Key Grip Page 14

  By early March, all the planes and vehicles were painted blue and white, and we had stenciled Istel’s company logo everywhere. I began bulldozing a drop zone in the overgrown triangle formed by the intersecting runways. In the evenings—every evening except Sunday, when nothing was open—Lew, Nate, Batch, and I would hit one of the eating establishments and then close Frank’s Bar. It’s hard to imagine, at this remove, how delicious a pickled egg tasted when seasoned with salt and washed down with a glass of flat Pabst Blue Ribbon draft beer. Perhaps it’s less hard to imagine why, instead of buckling down to college life, I preferred coming in from the winter wind after a hard day’s work and hanging out with grown men who talked about dangerous things.

  Every single night, after listening to tales of bravery and foolishness, and after nearly choking with laughter about close calls and fatal jumps, I would ask Lew or Nate, “So, when can I jump?”

  “Maybe tomorrow, if it clears up,” Nate would say.

  Lew reminded me that the air got ten degrees colder for every thousand feet of altitude. “Soon, Dusty, soon.”

  For weeks on end, I acted like one of the men, singing stupid military songs, falling backward in unison off barstools, and arm wrestling, but I still couldn’t claim to be one of them. I’d been working in Orange for two months, swaggering in front of townspeople, the way I had postured in front of the motel mirror—and answering their questions with the same empty authority I’d displayed for my imaginary reporter in Montreal. Yet I still hadn’t jumped. It began to eat at me: what if I chickened out when the time came? Would I freeze like the airborne jumper Lew told me about, whose knuckles had to be pried loose from the door? That guy was screaming like a baby when they tossed his ass out of the plane. Or worse, what if I froze and they didn’t even throw me out of the plane, but just brought me back down and said it was okay? Where could I possibly go after that? The tension grew until it was nearly unbearable.

  Then, one balmy day in late March, while we ripped eight-foot lengths of tempered masonite through a table saw, Lew suddenly killed the power and asked Nate, “What do you think, should we get it over with?”

  “If we have to,” growled Nate, taking off his leather nail belt and throwing it on the tarmac. “Goddammit! I guess we have to, right?”

  “I mean, we might as well,” said Lew, looking exasperated.

  “Get what over with?” I asked.

  “I mean if we don’t, he’ll be nagging us right up to opening day,” said Lew.

  “Pain in the fucking ass,” said Nate, spitting a long stream of tobacco juice onto the tarmac.

  “If we do it now,” said Lew, “maybe he’ll shut up and we can get some work out of him.”

  “Fucking college boys,” said Nate, as if he’d never been one himself. “Always nagging. Should draft his ass, send him to Fort Bragg. That’d shut him up.”

  “Shut who up?” I asked, removing my own nail belt. But I knew who, and I could feel a knot tightening in my stomach.

  “We’ll give him that old beat-up white canopy,” said Lew.

  Nate grinned. “You mean the one I used when I jumped in Bulgaria? The one that knocked me unconscious when it opened? Good idea!”

  “Either that or the one we took off that dead guy—the one who creamed in down at Stormville. You cleaned the blood off it, right?”

  “Sure did,” said Nate. “Fucking college boy. I’m getting hungry. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Hey,” said Lew, “looks like Batch is already warming up the plane! I’ll help him take the door off.” He winked at me before he walked away.

  “Go over there and get up on that oil drum,” ordered Nate.

  Suddenly, I didn’t want to be alone with Nate Pond. I wanted Lew to be my jumpmaster, kindhearted Lew.

  “Do I look like I’ve got all day?” asked Nate. “Come on, goddammit.”

  I leapt onto the oil drum and stood there.

  “Now put your hands up over your head, like you’re holding the parachute suspension lines,” said Nate. “Good. Now jump off sideways and do a PLF.”

  I leapt sideways into the air and landed with my feet together in the sand. The momentum caused me to fall onto my left side, and it carried my feet over my head so that I ended up lying on my right. This absorbed the energy of the fall; I’d been practicing it for months.

