Our memories die so fast. SEVEN years, SEVEN, since this skydiving legend (completely true) has been reminisced about. OK, here's hoping to put the cap on the bottle. Most of the above is true, but allow me to introduce myself.. The Horse's Mouth. (Never mind jokes about the horse's other end.) This is a person who ACTUALLY FLEW on the famous Dornier French King Bridge load. Our two pilots, Mike and Fred (the insane one), were congenial young fellows and seemed swept up in the enthusiasm one of our organizers, Jasper (name changed), created about the whole boogie event. Tales tall and true were told. One of the true ones was Jasper's marveling over a fete of considerable cojones, the underflying of the French King Bridge by a local pilot in a Cessna 172... "Big Balls Bobby the Brave". (Name changed slightly.) Fred in particular seemed captivated by this, but most of us must have missed the gleam that must have been in his eye as he talked with Jasper before the next load. I would love to have heard how the conversation went... Because about 24 of us took off for 13,500' for a mid- or late-afternoon skydive. Everyone was in fine spirits and relaxed, and really didn't pay much attention to the covering of much more ground, down low, than we ever did on normal skydives. One group of jumpers (including Jasper) seemed more excited than usual, and instead of taking seats for the typically 20-minute ride to altitude were standing up and looking out the windows. I remember absently wondering, what's all this. I was to find out really soon. The jumpers were vibrating with excitement and I could hear a rising yell. Two seconds later I saw a vertical concrete bridge support member flash by my window about five feet from the tip of the wing. SHOCK! HOLY SHIT! People on the plane started cheering. I was so unhinged even felt some ebullience-- like someone had fired a shot at me and wound up merely ripping my sleeve with the bullet. No one could give it much more thought because now we were going up for our jump, but after landing we just kind of hung around each other, stunned. A couple of people who had been excited were starting to rub their heads and saying "what the hell just happened"? Most continued to laugh about it-- at least through the end of the day. Probably half of the jumpers were going Yahoo! One of the best jumps of my life!, while some others were going God damn it, that was a risky stunt without asking me first. This is what had happened. Jasper had suborned, or evangelized, or whatever you want to call it, the pilot Crazy Fred (as some of us called him thereafter) into this grand final gesture. Final gesture because Fred had spent as much time as he was going to looking for a job and was giving up aviation-- who cares about my license? Poor innocent pilot Mike was in quite a spot-- Fred ignored him when he said "don't do this you idiot"! and Mike was not about to be one of two people pulling the controls in opposite directions (then, the plane could do anything.) Poor Mike had to sit there and watch a potential career-ending act take place with him on board as co-pilot. Well, skydivers stick together, so no one (almost no one) ratted-- but the one who did knew how to make a Godawful lot of trouble. She was a law student enrolled in Harvard Law School by the name of Patty Burns (rhymes with her real last name, but I don't want her finding her name via Google and deciding she's been libeled). (Remember, Patty, if you're reading this, that truth is a defense to libel.) She was like some women are, just so incensed someone had misbehaved in her presence (I think you know the Kind I mean) she wrote a description of the event, not to the club president, not to the Safety and Training advisor, NOT to the US Parachute Association, but to the Federal Aviation Administration... so out of sync was she with the Mind of the Skydiver. Of course, the shit hit the fan, she was ostracized from jumping for hundreds of miles around (maybe even on the West Coast by some reports), and Mike the pilot got in a dangerous career scrape. I did not know, but am glad to learn, he saved himself by self-reporting. No one whom I know knows how it fared with Fred, but whatever happened was probably for the best! Now Patty lived out her long, high-pressured life as a big-city law firm corporate-type attorney, finally fleeing for some peace as a spinster to a remote ranch in New Mexico. If she has friends, she may or may not tell the story, which to her was probably one of the great unfair treatments of her life. The rest of us keep the memory, and some are still ambivalent in feelings about the whole thing. But hey, we were young, and it was skydiving.
