Playing Fair and Being Kind

FLYING OBJECTS

I never got it right. The strings always got tangled or I couldn’t throw the thing high enough. I finally deduced that my skinny little arm could not launch the parachute with steel bolt weight with enough authority to give it the right amount of distance to capture air and deploy the rag and strings to slow its decent. A fail. I was not distressed. I sure did give it a lot of effort.

The bolt was about two inches long and heavy enough, I thought, to carry the payload up, up almost to the second-floor windows of my parents’ house. It would return to earth almost in the same configuration. That is, the rag parachute was still folded and the four strings, acting as parachute cords, were still wrapped around the rag. On occasion the whole contraption would come back to earth with the parachute and strings trailing behind flapping in the air. That was an image I will carry forever. My brain contains the frame by frame images of the bolt falling, speed-restricted by the drag of the strings and rag. The sad image is all I have as historical evidence of my brush with space travel and/or parachute jumping.

Another image has been added to super-impose over this one. It is of a man falling with the grace of an angel from the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. According to later information from friends, he was depressed and unhappy with his life. He was a beautiful man, still young and athletic. I watched him on a video pace the length of the bridge two times. He would stop occasionally and stare down at the water two hundred feet below him. Then he would continue pacing the bridge. The bridge, orange, international orange. Darker than regular international orange. Unmistakable in its color though.

Gene Sprague, tall; long, dark hair and black clothing paced and stared and showing his youthful athleticism, hitched himself up on the railing in a seated position. Then he stood for a very brief interval and fell backwards in a controlled form to his final moment on earth. His long hair and black leather jacket flapping in the air but not offering much resistance to the speed and weight of his body, held in perfect posture, moving downward toward the salty bay under the orange bridge. That sad image is now fully incorporated on top of the image of the bolt, strings, and rag of my failed parachute of long ago.

My feelings are of sadness mixed with admiration for his beautiful form falling. A flying object for about 4 seconds. Gene was traveling at seventy-five miles per hour at terminal speed.

It’s funny how we remember scenes.

G. M. Goodwin
28 December 2018