Lost time & Weightlessness
U.S. Navy “Boston Whaler” Skimmer
As teenagers with no respect for property values we used to beach a Boston Whaler at full throttle. There was always a gap from when we hit to several seconds later, doing a somersault fifteen feet from the boat, with the engine screaming at full throttle. There was a sensation as in a dream where you need to eun but are slowed by some invisible viscous medium.
Even the moment of impact was lost to memory, your brain shifting far in the back brain to get the leg reflex timed perfectly. The path through the air was elusive due to the unfamiliarity of the weightless condition and since you were traveling the same speed as the boat, the rush of air was the same as before and completely obscured by the terrific jolt of your exit from the boat.
The sight of the approaching landing spot on the sand was also managed by the back brain which was not sharing that info, so there was no reflex to put your arms out, almost always a bad idea. You arrive in a sort of flying fetal position, head lightly tucked, your limbs in neutral since they had no strain to tell them otherwise.
Then, as I mentioned before, the sound of the outboard enters and with the delayed reflexes of someone shocked awake by an alarm clock you scramble toward it, your body vibrating and elastic as you reenter it after the short blank hiatus.
Bob Truesdale had one of the first test boats of the Boston Whaler. His father sold chemicals and was the supplier for the project. This was in 1963 and it was one of the first designs that was all fiberglass sandwiching a foam core. His father was given a test boat and passed it on to Bob. It had been dropped on rocks and tortured in other ways, a fact we earmarked right away. It didn’t look that worse for wear but it was no frills. The seats were just planks that sat in grooves inside the gunwale.
So being fourteen we had to apply our own tests. The first was to take it from the river out in the ocean on days when there were rollers, nice big round top waves spaced yards apart, maybe twenty yards or so. The drill was to take off on one, which had the effect of disassembling the boat, now air borne, from, in order, the gas tank, the seats and then the passengers, like an exploded drawing, then skip over the trough and reassemble before the crest of the following wave. It was extraordinary how orderly the elements rising up perfectly spaced, nno wobbling or deviation. Even the gas tank rose straight up and came down flat, That went well, so on to the next. It was Bob’s idea that we go full throttle onto the beach just to see what would happen. That made the thrilling memory above crystal clear, blank weightless interlude and all.
The Milk Tanker
Over Connecticut 1962 & New York 1966
The copy of Time magazine that I had been reading slipped from my hands, fell part way to the floor and then hesitated as if it might change its mind and float back up. Behind me there was a commotion, the stewardess gave a short full business-like scream. I turned in time to see her simply throw a passenger, who she’d grabbed from the Loo, into a seat. He was still pulling up his pants.
It’s never good if the staff start screaming, I thought and “So this is a power dive.” The sensation was of being pulled down much faster than a fall. What set this chain of events in motion was a terrific noise, AAAAANT, so loud it blotted out everything but the scream, so loud it was hard to tell where it was coming from. Later, I would say it was as if a Giant was taking a power saw to the back of the plane. The stewardess strapped herself in.
We were pitched almost straight down but making so much progress we weren’t loose in our seats like on a roller coaster, but pressed in, accelerating. I began to wonder how much room there was to the ground, we started at only ten thousand feet. There was no announcement. Is this the aeronautical equivalent of the accelerator getting stuck to the floor?
Out the window you could see individual trees come into view. “Well. I’ve had a nice life.” I thought. I was fourteen, a little surprised how calm and accepting I was. I wasn’t positive we were going to drill into the ground but then nobody was saying we weren’t . And there was that scream. She was sitting right in back and across from me, wide-eyed, silent. The noise lessened and just when we were thinking this is DEFINITELY NOT GOOD we pulled up and started trundling alone at five hundred feet as if nothing was the matter. This seemed comically low after all the aerobatics.
Finally the pilot came on the horn and explained that the seal on the rear door had broken and that we were going to continue to Washington at fifteen hundred feet. No bowing and scraping, no, sorry I was scared speechless, I mean too busy to tell you, “Hey, I’m still flying this thing, I MEANT to go into a power dive.”
It was then that I remembered that the week before one of their planes had lost the seal on the rear door and it blew off at ten thousand feet, a stewardess sucked out by the decompression.
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Years later, when I discovered that if you lock up the rear wheel of a motorcycle you can still steer but you can’t see where you are going because now the headlight is shining up in the trees and if you then let off the brake you get pitched through the air, quite high, and are given plenty of time to say your goodbyes, when this was happening. I braced myself as it looked like we were headed toward a large oak tree.
I still had that “I’m just a guest-worker” attitude to life. I can’t account for it. I seriously thought I was in the next world when I didn’t feel any impact, no oak tree, no ground. There was a pervasive hissing sound and steam issuing up around a small red light. The doorbell to Hell?? In a moment it came to me that it was the motorcycle and that was the generator light
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We’d landed in a little creek that had been dammed up to make a swimming hole for the summer and was now drained leaving three feet of silt soft as chocolate mousse. I think in some far corner of my mind I was even a little disappointed that , having made a painless, yay sensationless transition to the next world, I was in fact still here and covered in mud from top to bottom.
Only the week after that the vision was of a farmer and his daughter, she perhaps five, holding his hand and he, leading a cow, the three of them spanning the road but because the car I was driving was now airborne and turned to the side, they appeared out of the passenger window. All my concern was for them, with the tangential thought that this was not the way to go, landing on a cow and a five year-old, to say nothing of the farmer. The car, shaped like a lemon wedge made a landing upside down at their feet and rocked back and forth.
When I unbuckled the seat belt and plopped on the ground he walked up to me and said.”Is the brake on?” and more or less singlehandedly straight-armed the car out of the ditch and onto its wheels where it promptly started rolling backward . No, I hadn’t thought to set the brake when I was upside down.
Then he collected his daughter and the cow and continued, seemingly uninterested in my efforts to apologize. I’ll leave out the rest. Discovering early one morning that that funny line across the road was in fact highway 9G seen at eye level. I was on a long stright part of a smooth and packed dirt road, going sixty with a lot on my mind. I was lost in some happy sad musings of the latest turn my life had taken; surprise fatherhood, college life put at one remove, married, still a teenager and as green and sheltered as I could be. By the time I snapped out of it I was fast approaching the point of no return; braking might put me up on the road. I put the pedal down.
The steep run up to the highway made a ramp that set me eye to eye with the driver of the early morning milk tanker coming full tilt down the hill, We could both see how close it was and that it was so fast on both our parts that it was going to be over in the blink of an eye. I had never jumped a car more than a few feet. There really isn’t anything to do once you are airborne, wheels dangling, except brace myself, hang onto the wheel and try not to think about the way the rear wheels tuck in. I snapped my head to the side at the surprise tanker, neither of us having time to change our expression or change what we were doing. I made a safe landing, the little Volkswagen this time did not fold up it’s landing gear. Relieved as I was I also suspected that it was going to be years and years before I felt stationed here and that life was to cling to.
