skr

> Paul was a good man.

Yes, he was.

A flood of memories.

Some of those times were stressful,
but his laugh often cut through the
undercurrents.

Tall Paul .. I'm sad .. I'm glad I knew him.

Good post.

Not only am I a poignance junkie, but
I know about this life cycle, so I got a
double hit.

And I think you are right, skydiving
permanently changes us, and it will
probably somehow influence how you
pursue this and the music that you
come up with.

Good Luck.

Skr

> speed stare demonstrations.

Yeah, those were pretty intense. Some of those guys
could stare at you for over 2 hours in less than 8 seconds.

I really liked the C-130.

I seem to remember each engine having over 4,000 horsepower,
and with just 50 or 60 people instead of serious cargo they took
off and climbed like they were practically empty.

And I remember the excitement of standing on that giant tailgate,
with my toes hanging over the edge, looking back at Stan Hicks
spotting out of the side door talking to the pilot with what looked
just like an ordinary telephone, waiting for his left arm to drop.

Those are strong memories even after all this time.

> I am somewhat puzzled by the horror stories associated with jumping rounds.

You have to allow for the jump story effect.

I made about 1,800 jumps on rounds and
most of them were stand ups, but I wouldn't
admit that in public.

You can't let facts get in the way of a good
jump story.

Skr

> Newcomers to sports tend to do stupid things until they realize how much they don't know.

> Cars, motorcycles, drugs, airplanes, parachutes, snowboards, snowmobiles, it's all the same.

> Once you start hanging around with adults you'll find that nearly all the survivors in a sport for enough years have a less cavalier attitude about safety.


Reading my thought balloon again, eh? :-) :-)

> Here's the illustrated version...

Thanks, Howard.

You know, the context of that was that most people
were focused on the concreteness and measurability
of hookups, and I kept thinking that all the good stuff
is in the flying around between the hookups.

The hookups are just something to do while we're
skydiving together.

It's the flying around and the shared human experience.

So in order to make that explicit I started designing dives
firstly out of moves (analogous to dance moves), and
secondly out of vibes and mood.

What emotional feelings are we trying to engender
on this dive? The hot dive feeling? The sunset loose
load feeling? The helping newcomers feeling? The
stately waltz feeling? The rowdy polka feeling?
And so on.

Some people obviously understood that point of view
or we wouldn't be in this thread, but for some reason
it never went mainstream.

It's hard to believe that it's been 30 years since that
was in Parachutist.

And Robin almost got fired for putting it in there
because "Parachutist doesn't do poetry." :-) :-)

There was one typo in the Parachutist version in
the third line up from the bottom.

"How do you create the consciousness *for* the Skydance dives?"

It was not to create the consciousness *of* in an
advertising sense, but consciousness *for* in the
sense of giving rise to this kind of skydiving in the
first place.

And Pat was right when he spoke of the the skydance
resonance.

Since it was more of a viewpoint than a concrete
form it was hard to convey to people, so I thought
maybe if I start a "team" of people who see it and
we all think those thoughts really hard at the same
time we can get some kind of 100th monkey effect.

It was called the "Skydance Resonance" and started
with 11 people, but it only lasted a week or two because
those people were all creative, independent people who
wanted to go off and invent their own stuff.

And eventually time moved on, people got killed,
Pope Valley closed, and now it's pretty much old
leaves blowing in the wind.

Or maybe not, after all we are in this thread.

Maybe it's just me that has moved on.

Ah .. Been off world for a while ..

DJan told me ..


> . And even now,
> . that bell tolls still for me in thy dreams.

Yes, me too, although it's mostly dreams now.

My rig is in date, but my checkbook is missing
some zeroes at the end of the numbers.


> . Know echo-reflected matches your own.

I know.

I just wish we could have somehow conveyed
it to more people.

Skr

> made me feel welcome

That's one of the things that I remember
about traveling as a jumper. You could go
all over the world and be part of the jumping
family.

Maybe we'll cross paths sometime again.

Skr

> I met this guy

:-) :-)

He's still around although it is somewhere
between sporadic and intermittent lately.

Small world, isn't it?

> while in the air I couldn't find it

Maybe you could use maps.google.com
to look at it during the week when you're
not having to think about making a jump.

