Pecked to death by ducks (36 page)

The plane circled around, and it was my turn to confront the fear of falling. The jumpmaster had stressed the importance of holding the proper position, which is very much like the Fly Away frog. One hangs on to the strut with the back arched. Let go of the strut and gravity tilts you over into an exaggerated belly flop—arms straight out and slightly above the head, legs held slightly above the butt—a position in which one falls stable. Think of a badminton birdie: Drop a shuttlecock feathers down, and it'll spin stupidly. Drop it feathers up, and the birdie falls along a perfectly straight, gravity-drawn line. In skydiving, and at Fly Away, you want to arch your back, keep your feathers up.

When the jumpmaster ascertained that I was in proper position —back arched hard—he shouted "Go," a command I obeyed with extreme reluctance. The plane disappeared overhead. I held position from the waist up, but everything below was moving at a ten flat hundred pace. I think, looking back on it, that fear, ignoring the hard facts of physics, was screaming, "Run or you'll die!"

Nevertheless, I didn't go into much of a spin, the chute opened splendidly, and I floated slowly to earth in an utter silence punctuated only by the bass drumbeat of my heart.

No matter that I'd failed to hold position. The point of the first jump is simply doing it. The niceties come later, if the student decides there is going to be a later. Jumping once is about fear rather than skill.

Some of my classmates who went on to further jumps might have been looking to recapture that first incredible adrenaline rush—as I know I was—but this is a process of diminishing returns. As the novice becomes habituated to the fear—as the student learns by doing that death is only a remote possibility—the thought process mutates. First-jump thinking—"I know thousands have done it before, but this time it's me, and I'm going to die"—gives way to a more casual attitude. "Okay, some folks have been injured, some have been killed, but I'm careful, and that'll never happen to me."

My experience suggests that the novice skydiver discovers, over the next few jumps, that one can never feel again that first thrill of pure and primal fear. He or she also learns to appreciate the skill involved in skydiving, and begins to understand that the mechanics of flying are pleasurable in themselves. Which is the reason some people become hooked on the sport. The woman I watched fall off the strut that day nearly a decade ago has now logged over a thousand jumps.

I wondered about the addictive qualities of dream flight during my standard five-minute session at Fly Away. Afterward, the people who flew with me inside the silo were pleasantly high, in the manner of children getting off the roller coaster. In contrast, my skydiving classmates, after the first jump, were positively giddy, ecstatic. Everyone mentioned "the sense of accomplishment."

I think the accomplishment had to do with terror. Those who went on with the sport started with fear and graduated to skill. At Fly Away you do it once, for the sensation, and you know right away whether you want to spend a couple hundred bucks getting good at prop-wash swooping. I'm not sure many do. Dream flight is fun once every six months or so, but the narcotic ecstasy of pure fear is missing here.

With that in mind I offer this modest, uh, proposition. In order to maximize profits by getting more folks hooked on silo soaring,

the Fly Away people might consider getting rid of the metal screen between the propeller and the flier. This is a bold idea whose time has come. And no sick jokes about opening up a hamburger stand next door. Let's be serious here. I'm going to call my Fly Away franchise "Blenderama."

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rials they would require. Besides the backpack, the tent, the layers of wool clothes, the spare gloves and socks, besides the snowshoes, the sleeping bag, ensolite pad, camp stove, and the mysterious crampons, the women had been told to rent ice axes, which could be used for "self-arrests." The axes were about a yard long, with a spike at the bottom and a kind of pick at the top.

"Self-arrests," Steph muttered. Did you slip handcuffs on your wrists, march yourself right down to the jail, violate your own rights? It was snowing out, the last winter storm of the season, and the winds were howling outside at seventy miles an hour. Airports were closed from Boston to Philadelphia. Power was out in parts of Boston, and the next day Steph and Deb were scheduled to climb some damn mountain in the middle of nowhere where they would be expected to feed crayons to birds and arrest themselves with axes.

The writer picked them up at the Phi Mu house. He was a big bearded guy— over six feet tall, about two hundred pounds—and he said, "The whole point is that the two of you have fun. America magazine wants you to have fun. If you don't have fun, I look bad."

