How Angel Peterson Got His Name (9 page)

Wayne's father saw the paper and took Wayne and his skateboard out into the garage and broke the skateboard. Wayne swore it was over his head but there wasn't a mark there, while he had trouble sitting down for nearly a week.

But he still has the record. Fourteen miles.

To understand what might have been the first bungee jump you have to understand my cousin Harris.

I wrote about him in
Harris and Me
—how he discovered rodeo, and Tarzan, and tried to make a motorcycle with a bicycle and a gasoline-powered washing machine motor, which almost worked until he accidentally tried to clear two acres of brush at the end of the driveway with his body.

The thing is, Harris believed, completely, in himself. Whether it was fighting the pet lynx or diving into the pigpen, which he pretended was a fort full of “commie bastards,” he felt he was absolutely unable to fail.

Even when he did fail, he thought he was successful.

The bungee jumping came about because Harris's father had to change the tires on their only tractor.

The tubes in the back tires were shot and his father pulled them out and replaced them. While
the tires wouldn't hold air, they could still be used for other things.

Inner tubes then were made of pure rubber and were wonderfully elastic. You could carefully cut strips out of a car inner tube about an inch wide and a foot and a half long and make a great slingshot that would zing a round rock fast enough to break a bottle at twenty-five yards or put a heck of a welt on Wayne's butt if he had just shot
you
in the butt with a small rock.

But something as big as tractor inner tubes, with their thicker rubber and large size, fairly screamed for some greater use.

“We could make a really
big
slingshot,” Harris said. “Tie it between two trees and shoot ourselves across the yard. Maybe into the sky.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, “we'd have to come down.”

“Hmmm.” He thought a moment and then smiled. “That's it.”

“What is?”

“Coming down. We can tie a rope to the inner
tube and then another rope under our armpits and we'll get a good bounce out of it. It'll be just like them parachute soldiers when they jumped on the commie bastards.” Harris's concept of history was a little blurred. He knew there had been a Second World War but the country right then was in the middle of the communist scare and he mixed the two up.

I was ten and he was eight, and I already had my healthy curiosity. “How will you get a good bounce out of that?”

“Simple, you gooner. We'll tie it to the top of the barn roof and jump out the hayloft door.”

And it was about that easy to set it up. There was a pulley at the peak of the barn for pulling hay up inside off hayracks, and Harris tied the rope to the pulley, then tied the other end to the inner tubes. He used both of them, side by side, and pulled the long part of the rope up to the peak of the roof, just outside the loft door.

The inner tubes were even with his head, where he stood up in the big barn door opening,
and he took another piece of old rope, made two loops through the inner tubes and tucked it up into his armpits, yelled something unrepeatable and, with complete confidence, jumped out the hayloft door.

The bounce part worked. I was standing slightly to the side to watch and I can vouch for that, although the rope was just a bit too long.

He went down like a shot, both inner tubes stretching nicely, and just as his face slapped the dirt they retracted and snapped him back up into the air.

Except he didn't come straight back up. He had gone down at a slight angle and there was a low eave over the milk room at that end of the barn that stuck out about two feet.

Harris came up under the eave and smashed into a wasps' nest.

The wasps had absolutely no tolerance for bungee jumping and they swarmed on him as he headed back down for the ground, hit once more, then snapped back up and cleared the milk room
eave, out into the open air, trailed by a swarm of wasps that had decided to use him for target practice.

“Cut the rope! Cut the rope!” he screamed, but I had no knife and had to untie the end he had tied to the barn and my ability to untie the rope was greatly handicapped by the fact that I was laughing hysterically.

“Cut the damn rope!”

Finally I got it loose and he landed on the ground in a buzzing, screaming heap and started running for the stock tank to jump in the water but he was still affixed to the inner tubes and the rope became entangled, so just as he got up a good head of steam, about eight feet short of the stock tank the rope caught, stretched the tubes and yanked him back a good ten feet, flat on his butt, where the wasps got him again.

“Them parachute soldiers really got guts,” he said later, as we were dabbing mud on his swollen, wasp-stung face. “I wouldn't do that again even
without
the wasps.”

Along with all the extreme sports I've described, there were attempts at stunts and sports that never quite jelled.

Wayne decided to crawl into a box with dynamite and set it off like the daredevils at the fair except that we didn't have any dynamite (a really good thing) so he crawled into an old refrigerator carton and we used three full-force M-80 fire-crackers with the fuses wrapped to go off at the same time. The box didn't blow up at all, and the only result was that for two weeks every time you asked Wayne a question he would say,
“What? What?”
and he kept slapping at mosquitoes buzzing around his head when there weren't any mosquitoes.

Orvis decided to take a try at the hoop of fire and against our advice made a wooden frame covered with burlap (“Just like they do at the fair,” he said), which he soaked in kerosene. We stood by with buckets of water as Wayne lit the frame and Orvis backed off and got a good run at
it before jumping his bike from the ramp through the center of the fire. It looked spectacular, with flames and smoke flying after him, and it could have been worse—his hair was slow to come back, but he had a pretty good crop of fuzz inside a month. The sad thing was that he actually got through the hoop when there were no girls around and Alan, who was standing by with the Brownie camera, forgot to take the picture.

Then there was Angel of the skis again with an army surplus full-sized parachute and his attempt to use it as a sail with ice skates on Lake Oosshta, which worked fine until a gust of wind pulled him off his feet and the chute rope that was knotted around his stomach slipped down to catch one leg and he was pulled some four miles across the lake, backward on his stomach. And then during the summer Angel tried to use the parachute as a sail on his bicycle, only to have a gust flip him over and drag him and his bike a quarter mile down a gravel road. Then there was Angel's
attempt to use the parachute as a sail on a borrowed canoe, only to have a gust flip him over and tangle him in the shroud lines and almost drown him. Then, at last, there was Angel selling the chute to the neighbors, who used it for a yard awning.

And then finally, Wayne again, who read a book that said the hero had made a diving bell by using a bucket over his head and some kind of hose arrangement to keep air coming from a tire pump. Even with Orvis pumping as hard as he could, Wayne nearly drowned under the Fourth Street Bridge on the Mud River, where he swears to this day that he felt a shark brush past him in the dark water. He always says that: “It brushed past me in the dark water.” There are of course no freshwater sharks in the Mud River in northern Minnesota—although the water is dark enough, being mostly mud—but you can't tell Wayne that, just as you couldn't tell Orvis he couldn't beat the bear or Angel he couldn't beat the speed record on skis or Emil he couldn't fly the target kite because, like Harris, we also
believed in ourselves and what we could do or thought we could do. It didn't matter that it hadn't been done before. It was still worth trying.

It was, always, worth the try.