On Second Thought ...

ON SECOND THOUGHT…

Steve McCluer

Some might argue that beer drinking and skydiving should not be associated with each other. But they usually are . . . although usually not at the same time.

The guys at the front table had obviously started their beer-drinking game well before the sunset jump. I gave them a wide berth and looked for my group in a tavern filled with skydivers. I found them in the back.

Beer in hand, I took a seat at the table and joined one of several conversations going on at once. Minutes passed before I notice Jim Porter sitting alone in a corner. Jim was a mousy sort of guy – small, quiet, thick glasses, a librarian; not one likely to fit in with the testosterone-pumped skydivers who packed this bar every Saturday night.

Jim was well known among the jumper community. Not because of his skydiving ability, but because of his notorious lack of it.

A novice jumper today can jump tandem with an experienced jumpmaster sharing the same parachute. But to learn to jump alone, a novice normally starts with a static line – a twelve-foot rope that automatically opens the parachute once the jumper has left the plane. After a couple of jumps, he progresses to pulling a “dummy ripcord.” It’s a flag. If the jumpmaster can see it in the jumper’s hand, he knows the student can stabilize his body position enough to safely pull a ripcord. After three successive dummy pulls, the student can be cleared for a genuine “clear-and-pull,” freefall, better known as a “hop-and-pop.” Most students are cleared to open their own parachute after five to seven static line jumps. Their total freefall lasts about three-to-five seconds.

So, why am I boring you with this trivia? Because Jim Porter had twenty static line jumps! It might be a world record.

I was surprised to seem Jim here for a couple of reasons.

First, Jim was an introverted guy, one whom I had never seen hanging out with this rowdy crowd.

Second . . . Jim Porter was supposed to be dead!

I walked over and sat down in front of him. He nodded and smiled in his bashful way. He looked beyond pale, but otherwise seemed quite serene.

“How are you doing, Jim?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just relaxing.”

“You’re okay after that jump today?”

‘Yeah. The landing was pretty hard, but I’m okay.”

“Pretty hard? Yeah, I would think so. It could have been a lot harder. You really shook people up around here. You scared the hell out of me!”

“What do you mean? Jim asked. He seemed sincere. I looked at him in disbelief as I replayed his jump in my mind.

* * *

The sun had already disappeared behind the western hills. Across the valley, the sky was pink above the eastern hills. A couple dozen jumpers were gathering their parachutes from the jump they had just made when we heard the Cessna approaching at thirty-five-hundred feet. Normally a student jumper would not get these seasoned jumpers’ attention. But word had gotten out that Jim Porter was about to make his twenty-first jump . . . his first hop-and-pop! We grinned at each other and looked up.

The Cessna pilot cut the engine. We could see a figure sitting in the open door of the plane for an unusually long time, then it separated. One-two-three; time to open. Four-five six. Still no chute. The falling figure, silhouetted against the pink sky, was easy to see. We knew that by this time the chute should be open.

Most of us jumpers had seen old movies about the first people to jump from airplanes. Conventional wisdom at that time had been that freefall was not possible. A body could not fall stable, they said, but instead would go into a spin, increasing in speed until the jumper blacked out. It was laughably absurd to this crowd, many of whom had logged hundreds of hours of freefall. But now we were seeing it played out. Jim was spinning.

Eight-nine-ten seconds. The falling body was past the safe opening altitude. He was rotating clockwise – or spinning, to be more exact – at about one revolution every two seconds. We knew it was easy to correct. Just stick out both arms and legs as straight as you can make them.

But Jim did not do that. He just kept falling and spinning, falling and spinning, growing larger in our vision. Maybe his arm was tucked in in with his hand on the ripcord. Maybe one leg was tucked.

A momentary silence fell as we began to realize that something was terribly wrong. People then began to shout.

“Pull! Pull! Pull the damned ripcord!”

Of course, the falling figure could hot hear us. Maybe he couldn’t remember how to pull.

People were not looking up now. They were looking out. The spinning figure had dropped below the horizon made by the distant hills. A woman turned her back to the scene and covered her eyes, certain it was too late.

Others stared in shock, no sure whether to watch something they did not want to see.

Then it opened. Not an emergency chute, but a much slower main chute designed to deploy more slowly. Could it fully deploy before impact? The jumper’s body went vertical under the canopy, but he was still spinning, less than a hundred feet above ground. Each spin wrapped the lines tighter, squeezing the canopy into a smaller bubble. His body hit the ground and collapsed in a cloud of dust, the entrammeled parachute still billowing in a slight breeze. We all ran to where the body lay.

Then Jim Porter stood up and dusted himself off.

* * *

“What do you mean?” Jim asked again, calmly sipping his beer.

“I mean, one second! Not even that. One-half of one second! That’s how much time you had! If you had taken half-a-second longer, right now you would be a smashed-up body on a gurney in a morgue. How can you even be here?”

Jim Porter didn’t say anything for a moment. His face revealed a slight grin as he stood and winked at me.

“You are absolutely right,” he said. And Jim Porter walked calmly out of that bar.

Nobody has ever seen him again.

Did I really see him?