Copyright © 2018 by C-Star Press, Port Townsend, Washington.

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ISBN: 978-1-7326221-0-4

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~ Preface ~

Rigging sometimes means climbing, and climbing sometimes means falling. For all of my professional life, not a year has gone by that I haven’t heard at least one or two tragic stories about falls from aloft. It happens on construction sites, on mountains, on ships, and in theaters. It happens on rooftops, on bridges, in stadiums, and on windmills. It happens wherever some combination of inattentiveness, poor training, defective gear, poor judgement, an unstable platform, unanticipated actions, fatigue, injury, and the inherent malevolence of the universe conspire to expose the climber to unimpeded gravity.

But I am not going to write about fatal falls, not this time. Instructive though the saddest stories can be, their very gruesomeness is what takes our attention, so instead of learning from the mistakes or misfortunes of the fallen, we tend to fixate on the fall itself. Stories of death from falls can be useful, but, like capital punishment, they aren’t necessarily good at getting people to change their behavior. So in this book I’m going to talk about some near-misses; about times where things came out at least relatively okay; and even a few times where life aloft was merely amusing.

There is an old saying: “Experience keeps an expensive school, but fools will learn in no other.” My hope is that this book will be part of the curriculum of a much less expensive school, the one where you learn from the mistakes of others.

If you are not a climber, the technical side of these stories might not interest you, but you might be reading this because the subject contains some powerful metaphors. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, pride goeth before the fall, climbing that precarious ladder toward success, going out on a limb—all of these and many more common expressions are about the risks inherent in rising. I hope that these stories might have value for you, even if you never leave the literal ground.

This collection is by no means encyclopedic; I have no stories about rock climbers, mountain climbers, circus riggers, or any number of other disciplines that involve working aloft. The stories are mostly about the sailing vessel rigging with which I am most familiar. But my hope is that climbers of all types will recognize commonalities in their own lives. We are all dealing with gravity.

Brion Toss

Port Townsend

CHAPTER ONE

WORKING

There are no falls in this chapter. Rather, it is meant to illustrate some of the challenges and complexities involved in working aloft. It is about doing the work that you went aloft to do, and dealing with circumstances as they arise. The possibility of a fall is a constant companion, but you must not let it distract you from the job at hand. This is particularly important because the jobs one does aloft are often extraordinarily challenging and important in their own right; if they weren’t, you might not choose to leave the deck in the first place.

~ The Parable of the Parrel ~

Some square-rig sailors were talking about interesting problems they’d encountered while under sail. Given the hazards of the marine environment, the complexities of the rigs, and the huge forces that move through those rigs, the stories tended towards the scary/hilarious. It’s amazing how much trouble one can get into when confronted with high winds, steep seas, huge sails, and several miles of running and standing rigging.

One deeply experienced skipper was describing what happened when, in an extremely lumpy, storm-driven sea, the fore course yard parrel on his boat let go. The parrel, on pre-19th-century-style ships, is essentially a massive, very formally-constructed lashing. It holds the yard to its mast, yet allows the yard to pivot and tilt. If a parrel breaks, the yard might still be suspended at its middle by the tie or halyard, as well as by the lifts at its ends. It will also be restrained from below by the braces, and by the sheets at the lower corners of the sail when the sail is set. But even with all these attachments intact, failure of the parrel means that the yard, which in this case weighed about a ton, can and will slide a good ways laterally as well as swinging fore and aft, bashing the mast and tearing up assorted gear, both its own and that of adjacent spars and sails. That’s why, in this instance, a brave and experienced hand went very carefully aloft to constrain the yard. Essentially the task was to lasso the damn thing and lash it to the mast.

A parrel lashing on the fluyt Mayflower. (Photo courtesy of Plimoth Plantation)

All eyes were on him as he struggled to build a jury rig without getting crushed. “And of course,” said the skipper telling the story, “it’s especially bad when something like that happens,” at which statement everyone nodded in agreement, except for a young deckhand who was listening in, who looked puzzled and asked, “Why’s that? Because the crewmember was in danger? Because the sail can carry away? Because the yard can break, or the parrel get caught in the—“

“No, no,” chorused several old salts, and then the first skipper explained, “It’s because that’s when the generator caught fire.”

Now the young deckhand was really puzzled, and asked “How could a parted parrel have anything to do with a flaming generator?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” replied the skipper. “First, let’s take a look at how the yard got loose.

“It takes layers of protection to avoid mishaps. In the case of the lower yard parrel, there was first a redundancy in scantlings. That is, the materials were way stronger than the loads required them to be. In addition, the yard was part of a system comprising several other yards, as well as sails without yards, any several of which we could get along without, and that is redundancy in components. And finally, the overlapping actions of the crew—regular inspections, cycling of materials, ongoing awareness—make for a redundancy of efforts.

“The lower yard is the most important piece in its system, since it’s the biggest, and because the other yards on that mast are sheeted to it, directly or indirectly. You can still work around it, but without that parrel it can do a lot of damage, which is why we sent someone up there to secure it. The parrel’s redundancies had failed. The surplus strength had worn away, we in the crew didn’t spot the wear, and then that storm hit, and we suffered the consequences.”

“Okay, so you’re saying that there weren’t enough redundancies in the rig, and that’s why the parrel failed.”

“Not exactly. Obviously, if we’d done our job better, the yard wouldn’t have broken free in the first place, but redundancy and skill and care can never completely eliminate the possibility of failure. So I’m not talking about how important it is to keep things in optimal shape. I’m talking about what you do when things inevitably go sideways. I’m talking about a larger system, with deeper opportunities for chaos. Let’s look at the generator now.”

“At last, the generator.”

“This was one of two, both good machines, both properly maintained. Nothing the matter with them, lots of protocols and failsafes. But when they were installed, there was a flaw in how the venting was laid out. Not a major flaw; it just wasn’t optimal in terms of keeping seawater out in extreme conditions, the kind that even seagoing vessels rarely encounter.”

“And venting for extreme conditions means spending a lot of extra time and labor to prevent things that are probably never going to happen. Got it.”

“Exactly. It was a flaw that could only be exploited by violent vessel motion, with water pouring into places that it wasn’t meant to pour, merrily shorting things out, and starting a fire. Meanwhile that yard is thrashing around, some poor sod is aloft, trying to secure it without dying, the wind is still screaming, the boat is lurching to and fro, and everyone’s attention is either on keeping the ship head to wind, or watching the drama. That’s why the only person who sees the smoke coming out of the deck way aft is the person aloft. He shouts, but of course no one can hear a word. He waves and points, but everyone assumes that his gestures have something to do with the yard. They’re scratching their heads and shouting at each other in an attempt to confer, and all the while that smoke is getting thicker.”

“This is just an example, isn’t it?” said the young deckhand.

“Yes, good, yes. The second catastrophe could just as easily have been someone falling down a hatch, or a line about to get wrapped in the prop, or any of a hundred other things. The point to remember is that catastrophes don’t pick on one weak spot at a time; they’re after all of the weak spots, always. So when one thing fails, even though you might have your hands really full dealing with the consequences, it might be a good idea to look around for whatever else might be failing. It’s a good thing that we finally did just that.”

“Huh,” said the deckhand, “It’s like an emergency version of being at the helm: focus on your course, but keep scanning the horizon.”

“Ahhh,” said the old hands.

~ Slush ~

We sent a new hire aloft to “slush” some standing rigging. Slush is a mixture of pine tar and/or paint and/or fish oil and/or Marvel Mystery Oil and/or pretty much whatever gummy, stinky liquid that a rigging shop might decide should be painted onto served rigging[1] to act as a preservative.

