Patrick and Dakota

My brother Jayaraman and I toured the USA in July-August 2015. Mostly we visited our relatives, and met some friends. We visited some museums – and a memorial : what I’d like to call a Science Yatra. But we also had some fun. When we visited Ramanujam, our cousin’s son, in Rockville, Maryland, which is near the US capital Washington, DC, we went with him to Harper’s Ferry in the neighboring state of West Virginia, for a day of zip-line adventure.

A zip-line is literally a rope between two trees (or perhaps, in more adventurous versions, two cliffs with a canyon between them). Ziplines seem to have become a popular daytime activity recently. I don’t remember any in the 1990s, which I mostly spent in the US. I spent three years in College Station, TX, where my adventures were mostly exams, homework and occassionally playing basketball. Then I spent three months in Phoenix, Arizona – and had two wonderful vacations.

Once to Yellowstone National Park, 1200 miles from Phoenix; I rented a car and drove most of that distance back and forth, and since most of my earlier car trips were twenty miles or less, driving was the major adventure. The second time was a trip to Las Vegas where I kept my money, and to the Grand Canyon, where I kept my footing - I hiked a mile down the canyon in very slipppery shoes, cheerfully reassuring my friend Anil Annadatta that it was less dangerous than it looked, and avoided all talk of insurance or last wills.

I moved to Seattle in September 1994, and in the five years there, I developed a love of nature and outdoor sports and activities – whitewater rafting and skydiving were perhaps the two most adventurous things I did. I tried skiing a couple of times, but the cold put me off, even more than the several falls on hard concrete when I tried roller blading in Texas. At various times, I tried water skiing, kayaking, rock climbing (indoors only), paragliding once. The one activity that never appealed is bungee jumping. I wanted to go scuba diving, but never overcame the inertia. Someday. I’ll never forgive myself for not yet whitewater rafting either on the Brahmaputra, or in the much nearer Coorg part of Karnataka.

The zipline was new. While in California a fortnight earlier, I saw an ad for zipline through the canopies of the Sequoia forest, but I had some logistical difficulty renting a car, so reluctantly didn’t try it. When Ramanujam suggested we zipline when we visited him, I jumped at the chance and roped (sorry) my brother in.

Ramanujam had already been on other zipline tours in more scenic places apparently. He wanted to zipline over deep ravines or rapids with the occassional crocodile snapping at his heels. That morning at Harper’s Ferry, even the mosquitos were taking it easy.

So he was a little disappointed. But Jayaram and I were quite excited. And the whole trip was totally enhanced because of the constant chit chat and banter of our guides, Patrick and Dakota. Guides in America, especially on outdoor activities, are often a delight. Most of them have a terrific sense of humor (their school teachers and family members may disagree vehemently), and are trying to liven up the situation. During this visit, I found quite a few docents in museums quite informative and delightful. Our bus driver, in LA, from our hotel in Anaheim to Universal Studios in Hollywood, would have been a successful standup comedian in the 1980s or 1990s. (Today’s standup comedians seem far more vulgar and politically partisan).

Patrick and Dakota knew their jobs, but they were intent on jokes from the start. And they kicked off with self deprecating sardarji type jokes popular in India, but about West Virginia – which is not far from the capital Washington DC, but has a reputation as a rustic rural state. The popular silly stereotypes about West Virginians is that they are poor, uneducated, not sophisiticated, ungrammatical, casual about hygiene,etc. In Texas, they talk about Louisiana and Arkansas thus, in Louisiana (and perhaps Arkansas) they mock Alabama, and in Alabama they mock Mississipi. In Seattle, they mocked small towns like Enumclaw and Bothell. No different from the bhadralok of Calcutta mocking Biharis ; or Bangaloreans and Bombaywallas snobbing over the rest of India. No doubt the people of Mississipi and Bothell pine away in their beds, lamenting their inability to learn from the morality of Hollywood or the gentle civility of New York.

So Patrick shoots: “How do we know that a West Viriginan invented the toothbrush?” Dakota answers, “Anyone else would have called it a teethbrush.” 

“Why are the fences in West Virginia like the US Congress?” “Because they are all crooked and pointing at each other.”

