the Fall

his is a story about the time I jumped out of a Cessna 182 at 10,000 feet without wearing a parachute. That’s not a metaphor, or a simile or anything. I did it. I wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been for free, but it was and I did and I doubt I will ever again. Obviously, I lived.

During college I worked on the school paper, and there was a skydiving firm that advertised in our sports section. That’s how I ended up going for nothing; my editor said the guy from the skydiving place would give us a free jump if we ran a story on him. I called the number from the ad and told the guy I was from the paper. He told me to come by on Tuesday. That’s how it happened. The whole thing took less than ten minutes.

By Monday night I’d told everyone. One of my friends asked if he could have my stereo if anything should happen, and I told him he could. I emailed a professor to let her know that, rather than attend her class the following Tuesday afternoon, I would be busy cheating death. Because I’d let her know in advance, she marked the absence as an excused one.

Tuesday came, and I drove the 15 miles to the airstrip. That’s really all it was, a strip of asphalt in an overgrown field next to a golf course, running into the half-cylinder of a corrugated steel hanger. I parked in the dirt next to the hanger, fished a reporter’s notebook from the back seat pocket, and walked to the front.

My photographer was late.

I got a kick out of saying “my photographer.” He was just some kid with a digital camera, but he granted me status. Because he was mine.

“I’m Todd,” I said to a strained looking woman standing near where the asphalt of the runway hit the concrete floor of the hanger, “from the newspaper. I’m looking for Carl?”

“Oh, he’ll be along,” the woman said. I could tell from her fingers and the way her eyes sat in her face that she was a pretty heavy smoker. “I’m Paula. Carl went to get the plane.”

“Oh, fine, fine.” We stood there looking at each other for a minute. I got out my pen. “Where is the plane?”

She named a town forty miles east. The plane lived forty miles east, and every day Carl drove the forty miles to get the plane and flew it here. Then, once everyone had fallen out of the plane, he flew back to his car and drove back to the hangar.