A not-yet-installed shroud in the process of being served; the marline wrapping will be slushed after it has been completed and installed. (Photo courtesy of Jamie White)

No matter what is in it, slush is an awful, viscous mess until it cures, and riggers are expected to apply it while hanging above pristine yacht decks. There are ways to minimize the likelihood of spatter, but there are even more ways to spatter, thus no shortage of stories about teak, canvas, and humans being doused by what amounts to aromatic indelible ink.

So when we sent our apprentice up, we made it clear that the slush must not be spilled. Not one drop, we said. And up she went and immediately tipped the bucket into her lap. The rest of us were attending to matters below, and didn’t hear her gasp of anguish, and didn’t see her desperately trying to squeegee the goo back into the bucket. Nor did we see how, once it was clear that only a limited amount was going to be recoverable, she began to distribute it into her clothing and into the fabric of the bosun’s chair in an attempt to prevent drips.

She succeeded at this and spent the next couple of hours slushing the rigging by extracting tar from herself as well as from the bucket. When she got back to deck, gloriously stained, we asked her why she hadn’t just come down right away. She said it was partly because she was embarrassed, but mostly because she thought I would let her go if she didn’t get the job done. She really, really wanted to be a rigger. And she turned out to be a great one. To this day I am sure, when she is around, that I detect a whiff of pine tar.

~ Falling Sideways ~

My friends Melissa and Guy Stevens were somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in their sloop Pneuma, when they discovered that they couldn’t lower their genoa. They wanted to get it down for a bit of repair, but the halyard swivel on their furler kept hitting an obstruction and wouldn’t slide down the foil. For all you non-sailors, I will now commence a brief-but-important description of how a furler works.

The halyard swivel of a roller furler.

The genoa is the big sail at the front of the boat, and the furler is like a huge roll-up window blind, with a pull-rope spool assembly at the bottom end. The furler on Pneuma was about fifty feet long. The core of the furler, the part that the sail is wound up on, is a long aluminum tube called the foil. The halyard swivel slides up the foil, suspending the sail. The luff (the leading edge of the sail) is trapped in a groove that runs the length of the foil. Pull the furling line, and the sail winds up.

The stuck furler didn’t make for an emergency, because conditions were about as tranquil and unthreatening as they could possibly be, with absolutely no wind and a sea so calm and flat that it scarcely seemed a sea at all. Ordinarily, going aloft anywhere other than a marina is something to be avoided, at least in small craft, but in this case it made perfect sense for Guy to get his climbing harness on and get up there to see what the problem was.

The furler was a Profurl, and it quickly became evident that the problem was a fairly common one specific to this brand. Every furler brand has its quirks, and one of Profurl’s is that the foil sections are held together by machine screws that are coated, at the factory, with a threadlocker[2].

The threadlocker for this brand of furler has already been applied to the screws when you get the furler kit. It is dry, and is activated once you thread the screws into the foils. Or that’s the way it is supposed to work; there seems to be more threadlocker on some kits’ screws than others. And maybe sometimes the formulation isn’t quite right, or the stuff is old, so it won’t stick as well as it should. In any event, while the screws in most Profurls stay obediently in place, you occasionally hear about situations like this one, where the sail can’t be lowered because, in the course of sailing, the foil has rattled and twisted, the screws have backed out, and their heads are now projecting past the surface of the foil. The swivel, which goes up and down with the sail, fits closely around the foil; it can’t get past loosened screws.

A close-up of a Profurl furler (safely at ground level!) showing the problem facing Guy—the protruding screw (arrow) blocks the halyard swivel from sliding down the tube.

Well, Melissa and Guy are not the sort of people to let teensy screws get in their way, which is why Guy was up there on that flat calm day. He first detached the head of the sail from the swivel, so that Melissa could gather the sail in on deck. Then he got to work with a little baggy of spare teensy screws (they are easy to drop, so he brought spares), a screwdriver (on a lanyard, of course), and some fresh Loctite. He was up on two halyards (a primary and a safety), plus he had an approximately two foot tether looped around the stay to hold him close enough to the foil to do the work. He made his way down, section by section, removing screws, coating them with Loctite, and putting them back in.

All went well until he was about halfway down, at which point Melissa called up to him.

“Hey Guy!” she said.

“Yeah?” replied Guy.

“Swell!” said Melissa, and pointed off to one side.

Guy looked, and saw that the glassy, otherwise utterly flat and featureless surface of the ocean was broken by a single, large, rapidly moving swell. It was approaching from directly abeam.

“Hold on!” shouted Melissa.

Unfortunately the only thing available to hold on to was the foil, a device specifically designed to rotate under load. As the swell reached Pneuma, a series of intimately linked, harmonic mathematical elements were put into action. The speed, height, and steepness of the swell, Guy’s mass, his position relative to the boat’s axis of rotation and center of gravity, the length of exposed halyards, the boat’s lateral roll period, and the length of the tether all came into perfect alignment, such that as the boat rocked, it swung Guy forcefully, unstoppably around the stay. Fast. Because the stay was angled, it meant that he was swung forward and up, with an apogee in front of the stay. Which meant that there was now an opportunity for gravity to accelerate him through the second half of the rotation. As an engineer I know put it, Guy “achieved resonance.” Aided by the wonderfully complementary continuing gyration of the boat, he was swung around again. And again. And again, faster and faster, as the halyards spiraled around the foil, shortening as they went, until there was no slack left, and Guy came to a very abrupt stop with his face mashed against the foil.

At this point, as often happens in times of stress, he was able to be aware of several things at once; the impact of the foil, the warmth of the sun, the color of the sky, and the sound of Melissa laughing so hard she that she fell down at the sight of him pulling a stunt worthy of Buster Keaton. But in almost the same instant he was also aware that the boat’s ongoing motion was causing him to unwind, about as forcefully as he had wound. All the requisite inertial and geometric properties remained in utter accord, and he orbited the stay, slower and slower, until he was back where he had started, and then continued to wind up in the other direction, faster and faster, once again fetching up abruptly. This went on several more times, we’re not sure how many, as Guy was kind of occupied with the whole acrobatic thing, and Melissa was pounding one hand on the deck and laughing so hard she was having trouble breathing, let alone counting.

Eventually, long after the swell had gone by, the boat stopped rocking, and Guy stopped spinning. Melissa kept laughing, but she was able to tend him on the halyards as, bruised but unbowed, he finished the job.

Got a Profurl? Fine furlers, very reliable. But you might want to check those screws. At the dock.

CHAPTER TWO

DROPPING

This chapter is not about people falling, but things. It might seem that such accidents would be less consequential, but it is worth keeping in mind that (a) things can fall on people, and (b) dropping things out of the rig is widely seen as evidence of a lack of skill and attentiveness. I know that I kick myself, hard, if I drop so much as a washer. It’s the principle of the thing.

If you are not working, in every moment, to avoid dropping things, if you have in fact not taken exaggerated, obsessive steps to avoid dropping things, then you are likely a hazard to yourself, your crew, and your vessel.

~ The Spike ~

A crewmember—we’ll call him Todd—was up on the foremast when he dropped his marlingspike. It seems amazing to say it, but he had no lanyard on the tool, so it promptly hurtled towards the deck, far below.

Rigging tool or medieval weapon of warfare?

This was a yachty-style spike, with a flattened handle end with a slot cut in it, for opening shackles. It made for a lousy shackle wrench, but had excellent aerodynamic properties, so it quickly oriented itself pointy-side-down.