Pick large, identifiable features, roads,
a race track, a river, an oddly shaped
feature, runways, and practice seeing
it with your eyes closed.

Maybe try drawing it from memory.

Practice it several times until it starts
to get easy.

Skydiving is pretty overwhelming and
the more of the ingredients you have
practiced ahead of time the better.

Learn general features within 5 or 10
miles of the airport, and then when
you take off notice which runway and
which direction, and glance frequently
out a window as your climbing out.

That way you always know where the
airport is.

You keep from getting lost by staying
found.


I do that at every new DZ.

Everybody has to. The only difference
between you and me is that I have
more experience so I can go through
it in fewer jumps.

It's not something you automatically
know how to do, it's another skill you
learn, and it takes a while.

Skr

> I STILL miss this DZ.

Me too.


> Maybe reality will make me less nostalgic.

> Pope Valley has become the perfect DZ in my mind with the passage of time.

Oh, I think it really was perfect,
you're not making that up from
selective memory.

The Gulch was perfect in a pure
sort of way. There was no reason
to go over there 5 light years from
the nearest anything except for the
most fantastic skydiving I'd ever
experienced and the people doing it.

Pope Valley had that plus everything
else.

Oceanside in the early sixties had
that feeling of special too, that feeling
of family and community and special
times.

Those are the three dropzones that
really stood out for me.

Skr

> I'm sure you're thinking of "The Mighty Quinn"

Right now I'm just trying to not think.

> So I guess that leaves the question, do you know Joy?

And that's just the kind of question I'm trying to not think about :-) :-)

Skr

> I don't think that's the same Owen Quinn.....but I could be wrong.

I think you are right.

I never knew the Quinn I'm thinking of well enough
to know his first name, everybody just called him
"Quinn".

I never met the east coast version, but the name
was really familiar and the Seattle Quinn came to
mind because he made such an impression on me.

It's a good thing we're not all having old age moments
at the same time or we'd be in trouble :-) :-)

Skr

> Owen Quinn

I remember him as a Seattle jumper.

A plane load of Seattle jumpers came down to
the Gulch one time and he was one of them.

The first thing that struck me as I walked
toward the plane was this group of pale faced
guys sort of hiding in the shade under the wing
peering cautiously out at the blazing Arizona
sunshine :-) :-)

The next thing that registered was a tall guy
emerging from the door with some gear bags.

He had this wild, spring loaded hair that looked
like he'd stuck his finger in a wall socket, and
a great big smile.

I talked to him that weekend and a few other
times when we happened to be at the same
place.

He was a really interesting guy, and one of the
central inspirations in the Seattle scene at the
time.

I wish I could have known him better before he
got killed.

Skr

:-)

I remember that as Oceanside in the early mid 60s.

That's Lyle up on top, Suzie Bateman in the door,
Jim Hyland (blue jumpsuit) and Bill Spargur (big
guy) hanging underneath, Hector Nunez with the
blue piggyback, Chip Maury sitting on the wheel,
and the rest were Oceanside regulars plus a couple
people (Billy Lockward?) and a couple others who
came down just for this picture.

We did it several times, with Jack Zahnizer, the pilot,
going up to 6 or 7,000 ft, then everybody climbing out,
and Jack coasting slowly over the country side,
gradually losing altitude, until people got tired and
fell off, or he made a pass over the dropzone
and people got off.

I'm pretty sure it was Luis Melendez filming.


That Fairchild was a great airplane. My logbooks
are still packed from this move, but I'll look one
of these days and get dates and more names.

Skr

Thanks Sangiro.

Skr

My first jump, a static line from 2,500 ft, was $2.

Higher jumps were tach time.

I went to settings and hid the "my stuff"
stuff on the left side of the pages and now
there doesn't seem to be any place to logout.

And I seem to remember having to look for
it before I did that.

I guess I'm not coming over here often enough
to keep up.

Skr

> Ask a lot of questions. I've become known at my dz as "that guy who asks questions about everything", but I've learned so much. Any time I see someone do something new or interesting, I ask them about it. Any time I see something go wrong, I talk to the person and find out exactly what happened, why, what the best response would be, what they did, etc. Remember, people tend to love to talk about themselves, so if you frame the question in a way that they get to talk about what they think and what they do, they're almost always happy to answer any questions you have.