  “Good,” said Nate. “You’re ready.”

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “More than I got before my first jump. Fucking Istel. All this pansy-ass training. Come on, get suited up. You already know all this shit.”

  Ten minutes later, I was sitting on the floor of the Cessna, with my back to the instrument panel, watching Batch adjust the trim tabs after takeoff. I could hardly believe it was finally happening. When I think about it now, from the perspective of a man even older than Batch was back then—when I put myself in the pilot’s seat and look down at the kid that was me sitting in the open door—I see a boy struggling with second thoughts. I knew already how to be brave—well, I knew the face of bravery, the affect required—but I also knew too much about the messy consequences of a parachute malfunction. I’d heard a lot of scary jump stories at Frank’s Bar. As I gazed down at the sparkling springtime landscape, where newly melted snow was beginning to pool around yellowing willows, the notorious paratrooper song written to the tune of “Beautiful Dreamer” riffed in my head: “Beautiful streamer, open for me. / Blue skies above me but no canopy.”

  Just before takeoff, Nate had attached my static line to an overhead cable. As we ascended in a widening spiral above the airport, he double-checked the seating of the ripcord pins on my reserve chute. I experienced a surge of apprehension as I watched his cheeks jiggling in the cold air. My stomach felt suddenly bottomless. We made our first pass over the target at twenty-two hundred feet. Nate determined that because of high winds aloft, my exit point would be more than a mile distant from the drop zone, greatly reducing my chances of hearing instructions from Lew, who was waiting down there to guide me to an accurate landing. We soon climbed to twenty-five hundred feet. Batch banked the plane steeply before leveling out on jump run, and again I felt the bottom drop out of my belly. Apprehension threatened to mushroom into fear, but when I took a deep breath, it subsided. As we passed over the target a second time, I swung my legs out into the wind, positioned myself in the doorway, and looked straight down. I saw Lew, half a mile below, staring up at us, his eyes shaded with his right hand, a bullhorn at the ready in his left.

  The plane droned on until all the familiar landmarks passed and bare forest was all that was visible below. After shouting a few last-minute course corrections to Batch, Nate put his hand on my shoulder and yelled that I should reach out and grab the wing strut with both hands. He hollered, “Cut!” Batch throttled back, and the plane seemed almost to buck as it slowed to near stall speed. I placed my left foot on a metal step and my right foot on the landing wheel, and I pulled myself out there in the wind. From my perch beneath the high wing, I glanced over my shoulder at Nate and his father; their mouths were pulled back in identical tight-lipped smiles. Suddenly, it felt perfectly natural that I should kick my feet out behind me and push off with both hands.

  It felt right to let go.

  With a static line, it takes only three or four seconds before the chute opens. A bright red canopy suddenly blossomed above me, and when I looked down I found myself transfixed by the sight of my own two feet dangling so totally free above the earth. This was me alone up here! Gone was the airplane, gone the obnoxious sound of its engine. Through the ear holes in my football helmet I heard only the flapping of nylon in the breeze. A full minute passed before Lew’s amplified voice broke the silence, warning me to turn into the wind to avoid landing in the woods—a precious minute, during which I simply drifted in a self-amazed ecstasy of accomplishment. It was the most intensely private moment of my life up to that time. If only Dad could see me now! I thought. I couldn’t wait to get down and call my family
.

  Fifteen months later, in August 1960, a red-and-yellow biplane landed dead-stick on the tarmac, right in front of the airport administration building. Its engine off, the plane touched down silently, bounced once, and then careened wildly between two parked aircraft before screeching to a stop at the gas pumps. A few dozen spectators who had gathered to watch the parachuting let out a collective gasp, as if they’d just witnessed a stunt at some Sunday air show.

  Since I was now running the parachuting operation, it was my job to reprimand the pilot. I’d been standing on the flight line, answering some student jumpers’ nagging questions about the wind and when it might die down. I excused myself and walked over to the fueling area. With upturned palms, I gave the pilot my best what-the-hell gesture.