Directly below was the narrow, elevated deck in front of the wheelhouse, and standing on that deck, conversing, were the first mate and the bosun. They were perhaps an arm’s length apart. The bosun later said, “We were just chatting, and suddenly I felt a puff of air on my cheek, and in the same instant heard a sharp THWACK, and I looked down and saw this pissy little spike buried about two inches into the teak deck. It was vibrating.”

The bosun and the mate looked at the spike, then looked aloft and saw Todd, frozen in place, with the horrified/relieved/embarrassed expression that people wear when they have narrowly avoided killing somebody. The bosun gestured him back down to deck, and without saying a word walked him to the tool locker and handed him a needle gun. This is basically a cross between a multi-pronged tattoo machine and a jackhammer. It is ostensibly for chipping rust off metal surfaces, but is actually a form of corporal punishment, meted out by bosuns to deserving souls. A few hours with this buzzing, chattering tool will leave you deaf, numb, and with aching joints and a stunned brain.

~ The Sheave ~

After performing a suitable duration of penance with the needle gun, Todd was let back into the more pleasant workings of the ship and was eventually assigned the tricky task of removing the foremast’s t’gallant halyard sheave for repair. This sheave, essentially a 50 pound bronze hockey puck with a hole for an axle, was set in the mast well over 100 feet above deck. Todd went up with all suitable tools—with lanyards on all of them this time—and set about his work. He wasn’t worried about the sheave falling out, as it was stuck fast in its mortise, so he began by driving the axle out, seizing a lanyard onto it as it emerged from the side of the mast.

A halyard tye sheave, mortised into a mast. That doesn’t look very easy to remove, does it? (Photo courtesy of Mark Scibinico, of the bark Elissa)

At first, he couldn’t figure out how to put a lanyard on the sheave before driving it out, but then he noticed the nice convenient hole where the axle used to be, so he threaded a piece of rope through the mast and the sheave, tied the ends together around the mast, and commenced bashing on the sheave with a hammer and punch. I am not making this up. Naturally the sheave severed the rope as it slid out of the mortise, and Todd watched, with a horrible sense of déjà vu, as the sheave plummeted towards deck.

This time it fell aft and a little to starboard of where his marlingspike had gone, right towards a rack of five windsurfer boards that were stored outside the captain’s cabin. The deck was spared serious damage because the sheave was slowed by its passage through every single board. The captain heard the noise of the impact, opened his door, looked at the remains of the boards, looked up, looked back at the boards, shook his head, and went back into his cabin. Todd became reacquainted with the needle gun.

~ The Helper ~

Some days are perfect, and this one looks like it is going to be one of them. The sea is a series of gentle, regular, sparkling swells, the morning sky is an impossible shade of blue, with just enough clouds to keep the sun from overdoing it, and there is a pleasant breeze driving us along. My job this morning is to attend to a misbehaving yard band at the main t’gallant. It is a complex task, involving detaching a corner of a large sail, plus coordination with deck crew to tighten and slacken assorted strings, plus lots of parts to secure and switch out, plus a good deal of semi-acrobatic choreography at the end of the yard. The work requires more than one person aloft, and the bosun has assigned a stolid, steady German to help me. We’ll call him Heinrich. Together we festoon ourselves with tools and parts, and begin to climb.

When we reach the yard, we are well over 100 feet up, and motion that is scarcely noticeable on deck has become travel through a large arc. We make our way to the yard’s finely-tapered end. I am organizing my thoughts about the order of business when Heinrich catches up, sidling along the footrope, and comes to a stop next to me.

“Ohh,” he says. “I am as drunk as shit.” Then he throws up.

“Right,” I say, “Back to deck. You first.”

So we make our way inboard to the mast, back down all those shrouds, back to where the bosun is waiting for us, wondering what the bloody hell is going on. Heinrich sheepishly explains, and the bosun nods sympathetically.

“Oh, sounds like you feel awful,” says the bosun. “I’ve got just the thing for a cure.” And he heads for the tool locker, to fetch a needle gun.

~ The Topmast ~

A topmast was going up on a big schooner. This job is accomplished using a heelrope, which is rove through the bottom of the mast, up to the lower mast cap. The mast is hoisted aloft on the heelrope, and threaded up through a pair of “doublings,” basically a couple of brackets to secure the bottom of the topmast to the top of the lower mast. The topmast is the thinner mast on the right. Its bottom is square where it rests on the lower doubling, at the crosstrees. The round part is threaded up through the ring-shaped upper doubling.

(Photo courtesy of Matthews Model Marine)

The rigging has to be put on after the top of the mast has cleared the upper doubling. You basically thread this tree-size spar through the doublings and pause with the head of the topmast just above the lower mast cap. Then you slip all the gear on, and when you are done you send it the rest of the way up.

A topmast going up through the upper doubling on the bark Picton Castle. Our protagonist would have climbed up on top of the upper doubling, once the topmast was a few feet further along. (Photo courtesy of the barque Picton Castle)

This can be an awkward process, because if you are standing on the crosstrees—the logical place—the top of the topmast might be well above your head, and you have to strain to get the (heavy) rigging up and over the topmast’s top. You can also sit on the lower mast’s cap, but this is awkward, too. So on this schooner the mate decided he would stand on the cap and work from there. This is crazy, but not altogether unheard of. True, he was over eighty feet above deck, perched on something the size of a large dinner plate, but on the other hand he had several feet of topmast right in front of him, providing a stout and secure handhold. So he proceeded, hanging shrouds and stays and blocks. He was almost done when the heelrope broke.

The topmast immediately plummeted to—and then through—the deck, shedding all that rigging as it went, leaving the mate, as he put it, “Holding air.” He stood there for a moment, and then somehow, with extraordinary care and agility, he got himself down off that dinner plate. He has been a fan of carefully-inspected heelropes, plus backup heelropes, plus not standing in stupid places, ever since.

~ The Stalactite ~

Many years ago, a Major American City built a massive, brutalist concrete dome and called it a sports stadium. From the apex of the vast roof, 250 feet above the playing field, they hung an ungainly pipe scaffold assembly, a huge industrial version of a stalactite. On the faces of this stalactite they hung speakers and scoreboards, facing in all directions, so that one could follow the action from anywhere in the stadium.

Or that was the idea, at least, but the dome was almost 700 feet wide, putting the average attendee about 300 feet away from the monstrosity; the sound was garbled by distance, and you needed binoculars to read the scoreboards, because they had to be small enough to fit on the stalactite. To make matters worse, fly balls in baseball games often bounced off or lodged in the structure, to the consternation and frustration of players and fans alike. So it was quickly decided that an alternative arrangement was needed, and contractors were asked to submit bids for demolition. A young-and-hungry company put in the low bid and went right to work.

First they climbed down into the structure and removed all the wiring and assorted small fixtures. Then they lowered the speakers, one at a time, to the floor of the dome. Then the scoreboards. Then they started cutting up the scaffolding, one piece at a time, starting at the bottom, and lowering those pieces. Then they realized that their bid had been a huge mistake, that things were going an order of magnitude or so slower than they had imagined, and that they were going to lose their shirts unless they came up with an alternate plan. And they did:

They calculated the weight of the structure and secured two appropriately huge cargo blocks to the roof, one on either side of the stalactite. They ran a heavy cable over each block and secured one end of each cable to the stalactite. The other ends they led out all the way to the sides of the dome, in opposite directions.

