| The Bridge 8 |
| 1 | EIGHT I felt the same as laying out flat on the kitchen table in an airplane two miles up, and then getting kicked out the door. One instant the plane was full-size, inches from my fingers ... I was falling, but I could grab and get back aboard if I desperately needed to. The next instant was too late, the closest thing to grab was fifty feet above me, flying away a hundred feet per second. I fell alone, straight down. |
| 2 | Now it was straight down, fast. Oh, my, I thought. Am I sure I want to do this? When you live for the moment, skydiving is a whale of a lot of run. It's when you start caring about the next moment that it tarnishes. I fell down the wild vortex, watching the ground, how big it was, how hard and flat, feeling awfully little, myself. No cockpit, nothing to hang on to. Not to worry, Richard, I thought. |
| 3 | Right here on your chest is the ripcord handle, you can pull it any time you want and out comes the parachute. There's another ripcord on the reserve, if the main chute fails. You can pull it now, if you'd feel better, but then you'd be missing the fun of free-fall. I glanced at the altimeter on my wrist. Eight thousand feet. Seven thousand five . . . Way below on the ground was a white-gravel target upon which I aimed to stand in not too many seconds. |
| 4 | But look at all that empty air between now and then! Oh, my . . . - Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it observes. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or unhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. Its only job is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we are worthwhile human beings. Now perched the observer on my reserve harness, wearing his own little jumpsuit and parachute, taking notes on my behavior. |
| 5 | Much more nervous than ought to be at this stage. Eyes too wide; heart-rate too fast. Mixed in with exhilaration is one part too many fright. Grade so far on Jump #29: C-minus. My observer grades hard. Altitude five thousand two hundred . . . four thousand eight hundred. Push my hands ahead of me in the storm of wind and I'd fall feet-down; hands back and I'd dive headfirst toward the ground. This is the way I thought flying without an airplane might be, except for the forlorn wish that I could go up as fast as down. |
| 6 | Even a third as fast up would be fine. Wool-gathering during free-fall. Mind wanders aimlessly. Revised grade: D-plus. Altitude three thousand seven hundred feet. Still high, but my hand came in for the ripcord, hooked it on the right thumb, pulled hard. The cable slid free; I heard a rattling at my back, which would be the pilot-chute opening. Pulled early. Too eager to get under canopy. D. The rattling continued. |
| 7 | By now I should have had the falling-into-featherpile shock of the main canopy opening. Instead, I fell unchecked. For no reason, my body started to spin. Something . . . , I thought, is something wrong? I looked over my shoulder into the rattling. The pilot-chute thrashed and blurred, caught on a harness-strap. Where the main canopy should have been was a great knot of tangled nylon, reds and blues and yellows roaring in the vortex. |
| 8 | Sixteen seconds-fifteen-to fix it before I'd hit the ground. It looked to me, spinning, as though I were going to hit just shy of the orange grove. Maybe in the trees, but more likely not. Cut away, I had learned in practice. I'm supposed to cut away from the main canopy now and deploy the reserve from my chest-pack. Is this fair, a parachute failure on my twenty-ninth jump? I don't think this is fair! Mind uncontrolled. |
| 9 | No discipline. D-minus. It was just my luck, then, that time slowed down. A second took a minute to pass. Yet why is it so hard to get my hands up to the release-latches and cut away from the wreck of the canopy? My hands weighed tons, and I inched them slow-motion to the latches at my shoulders, an enormous effort. Is this worth the stram? They didn't tell me it would be so hard to reach the latches! In savage fury at my instructors, I grabbed the last half-inch to the releases and ripped them open. |
| 10 | Slow, slow. Way too slow. I stopped spinning, rolled over on my back to deploy the reserve, and to my dumb surprise saw the tangled nylon still with me! I was a. Roman candle in reverse, tied to a bright cloth flame falling, a rocket fired down from the sky. "Students, listen," the instructor had said. "This will probably never happen to you, but don't forget: Never deploy your reserve into a fouled main because the reserve will fail, too. |
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