My Brush with a Pothead Parachutist and His Coonskin Hat
By J. Todd Foster |I recently marked the 20th anniversary of the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. There were no champagne toasts or high-fives or whatever the kids are doing these days, just appreciation that I lived to recount this event.
Twenty years ago, even though I was deathly afraid of heights, I apparently was more afraid of being emasculated, so I agreed to do something that under any normal – and sober – circumstances would be thought of as insane.
I agreed to jump out of an airplane. And then did it.
We’re not talking a tandem parachute jump with an instructor, or even a static line jump from a capable aircraft with a large bay door. This was a solo jump from the wing strut of a rusting Cessna under the tutelage of an instructor/pilot who seemed to have an obsession with marijuana – specifically, smoking it at every opportunity.
The following story is not exaggerated. My imagination is not fertile enough to craft such a tale, or the main character.
In late 1988, a cocky rookie reporter at the Chattanooga Free Press – and no, it wasn’t me; I started in 1985 – organized a skydiving trip, although purists would point out that the free fall was limited to a couple of seconds. Call it a parachuting trip then.
A half-dozen newsroom colleagues signed on, but I declined on the grounds of acrophobia, and because I hadn’t yet started drinking that day. (It was an afternoon newspaper and our shift ended at noon.)
After being peppered all day with crude slings and arrows, I agreed to go parachuting the next spring, April 1989.
Six months was an eternity, I thought. How many more brain cells will these guys kill in six months? They’ll never remember this.
But as the howling winds of March gave way to the warm soaking rains of April, I learned the unthinkable: The parachuting trip was a go for the upcoming Saturday.
I forked over 90 bucks and joined my comrades-in-air at a rundown facility on Raccoon Mountain, a few miles west of Chattanooga, where we spent the morning and early afternoon repeating the jump procedures. Over and over we practiced deploying imaginary reserve chutes and jumping 15 feet from plywood scaffolding to mimic the effect of landing. We learned the banana roll to protect us from injury. And at the end of the day, much to my utter surprise, the instructor informed the 10-member class that I was the most proficient among them – a Cinderella valedictorian if there ever was one.
I later would prove the instructor a bad judge of talent.
The instructor – a mid-30s, bearded man who wore a coonskin hat with a long tail – had impressive skydiving credentials. Yet his technique troubled me because of his constant analogies that had nothing to do with skydiving: “If you get in trouble up there and your chute doesn’t open, grab your reserve handle like it’s a big ol’ Bob Marley joint,” he barked repeatedly. “And pull that big doobie!”
I was not a pot smoker. My poison was a Marlboro Light 100, actually 30 of them a day, and whatever was on tap. But as a journalist whose friends were all journalists, I was familiar with marijuana lingo. “I think this guy is stoned,” I whispered to one of my skydiving co-workers. “My, you really are an investigative reporter,” he responded sarcastically.
All 10 jumpers loaded into a van for a short trek to a rural airfield outside Jasper, Tenn. We would go up two at a time, and the first flight would include the cocky little snit who organized the trip. His descent from 3,000 feet was uneventful, until he landed on a runway light and injured his back. A friend carted him to the emergency room with minor injuries.
Then it was my turn. One of my best friends and I climbed into the back of a Cessna 172 whose ability to still fly amazed me. There was no door on the passenger side.
As we climbed to 3,000 feet, the instructor lectured us with a quote I’ll never forget, even if I live to be 100.
It was highly sacrilegious, but I was a captive in an airborne version of the Stockholm syndrome: “From this point forward, I’m Jesus Christ! You will do whatever I say! When I say climb out under the wing, you’ll do it immediately! Then I’ll kill the engine and tell you to jump! You will jump, immediately, got it?!”
When a bearded pothead in a coonskin hat – speaking in exclamation points and with one hand on the controls of a small plane and the other holding the tiny pilot chute designed to deploy your main chute and spare your life – tells you he’s the son of God, that particular moment is not the appropriate time to debate theology.
I climbed out onto the strut, he killed the engine and he yelled jump. Rather than going feet first with an arched back, however, I went back first. He threw my pilot chute out behind me. Time seemed to stand still. The plane hovered above me. I was looking straight up at my friend, whose face was pressed against the window and laughing like I had never seen him do before.
I tried to scream but there was no sound. It was the oratorical equivalent of a dry heave. All those horror movies had been wrong: When you are about to die, you don’t emit an ear-piecing scream; you mime one.
Seconds later, I was jerked upward and peered toward the clouds. I beheld a large canopy – a nylon angel that was filling with air. My chute had opened! Good thing, because I would have been unable to remember my name, anything I learned during hours of instruction and certainly would have been unable to locate the reserve chute handle.
The next 90 seconds admittedly were among the most serene of my life. Until I spotted the pond in my glide path.
I remember thinking … “I hope I find the person who built a runway next to a pond, because I’m going to hunt them down and …”
Reaching up, I found a toggle attached to a steering line and tugged it with my right hand. Slowly the chute drifted away from the pond. Then reality set in. When you’re parachuting, you get the sensation that you’re floating. The ground, however, comes at you quick, especially at the end.
Let’s just say I didn’t stick the landing. Had there been a Czech judge, he would have shaken his head in disgust. But I limped away from my one and only jump.
Two months later I would meet and fall in love with a woman who later became my wife. First I had to make two promises: No more parachuting, and I had to give up smoking.
The first was hardly a concession; the second was the most difficult act I’ve ever accomplished.
But on May 11, 1991 – two hours before we exchanged vows at sunset off the coast of Northwest Florida – I walked over to a Dumpster at our condominium on Okaloosa Island, near Fort Walton Beach. I pulled out a cigarette, lit it and then ditched a half-pack of Marlboro Light 100s and an orange butane lighter into the metal beast.
It would be the last cigarette I would ever smoke – and I sucked it like a Bob Marley joint.
J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews, on Twitter at @jtoddbhc or by phone at (276) 645-2513.