On one side, at ground level, they secured the end of the wire to a great big forklift. The end on the other side was secured to a great big truck. The two vehicles then backed up, almost to the wall of the dome, to tension the wires. The stalactite was held in place by bolts that penetrated the roof. The idea was that once the bolts were undone, the whole thing could be lowered to deck and disassembled quickly and easily.

So far, so good. There were nuts threaded onto the tops of the bolts. The first nut came off quite easily. So did the second. The third was a little harder, the fourth required serious effort with a large wrench, the fifth needed a cheater bar on that wrench, and so on; fewer and fewer bolts were holding the entire weight of the structure. After a while they gave up even trying to loosen the nuts, and started cutting them off with a torch. This became increasingly exciting, because the sudden release of tension—ever-increasing tension—meant that the nuts would shoot off the ends of the bolts as they were severed, literally ricocheting off the overhead.

Meanwhile, down on the floor, the man in the forklift was looking up the long run of cable in front of him, watching the structure on the roof shudder and jump, and listening to the sharp bangs of projectile nuts, far overhead. After a while, he got out of the forklift and walked away.

Over on the other side of the stadium, the man in the truck saw this, looked up his own cable, thought for a moment, then got out of the truck and walked away.

Shortly thereafter, the extraordinarily brave/foolish man with the torch severed the last nut. At that exact moment, several things became evident:

- First, they had grossly underestimated the weight of the stalactite.

- Second, they had therefore underestimated the relative weight of the two vehicles.

- Third, they had grossly overestimated the coefficient of friction of the two vehicles’ tires.

- Fourth, there was a lot of catenary in the cables, so the structure fell relatively unimpeded for the first few feet, producing a monstrous shock load when the cables went taut.

The blocks and the cables held, but the vehicles were dragged towards each other, at speed, even as the stalactite plunged towards the ground. The truck and forklift eventually went airborne, and all three objects collided with a mighty crash overhead, then fell to the ground in a tangle of steel.

The manager of the stadium, who had watched the whole thing, got on the radio and said, “Right, lock all the doors. Secure all the phones. Nobody leaves.” This was long before the era of cell phones, so he had a chance of keeping the incident under wraps, at least for a while. It would not, he figured, be good press for his brand-new stadium. He made a series of desperate calls, made some very expensive promises, and shortly thereafter there appeared a fleet of trucks and a whole platoon of cutting-torch-wielders. The wreckage was dissected, loaded onto the trucks, covered with tarps, and taken away.

CHAPTER THREE

NOT FALLING FAR

Jackie Stewart, the great race car driver, once said that the secret of his success was, “Quick reflexes, and slow reactions.” This is great advice for working aloft as well; you want to be able to act instantly when that is needed, but to move smoothly and deliberately at all other times. Otherwise you risk jumping at every perceived threat, making it more likely that you will fall at one of them.

This chapter is mostly about the reflex side of the equation, of how falls can be stopped almost before they start. There are many more of these stories around than the ones about long falls (survivable or otherwise), because (a) there is often something to grab onto nearby if one starts to fall, and (b) experience and training provide us with an ingrained awareness of where to grab when one needs to. Novelist Mark Helprin might have had this in mind when he spoke of, “… the blessing, amnesty, and encouragement that good climbers requisition from the thin air.”

~ The Deckhand ~

Once I was 100 feet or so aloft, up by the main truck of the bark Elissa, installing some gear. Discovering that I hadn’t brought enough shackles, I called down to the deck for extras. An inexperienced hand ran to get some, ran back with them, then smartly cast off what he thought was an unused gantline (utility line), but was in fact the halyard I was hanging from. The chair dropped, with terrifying abruptness.

The physics of this moment were the same as that of the parachutists who you will meet later in this book: acceleration instantly ensued. But land-based falls often happen in relatively small increments, and it is worthwhile to understand the effects of those increments. So here is a finer-grain revisiting of acceleration:

A human body in freefall travels about 3 feet in the first tenth of a second. This translates to a little over 2 mph. Jump off a tabletop, and that is how fast you are traveling when you land. Not hard for most people to manage, but you know that you have done something.

Speed builds as you fall further. In ½ second you have fallen 4 feet and are traveling at 11 mph. This is like jumping off the top of a Mini Cooper.

After the first second has passed, you have fallen about 32 feet. This translates to about 22 mph. Jump off an average giraffe, and that is about how fast you are going when you land. Given training, a resilient landing surface, a compliant giraffe, and excellent physical condition, it might not kill you, but it is not something that most people would want to do on purpose.

When two seconds have passed, you are traveling at about 44 mph. After three seconds it is 76 mph, and so on, an inexorable additional 32 feet per second for every second that passes, until, as wind resistance increases, you are in the world that parachutists inhabit, and your speed tops out, typically at about 120 mph.

If you are reading this, you don’t need to know any of those numbers. You come from a long line of primates who liked to climb things, and who were intimately familiar with the consequences of falling. You are hard-wired to avoid it. But those same primates liked to climb because doing so offered them shelter from predators and access to food, so you are also hard-wired to be fascinated, at least, with the prospect of leaving the ground.

Getting back to that halyard, I hadn’t fallen far when the aforementioned primate heritage manifested as a reflexive, convulsive grab for the royal backstays. I hung there and watched as the gear-laden bosun’s chair hurtled towards the deck. I watched as several comically foreshortened figures ran towards the man who had inadvertently cast off my halyard. He was still standing there, wondering why the rope was moving so fast, when the other crewmembers shoved him aside, grabbed the halyard, and brought the chair back up to me.

I had made a series of mistakes: inexperienced deckhand; only one attachment point; an old-style plank chair that I might easily have fallen out of, even if the halyard hadn’t been released; poor aloft/deck communication; and so on. All of these things seem obvious now, but it took me years more before I began to incorporate better aloft protocols into my work. Frankly, it took way, way too long for me to learn needed lessons, and involved way, way too much luck. That is why, with the zeal of the converted, I always recommend that people study up on climbing safety, take classes, watch the pros, do whatever it takes to incorporate the wisdom of people who tend to survive the risks of working at heights. Cheap insurance.

~ The Trapeze ~

Aboard the bark Sea Cloud, we had a ponderous monster of a rugby-playing, beer-drinking deckhand we’ll call Glen. He was a guy with a face that could make a freight train take a dirt road, but he was not unpleasant to be around. Except when he slept; when he slept he would more or less continuously cough, sneeze, snore, fart, burp and talk, sometimes all at once, all night long. When he was awake, he was occasionally handy for moving large heavy objects, and he came to take pride in his strength.

Sails being furled aboard the tall ship Elissa. (Photo courtesy of the Galveston Historical Foundation)

His station was on the mizzen mast, and his favorite job was to furl squaresails. To perform this task you lay out on the footropes, lean way forward over the yard, grab fistfuls of canvas, and heave them up onto the top of the yard, then reach down for more. Glen was very tall, with gorilla-length arms, so he could gather in and hoist a lot of canvas. As he developed his technique, people started watching him instead of helping to furl. They were amazed and complimentary about what he could do. Glen was pleased, and they didn’t have to work as hard, so everybody was happy.

One day, at the peak of his abilities, Glen was pretty much furling the entire port side of the lower topsail—the biggest sail on that mast—all by himself. The yard captain—let’s call him Chris—came out on the yard. He wanted to get to the outboard end, to tidy up the sail out there, so as he approached Glen he said, “Just hold on a moment, I’m going to step behind you.” Glen leaned forward and was still, and Chris thought this meant it was okay to pass by, so he unclipped his safety tether from the jackstay (yes, bad idea) and stepped behind.

