the Fall

From up here, you can see the cobalt blue lakes gathered in puddles, the lines where the foothills uplifted and the spaces where they were pushed apart by the glaciers. I looked down. I couldn’t see the airfield or the golf course.

While I was looking, Carl told me something that bent my head wrong for three days. He told me that in terms of skydiving, the dive was pretty terrible. My legs were bent wrong. I hadn’t arched correctly. I’d made him work much harder than he should have had to. It sounded like he was disappointed in me. Disappointed I hadn’t let us fly.

My legs and arms were still cold from the wind rushing past.

He said he thought my performance showed a great amount of disrespect to his sport, that of skydiving, and to him personally as an instructor and as a human being.

But fuck it, he said. We were both alive. We would both have beer with our dinners that night, and so he said the day wasn’t totally shot.

He told me all this 3,500 feet above an airstrip in the middle of a golf course, and then, just as quickly as we’d fallen 6,500 feet from an airplane, he let me play with the parachute toggles pointed out interesting landmarks.

I’d failed him. I’d failed at skydiving, at falling from a plane, I’d offended Carl, and I’d endangered both our lives. I think, because I wasn’t wearing any parachute, because it was in Carl’s hands that I’d placed my life, that I put more stock into his words then than I should have. I think, because I jumped and he slowed me down, it was very important for me to please him. All I know is that at 3,500 feet, strapped to a man who jumped out of planes for a living, I felt like I’d disobeyed my father. I felt as if I owed Carl something. I felt as if I’d let him down.

We landed, apparently, more successfully than we’d fallen, and Paula put some t-shirts on the sawhorse we’d used to practice our arching. I bought two, one for myself, and one for the photographer, collected my notepad, and drove home. We learned, after we’d gotten the pictures back, that my photographer hadn’t gotten the shot. He’d gotten a very nice picture of the floor of the airplane.

Everyone I’d told about the assignment wanted to know what happened. It was fine, I told them. It was everything I’d hoped for.

It took a few days before I could talk about what happened up there, 3,500 feet up, and once I did, once I put the day into words I felt less and less like a failure. The more I repeated exactly what had happened, the more I told my story, the more righteous I felt. The more of my words I bound to the ones Carl had used at 3,500 feet, the less indebted to him I felt. The more I felt that Carl’s speech could have waited.