The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

Is this worth the stram? They didn't tell me it would be so hard to reach the latches! In savage fury at my instructors, I grabbed the last half-inch to the releases and ripped them open.

Slow, slow. Way too slow.

I stopped spinning, rolled over on my back to deploy the reserve, and to my dumb surprise saw the tangled nylon still with me! I was a. Roman candle in reverse, tied to a bright cloth flame falling, a rocket fired down from the sky.

"Students, listen," the instructor had said. "This will probably never happen to you, but don't forget: Never deploy your reserve into a fouled main because the reserve will fail, too. It'll barber-pole up the streamer and it won't even slow you down! ALWAYS CUT AWAY!"

But I did cut away, and there's the main tangled, still jammed in the harness!

My observer snorted in disgust, over his clipboard.

Loses rationality under pressure: F is for Failed.

I felt the ground falling up behind me. The grass would hit the back of my neck at about 125 mph. Certainly a swift way to die. Why aren't I seeing my life flash in front of my eyes, why aren't I leaving my body before I hit, the way it says in books? PULL THE RESERVE!

Acts too late. Asks irrelevant questions. Basically poor human being.

I jerked the emergency ripcord, and instantly the reserve burst by my face, up from its pack like a silk snow-shell, cannon-fired into the sky. It streamed alongside the rag of the main; sure enough, I was tied to two Roman candles streaking down.

Then a slamwhite gunshot and the thing was open, full open, and I jerked to a halt in the air four hundred feet above the orange grove, a broken puppet dangling, rescued last-second on its strings.

Time jammed back into high gear, trees whipped by, I hit the ground on my boots and fell in the grass not dead but breathing hard.

Had I already smashed in upside-down killed, I thought, then got myself dragged backwards two seconds in time by a mercy-chute and saved?

Plummeting death was an alternate future I had barely managed not to choose, and as it veered away from me I wanted to wave it goodbye. Wave sadly, almost. In that future, already an alternate past, I had sudden answers to my long curiosity about dying.

Survived the jump. Bungled through with luck and brilliant action from guardian angels. Guardian angels: A. Richard: F.

I gathered up the reserve, hugged it lovingly into a cool foamy pile alongside the failed main. Then I sat on the ground by the trees, lived the last minutes again, wrote into my pocket notebook what had happened and what I had seen and thought, what the mean little observer had said, the sad farewell to death, everything I could remember. My hands didn't shake, writing. Either I felt no shock from the jump, or I was suppressing it with a vengeance.

Home that day, back in my house, there was no one to share the adventure, no one to ask the questions that migh

t show values I'd overlooked. Kathy was out with someone else for the evening on her night off. Brigitte's children had a school play. Jill was tired from work.

The best I could do was long-distance to Rachel, in South Carolina. A pleasure to talk with me, and I was welcome, she said, to stop by whenever I could. I didn't mention the jump, the failed parachute and the other future, my death in the orange grove.

Baked myself a Kartoffelkuchen to celebrate, that night, straight from my grandmother's recipe: potatoes and buttermilks and eggs and nutmegs and vanillas, iced it with white frosting and melted bitter chocolate, ate a third of it warm and alone.

I thought about the jump, and concluded at last that I wouldn't have told them anyway, wouldn't have told anyone what had happened. Would I not have been the showoff bragging death escaped? And what could they say? "Goodness, there's a scary time!" "You must be more careful!"

The observer perched again and wrote. I watched from the corner of my eye.

He's changing. Every day more remote, protected, distant. He builds fests now for the soulmate he hasn't found, bricking wall and maze and mountain fortress, dares her to find him at the hidden center of them all Here's an A in self-protection from the one in the world he might love and who might someday love him. He's in a race, now . . . will she find him before he kills himself?

Kill myself? Suicide? Even our observers don't know who we are. It wasn't my fault, the streamer. A freak failure, it won't happen again!

I didn't bother to recall that I was the one who had packed that parachute.

A week later, I landed for fuel, late on a day in which everything had been going wrong with my huge fast P-51 Mustang. Radios failing, left brake weak, generator burned out, coolant temperatures unexplainably to redline and unexplainedly recovered. Definitely not the best day, definitely the worst airplane I had ever flown.

Most airplanes you love, but some, you just never get along.

Land and gas, tighten the brake and let's get off again, quick as we can. A long flight, watching engine instruments show things not right behind that enormous propeller. Not one part of the airplane cost less than a hundred dollars, and the parts that were breaking like reeds, they cost thousands.

The wheels of the big fighter-plane floated a foot over the runway at Midland, Texas; then they touched. At once the left tire blew out and the airplane swerved toward the edge of the pavement, in a blink off the pavement into the dirt.

No time. Still moving fast enough to fly, I pressed full throttle and forced her back into the air.