But Glen hadn’t heard him, didn’t even know he was there; he was so still because he was concentrating, bracing himself for a world-record furling heave, which he exploded into at precisely the wrong moment, knocking Chris completely off the yard.

I was looking aft at that moment, and saw Chris silhouetted, spread-eagled in thin air. It was an awful moment, because it was obvious that Chris was about to take a probably-fatal fall. But when Glen pulled up on the sail, it caused his feet to push the footrope back, like a trapeze swinging into the reach of Chris, who grabbed it as he fell, hung swinging for a moment, then calmly asked Glen to move inboard, whereupon he swung back up to the yard and finished furling the sail. Shortly thereafter, Glen became familiar with the workings of a needle gun.

~ The Flag ~

At the first level on this, the mainmast of the bark Sea Cloud, the shrouds are thick and stable, with fat ratlines. It is like that for the first 80 feet or so.

Plenty of big shrouds down low, with nice fat ratlines.

Things are still good at the next level, the topmast, but not as good; the shrouds are thinner and there are fewer of them, and their fore-and aft spacing diminishes as they go up another 60 feet.

At the third level there are few shrouds, and spaced so close together that they twist from my weight. My feet barely fit on the narrowing gaps between the shrouds.

And then fewer, and then fewer still… (Photo courtesy of Joe Lombardi of Ocean Technical Services)

When I am over 200 feet up, hanging on to the skysail lifts, which are the last bits of significant rigging on this mast, my goal is still several feet above me. It is the gleaming mast truck, the cap at the very top. It houses pulleys for flag halyards, and has always performed admirably for the flags we usually fly, but the Yale Alumni Club is arriving soon to cruise the Turkish coast, and they have sent ahead a huge Yale flag; the bosun is afraid that if the wind picks up, that flag might tear the truck off. So he has assigned me to lash a separate block on, right under the truck, just for that flag. But there is nothing to hang onto up there; I will have to shinny up and tie myself on before tying the flag on.

There is no safe way to do this job, but at this time, in my naive youth, it is especially dangerous, because I have neither the training nor the knowledge of how to keep myself tied on at every moment. I will just try to hang on until I can get into position above the lifts, and secure my lanyard then.

By brute force I manage to get up. The boat is at the dock on a fairly calm day, but up here the mast is going through at least a 20-foot arc, back and forth. With one hand I reach for the lanyard on my belt that will secure me to the mast. My feet slip. The mast probably still shows dents from where I make a desperate grab.  As I hang there, an image pops into my mind of the obituary page of my hometown newspaper. The headline reads, “Local man dies hanging Yale flag in Turkey.

I think, “No. Too embarrassing,” and I reposition, and get secure, and use my hands and teeth to secure the halyard block for the damn flag, and I get back to deck the gradual way.

~ The Bounce Test ~

I now never go aloft unless I have, at all times, at least two methods of attachment to something trustworthy. Usually this means two halyards, and I prove each one by taking up on it, then holding it on a belay point as I leap up and fall on it. This imposes an impact load that is much higher than my bodyweight; the idea is that if any component is going to break, it will break it before I leave the deck. We call this “the bounce test.”

There is a hidden double meaning to this phrase, having to do with how fast things fall. In J.B.S. Haldane’s 1928 essay, “On Being the Right Size,” he notes that “… the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.”

Translation: big animals fall faster than small ones and are therefore more likely to be injured or killed when they fall. Cats land, people bounce, horses splash.

When you do the bounce test, then, it is well to remember that, should something go wrong, you will hit the deck so hard that you will actually bounce. This is to be avoided.

The trouble is that, even knowing the consequences of the failure of one’s gear, the repetition of ritual can wear away the significance of its source. The bounce test is a ritual, a comforting ritual, a way of informing the hind brain that you are being appropriately cautious. But for me on this day it has become a bit empty; I am just going through the motions.

Spinnaker halyard crane, bail, block, and halyard. If any part of this component fails, the whole thing comes down—along with anyone with the misfortune of being tied on to the end of the line.

One of the halyards I am using is the jib halyard, and one is for the spinnaker. The latter is rightfully regarded as the least favorable line to go aloft on, because the block and both ends of the rope are external to the mast. Therefore any failure of any component in that fixture means that the entire halyard will fall to deck, along with whoever is on it. On some boats the line goes into the mast a few feet below the block, but even here a fall could kill you, because you will fall twice the distance from block to mast entrance before fetching up sharply. Talk about a shock load. There is even a moderate-to-good chance that, in fetching up, the halyard might shear on the lower edge of the exit plate, so you would get one possibly fatal shock load followed by an almost certainly fatal landing. Halyards that go directly to masthead sheaves are far more robust, and far more trustworthy.

I am not thinking of any of this as I jump up, lean way back, and bounce on the belayed spinnaker halyard. Suddenly I am lying flat on my back, stunned, and watching as the halyard, its block, and a broken-off chunk of stainless steel spinnaker crane is hurtling towards my head. I think, “It would be really embarrassing if that kills me,” and I roll sharply away.

The assembly just misses me, hits with a crash, leaving a divot in the deck. My crew rushes forward to see if I am all right. Behind them I can see our client, gone utterly pale. It turns out that he is a personal injury lawyer; he later relates, not that he was concerned for my well-being, but that he was fearful that somehow I would want to sue him. But all he says at the time is, “I didn’t know that stainless steel could break.”

Since that time, we always leave one halyard belayed, with just a bit of slack in it when we are testing the other one. That way, if the one being tested lets go, the other will catch the climber right away. And we never lean way back as we jump. We work to keep the ritual, and therefore ourselves, alive.

~ The Ascender ~

My friend Rose Loper used to be a test pilot, the first woman to hold that job at Boeing. Given the preposterone-heavy demographic of the profession this means that, even more than is usual, she had to be at least twice as good at her job as her male counterparts. If you want to meet someone preternaturally capable and calm, you want to meet Rose.

She is also fun-loving, warm, and adventurous, so naturally she became a sailor. She and her spouse Jani bought a big Hallberg-Rassy cutter and set out to cruise the world. I met them when they came to Port Townsend for some rigging upgrades, and one of the things they were interested in was gear for going aloft. Rose bought one of our climbing harnesses, and she patiently endured my obsessively detailed lecture on its use: how to adjust it for comfort and security; how to attach halyards to it; how to use the multipurpose tether that is built into it; how to use lanyards on anything that might dent a skull if dropped from on high; and other niceties that we have found make going aloft, if never actually safe, at least not actively dangerous.

We also discussed the merits of the various ways that one can climb a mast. There are numerous methods, and I am about to describe two of them. Bear with me, there is a payoff on all this.

As noted in the previous story, we always go aloft using two halyards: a primary and a safety. I prefer to haul myself aloft on the primary and have a deck crew tend the safety, but it is also possible to have the deck crew provide the hauling power, leaving the climber to tend their own safety. Rose preferred this method, and I told her that one way to do this task is with a device called an “ascender.”

An ascender, clamped onto a safety line.

Basically this is a clamp on the rope that is attached to your chair, leaving your hands free to guide yourself as you travel. The ascender slides up a belayed halyard, but won’t slide down. If the primary halyard fails, the ascender grips immediately, which is why in this application it is called a “fall-arrest device.” You are left dangling up there, and will need to figure out a way to get to deck, but things could be worse.