  “Sorry about that,” he yelled. “I plumb ran outta gas!” Craggy-faced and square-jawed, he was wearing a beat-up leather flying helmet and a faded silk scarf. Lifting his oil-spattered aviator goggles, he flashed an appealing grin, completing the iconic image of the outlaw barnstormer. He looked to be about my father’s age, but unlike my father, weather-beaten and rugged. I liked the guy right away. I could tell by the sealed-off front cockpit that the plane, a Stearman, was used for crop spraying. I was not about to hassle a working pilot.

  “No problem,” I told him.

  “Go ahead and top it off,” he said.

  I gassed up the Stearman, took the pilot’s cash, and stood back as he gunned the engine and swung the tail around. At the last minute, I ran over and yelled up to him, “Too bad that front seat’s closed off, I’d love to jump out of this beast!”

  He eased off on the throttle and hollered back, “Get your chute and climb on. I’ll take you up right now.”

  “Climb on?” I asked.

  “Right there on the wing. Just watch you don’t put your foot through the fabric.”

  I ran back to my students and told them I was going up to test the wind conditions. “Hang in for a while,” I said, grabbing my gear. A few minutes later the Stearman was roaring along runway three-one, with me lying face down on the lower wing, my arms locked around a diagonal strut. It took nearly the full mile of runway to gather enough speed to clear the trees at the end—my body on the wind-whipped wing had disturbed its natural lift. I had to hang on for a good thirty minutes more before we reached a respectable jump altitude of three thousand feet. My elbows ached and my ribs felt numb from lying on my chest-mounted reserve chute, but when I finally stood up and inched my way forward against the powerful prop blast, I experienced a kind of epiphany—one of those moments it takes a lifetime to digest. Looking down over the leading edge of the bright red wing and seeing the landscape glide beneath me—green New England hills dotted with houses, steeples, and cows—I felt a surge of power so pure and thrilling, so sunlit and masculine, I would draw upon it for years to come. Everything seemed possible. I had earned the future.

  In a month, I would leave Orange to begin my first semester at Columbia University. My father had already written the check. I would rent a tiny room near the campus, and New York City would soon swallow me whole. But I didn’t know that yet. Just then, I felt decidedly immortal, and when the pilot made a circular gesture with his gloved hand, suggesting we do a back loop, I gave him a heartfelt thumbs-up and hung on for dear life. The earth below disappeared from my view and the sky and sun revolved in a mad crescendo of full-throttled power accompanied by a G-force that nearly buckled my knees.

  When the plane leveled, the pilot smiled and jerked his head toward the tail: Time to get off my wing. I didn’t want to go, didn’t want the flight to end. It all seemed so clear from up there. I had discovered the perfect intersection of willingness and opportunity, hidden in an otherwise misty landscape of luck or fate or whatever you want to call the unknown. I could do anything, if I dared.

  I pulled myself closer to the engine cowling and inched my way back along the yellow fuselage, careful to step only on the narrow skid-proof surface. “Thanks!” I yelled to the pilot. Then I simply let go, and the wind swept me from the wing like a speck of dust.

  11. The Long Road

  I HAD A PRETTY GOOD fastball, even at age ten. My father said it made his mitt hand ache. This pleased me at first, but soon his growing reluctance to catch for me in the afternoons began to feel like a chasm opening between us. I started to suspect that his inability to handle my fastball might actually be an inability to handle me. When my parents began discussing the possibility of summer camp, my suspicions were confirmed.

  Our house was located between a pristine reservoir and a four-thousand-acre wildlife preserve called the Pound Ridge Reservation—so named because Lenape Indians had once lived and hunted there. Our town was short on kids my age, and what I was learning from the older boys—how to break windows, tip over outhouses, mar road signs, and steal rowboats—wasn’t exactly the kind of education my parents had in mind for their firstborn son. But neither was the alternative: roaming a non-peopled realm of fantasy—striding merrily through the woods like Robin Hood, marshaling armies of toy soldiers in my bedroom, or firing hardballs at the slatted side of my father’s studio as he worked all day on book illustrations.