Patrick, Gopu and Dakota

Fences in West Viriginia

And on and on. On the bus, on the walk from the bus to the trees, on the treeposts, while we waited for each person to zip off to the next tree, all the way. Jayaram and I cracked a few jokes we knew too, and they had a few chuckles. It’s amazing how much care they took to suit up each person, make sure all their straps and buckles are in place, went through a back and forth protocol over walkie talkies, and ensured that every safety precaution was followed. For anyone who grew up traveling on bus footboards in India, and see the utter chaos of our traffic, the disregard for safety among construction workers, drivers, pedestrians, electricians, even parents for their children, American safety standards are amazing. Patrick repeatedly warned Ramanujan from mindlessly fiddling with his buckle – “That’s the only thing keeping you from falling off the rope . Fiddle once more and I will let you off the group, and you will have to walk back from here,” he warned. It worked. Jayaram said there were people at Niagara falls who simply refunded your money and wouldn’t let you on the boat if you didn’t wear a life jacket. At Kanyakumari, on the ferry from the mainland to Viveknanda Rock, they barely have enough life jackets for each person, and half the passengers wont put them on. No one cares.

Being silly

A beautiful spot, from the tree top platform -
Virigina, Maryland and West Virginia meet here

Here are some videos of us ziplining at Harper's Ferry

The diligence and the sense of humor go well beyond adventure tours. I visited quite a few museums in the US, in what I’d like to call a Science Yatra and the docents who guided us around were quite excellent too. On Sunday, I guided some school teachers from Trichy around the Bronze and Amaravati and Sculpture galleries of the Egmore museum, on Badri Seshadri’s recommendation. They enjoyed it, though they could only see a selection of exhibits, in the two hours that I wandered around with them. Only the Tamil and History teachers stayed with me, the Science teachers were interested in other things. I will write about docents separately.

My other adventure essays

1. America, the beautiful 
2. Skydiving 

You might enjoy these other essays on my American tour also

1. Science Yatra
2. Sophie Wilson - at the Computer History Museum
3. San Francisco Botanical Gardens
4. At Stanford Universtiy - The first Google Computer
5. At the Library of Congress - ஞானதேவதைகள்
6. தோண்டாமை

Skydiving - an update

I posted the photos a while back, then I updated it with a narrative - in case you missed it, here's the link. I'll write a Tamil version later.

http://varahamihiragopu.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-to-numb-your-senses.html

How to numb your senses

In 1995, I was living in Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle. Seattle is an awesome city for a nature lover. There are two large fresh water lakes in the city, Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish; there are snow-capped mountain ranges, the Cascades and the Olympics, fifty miles to the east and west respectively – excellent for skiing in winter and hiking in summer; there are several rivers with rapids, like the Methow and the Wenatchee, with organized whitewater rafting; there are two dormant volcanoes, Mr Rainier and Mt St Helens with 150 miles. Seattle lies on the sea - Puget sound, and the Pacific ocean lies west of the Olympic mountains. All of these are one or two hours away by car. It was vastly different from my school and college days in India or in Texas. Having no car, and a limited mind and less money, my travels were rare and not exotic.

While, work occupied the weekdays, my first few weekends were spent watching NFL football all Sunday. But I started travelling to these places on weekends with some friends/colleagues from India. Two of my fellow explorers were Bikram from Punjab and Debjyoti from Calcutta, and one day these guys asked me to come along for skydiving. So we drove an hour by car to the nearby Snohomish Parachute Center. There was an airfield and several single and double engine propeller planes, which can carry two pilots and four or five passengers. These are mostly privately owned, which is very common in the USA, unlike most other countries. 

An airport is for suiting up

A plane is for sitting in

 

There was a hangar - as we entered, we saw several parachutes being folded into their bags after previous jumps by other customers like us.

The photo on the right shows me suited up for a tandem skydive.

The first skydive is either a half day or full day venture. One needs no license, previous experience, training, education etc. There are two ways an amateur jumps out of a plane – static line parachuting and tandem skydiving.

In tandem skydiving, an expert instructor wears a parachute; he wears a harness, which has four steel hooks, two at the chest level, two above the hips. The amateur customer also has a harness with four steel hooks on his back, which line up with the hooks on the expert’s harness. The amateur skydiver has NO parachute. Once the plane reaches an altitude of 12000 feet – there is too little oxygen above this height – the expert and the amateur hook up their harnesses, open the plane’s door and jump out, in tandem. After a freefall of 8000 feet, which takes less than a minute, the expert unleashes the parachute, which unfurls at a height of 4000 feet. Then they both descend to the ground in about five minutes. The expert takes care of everything, the amateur just comes along for the ride. As he is strapped to the expert’s chest, he feels the full blast of the air rushing up, and if he screams or vomits, gravity ensures that the expert is protected. Fainting is optional. No extra charge.

