Anniversaries

After 10th anniversary jump

This picture was taken of me and SG on our tenth wedding anniversary, May 5, and since we got married in freefall on that day a decade earlier, we decided to make an anniversary jump from the same plane we had jumped out of ten years before. This photo was right when we landed after the jump.

As many of you know, we met skydiving in the 1990s. We connected through a now-defunct FTP internet message board called "rec.skydiving," which was just one of many different groups to help you to find like-minded people. This was before the modern World Wide Web. We sent a few private emails to each other, which expanded into long phone calls (when long distance was actually expensive) and finally into visits into each other's homes. I lived in Boulder, Colorado, and he lived in San Francisco. After several months in this mode, we decided to make the leap: he quit his job and moved to Boulder.

After lots of fits and starts, we gradually realized we belong together, and on May 5, 1994, we got married in the air above Loveland, Colorado. The above photo is ten years later, in 2004. We lived in Boulder until I retired from my job in 2008, but we spent several months trying to decide where we wanted to move to. We favored San Francisco, because that's where SG felt most at home. But it had grown far too expensive for two retirees on a budget, so we took a long car trip to the west coast to explore other options.

We spent a week in Bellingham, Washington and thought it would be a good place as a stopgap until we found out where we would finally settle. That was in 2008, and we've never left. Happy to be here in the Pacific Northwest. And we found places to skydive here, until we both decided we were probably finished with the sport. He had taken his own gear apart and stored it, but I sold my harness/parachute system in 2015, after I took my last skydive in Snohomish at the ripe old age of 72.

And there are a couple of other anniversaries that fit in here: SG made his very first skydive sixty years ago! On September 1st, 1962, as a college student of twenty, he made his first jump. I asked him what he remembers from that day:

There I was, scared shitless! Jack, the pilot of his Piper Cub, had me sitting in the back seat, and he said, "okay, climb out!" It was a very tight fit, so I scraped the back of my container across the back of the door, and then there I was on the strut, and my parachute was falling out, so Jack pushed me off the airplane. I don't remember much after that. But what I do remember is that when I was about to land, I was steering and it was looking okay, but suddenly I realized how fast I was coming down. The ground jumped up and hit me! I was twenty years old. I could hardly wait to do it again!

What had happened as he climbed out is that he broke the static-line break cord that held his parachute in its container, and quick action was required to keep it from entangling with the plane (which is why Jack pushed him off). The Piper Cub is a very small airplane that only holds the pilot and one passenger. When I began my own skydiving career, it was quite a different scene. 

It was September 1st, 1990, when I made a tandem jump with an instructor, in a little bit larger plane, a C-206, which holds five jumpers plus the pilot. Although I had the option of pulling the ripcord, taking us from freefall into the second part of the skydive, the canopy portion, I didn't need to do it; the instructor was responsible for it all. However, I loved freefall just as much as SG did, and I could hardly wait to do it again, either. Both of us went on to make many more thousands of skydives over the years, but I thought you might like to see a picture of our very first logbooks. Most skydivers keep a record of every jump we make.

His on top, mine below

These little logbooks hadn't changed much in thirty years, still recording the important information: date, altitude, airplane, amount of freefall time, equipment used, wind speed, and so forth. I ended up using this little book through my student jumps and until I bought my own equipment. And along with it, sitting on my bookshelf, I have dozens of full-sized logbooks, filled to the brim. Just looking at some of the entries brings back a memory of the jumps.

So, as you can see, this post is about several anniversaries: our wedding anniversary and our first jumps. Although we are no longer active skydivers, we will always be connected to the sport. Some couples might say (for example) that they still have Paris, but we will always have skydiving. Although the memories might fade as time goes by, the amount of time we spent in freefall will never change.

Our lives are full and satisfying, even though we are now well into our elder years. I turn eighty this fall, and SG had his eightieth birthday back in February. He is doing quite well after having suffered a stroke two years ago and later developing a blood cancer (lymphoma) but is under a doctor's care and for the moment doesn't need any treatment other than to monitor his progress. The older one gets, the more things begin to fall apart, since we weren't made to last forever, but if you can maintain your mobility and health, life can be quite fulfilling. I am so happy to be sitting here in the dark, a laptop connected to the world, and my sweetheart still sleeping next to me.

I'll finish up this post with a quote from somebody who has been in the news this past week. She has developed the same illness that SG has. And she still looks great and tells us to stay active.

The most important thing to do as you age is to stay physically active. Lots of people just throw in the towel if they can't do what they used to do, and that's terrible. —Jane Fonda

I have to remind myself every day that each time I get to see the sunrise and the sunset as well is a very, very good one. My tea is long gone, but I look forward to the new day ahead, and hope that you, my dear friends, will have a beautiful, bright new day as well. Until we meet again next week, I wish you all good things.