The writer had a huge backpack that looked as if it had suffered some pretty tough use. He seemed to know a little about winter camping and was full of advice about how to stay warm and various dangers they would encounter. Listening to the writer as he drove them up into the mountains, Deb and Steph began to see the expedition as a choice between certain death— freezing stiff as a board, sliding down an ice field and plunging over a cliff, being buried in an avalanche—and some nebulous concept he called "fun." Nothing the guy had to say sounded like all that many giggles. "We're not going to put ourselves in any avalanche situation," he said, "but, you know, just for future reference, if you should get caught in one, you want to keep on top of the moving snow. Sort of swim with it, then angle out at about forty-five degrees ... if you can."

The writer was trying to be nice, but he seemed overly polite,

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in an unnatural sort of way, like a wino meeting the queen of England, and his idea of fun apparently had a lot to do with danger and discomfort. He outweighed each of the women by eighty or ninety pounds, and they began to feel that if they didn't have "fun," this big, shaggy guy was going to be plenty pissed off.

They met the photographer and guide at the Appalachian Mountain Club camp at Pinkham's Notch. The photographer was a good-looking red-haired guy, and his pack looked also looked banged up and well used. He and the writer had never met before, but they began talking about a place called Batangas, in the Philippines, where they had both been on separate assignments. There was a sense that these fellows had spent a lot of time outdoors, in difficult circumstances. A couple of guys, Steph and Deb decided, who knew a little bit about having fun in places where there was no fun to be had. The expedition was shaping up as an exercise in masochism.

And worse, worst of all, was the guide. Teresa Sims was almost as tall as the writer: a strong, broad-shouldered woman. She wore her mountain woolens as if she belonged in them, and she exuded an aura of self-sufficient competence. Steph and Deb just felt "cute" in full-cut wool pants and shirts, the way a woman feels cute wearing a man's shirt. The two women sensed the enormous gulf between cute and competent.

The guide didn't talk much, but she tore apart the backpacks and examined all of Steph and Deb's gear, clucking sadly at their boots and criticizing the crampons they had finally rented: little spiked gadgets they could strap onto their boots for some unknown reason.

"Instep crampons like these are useless," Teresa said. "You should have gotten the full-foot models." Steph and Deb felt as if they had sinned. The guide stared at them—one of those appraising up-and-down looks—and Deb felt that she was being "sized up."

The women of Phi Mu were now very tense about all the fun that lay ahead of them.

The writer parked the van at the trailhead, and everyone hoisted the heavy packs onto their backs. Skies were icy blue after the fury of the storm. Steph had done some bicycle camping, Deb was a downhill-ski instructor, but neither of them had ever carried a fifty-pound pack before. The things were impossibly heavy, and the trail that wound through the trees seemed to rise almost vertically in front of them.

The group walked across the road, to the trailhead. There was a small four-foot-high ridge of hard-packed snow the plows had deposited on the shoulder of the highway, and everyone chugged right on up and over it, leaving Steph and Deb floundering there. The snow was steep and icy. You couldn't just walk up it, not with a heavy pack on your back. Deb gave it a try—the others had walked up without thinking about it—and she slipped, falling facedown into the snow. The weight of her pack drove the breath out of her lungs. She thought, How am I going to climb a mountain when I can't even make it to the trail?

The others came back and told Deb to "kick steps." They were sorry, they said, but "kicking steps" was a trick so elemental to winter camping, they had simply forgotten to mention it. What you do on steep snow, Deb learned, is to attack the mountain as if kicking it in the shins. The boot slides into the snow, forming a little platform that is used for kicking the next step.

Five kicked steps and Deb was up and over the little ridge, where she and Steph were presented with a yellow Forest Service sign that read: "Attention. Try this trail only if you are in top physical condition, well clothed, carrying extra clothing and food. Many have died above timberline from exposure. Turn back at the first sign of bad weather."

"We're going to have lots and lots of fun up there," the writer threatened.

