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— Excerpt from Bad Advice For Travelers
You know, they say the future is never so determined as when you are falling out of the sky.
I like that. There's so much truth to it, and a bit of humor as well, if you choose to see it that way. There's the story of the optimistic man, the naiif, maybe that's how you see him, who falls from the roof of a building and manages to say to himself, with great optimism, “things could be worse right now.” The optimistic man can tell himself whatever story pleases him, but we all know exactly what happens after you fall off a roof. Much expense is made in the form of fortunes told, lottery tickets scratched, palms read, stars charted, and cards overturned in an effort to reckon with the depth and the darkness of the future; the depth with which life is fickle, yet resilient; the darkness of time unfolding in front of us, like the towering wave that reveals nothing about the fury of the endless sea behind it. It's an odd feature that we seem to perceive time from the opposite direction--it is perfectly clear moving away from us, and perfectly opaque as it approaches...
Now, on the other hand, if you were to fall from an airplane, there is little doubt what the future has in store. Gravity is supremely deterministic in this way. It's just down, down, down, you go--the blue becomes brown becomes green, the squares and rectangles become fields, the tartan cords become roads--and through the clouds, too, you fall, realizing once and for all that there really is nothing at all to clouds, that they're just puffs of nothing, like reaching your hand into the freezer, just an illusion in the background. To encounter clouds personally--with our senses, the way we are accustomed to--is impossible. As children, we imagine cities in the clouds. Why not? Things look solid enough up there. And the view would be phenomenal. But the sky is endless and trivial. Its denizens are disembodied forces: storms, currents, electrostatic murmurations, the sort of thing that can only inspire awe from a distance.
A tornado, for instance, believe me, is a sight to behold from a mile away. As is a hurricane from one hundred miles away. Rarely do these things display their magnificence. To the naked eye, a hurricane does not gyrate, and a tornado does not juggle houses and cattle. They simply rage. Their rage consumes everything. You close your eyes. You hide in the bathtub in the bathroom on the ground floor without any windows. Nobody wants to have a personal relation towards these powerful forces. They are gods to us. And we all know that gods commit unspeakable acts towards people.
I guess what I'm saying is, when you fall through the air, suspended above the earth where no person should ever be, it's only then that you realize the whole world is just physics. All color is illusion, all shape illusion as well. The only things that are true are the rules and how your body obeys them. All feeling is illusion, all temperature. The only thing that is certain is the ground comes at you real fast, and then what?
I suppose you're wondering what all this is about--considering your initial query, the reason we're sitting here together, had nothing to do with the sky, with falling, with what is pre-determined, fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it. I'll get to that, because the fate of certain things is inevitably tied to other things, and often it is impossible to know this until exactly the moment it happens.
There are exceptions to every rule. Believe me, when I tell you, people have survived falling out of the sky.
For instance, a woman: her name was Vesna. Vesna was a flight attendant from Serbia, working on a Yugoslav airlines jetliner traveling from Stockholm to Belgrade--this took place in the 1970s, there are a few locations and identities which have since changed name, and I can't say I know enough to connect all the dots, but trust me when I say this really took place--she was flying from Stockholm to Belgrade, which is quite far, about the distance from Chicago to LA, and about halfway there, as they were flying over East Germany, a bomb that had been stored in a checked bag exploded, and the plane broke into three pieces about six miles above the ground. It all sounds crazy, but back then planes were much smaller. I think there were only 20 people on board. Rules were lax. If you were born in the 90s you probably don't even remember, but before 9/11, you could really walk anywhere you wanted in the airport. They didn't check your ticket. Security was just a metal detector, like the ones they have at the courthouse. To be honest, the whole experience was much more freewheeling. But of course that came with costs. Hijackings were much more common. You think people are crazy today? Imagine back then, people were hijacking planes and redirecting them for all sorts of reasons. These days they would label you a terrorist. Back then people would commandeer planes just because they wanted to steal them! As if it were a car-jacking! And when you think about it, there's not much you can do, better to land the plane and give the guy with the gun what he wants, right? Since then, the best fucking idea they've come up with is locking the flight deck! They put a lock on the door and called it a day.
This was not one of those provincial hijackings though. It was politically motivated. So the plane is blown to bits and everyone is sucked out into the open air, and from the ground it probably looked like bits of a broken leaf drifting down from above, but of course they were falling at hundreds of feet per second, and anyone who was still conscious would have a couple minutes between sky and land to make their peace with it all. But Vesna survived. How is this possible? There's no explanation. Scientists say it's possible that her low blood pressure kept her heart from exploding. They say the fact that she passed out meant her body was limp, that it absorbed impact without bracing, that she bounced like a ragdoll in soft snow. Of course this woman became very famous after she made a full recovery. Her last memory was getting on the plane though, so even she has no idea how she ended up where she did, and what even happened afterwards. An entire month went missing, shaken out of her head! It is significant, I think, that these events can never be properly explained.
