gary@utastro.UUCP (Gary Hansen) (01/16/85)
>>> Damn, it's to windy to skydive, lets do a cross country. <<<
The accompanying composition by Charles Lindberg should be entertaining
to readers of this news group, be they skydivers, or just interested bystanders.
Read and enjoy.
Blue Skies
Gary Hansen
D7703
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I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and,
minutes later, a black dot fall off the wing two thousand feet above our field.
At almost the same instant, a white streak behind him flowered out into the
delicate, wavering muslin of a parachute---a few gossamer yards grasping onto
air and suspending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, a man who
by stitches, cloth and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for those
immortal moments.
A day or two later, when I decided that I, too must pass through the experience
of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated
calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the wing, through a hurricane of
wind, clinging onto struts and wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then
giving up even that tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left me a feeling
of anticipation mixed with dread, of confidance restrained by caution, of
courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold onto life? How
loosely give it rein? What gain was there for such a risk? I would have to pay
in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and
applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No,
there was a deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain. It
was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place---it was a love
of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of
beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men----where immortality is
touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane, where man is more
than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.
Charles A. Lindberg
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EXCELLENT!!!!!! Al Gettier D5850