Getting Air (11 page)

It was like a vision, a bolt out of the blue! It was like that cornball moment in every movie when the hero suddenly has some brilliant idea or insight and you hear a choir of angels singing.

I looked at the plane again. If the top was cut off, it would be the shape of the letter
U
. I was sitting not more than ten yards from a perfect halfpipe! It had been right under our noses this whole time! How did I not see it before?

“Hey!” I said to the guys. “Does that look familiar to you?”

“Does
what
look familiar to us?” David asked.

“The plane!” I said excitedly. “The shape of the plane!”

“Yeah,” Henry said, “it’s shaped just like an airplane. Remarkable!”

“It’s shaped like something else too,” I told them. “Don’t you see it? It’s a halfpipe!”

“Zimmerman, you’re delirious because you never went this long without skating,” David said. “You’re starting to hallucinate.”

“No, he’s
right
!” Henry said, getting up to look at the plane more closely. “If we stripped off the outside shell, it would make a perfect halfpipe!”

Finally, even David saw what we were talking about. We all went to the plane and ran our hands over the surface.

“We could skate this thing!” the three of us said at the same time.

It would be simple. All we’d need to do would be to remove the outside layer of metal, turn it upside down, lay it on the ground, and prop both sides up to hold it in place. It shouldn’t take too long. We had already found the toolbox in the cockpit and used it to remove the seats.

There was just one problem. We were using the plane as a place to sleep. It was our shelter. The girls probably wouldn’t take too kindly to the idea of ripping it apart so we could build a halfpipe.

“No way they’ll go for it,” I said.

“Hey, there are three of us and three of them,” David whispered so the girls couldn’t hear. “All we have to do is convince one of them and we’ll have a majority.”

“Listen to Mr. Democracy,” Henry said. “Aren’t you the one who didn’t approve of voting?”

“Well, I changed my mind,” David said.

So we went over to the girls. Henry and David agreed that I should do the talking because, they said, I have “a way with words.”

“We were thinking,” I began, “that we only use the plane as a place to sleep. That’s a big waste. So, uh, you wouldn’t mind if we sort of…took it apart and made it into a halfpipe, would you? All in favor, raise your hand.”

Me, David, and Henry raised our hands.

“What?!” my sister exclaimed. “Are you crazy?”

Right away, Julia and Arcadia started in whining and being all negative about my great idea.

“We have more important things to do…. What would shield us from the rain?…Where would we sleep?…How would you take off the metal?…You’ll fall down and get hurt…. We have no medical training….” And so on. Those two are no fun at all.

“May I ask one question?” said Mrs. Herschel.

“Shoot,” Henry said.

“What’s a halfpipe?”

We explained to Mrs. Herschel what a halfpipe was. At first she looked at us just like we must have looked to her when she was trying to explain cricket. But eventually, she seemed to grasp the idea that you skate up and down and up and down the halfpipe for no other reason than the thrill of it. After listening to our explanation, astonishingly, she raised her hand.

“I think it’s a smashing idea!” Mrs. Herschel said. “You boys have worked hard. You deserve to have a little fun.”

“All right!” we yelled, high-fiving each other. “Majority rules!”

Julia and Arcadia weren’t happy, but what could they do? We had voted on it.

David, Henry, and I hauled out the toolbox and got to work building the halfpipe right away. It wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be. There was a gadget in the toolbox that made it easy to loosen and tighten the rivets that held the metal skin on the body of the plane. We only had one, so David was assigned the job of peeling the metal plates off. While he did that, Henry and I built a simple ladder out of tree branches and vines so we would be able to climb up to the top of the halfpipe.

As it turned out, removing the metal from the plane wasn’t going to ruin our shelter after all. There was another layer underneath that would protect us from the rain. So Julia and Arcadia weren’t so upset about our little project. In fact, they started to help. Julia kept us going with berries and some nuts she found while we worked. Arcadia came up with the idea of making a helmet and kneepads for us out of the bark of a tree. She said she could use vines to strap them on.

“I’m not wearing some lame helmet made out of tree bark,” David complained when Arcadia suggested the idea.

“Hey, bark helmets are cool,” Henry said. “I bet in a couple of years everybody will be wearing bark helmets.”

David didn’t peel
all
the metal off the plane. He just took off enough to make a ten-foot halfpipe that was about six feet wide. We put the pieces together on the ground next to the plane and tightened the rivets as much as we could with our fingers. Then David used the tool to make each rivet good and tight.

