the Fall

John went first. It was his birthday, and it seemed to make sense to do things that way. Sarah would go second and I, because I’d brought no money, would go last.

Carl clapped his hands. Our training complete, he walked over to a metal cabinet, pulled out a thin nylon harness from inside, and held it up so John could step into it.

This is what I meant when I was talking about the parachute in the beginning. We don’t wear a parachute. We wear a harness, Carl wears a parachute, and Carl clips himself to our harness right before we jump out of the plane. The idea is that as Carl’s parachute slows him down from 210 mph to 15, it will slow us down too, via five reinforced metal loops sewn into the back of our harness.

The whole thing, the whole idea of not having any cord to pull or straps to tighten, made me nervous. At the time, I thought this was because of the thickness of the nylon, or because of the tensile strength of the reinforced metal loops. Now I think that it was Carl. I was about to jump from a plane, and I’m not sure I trusted him to stop me before I hit the ground.

The plane took off with John and Carl and the pilot in it, and I stayed on the ground with Paula and Sarah and the high school kid Carl and Paula paid to pack the chutes. The drop zone is almost directly above the airfield, so to get there they have to fly in a big spiral. The spiral takes about twenty minutes. I tried to get some quotes from Paula, tried to figure out if she and Carl were, you know, together, but she wouldn’t say.

Around this time, my photographer showed up and I introduced him to Paula and Sarah. I would’ve introduced him to the kid packing the next chute, but I never met him in the first place, and he didn’t look up while I introduced him to the others.

“This is my photographer,” I said, passing him around. They all shook hands.

The loudspeaker riveted to the side of the hangar crackled and said John and Carl would jump in 30 seconds. There was a radio in the plane, and the loudspeaker was set up to say whatever the pilot said into the radio. We all looked up. We saw a dot moving across the sky. We saw another dot fall from the first toward the earth. And then we saw that dot split in two.

We knew it was very important that the dot with a parachute stay connected to the dot without one. We were sure this was very important. The dots moved farther apart.

Seconds passed. I fought the urge to reach for my notebook and record how Sarah gripped the wooden fence we both stood behind. More seconds. Then the kid behind us looked up from his chute packing and pointed somewhere out to the left of the two dots we were watching put distance between each other.

“Looks like they’re just about ready,” he said. The loudspeaker crackled. We’d been looking at the wrong dots. The faint buzz of the plane washed down from a bigger, shinier, redder dot, and Sarah’s grip on the rail loosened. This time I did take out my notebook, and we watched a new set of dots fall from the plane. This one stayed safely clipped together.

Carl and John skimmed into the grass next to the runway, and John stepped out of his harness. Sarah stepped into hers. My photographer took some pictures. The plane landed a few minutes later, and then Carl and Sarah taxied and took off on their spiral upwards. I stood behind the fence with John, and we waited until Carl and Sarah grew from a dot to a splotch to a blue and yellow striped parachute and slid into the grass on their bottoms. The plane landed and my photographer took some more pictures. I stepped into my harness. It made the zippered part of my pants stick out in a funny way.