----

This is a good answer.

It is hard to formulate experience into written words.

And even when you do get a verbal description
that is close to what you mean, you don't know
what meaning those words will generate in the
reader's mind.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how things
work, but I also watch and listen to people, sometimes
directly and sometimes just in general eavesdropping
mode. I get a packing trick here, a new viewpoint
there, or sometimes a response to some situation
I've never thought about.


Of course I have a certain depth of background so
I can filter out a lot of the weird babble and brain
foam that makes the dropzone so entertaining.

Picking good mentor and role model type people
to learn from is perhaps the most important thing
a new jumper can do.

Skr

> wood frame thingy didn't really sound like the hot ticket?

Well, getting those wooden chutes into the box
could sometimes be a bear if you didn't fold the
hinges in the right order ...

But the real difficulty was some of the weird
malfunctions.

The nail-over was probably the worst ..

If you forgot your claw hammer ..

Plus using a saw to cut away was a bit awkward ..

> been round almost long enough to be one of them there pioneers

You've stumbled onto the secret.

You have to be born early enough
to be on the scene before very much
has happened.

Or if someone just got here, they just
have to hang out for a few decades
and remember a few stories about how
it was back when people were still using
parachutes.

Imagine! Parachutes! Trusting your life
to a few strings and rags! Plus we had
to peddle the airplane to altitude too!

None of this new-fangled levitation stuff!

> Barbara Roquemore

Hey Howard, I'm not coming to this one
but would you tell her I said hi if you think
of it while there?

I've wondered a few times what path her
life took. The last time I remember seeing
her was at UCLA in the late 60s, where she
was majoring in Russian and I was ostensibly
getting a PhD in math.

Skr

> interested in the thinking processes involved with skydiving

I'm guessing that you had in mind how people
are thinking when they are making competent,
intelligent jumps, and that's a great question,
right at the center of things, but equally interesting
could be what people are thinking in all the shenanigans
that go on at the dropzone in between jumps.

"Jeez, what were those guys thinking!?" :-) :-)



Also, remember that you have one really good
case study already, which is your own thoughts
as you go through this process.

Skr

> person in the red jumpsuit

Looks like Vic Deveau to me.

And if it is Las Vegas it would have been
the "Professional Meet" in 1964.

I think it was called "professional" because
there was several thousand dollars prize money.

I also seem to remember Daryl Henry breaking
his neck doing one of those suicidal, downwind
accuracy landings with a Crossbow piggyback.

He came in and kind of laid out flat on his back
reaching for the disk and wasn't used to having
that reserve back there instead of up front where
it belongs.

I also saw Loy Brydon lead one of those no contact
diamond formations down over the crowd to the point
that I could read their name tags before they did that
crossover break and track.

It seems that Lyle or somebody had mentioned opening
altitudes the day before and Loy wanted to make the
point that military teams are not under civilian jurisdiction.

I'm not saying they were low or anything, but the high
man was 27 seconds in the saddle. Low man was was 20.


It's funny, I met Loy many years later at a Pioneers thing
and was stunned that he was just a little guy.

I guess it was the power of his personality, because
I remembered this really rough, gruff Sergeant about
7 1/2 feet tall stalking around, talking to his men, taking
crap from no one, and clearly being someone you did not
want to mess with.


I was just a college kid with less than 200 jumps, and
here were all these people I had been reading about,
Lyle Cameron, Loy Brydon, Daryl Henry, others, and
I was hovering around the edges of conversations,
trying to eavesdrop, and bouncing up and down with
excitement.


Vic was in a reckless, fuckit state of mind because
his girl friend had just been killed, in a car accident
I think, I don't quite remember.


He came over to Los Angeles from there, and we
went down to Oceanside in the middle of the week
and made some jumps.

I will have to blame Vic for never finishing my PhD.

He had a real knack for showing up and derailing
my school efforts by filling my mind with jumps
and jump stories and beer and stuff.

Skr

Edited to add that the guy in white on the left
looks really familiar but I can't pull up his name,
and the guy on the right in white looks kind of like
Roy Johnson.