A lot of the people who have survived falling from airplanes were soldiers. Maybe the planes flew lower back then? Maybe they had better mental preparation for embracing the void, so to speak. I don't know. But take the story of Alan Magee. A real American hero, if you ask me. He was a ball gunner on a B-17 jet during World War Two. The ball hangs beneath the plane, like a little glass bubble, and a person sits in the bubble and controls its swivel, and defends the plane with a .50 caliber machine gun. That means the bullet is about the size of your thumb. They were trying to shoot down other planes, after all. So the ball gunner is crammed into this tiny space--people were shorter back then, even you couldn't fit in it now--and Magee's plane takes on heavy fire. The wing rips off, and the explosion sends shrapnel flying through the fuselage, tearing everything in sight to pieces. So the plane has one wing and is now smoking and spiraling out of the sky, and Magee's gotta climb from the his little bauble dangling beneath the plane up into the main fuselage to get his parachute. He manages to crawl onto the bomb deck and blacks out. The world is spinning at this point, who could blame him? Whoom! He's thrown out of the plane, freefalls for some five miles, and crashes through the glass roof of a train station. They find him lying on the ground in a heap of broken glass.
That was in 1942. A few years later, in 1944, a similar thing happened to a British guy, Nicholas Alkemade. His plane went up in flames and, by his account, he jumped to avoid burning alive. What a choice! Again, he blacked out, and came to lying in deep snow somewhere in the German woods. Eventually the Germans captured him. Personally, I can't think of what is more amazing, that he survived the fall, or that he survived everything that came afterwards--the camps, the treks, the cold and unforgiving snow, the torture. At this point though, maybe he had reached a point where nothing could stop him.
It takes a miraculous intervention to survive falling for miles. As for me, I wish I could tell you the secret. But there really is none. I remember coming to lying on my back, feeling like I had the wind knocked out of me. My eyes were open, but I couldn't see a thing. Finally, I looked at the path I had torn through the leaves on my way down and I realized I was lying beneath the Wilton magnolia, one of the tallest, broadest trees in town, a towering thing that used to sit out in front of the Wilton Hotel on Main Street. The tree had four massive branches on its bottom, that lifted up naturally, like seats, and lovers and picnicers used to sit on the branches and feel the tree gently rocking them. Had I hit one of those, I surely would have cracked in half like a stick of cane candy. Instead I made a perfect imprint in the grass of my body, arms and legs splayed out, and around me was the wreckage of the branches I had torn from the trunk--damn near every branch from the canopy on down! I sheared off half the tree so that it looked like a feather, completely bare on one side.
I couldn't tell you how it happened. There was only four witnesses present: the mail carrier, who was delivering a package to the Wilton and had her back turned to me, thus she was only alerted by what she described as “the sound of a barn caving in on itself” right behind her; there was Tom Wilton himself, who was sitting in his study on the top floor of the hotel, overlooking the magnificent tree, and who out of the corner of his vision saw a comet descend straight from heaven and, in his words, “completely fuck up my front yard”; there was Kent Murphy, who at the time was my partner at the local news station, and was up in the helicopter with me when things went awry; and finally a buzzard flying beneath us that had to maneuver out of my way, and later swooped down low and perched on the unblemished half of the wrecked magnolia to examine my broken body in its sorry state. It was the buzzard who I noticed first, before I became aware that a crowd had formed around me, and familiar faces from throughout town were staring with eyes wide, amazed that I had survived. And I was amazed too! To the point that, to this day, I can hardly conceive of it as something that happened to me. I have no scars. I have no recollection. It's as if the sole participant was the Wilton magnolia. Even she is gone now--the tree could not survive the following winter in its condition, and now the Wilton property contains just the stump on their pretty green lawn. There's a plaque there, commemorating the tree--no mention of me, mind you. Wilton himself bore a terrible grudge against me after that incident. I suppose if I had died he would have softened up a little. With what happened with Keller, an old friend of his, I suppose he felt like he lost a large part of himself that day.
That's how we lost the two most famous trees in town. You can ask anyone you like and I doubt they will remember. But I feel it's important to keep a chronicle of these things. These days, I'm more comforted knowing the past than the future. Having seen the land advancing towards me like a tsunami, I much prefer the solitude, the completeness of the night of time, where I can sit as we are sitting now, converse with strangers, just as we two are conversing, and pass on into my day without knowing what else it holds in store for me.