Four hours later, Deb was plodding along in a misery of fatigue. She just couldn't keep up with the others, not even Steph, and she wondered if she was in the kind of "top physical condition" the trail demanded. The party had been moving up the steep trail,

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occasionally kicking steps. They had walked up through stands of hardwoods, with an open stream rushing on below them, and everyone talked about how beautiful it was, but Deb was exhausted and couldn't catch her breath. Now, they were up near the ridge line, and the hardwoods had given way to spruce trees. Deb was forcing the party to stop every fifteen minutes. She didn't want to hold them back— she had plodded on for an hour past the time she felt she couldn't take another step—but now her legs were giving way on her, and she had no choice. She felt like a leper. A leper with emphysema.

Deb understood that everyone was getting chilled now. Walking straight uphill with a heavy pack, kicking steps, was incredibly hard work, and everyone was sweating profusely, even though the temperature was well below freezing, and a thirty-mile-an-hour wind was whipping along the ridge. Unfortunately, when you stopped, sweat froze to your skin. You had to keep moving to keep warm.

Steph was particularly cold. She had been told to wear wool next to her skin, but wool was scratchy, and she had cheated a little—fooled everyone—by wearing a cotton shirt that looked like wool. Now, she realized that she had only fooled herself.

Proper women, Steph had heard, didn't sweat, they glowed. She had been glowing all the way up the mountain, glowing to such a degree that her cotton shirt was sopping and could actually be wrung out. Wool, Teresa Sims had said, wicks moisture away from the skin, and often dries itself out from the heat of the body alone. Cotton retains moisture against the skin. Stopping every fifteen minutes for Deb, Steph began to understand why the writer had said, "Cotton can kill you." She could almost feel the wet shirt freezing against her skin, sucking away her body's heat dozens of times faster than low temperatures or wind alone. Still, she wasn't going to say anything: She didn't want to be a corn-plainer, didn't want to put Deb on the spot for having to rest.

So the party was standing in the snow, with the wind cranking up a little more every minute. It was getting late, toward dark, the temperature was dropping, and they were still an hour and a half from a decent campsite, according to Teresa. It seemed as if

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there was no warmth or comfort left in the world, and when Deb caught her breath, she asked the writer: "Is it fun, yet?" Deb making a little joke that wrapped itself around a hard core of bitter truth, like a snowball with a stone inside.

It was the photographer who spotted Deb's problem when everyone put their packs back on: "Have you adjusted your straps at all?" he asked, and Deb said she didn't know you could. She had been buckling the pack's belt around her waist, and although everyone ends up finding what suits him or her best, the photographer thought Deb would be more comfortable with the belt fastened just above the point of her hips. She had been letting the full fifty pounds dangle from her shoulders, but the new arrangement would shift the weight to the stronger muscles of her hips and legs.

It was a revelation. Deb wasn't out of shape at all, and she was never again the first to call a rest. You could just shift the weight from hips to shoulders, or balance it out between them, and walk all day. It amazed her to realize that she'd been so down on herself, that she had felt so unworthy. There were tricks—call them techniques—involved here, and proper technique had an effect on one's emotional outlook. It made you think about yourself, winter camping.

Get the snowshoes off the pack and stomp around in the snow to form a solid platform. Set up the tent and remember to bury the pegs under wet, heavy snow so the shelter will be stable in case a heavy wind springs up. Sit in the snow on the ensolite pads and try to get the camp stove going. It took almost fifteen minutes to melt enough snow to make a quart of water, and the women needed water to rehydrate the dried macaroni-and-cheese they carried for that night's dinner. They needed water to fill their canteens. They had been told to drink plenty of fluids, and that water could help keep them warm. The blood, it seemed, could thicken—like oil in a car on a subzero morning—without enough water to thin it out and get it to the hands and feet. It took an hour to make enough water for dinner and drinking. The temperature was dropping in the absence of the sun, and it

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was cold, bitterly cold out in the snow. Deb's boots had gotten wet, and there was a thick glaze of ice on them. "Keep your boots on the pad," Teresa said. "It'll keep your feet warmer."