“Then we just slip the ripcord pins in like… so. And we’re ready to jump.” He patted the pack and tucked in some loose flaps of material with the packing paddle. Then he was the laconic Stu once again, asking tersely if we might be running another jump again this afternoon.
“I don’t see why not,” Paul said, walking into earshot and casting an appraising eye at the finished pack. I wondered if he was tempted to jump again. It had been years since he had quit, a battered sky-diver after some 230 jumps, grounded with injuries that kept him in a hospital for months.
“Might as well go up right now,” he said, “if you promise to come a little closer to the target.”
“I’ll try.”
Five minutes later they were off in the Luscombe, and I was watching from the ground, holding Paul’s movie camera and charged with the job of getting some good shots of the jump.
In the zoom-lens viewfinder, Stu was a tumbling black dot, stabilizing in a cross, turning a huge diving spiral one way, pausing, turning the other way. He was in complete control of his body in flight; he could go any direction, I thought, but up. He fell for nearly twenty seconds, then his arms jerked in, and out, pulling the ripcord, and the chute snapped open. The sound of the nylon firing open was a single shot from a 50-caliber pistol. As loud and sharp as that.
Like every jumper, Stu lived for the freefall part of the jump, that bare twenty seconds in a twenty-four-hour day. He was now “under canopy,” which term must be spoken in a very bored tone, for the real jump is over, although there is 2000 feet yet to fall, and some delicate handling still to do of a cloth flying machine that is 28 feet wide and 40 feet tall.
He was tracking well, coming right down toward me as I stood by the windsock. I filmed the last hundred feet of the jump and his touchdown, moving back to keep his boots out of Paul’s expensive lens.
A jumper, I saw in the viewfinder, is moving at a pretty good clip at that moment he crashes into the ground. I felt the world shudder as Stu hit, 20 feet away. The canopy drifted down to catch me, but I dodged north. I was proud of Stu, suddenly. He was part of our little team, he had courage and skill that I didn’t have, and he worked like a professional, a seasoned jumper, though there were only twenty-five jumps in his log.
“Pretty nice, kid.”
“At least I didn’t get off in the rye-patch.” He slipped out of the harness and began gathering the suspension lines into a long braided chain. A moment later Paul landed and walked over to us.
“Man, I really burned off the altitude,” he said. “What did you think of that slip? I really had her stood up on the wing, didn’t I? Coming down like a ROCK! What did you think of that?”
“I didn’t see your slip, Paul. I was taking pictures of Stu.”
At precisely that moment a girl of six or seven walked into our group, offered a small blank book, and shyly asked Stu for his autograph.
“Me?” Stu said, stunned to be on stage and in the center of the spotlight.
She nodded. He wrote his name boldly on the paper and the girl ran off with her prize.
“The STAR!” Hansen said. “Everybody wants to watch the STAR! Nobody watches my great slip, because the old glory-hound is ON STAGE!”
“Sorry about that, Paul,” said Stu.
I made a note to get a box of gold stars at the dime-store and stick them all over everything Stu owned.
The Star laid out his chute at once, and soon was lost in the task of repacking for tomorrow. I walked toward the biplane, and Paul followed.
“No more passengers, this time,” he said.
“Quiet before the storm.” I patted the biplane. “Want to fly her?”
It was a loaded question. The old Detroit-Parks biplane, as I had told Paul over and over, was the most difficult airplane I had ever learned to fly.
“There’s a bit of a crosswind,” he said cautiously, giving me a way to withdraw my invitation.
“No problem, if you stay awake on landing,” I said. “She’s a pussycat in the air, but you got to stay pretty sharp on the landing. She wants to swerve, once in a while, and you have to be right there with the throttle and the rudder to catch her. You’ll do a great job.”
He didn’t say another word, but climbed quickly into the cockpit and pulled on helmet and goggles. I cranked the inertia starter, called “CLEAR!” and fell back while the engine roared into life. It was a strange light feeling to see my airplane start engine with someone else in the cockpit.
I walked around and leaned on the fuselage, by his shoulder. “’Member to go around and try again if you don’t like any landing. You got an hour and a half fuel, so no problem there. If she wants to swerve on you, just give her throttle and rudder.”
Paul nodded, and in a burst of power swung the plane about and taxied to the grass strip. I went back and picked up his movie camera, focused down on him with the zoom lens, and watched his takeoff through the viewfinder. I felt as though it was my first solo in the biplane, not Paul’s. But there he was, smoothly off the ground and climbing, and I was struck with what a pretty sight the biplane made in the air, and the sweet soft chugging that the Whirlwind made in the distance.
They climbed, turned, swooped gently through the sky as I walked with the camera to the far end of the strip, ready to film the landing. I was still nervous, and felt lonely without my airplane. That was my whole world this summer, circling around up there, and now it was all under the control of someone else. I had just four friends that I would allow to fly that airplane, and Hansen was one of them. So what, I thought. So he breaks the thing up to nothing. His friendship is more important to me than the airplane. The airplane is just a bunch of sticks and wires and cloth, a tool for learning about the sky and about what kind of person I am, when I fly. An airplane stands for freedom, for joy, for the power to understand, and to demonstrate that understanding. Those things aren’t destructible.
Paul now had the chance he had been awaiting for two years. He was a good pilot and he was measuring himself against the hardest machine he had ever heard of.