While ascenders work automatically on the way up, most of them require tending on the way down. This was the case with this ascender, and this is where Rose got into trouble. The clamping mechanism is spring-loaded, and you can easily overcome the spring simply by squeezing a projecting piece on the side of the ascender. Now you can come down, and if the primary fails, all you have to do is to let go. The spring snaps the cam onto the rope, and there you are, safely dangling. Sounds easy, right?

So yes, Rose went up her mast to do some maintenance, with the ascender automatically tending itself on the way up. And yes she held it open while Jani lowered her back towards deck. And yes, Jani had a brief moment of imbalance and the halyard popped off the outboard end of the winch that the rope was on, and suddenly Rose was in freefall.

This is where it helps to have been a test pilot. As time slowed to the proverbial crawl, Rose looked over at her hand and said to herself, “Brion told me I have to let go.” And she did. It all happened in an instant, she only fell a very short distance, so there was no massive jolt when she fetched up, no harm was done. But it took a conscious, non-panicking, steel-nerved act of will to open her hand.

The reason that it was so hard to let go is that our arboreal ancestors, the ones I keep talking about, gifted us with a powerful reflex: if you start to fall, you grab the nearest object and hang on for all you are worth. This reflex is one of the reasons we still exist as a species. It has saved many lives, including my own. It is a good reflex. You want to have this reflex. Unless of course the thing that you are hanging onto will kill you if you don’t let go of it. There are oh so many sad stories about people who just couldn’t manage to let go. There is a metaphor in there somewhere.

CHAPTER FOUR

FALLING TOO FAR

If, while falling, you have time to wonder if you will survive the landing, you are falling too far. If you have time to be embarrassed, or to anticipate pain, you are falling too far. These are the falls we dread, the prolonged submissions to descent at speed, that must end with some degree of violence.

This chapter contains stories of three such falls. The first is about the lure of adrenaline. The second is about how survival of a long fall—or of any difficult experience—can depend upon what you bring to that experience. The third is about how an unlikely survival shaped the subsequent life of an inexperienced climber (me).

~ The Affelbach ~

Based on an actual event. Heck, very likely based on numerous actual events.

Henry wants to try bungee-jumping, so he asks his brother, who has jumped many times, for the name of a good company. The brother obliges, and says, “When you check in, ask for the Affelbach. It’s an extra-special option.”

“What does it involve?” asks Henry.

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. Just ask for it.”

So on a mild, sunny day Henry drives up into the mountains to the headquarters of the bungee-jump company, and checks in. As he is paying his fee he asks the clerk, “And could I get the Affelbach option?”

The clerk freezes in mid-motion, looks sharply at Henry, and says, “We don’t do that any more.”

“Are you sure? I’ll pay extra.”

“No. Not a chance.”

So Henry shrugs and takes his ticket, and walks out to the bus that will go up to the jump site. On the way, he strikes up a conversation with one of the staff. After some pleasantries he says, “The guy in the office didn’t want to give me the Affelbach option. Is that something I could arrange directly with you?”

“The Affelbach? Listen, I don’t know where you heard about that, but we haven’t done one of those in a long time.”

“Well, how about today?”

“Hey, there’s a reason we don’t do them any more. You’re just going to have to settle for a regular jump.”

“But my bro—“

“No.”

So Henry gives up, and settles back for the rest of the ride. In a while they arrive at the jump site: a bridge over a narrow, rocky chasm. It is well over 200 feet to the bottom. One by one the jumpers are helped up onto a platform in the middle of the bridge. It has walls on three sides, but is open on the jump side. For each participant, the crewmembers very carefully and thoroughly check the anchor point, check the bungee from one end to the other, check the connection to the special boots, and check the attachment of the boots to the legs of the jumper. When all is ready, they have the jumper face the bridge and bunny-hop backwards until they are close to the edge. Finally the crew leader counts “3, 2, 1, jump…”

An aside:

At the moment of taking a risk, we typically feel a mixture of things, possibly including anxiety, fear, even dread. But we might also feel thrilled, exalted, and powerful, because risk implies reward. The idea of what we might gain can override our worry of what we might lose. We are wired, to varying degrees, to enjoy the feeling of adrenaline flowing into our blood, to enjoy the tantalizing, evolution-reinforced possibility of a payoff. This feeling can be so intense that the payoff becomes a secondary matter; we fixate on the rush, and it can be a heady rush indeed.

If that rush is all you want, if you don’t care about the intricacies involved with risky, technically-complex sports like mountain-climbing or hang-gliding or race-car driving, then bungee-jumping is for you. You stand alone on a precipice, and jump off, with only an industrial-grade rubber band between you and certain death. It doesn’t matter that, statistically speaking, the jump is far safer than any of the abovementioned sports, or even than milder pursuits like canoeing or bicycling, because it feels dangerous. To our ancient, pragmatic animal judgement it obviously is dangerous. So we get the massive thrill of risking death, without the correspondingly high likelihood of dying. It is an activity custom-made for adrenaline junkies, and the only downside, if you can call it that, is the frontal-lobe knowledge that it is actually safe.

Back to the jump:

Henry is one of the last to jump, and when it is his turn the crew repeats the ritual, checking every component. They position Henry near the edge, and one of them counts down 3,2,1, and Henry pushes off. But as he does so one of the other crewmembers looks at Henry’s feet, does a sharp double-take, and lunges forward, shouting, “WAIT!!!” But it is too late.

Henry desperately reaches up, trying to get hold of the cord, but to no avail. He falls, knowing that he is about to become a statistic. A few seconds later, as he dangles safely above the rocks, he thinks, “Ah. So that is an Affelbach.”

~ The Jump... and The Landing ~

Note: the names of the people in this story have been changed to protect privacy, and to respect an insistent humility.

The U.S. Army is very, very good at launching large numbers of parachutists from airplanes. Dozens, scores, hundreds of soldiers at a time, every jumper equipped with reliable gear, every jumper prepared with comprehensive, rigorous training, supervised by jumpmasters who have spent more time airborne—in and out of airplanes—than many people have spent walking, and backed by a system that has been supplying, organizing, practicing, and executing jumps for so long, and in so many places and circumstances (including, yes, many where the gravity-associated hazards are relatively trivial), that every conceivable variable, every possible hazard, failure mode, catastrophe, and malfunction, every likely and unlikely combination of recalcitrant equipment and human folly, has long ago been recognized, taken into account, and given a place in the manual. Well, there are always exceptions. This is the story of one.

In order to stay qualified, every Airborne member must make a “proficiency jump” at least once every 90 days. Some units and specialties might require more frequent jumps to maintain qualification. For this exercise there were 100 soldiers aboard a C-17 Globemaster III. Half were seated on either side of the fuselage, with a Humvee in the middle, right aft. The idea was to put the ramp door down on the first pass over the target, launch the vehicle, and then circle around and launch the personnel. The vehicle was to go out first for reasons that might be obvious once you think about it. Not obvious? Just imagine yourself on the ground after a bad landing. You’ve broken your leg and aren’t moving real well. The last thing you need is a 5-ton truck floating down onto you. This is the kind of thing the manual helps with. The difficulties with this particular exercise started with a glitch in the ramp mechanism, preventing the Humvee drop.

