sweating, woozy, dizzy, ready to pass out — maybe puke….. my friend had me sit down and splash some water on my face and the back of my neck. Mere moments earlier i’d been standing above a fallen brother, holding his parachute over him to block the heat from the sun while the paramedics cared for him. No one on the scene saw how it started, only how it had ended — a friend tumbling end over end. The end of it didn’t look that bad, people land poorly all the time and often the tublesault. No one thought anything was wrong until they saw him not getting up. It was at this point that i heard a commotion and looked up from packing my parachute to see the what was up. I knew immediately who it was and that things weren’t good. There were alreay people on their way out to help him — people much more knowledgeable than i — so i held back, what could i possibly do but get in the way? Fuck that… that’s my buddy out there… i ran out, if only to be there for him, afraid of what i’d find when i got there. He didn’t look so bad, really. At least, not as bad as i knew he could have looked. Even so, there lay my friend, disoriented and in pain, baking in ths sun with people surrounding him. I picked up his parachute and held it over him so he wouldn’t roast — at least i could do something.

So he was in pain. Pain is good though… means he still has feeling. His back hurt, his arm hurt, his leg and foot hurt. That’s top to bottom, a good sign in a sick way. He could remember his name, but not his birthday, ir anything that had just happened — probable concussion — not so good. We have some medically trained staff on the DZ… a couple of EMTs at least, maybe a paramedic. They were there, tending to him as best they could. They got him out of his gear an onto a back-board, and soon the town medics showed up with the ambulance to take over and take him to the trauma center.

About this time is when my vision started to blur and i felt sick. I’m sure a large part of it was from overheating, parachute fabric doesn’t breathe, you see, and i’d been wrapped in it out in the prime-hours sun for 25 mins. I’m equally sure the rest was from seeing my friend like that. We’ve been jumping together for a couple of years now, we had made a jump that morning.

i started to walk away with another friend and that’s when i had to sit down…. i took a break after that…. had a gatoraide and a muffin, trying to mellow a bit. The ambulance had gone, and his (long time) girlfriend was with him. He was well taken care of. I finished my snack, walked back to the school, and continued packing my parachute. 40 min later i was back in the air with a student, flinging myself out of a plane and back onto the horse.

Mark has a long list of injuries. Fractured neck, back, broken hip, pelvis and ankle, plus a concussion. He’s got a long road to recovery ahead of him, but he’ll heal.

Later on that day I personally witnessed 3 more really close calls within a 20 minute time-span, all of this was enough to frazzle me into stopping jumping for the day and find a beer.

Now, Mark made a mistake, a couple of mistakes really, and ones that i don’t think i’d have made even before this happened. That’s comforting to an extent, and i’ve had friends hurt themselves far worse due to their own fuckups before. Even so, it’s always been when i wasn’t around, so it was kindof abstract, even in their hospital rooms. There’s something much more real about it when you’re there, standing over your broken buddy, doing your damnest to keep the sun off him cause it’s all you can do. Gives one a bit more pause. Even so, it’s still easy to file those into “i won’t make that mistake” categories, cause i try my hardest to learn from other people’s mistakes.

The near-incidents later on are almost more disturbing…. cause they’re not an individual fuckup. They would have been someone taking someone else out. I can keep myself from making those mistakes, but i can’t keep those around me from making them, and that’s the scary thing.

It also scares me that i do all of this w/o any sort of health insurance. Getting hurt would suck, sure, but chances are i’d heal. The issue, beyond the obvious huge financial burden, is the quality of care one is like to receive. Oh sure, they’d fix me up, but maybe if i had insurance they’d put a plate on the break instead of just a cast….. a cast doesn’t cost as much, and should heal it well enough, right? ……

Still, given all of that, it’s stupid amounts of fun, and i’ll continue to do it. Plki has his donor-cycles, Nate rides down rocky trails and mind-bending speeds, and i have this.

We’ll all get hurt, and we’ll all die eventually, i know that. Still sucks to see it, and i’m glad i saw the lesser of the two this weekend. Maybe that’s a sucky closing, but i’m done now.