By Seán Malone and John Sweetman
“Can you bring down my groceries from the Toyota?” Seán asked as I stopped by to visit. The path to Seán’s cabin is all uphill or downhill, depending upon one’s direction. I dragged a few bags out of the back of his pickup and brought them down the path steps and into his comfortable cabin.
“How come this gallon of cider seems heavier?” I asked. Seán responded, “Well now everything seems heavier. You are the physicist, so explain this!”
And this led to a discussion of how gravity seems to pick on we older folks.
In our younger days, Seán and I were able to use “gravity” to our advantage. We both felled timber and learned:
“Don’t fell and load firewood from the downside of a road.”
“Don’t shoot a deer from the 100 yards above the steep bank of a road.”
Practical things.
Well, we grew older and “practical” things became, “Get down from that ladder and stay offa the roof, you idiot!” Gradually, we seemed to lose our affection for gravity, and after a few falls became aware that gravity was no longer our friend (except for the fact that toilets still flushed down the tube, which was some consolation).
Both Seán and I did parachute jumps. Mine were less adventurous than his. I was temporarily sent to an Army base with a few 101st Airborne Rangers that just loved to have fun with Air Force officers. They said, “How about we show you how to parachute?” After an hour or two over beer at the ”O” club, this vaguely sounded like a good idea. So, several rangers began to instruct me, including a master sergeant who apparently had a sadistic genetic dislike for Air Force captains.
After a bit of ground school, they gave me instructions on packing my own parachute. “What if it doesn’t open?” I asked. “You have a reserve chute, which you also have to pack yourself, and if that doesn’t work, bring them back and we’ll repack for you, guaranteed.” Well, that was encouraging.
We used vintage Huey Vietnam helicopters as jump bases. These were worn-out things redolent of JP-4 fuel, overheated gear box oil, and latent jungle odors. And noisy, except when I occasionally got to fly in the front left seat.
My first jump was probably 5,000 feet and all downhill. The first 4,900 feet were pretty nice, except for the kick in the ass from the sadistic sergeant because I had hesitated at the open door. As a flight meteorologist, I had advised the crew pilot of nasty low-level winds, but Rangers tended to regard weather forecasts as useless information.
The last 100 feet landed me in the edge of a nice pine tree, despite my efforts to control the descent. I was left hanging by several weak pine branches. After some swinging around, I finally got untangled and gathered up the chute, waiting to be found.
I made a few more jumps without incident and never did return my chute for the promised “guarantee.” I should have paid a bit more attention to gravity after that.
~
Seán has more adventures.
In the early 60s, I fought forest fire from the southern border of Oregon to Canada with a Pulaski and a shovel. The Pulaski is a firefighter’s tool, with an ax head on one side and a grub hoe on the other. Along with a shovel, it is used to build fire lines.
We worked up to 16 hours per day, All the time, I wanted to become a smokejumper. At one point, they took me off the fire line to make me a radio operator in headquarters.
For seven winters, I made ship-to-shore calls for the U.S. Navy as a volunteer. My job was to patch my radio into the commercial phone line. Sometimes it was an AMCROSS, American Red Cross emergency call, to connect the shipboard sailor to his home. If this connection to the Afloat and Overseas Network led to smokejumper school, I was all for it.
Before applying, I decided that I needed practice jumping out of an airplane. For two or three hundred dollars, I could parachute from a small four-place Cessna out of the Snohomish airport. The day of reconning found me strapped into a parachute with a “static line” in my right hand, waiting to board the Cessna.
I was to be first out, and the pilot guided me to sit on the cockpit floor with my back to the instrument panel. The passenger door on my side of the cockpit had been removed. My bravado disappeared as the pilot attached my static line to the floor of the open-door cockpit and explained how to exit the plane.
I was told to face the doorway when we neared the drop zone and rest my feet on the step secured to the cockpit just below the open doorway. My next step was to extend my hands to grasp the wing strut and wait for the crew chief to slap my calf, which was my signal to jump.
My mistake took place as the pilot crossed the jump zone. I flexed my knees and leaped from the step. My body crashed against the side of the Cessna, jerking me upside down. I watched the plane disappear from my line of sight.
The static line jerked tight and I yelled “Geronimo” as the chute unraveled between my legs, snapping me upright between the wonderful canopy and the view of the ground between my feet. An unseen dog barked off in the distance, as if to announce my presence high in the sky.
~
Remember, gravity is not merely a suggestion, but rather a law that gets more severely enforced as one grows older.