To appreciate what happened next, it would be useful to know a bit about the logistics of mass jumps. Every soldier’s primary chute has a static line that runs from the pack, then up and over the inboard shoulder. That way it won’t be under an arm or around your neck when you turn outboard at the door to jump. The tether terminates in a robust clip. For walking around before the jump, the clip is secured to a gear loop on the soldier’s chest. The chute is held in place by cotton webbing with an 80 pound break strength. When the paratrooper leaves the plane and fetches up at the end of the static line, the force tears out the cotton webbing, and the chute deploys. It’s a brutally simple, wonderfully reliable arrangement, but it can be compromised. For instance, it is possible for the rigger to use a stronger webbing than the 80 pound cotton (the penalties for this are understandably severe).

It is also possible for a jumper somehow to misreeve or tangle the static line before a jump, getting it stuck behind a D-ring, strap, or the like. If this happens the static line might not tear the webbing out, and the jumper can end up hanging on the outside of the plane, slamming repeatedly and violently against the fuselage in the slipstream. But there’s a procedure for this, too: if the jumper is still conscious and uninjured (and you can tell because, as per training for this unlikely eventuality, they’ll be curled up in a ball, with no limp limbs), then the jumpmaster will just cut the static line. That’s what reserve chutes are for. If the jumper is unconscious or significantly injured, the jumpmaster will arrange to haul the person back into the plane, then proceed with getting the rest of the people out. This is yet another of the many screwups that the system is prepared to deal with.

A C-17 interior with Humvee and a full load of paratroopers; the exit doors are located on either side of the truck. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Defense)

There are four jumpmasters, two at each exit door. One on each side is there to assist with the static lines and to act as a safety. When it is time to jump, the jumpmasters check with the aircrew, and then begin giving a very specific series of commands. First is the order to stand up, then to hook up. On the latter command, everyone in the “stick” (line of jumpers) transfers their hook to a taut overhead cable that runs fore-and-aft, just inboard of the seats, on both sides of the plane (on really packed flights, as in the picture above, there are two inboard rows of seats). Then comes the command to check static lines. Next is the command to check all equipment. The jumpmasters have already given everyone a thorough inspection before the plane boarded, but in the next couple of minutes everyone is going to jump out of an airplane. So everyone checks everything again. They check the helmets’ chin straps, the parachutes’ leg and chest straps, any and all gear straps and lanyards. They check the up to 70 pounds(!) of gear they will be jumping with. And everyone pays particular attention to those static lines: You check your own static line in front of you, where you can see it, and you check the static line on the back of jumper ahead of you. These lines absolutely must run fair.

When all is checked, the jumpmasters call out “Sound off for equipment check.” The forwardmost jumpers (they’ll be the last ones off), call out “OK,” and tap the back of the person in front of them. On receiving that signal, that person calls “OK,” then taps the next person, and so on. The idea is that every jumper in both sticks confirms readiness. When the person at the front of the line feels that tap, they call out “OK jumpmaster,” and hold a “knife hand” (fingers straight, thumb laid down flush, palm vertical) pointed right up in front of the jumpmaster’s face. Even this specific hand ritual speaks of deep institutional experience; these airplanes are noisy things and lighting is not always ideal. There is no room for ambiguity or uncertainty, thus the string of verbal as well as physical signals along the length of the stick. But the lead jumper, instead of tapping the jumpmaster, emphatically extends a hand, formed to maximize visibility and minimize getting a sprained finger from what comes next: the jumpmaster makes an emphatic verbal acknowledgement and then slaps the hand to make an equally emphatic physical acknowledgement.

Now the loadmasters—specialized Air Force crewmembers—raise the doors, latch them open, and let the cockpit crew know that all is ready, at which point the pilot will radio, “Army, your door.”

The jumpmasters conduct a careful ritual, checking the edges around the door for sharp spots. It wouldn’t do to have a static line get severed when it fetches up. If all is well, the jumpmaster on each side leans right out of the door and looks around, making sure that no other aircraft are in dangerous proximity, and not incidentally looking to see that they are not over the wrong target. It happens.

Up until now there has been a red “jump light” glowing in the cabin. At 30 seconds from go, an amber light replaces the red, the jumpmaster calls out “stand by,” and the first jumper turns to face out the door.

Finally a green light comes on and the jumpmaster says “green light go,” smacks the first jumper on the leg or butt, and the jump commences. A soldier goes out on one side of the plane, followed by a soldier from the other side. The two lines shuffle aft, jumpers leaving alternate sides of the plane at half-second intervals. That’s right, half-second intervals; the idea is to get an effective group on the ground as quickly as possible. To help keep the intervals from being too tight, no one moves towards the door until the person ahead of them is a full arm’s length away. Every mass jump that the army conducts sees each of these details—and more that we don’t have space for here—done consistently and scrupulously. Every step puts the jumpers that much further from potential catastrophe.

When all goes as it should, a mass jump can be a thing of precise beauty.(Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Defense)

With all this in mind, let’s return to our plane with the jammed tail ramp. This is an extremely uncommon mechanical failure, because aircraft mechanics tend to be at least as thorough and skillful as parachutists, but sometimes things do break. The jumpmasters confer briefly and decide to scrub that part of the mission and move on to the next. As covered in the manual. People start going out the doors.

The soldier who related this story to me (we’ll call him George) was third in line on his side of the plane, so he was to be the fifth or sixth one out. A lieutenant he worked with (we’ll call her Maria), was on his side. Second in line on the other side was another lieutenant (we’ll call him Bill). Unfortunately, what should have been a routine jump was unbalanced by the unanticipated presence of the Humvee, which partially blocked the view between the two doors. The lines started out not-quite-synchronized, and Maria and Bill went out their respective doors almost simultaneously.

The slipstream of the plane swept both soldiers aft and inboard, canopies already deploying. In some cases when this happens, bodies will collide hard enough to knock one or both parties out. Bad. In this case the collision wasn’t too serious, but the two partially-deployed chutes immediately tangled and collapsed. The two soldiers were now locked together, heading for the ground at speed, and accelerating.

The jumpmasters immediately corrected their timing, and everyone else’s chute opened uneventfully. George reached the front of his queue, jumped, and looked down the line of parachutes trailing away below him. He immediately saw the two tangled chutes, and realized that one of them must belong to his friend Maria. As he watched, Bill’s reserve chute blossomed, filled, and collapsed. The pair continued their way-too-fast descent.

George watched all this, helpless. His official task for this jump was to carry the radio for the commander, but as a graduate of a Combat Lifesaver course he also had a medical bag. Medical attention probably wasn’t going to make any difference in this case, but you never know, so he pulled at his chute’s suspension lines to maximize his own descent rate. This is a hazardous move, itself possibly leading to chute collapse, but he had to do something. He could see that the two lieutenants were working at getting separated, but they were trapped by their lines. As they neared the ground, when all seemed lost, George saw Maria’s reserve chute open—and stay open.

It was an indescribably sweet sight, and the descent of the two soldiers slowed to a survivable rate. Note: a reserve parachute is much smaller, and much less aerodynamically effective than the primary chute. At the time of this jump, the reserve was 28 square feet, and basically a very thin disc, while the primary was 34 square feet, with a deep parabolic shape. The difference in size and shape meant that, if you had to use the reserve, you would come down faster and with less control.

Having to bear the weight of two people made things even worse, but it was better than nothing. Maria played her control lines, working to keep the canopy open as it was battered by the still-fluttering mess of the three other parachutes.

It looked to George as though everything was going to be okay, but when the pair was still about 200 feet above the ground that last, precious reserve chute collapsed.