  Given the natural resources at my disposal, attending summer camp seemed like an exercise in redundancy, but my father announced one evening that Camp Kitchigamink, in Barnard, Vermont, would be “just the ticket.” By which I suspected he meant “the cure.”

  “Just think,” he said, “you’ll finally learn how to swim.”

  A quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson graced the cover of Camp Kitchigamink’s fifteen-page brochure: “He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.”

  What the word kitchigamink meant, the brochure didn’t say, but the camp emblem, a profile of an Indian chief wearing a feathered headdress, gave the place a reassuring authenticity. Indians were the tutelary spirits of white boys in those days, and their skills—fire making, lean-to building, leather crafts, knife and hatchet throwing, and archery—were taught even during the winter in the school gymnasium. To become a rich and royal man, one first had to be an Indian.

  My parents, neither rich nor royal in the typical sense, were stingy with their free time. And from my perspective, my eight-year-old sister and three-year-old brother sponged up all the available parental attention, so when it was announced at supper that I was indeed being sent away to camp, I took the expulsion like a warrior. I got into it.

  Central Vermont was a haul in those days. When you went away to camp in 1950, you went away. My father, meticulous in all things, made the trek sound like a journey to the Himalayas. Out came the maps, the field compass, the army-issue leggings, the canteens, the lists. On went the name labels, the footlocker stickers, the jacket patches. He tried bravely to pave the way for me, telling me how he’d persevered in high school and college, how he’d met my mother and courted her diligently, how he’d used his experience as a war correspondent to further his artistic career. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, but his rendering of the past was cleansed of the anxiety I was already feeling about my future.

  It was a setup, of course, and the message was clear: to be a rich and royal man meant being an achiever. Success required setting and meeting goals. Awards and kudos, while certainly not everything, were of necessity the mark of the man. With all this firmly in mind, I waved goodbye to my family and rode to Vermont with the head counselor, Mr. Noyes, in his beat-up station wagon.

  Camp Kitchigamink consisted of seven tiny cabins clustered on a grassy hillside south of Silver Lake. Slapped together with pine logs and rough-hewn cedar planks, each cabin contained five double bunks—precarious, squeaky structures bedecked with thin, mildewed mattresses crawling with bugs. Every other night some kid woke up screaming with a tick on his eyelid or scrotum.

  My first night there, I cried soundlessly into my pillow until I fell asleep. When I woke up, I was in love
with the place. Populated with boys ranging in age from eight to fifteen, it sounded, when you closed your eyes, like a forest teeming with birds. Yet it was run like a boot camp. Every boy was on the same page: buddy systems in the lake, jousting competitions on the grass, obstacle courses in the woods, play acting in the outdoor amphitheater, roaring campfires with drumming and whooping and loincloths and headdresses. The air vibrated from dawn to dusk with the shrill sound of whistles. The daily pulse of victory and defeat, ruled as it was by the overarching principle of survival in the adult world, sustained us as we could never have been sustained at home.

  So, I learned to swim—and to keep my eye on the prize.

  There were four prizes, kept behind glass in the counselors’ office until the awards ceremony at the end of the summer. Four gold cups resembling those double-handled trophies you see race-car drivers and hockey players hoisting aloft and kissing. But considerably smaller—twelve inches high and weighing a pound, if that. Yellowish might be a more accurate word for the cups, but they shone like gold to me. I studied those trophies whenever I got a chance, memorizing the categories for which they would be given: Greatest Improvement, Greatest Leadership, Greatest Achievement, and (ta-da!) Camper of the Year.

  As if underscoring how far behind I’d been when I first arrived at camp, my name was called for the first category during the final campfire ceremony in August. On returning home, I greeted my father with the Greatest Improvement cup held victoriously over my head.

  “Hey, Dad, look!”