REAL FLUSH Pt 2

For a very few heartbeats we float eerily, and nothing says smoooth like zero G! Then in one beat it’s full negative. Cinching belts tight makes sense when pitching over Niagara, but doesn’t help as much as you’d wish. The turbulence is dagger sharp, not shove here and slam there but ever present and overwhelming, more like intense low frequency vibration. How it can rattle teeth and blur vision while the aircraft hangs together, no idea. And no complaint. Our MacCready ring still calls for hundred or more, but the gulch below is falling even faster than we are, so we slow to fifty for the sake of the bird.While our shoot-down proceeds I concentrate 51% on the aircraft and devote all the rest to capturing this scene. Mountains on each side, huge already, swell as we drop between them. Walls rise angry, squeezing together. Vertical slabs, flutes, crevices, moraines like lava flows, all sliding by so fast every target is a moving one. On down the canyon’s greening throat stair step lakes appear in series, larger than those behind us and every bit as wild, but somehow less desolate. Ease up on the trigger mate, you’re running out of ammo!

One end or the other, it’s gonna come out.

dalem

Say what you will about gravity, it has a way of resolving issues. Just when it seems we can’t sink any faster or those walls come any closer, the canyon turns a corner and opens like the bell of a horn. Finally the sink abates, but not the tailwind.We’re spit out to where some air must go back up to make room for what’s still tumbling down the flue behind us. A four-knot thermal becomes six, then twelve, and soon we’re peering into the hole we just fell through, vowing to never go there again and wondering how much different it’ll be when we do.Skating the sixty miles back to Lone Pine, opposed mentalities grapple in my head, fanatical urge to view what we just recorded, and icky guilt over being flushed from the high country. As a kid I was steadfastly unsuperstitious, but soaring - and observing consequences - changed that. I’ve learned to never do certain things unless I want to jinx myself. One is biting off more than I can tastefully chew. Another is thoughtlessly wasting altitude.At the motel we find our video cassette ran out exactly as that glorious shoot down began: no joy there.Whatever. It would’ve been blurred by turbulence anyway, image stabilization or no. Nice to know we have all those stills in the can, ready to ogle when we get home. Viewing them on this teensy screen back of the camera is titillating but only amplifies the jones. If we had one of those new laptops we could download them right here in our room. Patience, patience.Back home I tell myself to exercise some self-discipline for a change. Before sneaking a quick look at each image and drooling all over the keyboard, I’ll copy the whole business to another folder for backup. Boy am I clever!Of course while rushing that task I hit the same damn button I’ve hit so many times before and since: the WRONG one.  And...NO!Oh yes, two days of irreplaceable shots deleted.The refrigerator’s hum fills a cold-sweat silence, good angel whispering that this boner was necessary to rid myself of plunder I did not rightly deserve. Bad angel only sneers.Nonsense you say? Well have fun proving otherwise.And go get your own pictures.