The Windfall

A near death experience leads to a higher view.

West winds sometimes howl through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and rip across the inlet, raising a wicked wall of whitecaps and heavy rolling seas of churning foam. It’s as if a curtain has dropped. Calm water on one side and all hell breaking loose on the other. As the wind approaches, hurried preparations begin. Birds flee. Rabbits scatter. We rush to tie down deck furniture and fuel the generator. The cupboards are searched for candles. Then the wind hits the cliff face and sends sand and leaves and loose branches flying up and over the house. Trees bend, pinecones hail down, the windows shake. The storm is upon us.

My wife and I retreat to our bedroom, the most protected part of the house, feeling powerless and hoping for the best while marveling at the cat’s ability to sleep through this apocalypse. It’s a time to hunker down, to close out the world, to connect and share memories. Two kids hiding in a tent. Occasionally, the storms come at night and there’s nothing to do when they wake you but lie in the dark and listen to things bouncing off the roof. These events are almost always followed by an eerie stillness at dawn, pierced now and then by the bark of a distant chainsaw.

The silver lining to these storms is that when the front passes and the winds have settled, conditions are usually perfect for flying. “The eagles are up,” I say to my wife, as I shrug on my pack, kiss her goodbye, and head out to hike the bluff. There I unfold my paraglider, clip into the harness, and step out over the edge and into the arms of the wind.

Some days the wind carries me up high above the treetops, and everything below shrinks away. A new perspective emerges beneath my dangling feet—panoramic, peaceful, clean and calm and quiet after the storm. At times I play music, other times I think. Sometimes I forget the music and forget to think, and then it’s enough to just breathe it all in, to float in high tranquility, disobeying nature and riding the wind. But it’s easy to forget that I am suspended in the sky from a fancy shower curtain held by Kevlar strings.

Lulled into carelessness once, I failed to see the second wall of whitecaps pushing in. When it hit, the weather seemed personal. Maleficent, even. Tossed and tumbled like a toy in turbulent clouds, fingers freezing, little visibility, I had no way to get down. I was terrified. Then it got worse. Then my wing disappeared from above my head. It was there and then it wasn’t; I was flying and then I was falling.

In the movies people’s lives always flash before their eyes, but that was not true for me. I’d like to say I thought about my wife while I was falling. Or my friends. Or had some deep epiphany. But there was just no time. I was too busy messing with my tangled lines and watching the ground rush up, bracing for the coming crash into the surf and boulders far below. The crash that was certain to end my flying, and probably everything else. My only conscious thought was an amused pondering of whether I would wake in the hospital or not at all.

But the wind that had failed me also saved me. It pushed me toward the bluff face where Scotch broom on the sandy slope broke my fall. In the quiet that followed, I lay cradled by soft earth, acutely aware of my breath and my beating heart. I did think about my life then. About its highs and lows. About my friends. About the windfall of meeting my wife. About how lucky I am that despite her worry she supports this crazy obsession that has me out here soaring with the birds. Grateful that she knows I need adventure to feel alive, as does she, in her own way, as do we all. Grateful that I knew I could share this accident with her, laugh about it even, safe in our warm home, and that she would listen and not use it to discourage me from flying again.

As I counted my blessings, the wind settled, and flying conditions improved. I could see it in the treetops and the way the Scotch broom danced around me. An eagle soared high above, calling. But the wind could wait. At that moment there was nowhere I wanted to be but home. I realized then that no matter how high I fly, or what mountains I might climb, the truly important things are carried up with us, often unseen—solid and real and always waiting, the people who return our love, the foundation from which the peaks of life rise.

I still get excited when the west winds blow, and fly every chance I get, but I know that life’s most meaningful measures aren’t found in the wide vistas and great heights, they’re found in the narrow places in between.

An audio recording of this essay can be found here:

Audio: The Windfall