THE OTHER EIGHT : ’Scuse me, while I kiss the sky
Posted on Sunday, October 5, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Northwest_Profiles/239351/
Editor’s note: The Other Eight is a look at how people spend the remainder of their day, when they’re not sleeping or working.
SILOAM SPRINGS — A queer thing happens halfway to the drop altitude of 10, 000 feet. The airplane’s thin aluminum shell quits its violent quaking and the compressing tug of takeoff lightens as the pilot puts the plane’s nose down a bit. As the aircraft passes through the clouds, the rush of air quiets, and on a hot day, a welcomed coolness settles on the face. The clouds begin to look as substantial as snowcaps below.
The tranquility is dizzying, so that when the side flap door is opened and the troposphere comes rushing into the cabin, it feels no riskier than the open cab of a UPS truck. What it doesn’t feel like, in other words, is an icy, fatal fall to earth.
It’s what enabled Liz Matney, 55, to put away an earlier fear of heights and take her 200 th plunge, a milestone most enthusiasts will never match.
“If you take a poll, you’ll find the majority of jumpers do not like heights and are scared to death of falling, but strap a pack on our backs and at the right altitude, we’re fine,” says Matney, who cleans house part-time.
Be careful of sky-diver speak. Theirs is a logic twisted by years of freefall abuse. Some rules may not ring true at all to the uninitiated, like the street sign posted on the road into Cecil Smith Field warning motorists “Aircraft has right of way.”
Matney’s husband, Wayne, or “Phiz” as he’s called, also notes that more women die in childbirth every year than women and men together in sky-diving accidents. While this is true, there are far fewer sky divers than mothers, and they test the limits of the danger continually.
Liz Matney can speak to the fear factor. When she was a child living in California she pulled herself higher and higher into a eucalyptus tree until she reached a rotten limb. She fell more than five stories. The adults who didn’t believe her had only to measure the distance from that shorn branch to the ground. Heights scared her ever since.
So it was with some surprise that Wayne, a paratrooper in the Army, learned his wife finally wanted to give the sport a try some six years ago. She had changed her mind after researching sky diving online and discovering that even a standard light parachute comes with several redundancies to ensure safety. She also learned that a lift to 10, 000 feet out at Skydive Skyranch costs about $ 25 — “cheap.” So one Saturday she took the sixhour training course and made a 3, 500-foot static-line jump.
“It has a life after that,” she says.
And that life is largely spent on the ground. Though it is not uncommon for a sky diver to jump a half dozen times in a single outing, the Matneys spend most of the day inside the small hangar that more accurately could be called the hang out. On weekend nights, drop zone operator Wolf Grulkey, his staff and the regulars feast on extraordinary potluck dinners — prime rib, bruschetta, a pig — and maybe listen to Grulkey play on his worn guitar such favorites as “Blood on the Risers” and “He Thought He Had Some Tangled Lines.”
“The jumping is what got us out there, but... here is a family that you want to adopt,” Matney says.
Within this family, Liz Matney has a nickname — “Granny.” It’s not flattering, but it’s better than some. “One guy got the name ‘dozer’ because he almost took out a dozer, or the dozer almost took him out.”
Roast pig and ribbing notwithstanding, what separates the one-time thrill seekers from the regulars is a healthy addiction to the spiritual ablution of the fall. Liz is not an aerial acrobat. By her own admission she is a control freak, and maybe the falling releases her from her own grip.
“You’re not thinking about [stuff ] at work, the bills, getting the kids to wherever... you can actually allow yourself small moments of thinking of other things.”