gas!” Craggy-faced and square-jawed, he was wearing a beat-up leather flying helmet and a faded silk scarf. Lifting his oil-spattered aviator goggles, he flashed an appealing grin, completing the iconic image of the outlaw barnstormer. He looked to be about my father’s age, but, unlike my father, weather-beaten and rugged. I liked the guy right away. I could tell by the sealed-off front cockpit that the plane, a Stearman, was used for crop spraying. I was not about to hassle a working pilot.
“No problem,” I told him.
“Go ahead and top it off,” he said.
I gassed up the Stearman, took the pilot’s cash, and stood back as he gunned the engine and swung the tail around. At the last minute, I ran over and yelled up to him, “Too bad that front seat’s closed off, I’d love to jump out of this beast!” He eased off on the throttle and hollered back, “Get your chute and climb on. I’ll take you up right now.”
“Climb on?” I asked.
“Right there on the wing. Just watch you don’t put your foot through the fabric.”
I ran back to my students and told them I was going up to test the wind conditions. “Hang in for a while,” I said, grabbing my gear. A few minutes later the Stearman was roaring along runway three-one, with me lying face down on the lower wing, my arms locked around a diagonal strut. It took nearly the full mile of runway to gather enough speed to clear the trees at the end – my body on the wind-whipped wing had disturbed its natural lift. I had to hang on for a good thirty minutes more before we reached a respectable jump altitude of three thousand feet. My elbows ached and my ribs felt numb from lying on my chest-mounted reserve chute, but when I finally stood up and inched my way forward against the powerful prop blast, I experienced a kind of epiphany – one of those moments it takes a lifetime to digest. Looking down over the leading edge of the bright red wing and seeing the landscape glide beneath me – green New England hills dotted with houses, steeples, and cows – I felt a surge of power so pure and thrilling, so sunlit and masculine, I would draw upon it for years to come. Everything seemed possible. I had earned the future.
In a month, I would leave Orange to begin my first semester at Columbia University. My father had already written the check. I would rent a tiny room near the campus, and New York City would soon swallow me whole. But I didn’t know that yet. Just then, I felt decidedly immortal, and when the pilot made a circular gesture with his gloved hand, suggesting we do a back loop, I gave him a heartfelt thumbs-up and hung on for dear life. The earth below disappeared from my view and the sky and sun revolved in a mad crescendo of full-throttled power accompanied by a G-force that nearly buckled my knees.
When the plane leveled, the pilot smiled and jerked his head toward the tail: Time to get off my wing. I didn’t want to go, didn’t want the flight to end. It all seemed so clear from up there. I had discovered the perfect intersection of willingness and opportunity, hidden in an otherwise misty landscape of luck or fate or whatever you want to call the unknown. I could do anything, if I dared.
I pulled myself closer to the engine cowling and inched my way back along the yellow fuselage, careful to step only on the narrow skid-proof surface. “Thanks!” I yelled to the pilot. Then I simply let go, and the wind swept me from the wing like a speck of dust.
Dustin Beall Smith’s essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and Writing on the Edge. His book, Key Grip: A Memoir of Endless Consequences, will be published by Houghton Mifflin later this year.