Finally, as the sun was beginning to sink in the afternoon sky, our halfpipe was done. We were exhausted, but it was beautiful. We checked all the rivets to make sure none of them were loose. We slid the whole thing over until it was braced by the plane. We probably should have called it a day and tested out the halfpipe in the morning, but none of us wanted to wait. We had worked so hard building it. We wanted to skate.

I got out my trusty titanium skateboard. This board had already come in handy so many times, it occurred to me. I used it to bash that hijacker over the head so we could take control of the plane. The board saved my life when the plane crashed and I went flying through the windshield. We used it to help start the fire. David killed the snake with it. The girls used it to trap the rabbit. And now we were finally going to use it for the purpose it was intended. To
skate
.

The question was, who would go first? It was my board, of course. Obviously, I should get the first turn.

“Firsts!” David called. “I got dibs.”

“Why should
you
get to go first?” Henry said. “It’s Zimmerman’s board.”

“If it wasn’t for me, we never would have fought back when they hijacked the plane,” David said. “We’d all be dead right now.”

“Oh, yeah?” Henry said, “If it wasn’t for me we’d be dead right now too. I’m the one who landed the plane. Maybe I should go first.”

“I’m the one who thought of building a halfpipe,” I chimed in.

“And it’s my brother’s board,” added Julia.

We had a pretty good argument going when Henry suddenly stopped talking. I looked at him. His face was pale and his mouth was open. He was looking over my shoulder. I turned around to see what he was looking at.

Arcadia let out a scream. There was a guy standing there!

“Who are
you
?”

He was a big guy, even taller than my dad. He was wearing a uniform and one of those hats that Dudley Do-Right wore in those old cartoons.

“James Cavanaugh, Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” the guy said, sticking out his hand.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Well, I believe I’m rescuing you,” he said. “Sorry we weren’t here sooner. It’s quite remote. The roads were blocked…had a heck-uva time getting here.”

At first we couldn’t comprehend this stranger in our midst. It had been so long since we’d seen another human being, we didn’t quite know what to make of him. But that only lasted a few seconds.

“We’re saved!” everybody started screaming. “Yipee! We’re going home!”

The six of us were all jumping up and down and hugging each other as if we had won the Super Bowl or something.

“We just about gave up hope of finding you folks alive,” the officer told us once we had calmed down. “We’ve been looking high and low for you.”

“Maybe you should have looked in the middle,” said Henry.

“Say, if you don’t mind my asking,” the officer said, “why are you fellows dressed in women’s clothes?”

“It’s a long story,” we all said.

We were thrilled to be rescued, of course. Soon we’d be back home with our parents, our pets, our stuff. I could sleep in my own bed without worrying about a bear attacking me. I could eat a pizza. I could eat a
real
chocolate cake. Life would return to normal. Even going back to school in September would be great.

But something was bothering me. Something wasn’t right. I guess we all felt it.

“Uh, officer,” Henry asked, “would you mind giving us a little more time here?”

“You don’t want to be rescued yet?”

“First we need to skate our halfpipe,” David told him.

“Yeah!” Henry and I agreed.

The officer said he understood, and told us to take all the time we needed.

“Okay,” I said. “Now as I was saying, I should get to go first. I started the Woodpushers, remember? It’s my board and it was my idea and all.”

“Oh, give it a rest, Zimmerman!” David said. “I’m way better at skating vert than you.”

“I’m better than both of you,” said Henry.

“How about I go first?”

We turned around. It was Mrs. Herschel.

“You?”
We looked at her like she was from another planet. Like Uranus.

“In my day I was quite the roller skater,” she said. “I even won a trophy when I was a girl.”

“You boys should give Mrs. Herschel the first turn,” my sister said.

“Yeah,” agreed Arcadia, “as a birthday present.”

“Uh…okay,” the three of us agreed. I had never seen an eighty-year-old lady drop into a halfpipe before. But then, in the last three days I had seen a lot of stuff I never thought I’d see.

Julia helped Mrs. Herschel strap on the wooden pads and helmet. I handed her my board.

“Are you goofy or regular?” I asked her.

“I
must
be goofy to do this!” she replied.

As she climbed the ladder up to the top of the halfpipe, the rest of us shouted advice and encouragement.

“You can do it, Mildred!”

“Mrs. Herschel, you are an awesome skater chick!”

“We’re going to make you an honorary Woodpusher!”