Static line jumping, on the other hand, involves jumping by yourself. After a five hour training session, most of which is spent trying to discourage you from attempting to skydive, including a one hour video session of the sixty different ways a parachute can fail, the instructor took the three of us, Bikram, Debjyoti and me on the plane, and we ascended to 3000 feet. This was just a parachute jump, no freefall. There was a rip cord – the static line- on our parachute bag, which is about twenty feet long, which would be attached to a hook on the airplane. Incidentally our jump instructor was an ex US army major with 1800 jumps. He said that US paratroopers get three months of training before their first jump.

Hanging from the strut. You can see the red static line

We would step out of the plane, catch hold of its strut, and hang from it for a few second. The strut is a metal rod, connecting the wheel base to the tip of the wing. Then we turn towards the instructor and pose for a photo, while the pilot flies the plane at about a hundred miles per hour. Once the instructor clicks the picture, he gives a thumbs up. We let go of the strut. Once we fall twenty feet away from the plane – the length of the ripcord – it peels away the parachute bag, and the parachute unfurls. This literally takes three seconds.

Nothing in life ever prepares anyone for the first three seconds of skydiving, of freefall. The human body is not meant to fall through space at 150 miles per hour, and our senses : vision, hearing, balance, breathing, thought, and reflexes are simply unprepared and unable to cope up with it. A primal scream comes out of the mouth, gasping for air and in shock, then the parachute opens, which is another shock, and one slows down from 150mph to 15mph – in 3 seconds, the speed of descent under a parachute.

The sky is for flying!!

There’s a one way radio attached to the shoulder, where a ground instructor tells you to turn left or right. There are two guide ropes just above the shoulders leading to the left and right extremes of the parachute, and pulling either makes one turn in that direction.

There is a large one square mile field on the ground with a ten foot wide X, painted in white. 

We just need to land anywhere on the field, not the X. You can see the farm plots below, some forest scrub and water in the distance in this photo to the left.

It takes five minutes to descend to the ground under the canopy of the parachute. That may sound simple, but one has to avoid high power 11000 Volt electric lines, a sewage treatment plant, a highway with traffic, a fast flowing river and the cornfields of a farmer with a shotgun, who didn’t like trespassers. Incidentally, on my fourth jump, I landed in the cornfield since my radio had conked out and I started making turns very late. 

Add caption

The view was spectacular. No camera or film can capture it. It was a crystal blue sky with very few puffy white clouds. I could see the volcanic peaks of Rainier in the South and something else in the North, the Cascade and Olympic ranges to the east and west, the sea far away, and gorgeous farm lands and forests, rivers and lakes, highways and towns and villages in every direction.

This photo on the right, is of my second static line jump, a year later. Photo taken by instructor. You can see  houses, streams, etc. and my chute just beginning to unfurl. Mouth wide agape, all senses gone haywire :-D :-D

No essay, no narrative, no poem, no song, no epic, surely no blog, can capture the feeling of being suspended in mid air, slowly descending to earth, surrounded in every direction by indescribable beauty. It was delight and exhilaration, rapture and ecstasy, a pulse pounding feeling of fearlessness and foolhardiness, a sense of adventure and novelty.

Flying by plane is quite exciting too, but being in a seat and looking at the world through a window is nothing, compared to being surrounded by nothing but air, enveloped by the rawness of nature. A plane is for sitting in, the sky is for flying in – or falling through.

But there was also a feeling of extreme loneliness, of tremendous incomparable isolation : a sense of insignificance hits one’s soul harder than the shock of the parachute jerking open in 3 seconds. When I was floating in the air, even the mountains seemed quite tiny and sea looked like a lake. I realized the enormity of the Earth like never before or after. Along with that comes a sense of appreciation for everything material. Nothing makes me treasure the earth, more than floating far above it.

If our rishis and hermits had skydived, perhaps they would not have renounced life, but embraced it in all its material pleasures and delights, experiencing every moment and sharing the joy of living. And not worrying about the after-life and what happens to the soul, and so on.

By the way, I may not be very recognizable in the photos, because I was growing a moustache, wearing a helmet and the photos are mediocre.