In normal circumstances a parachutist, using the equipment that was Army standard at the time, would hit the ground at about 15 mph. This is about as fast as you’d be going if you jumped off the top of a minivan. With a crosswind it can be more like running off the top of a van, but we’re still talking relatively low velocity. If a skydiver jumps out of an airplane, by the time they freefall 200 feet, they will be traveling at about 60 mph, about like a freefall off a 20-story building. It is just barely conceivable that a human being could survive an impact at that speed, but given the drag from all those flapping parachutes, and/or the possibility that the reserve collapsed at less than 200 feet, the soldiers might have augered in at as little as 40 to 50 mph. Which would be like jumping off a building of merely 6 or 7 stories.

By any normal standards, this is still a guaranteed-fatal velocity, but Bill and Maria had two more factors on their side. One was that they were young and extraordinarily tough people; there are no couch potatoes in Airborne. The other factor is a crucial determinant of outcome for almost any jump, something almost as important as the parachute itself: the Prepare to Land Attitude.

When you are properly in the Attitude, your knees are slightly bent, your feet and knees are pressed together, your back is straight, your chin is tucked, your elbows are close to your side, and your hands are up to protect your face. There is also a dynamic aspect to the Attitude. If you are coming in at any speed at all, you need to take a shoulder roll to bleed off the force of the landing impact. A face plant does not accomplish this, nor does falling onto your back. Instead, you need to twist your body to one side as you are about to land, and roll onto the other side, progressively making contact with feet, calves, thighs, butt, and lats. This twist-and-roll is particularly valuable when, as is often the case in the military, you are landing in a breeze and/or swinging in a pendulum arc, but it is also a vital technique if you are coming down extra-fast.

As Bill and Maria neared the ground, observers there saw that Bill’s knees were locked back and that his legs were apart. Maria, by contrast, was holding a textbook example of Attitude.

George watched as Maria hit, rolled several times, and then lay completely still. He feared the worst, but then she took a deep breath and shouted, “Mother---- that hurts!” It turns out that she had severely sprained an ankle, suffered two hairline vertebrae fractures and some bruised ribs, but was otherwise okay. Bill did not fare nearly so well: six spiral fractures from knee to ankle on one leg; one break on the other; multiple broken ribs; several fractured vertebrae; concussion. The Attitude makes a difference.

One more note on procedure. A jump like this one typically takes 40 to 45 seconds. George came down as fast as he could, so his time in the air was almost certainly less than 40 seconds. But by the time he landed and went to help, an ambulance had rolled up and medics were tending to the wounded. Just as the manual says they should.

There are any number of morals that might be appended to this story, things like Teamwork is Powerful, or Never Give Up, or Airborne is Awesome. But the one I like is both figuratively and literally apt. It comes from Archilocus, a soldier and poet of ancient Greece. He wrote that, “We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”

~ The Tower ~

Many years ago I was at the top of a 45-foot-tall scaffolding tower. It fell over. As I was about to die—it was obvious that I was about to die—my last words were, “Oh no, oh no.” Some time later, from a great distance, I heard someone saying, “Oh no, oh no,” and realized it was me, not dead yet. My right knee hurt, my back hurt, my head and a few other things hurt, but mostly my left ankle hurt.

A deputy from the nearby town of Tenino came rushing up to where I lay amidst a tangle of torn and fractured steel. He had been there to monitor us as we cleaned up after a rock festival. Until that moment it had been boring duty, but now he had an actual emergency to deal with. I told him that I thought I’d broken my ankle. Whipping out a huge, very sharp knife, he prepared to cut off one of my ridiculously expensive, much-beloved hiking boots. I pointed out that it laced down to the toe, and that he could just untie it. He was crestfallen, but he put away the knife and eased the boot off. Then he went to pull my sock off, but my ankle was now grapefruit-sized, visibly expanding, and pulling on it made for passing-a-kidney-stone levels of pain. Granted, I have never passed a kidney stone, but it seems likely that one’s pain meter is pretty well pegged when you get to the gasping-as-you-almost-faint level of agony. I suggested that he could cut the sock off. This really made his day. Out came that knife and off came the sock.

What followed, in the short term, was a cast on the ankle, bandages on assorted other body parts, and slow recuperation in my parents’ basement. I taught myself to juggle, studied knots, read many books, and thought a lot about mortality.

What happened in the long term was a life: a series of ludicrous mistakes tempered by love and education. Along the way the ankle decayed, little by some, until it felt like that sock was being pulled off every time I walked on it. Eventually I had it fused, which, interestingly enough, involved someone approaching it holding a very sharp knife. The good news is that the pain then went completely away. The bad news is that the adjacent joint (the subtalar, for you anatomy nerds) now took up the slack in stress, which it was not even remotely designed to handle, until it, too, became seriously decayed.

I recently had my foot X-rayed. The technician took one look at the picture, then turned to some nearby colleagues and said, “Hey guys, take a look at this!” They all crowded around, marveling. I stood on my little pedestal, in one of those charming hospital gowns. One of the techs said to me, “How can you walk on this thing?” In that moment, it occurred to me that I might have been being just a bit too stoic.

Many climbers have taken falls much worse than mine, and been damaged more badly, and still recovered and got back to work. And of course many climbers do not survive bad falls at all. Pain is a possibility. Death is a possibility, but I have never wished to stop climbing, and I dread the day, not so very far off, when age will demand that I stop. That is because along with risks, and even actual consequences, there are also amazing benefits: Standing on the spreaders of a schooner under way on a sparkling day in Maine; finding a flaw in a rig, at the top of the mast during a survey, that likely saved the vessel and the lives of the crew; working aloft with my teacher, where he simultaneously demonstrated a proper seizing and introduced me to the fundamentals of vessel stability; training other young people, initiating them into the same mysteries; and much more. So the point of the above story, for me, is threefold:

1. Working aloft can be hard on a body, and even the traumas we survive can have long-term, debilitating consequences. Even relatively minor strains and bruises and breaks can come back to haunt us over time. Therefore,

2. Work smarter than I did. That tower fell over because it was very, very badly built, but I went up on it anyway, even though I knew this was so. A large proportion of aloft accidents are the result of people underestimating how dangerous the job is, and overestimating their own ability to survive.

3. Points 1 and 2 notwithstanding, take risks. Put yourself in places of meaningful danger. Yes, life is unutterably precious, unbearably fragile, but it becomes flimsy and shallow if your primary aim is to preserve it. Risk it. If you huddle in a safe space, you might live longer, but you will not be fulfilled. Risk your life, at some point, to some extent. Do it with enough training and gear that your chances of survival are excellent. But do something that will let you know how close Death is, and how amazing Life is.

~ Acknowledgments ~

Thanks to Scott Wilson for turning these musings into a book. Thanks to Brian Brown, Harry Donovan, Nick Benton, Philippe Petit, Kathy Holzer, Guy Stevens, and all the other climbers, living and dead, who continue to inspire, entertain, and educate me. And of course, love and gratitude to my bride, Christian, who keeps me writing.

~ Biography ~

Master Rigger Brion Toss has been working magic in high places for over 40 years, rigging everything from tiny daysailers to huge traditional squareriggers. He is best known as author of The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice, and as the star of a series of instructional rigging videos. He has also acted as an instructor to the U.S. Coast Guard, among other organizations, and is an expert witness in cases involving rigging of all sorts. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his amazing spouse, Christian Gruye, and the two of them are still happily involved with rigging sailboats.

~ More Brion ~

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Notes

1. Service: tight, contiguous turns of marline that are wrapped around a vessel’s rigging, to protect it from wear and the effects of weather.

2. A thread-locking compound is a thin adhesive and sealant applied to the threads of screws to prevent loosening and corrosion. Loctite is the best known type of thread locker.