“Lean forward! Always lean forward!”

Mrs. Herschel positioned the board on the edge of the halfpipe the way we told her to. Then she put a foot on the board and gave us a thumbs-up.

“What is it you Yanks holler before doing something extremely daft?” she asked. “Geronimo?”

“Cowabunga!” suggested Julia, whose skateboarding knowledge comes almost entirely from old episodes of
The Simpsons
. Skating is the only thing I know more about than her.

“Cowabunga!” Mrs. Herschel yelled it as she leaned into the halfpipe.

In a perfect world, Mrs. Herschel would have dropped into the halfpipe, done a 360 flip-to-tailgrab and landed fakie, tearing that thing up like Tony Hawk in his prime. Then we’d give her a standing ovation.

Well, what actually happened was that she fell on her ass.

“Oh, my bum!” she hollered after a spectacular face-plant.

We all came running over, terrified that Mrs. Herschel might have broken her hip or something. But she just dusted herself off and told us we were all a bunch of crybabies.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s get out of here.”

Me and Henry and David took turns skating the halfpipe for about an hour, and it was awesome. Believe me, if you haven’t skated the inside shell of a jet plane, you haven’t skated. The Canadian police guy was so impressed that he pulled a video camera out of his backpack and filmed us.

We said one last good-bye to our campsite that had been our home. Officer Cavanaugh told us it had been nearly a week since the crash. Somewhere along the way, we had lost track of time. He led us about a mile through the woods to a clearing where a helicopter was waiting to airlift us back to civilization.

That’s when things got
really
strange.

I thought our lives were going to return to normal when we got home, but it was just the opposite. When we stepped off the helicopter at the airport, there was a marching band playing and thousands of people cheering. I figured somebody famous must be coming through, but then we realized that somebody was
us
!

It turned out that after our plane crashed, a laptop computer owned by the hijackers was found in the trunk of their rental car which was parked at the airport. It contained documents that showed they were planning to crash the plane into the dome of the United States Capitol, which is nearly three hundred feet above the base of the building. Congress was in session at the time, and, if the hijackers had succeeded, they could have wiped out the United States government!

We also found out that as our plane was coming down, we were traveling almost the length of three football fields every second. If we had been in the air for a few more minutes, we would have smashed into a small town. Who knows how many people would have died?

We weren’t just six survivors. We were six heroes in the war on terror.

The day after we were rescued, the video that Officer Cavanaugh shot of us skating was played over and over again on CNN, MSNBC,
Good Morning America
, the
Today
show, and just about every news program in the world. I guess three guys dressed up like old ladies and skating a halfpipe made out of a downed plane must have captured the interest of the media. Everybody wanted to know all about the Woodpushers.

What happened after that was better than any fantasy I could have dreamed up. Our picture was on the front page of every newspaper in America. We went on
The Tonight Show
. We were invited to the White House. We were honored guests at the X Games. They had a parade for us in New York City. Kids were all over us asking for autographs, like we were real celebrities.

Before the plane crash, all I’d ever wanted was for some skateboard company to sponsor the Woodpushers so we’d get some free T-shirts and boards and stuff. Now, companies were falling all over themselves trying to give us money. Henry got sponsored by some company that paid him a fortune to put his name on helmets and pads that looked like they were made out of tree bark. David signed a deal to endorse an energy drink for extreme athletes.

The girls were heroes too. Arcadia got hired to be the spokesperson for United Airlines. She also received about a million marriage proposals after guys saw her on TV. Julia got a full scholarship to any college in the United States. And she’s not even in high school yet! Companies that make laxatives, wheelchairs, denture cream, and other products for senior citizens were tripping all over each other trying to sign up Mrs. Herschel. She was on a reality TV show with Snoop Dogg too.

And me, well, let’s just say I did pretty well for myself. My dad and I patented his titanium skateboard design and we formed a company together called Woodpushers, Inc. I was the star in the Woodpushers TV commercials we shot. Soon kids all over America were buying so many Woodpushers boards that we were having trouble keeping up with the demand. It was sort of like when baseball bats used to be made of wood and then they switched to metal. I’m not allowed to say how much money we’ve made, but we had to hire a team of accountant guys in suits because there was so much money pouring in that we didn’t know what to do with it.

Oh, yeah, one more cool thing happened. This editor from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers called me up and asked if I wanted to write a book about the Woodpushers. So I did.

In fact, you just read it.