POLING: Remembering an old friend and skydiver
Dean Poling
His obituary doesn’t mention skydiving about a million times.
It doesn’t mention his outrageous sense of humor.
It doesn’t mention the humanizing irony that even though he could easily step out of plane at 10,000 feet, he couldn’t bear to climb a ladder because he was afraid of heights.
How do you casually or formally announce someone was larger than life once he has left this life?
Bert died nearly three years ago, the obituary notes. He was 68, an Army veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, a retired truck driver.
He died in Dublin, Georgia, miles and years removed from his time living in Hahira and floating through the skies of South Georgia. The obituary makes no mention of Valdosta or Lowndes County.
Nor does it mention his love for hunting or the times he regularly lived in a hunting camp in the Georgia woods. There’s no mention that even though he lived like a giant, he was not a large, towering man.
There are no words about his singing along to “My Girl” whenever the band played the song at his request, his taste for drinking White Russians, his leading groups of grounded skydivers in a round of “chair dives” face first into a barroom floor.
It does not mention his regular toast, raised White Russian in hand, in a surprisingly big voice, “There’s none like us and none like us.” Usually, for people hearing it for the first time, the double meaning of the toast took a minute to sink in.
Or actually skydiving into Remerton, on a semi-regular basis, afternoons, evenings, early nights, landing in the yard of the old Mill House.
Or the time a Remerton cop stopped to ask why everybody was standing outside of the Mill House. The walkie-talkie man directing the skydiving jump from the ground asking the officer to move his squad car. All while Bert and two other skydivers floated down from 10,000 feet, lower and lower behind the police officer, parachute silk flaring, the officer refusing to move his vehicle. Not knowing skydivers approached, or not believing it anyway, even though three of them fell from the sky behind him.
Closer and closer, lower and lower, until Bert tip-toed across the roof of the cop car, tapped the startled officer on the shoulder and boomed in that voice, “He asked you to move your car,” then Bert landed in the yard.
That’s not in there.
Neither is catching “speed meat” on the run, cooking fresh rabbit with rice on a camp fire then serving with a bottle of honey.
Nor conversations about God and the universe under a Georgia night sky filled with a billion stars.
Nor mention of the time he was hospitalized with shattered ankles after his parachute was slow to open during a sanctioned base jump from the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia.
No lines about his claims he could drive from Valdosta to Atlanta in two hours as long as the police didn’t catch him.
No obituary for Bert ran in the local newspaper. So, even though he passed nearly three years ago, I learned of his death a few months back during a conversation.
I hadn’t seen him in years. He hadn’t lived here in about 20 years. Still, as clear as yesterday, I recall him as jumpmaster when I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane over Waycross.
Bert talked me into jumping. I chose static line, instead of tandem jump. Static line means a person jumps, a line pulls the chute cord open and the person is in control of steering the parachute and landing. Tandem is when an inexperienced jumper is strapped to an experienced skydiver.
After a few hours instruction on the ground, we took off. Bert’s face was only a few inches from mine in the small plane.
Serious. No shame in changing your mind, even now, he said, but once you step out of the plane with the pack on, you have to jump, too much danger coming back in with a chute ready to go. So, if you step out, you have to let go.
I stepped out. I let go. Mad spin of seconds, of eternity. The plane above shrinking to the size of a toy instantly. The chute opening, a jolt followed by a lifting sensation. Laughter to see the open chute above me.
Steering my way down. Then suddenly, right beside me, still at a couple thousand feet – Bert. Well, what do you think? he bellowed. All I could say was, Man ...
Bert laughed, floating down through the sky beside of me.
The obituary does not mention that day but I don’t need an obit to remember that day or him.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.
