Whuffos Are People Too!

[guest]

There's a bar down the street from a building we were jumping downtown. The owner of the bar would let us hide out there after jumping, and also let us pack in his back room. This is a piece about a waitress I met there and was originally published in the Fixed Object Journal. (Like they say on TV, if you haven't seen it, it's new too you). :-)


Whuffos Are People Too!

She is the kind who works in a bar and enjoys it. She isn't working her way somewhere else. This is it and she is good at her job. She is early 40 something with a smile that makes you smile. She is the type you can tell things. She wouldn't snicker, she wouldn't patronize and she would keep your secrets.

I don't usually go out of my way explaining BASE jumping to whuffos. Mostly, I find them incapable of understanding it, and the more I try to explain it the less plausible it begins to sound, even to me. But, I'm not too surprised the night she asked, "Can I come and watch?"

She's different than most. She listened and she got it. She asked good questions and laughed in all the right places. I climbed the fence and started up the darkened stairwell thinking over her parting words. It wasn't be careful. It was, have fun.

It is unseasonably warm in San Diego as I stand behind the safety cable and study the street below. No vehicles, no people, no wind. She stood on the sidewalk close to the car looking up.

I climbed over the cable, waved at her, and pushed off. Four seconds later I cranked a hard 180 right over her head and caught her silently clapping her hands. She opened the car door, but stayed out of the way as I stashed my gear. She seemed to realize it wasn't over yet and any conversation now would intrude on my elation.

It's not until we looked at each other over coffee in a nearby restaurant that she told me how wonderful she thought it all was. She offered up a thanks and also the fact it helped her make a decision. She didn't offer an explanation and I didn't press.

A week later I'm told she had left her job. A bartender where she worked said her life long dream was to live in Hawaii. She talked about it all the time, but thought herself too old and too set in her ways to make such a move. Nobody thought she would actually do it.

I picture her now sitting on pure white sand, her feet immersed in warm blue water. If she could, she's see me silently clapping my hands.

Nick_BR

[guest]

Not only is ol' BR_Nick a heckava writer, his story points up an important function we serve for the larger society:

We inspire.

There's that quote I've mentioned before, spoken by the Woodpecker in Tom RObbins' book, Still Life With Woodpecker:

Poets remeber our dreams.
Outlaws act them out.

Nick's www (wonderful whuffo waitress) watched someone act out a dream and it was her map to acting out her own.

We do this for people, not always as directly and as dramatically as Nick had the privilege of doing, but we do it.

I remember one day sitting on a bus bench in downtown Denver waiting for my photo subjects to appear from the upper stories of a still-under-construction skyscraper.

It was early on a Monday morning and the streets were still largely empty. The few people there were definitely looked like people going to work on Monday.

Suddenly, the show begins. The sound of counting echoes from the adjacent buildings, then the two men leap simultaneously from separate windows on different sides of the corner.

Three seconds later, the shotgun WHOMP! of a parachute opening between glass towers and within seconds they disappear behind a tall church.

I get my pictures (for a Firefly ad some years ago) and as I walk toward the getaway car I get something else:

The pleasure of watching the ten or 20 people on that street-- who just moments before had been sluggish and plodding and looking at the ground -- walking with a new bounce in their step and a look of pure wonder and joy on their faces.

Because what they saw inspired them, entertained them, compelled them even, to maybe look beyond their everyday lives to what could actually be if they "dared mightily," as Theodore Roosevelt liked to say.

Nice added benefit isn't it?

-- Robin

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it would be nice if more folks could watch without us ending up in jail...

[guest]

Nick -Thanks for your posts they are always insightful and appreciated.