by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Mar 1, 2022 | Featured, Personal
Last week, I posted about my first parachute jump with my wonderful and crazy lost friend Haven.
But here is the rest of the story…
About ten years after my jumps with Haven, I told the story during lunch at the law firm where I worked.
As I finished, a few members of the staff and two associates unexpectedly got up and left. They came back about 10 minutes later with an announcement.
There was a parachute place on the Eastern shore of Maryland just across the Bay Bridge, about two hours away and, if I wasn’t a coward or just a B.S. storyteller, they would go next Saturday with me. But only if I would do the first jump.
That night, my wife just shook her head, looked at me in disbelief and said, “At least you don’t have any children.”
Because of my luncheon bravado, I was now a fool following myself down a path I did not want to follow… but it got worse.
The following Saturday, eight of us piled into two cars and drove down to “Parachutes Are Fun,” which looked a lot different than the professional business in Massachusetts where I first jumped.
Parachutes Are Fun featured one single engine plane with all the seats removed except for the pilot’s, a barn, and a school bus that had no tires and was up on cinder blocks.
As if launched from the bus, an overly excited prematurely-aged young man with wild blond hair and dilated pupils approached us. He looked like a stunt double for the old guy in “Back to the Future.” He held a helmet in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other and couldn’t stop welcoming us even before we got out of the car.
At the same time, the owner came out of the barn, dressed in a bombardier’s jacket with Parachutes Are Fun stenciled on the back, carrying a walkie-talkie. Behind him was as an assistant leading four people with parachutes on their backs to the little plane as a pilot in blue jeans, a baseball hat and sneakers was entering the cockpit of the plane.
This was way too informal! This was not good.
It was too late to change directions and forever be the coward who turned around and for once in his life had been responsible.
We were divided into two groups of four based solely on the car in which we came, and I was volunteered to be in the group that would jump first.
The character from the bus enthusiastically showed us how he packed the parachutes and couldn’t stop promoting as he did. He was excited to tell us he lived in the bus and loved his job so much that he took his raises and bonuses in free jumps.
Our new friend who lived in the bus took off with every plane and was responsible for everything from our chutes being packed properly to cursory instructions about the emergency chute if the primary shoot “perhaps” didn’t open, as well as coordinating the open door jumps from the plane that had taken off as we had entered.
As the plane circled overhead, the owner turned on his walkie-talkie and watched as the first diver spreadeagled at about 2,500 feet above us . The chute opened and the owner barked into the walkie -talkie, “Pull your left toggle”… “Reach up and PULL YOUR LEFT TOGGLE,” and then turned to the assistant and yelled, “That son of a bitch loaded them in in the wrong order again, dammit! I’m talking to somebody who hasn’t jumped yet!”
The clueless diver was drifting, arms at his side, downwind at a high rate of speed toward northern Virginia.
The owner shoved his hand into his pocket, threw a set of car keys to the assistant and told him, “follow the bastard and pick him up where he lands!” Three jumps later, the plane taxied down the dirt road runway to the barn to reload as the jumpers landed helter-skelter in the surrounding soybean fields.
I concluded this chaos was all a very good sign.
I had strategically decided to show no fear and thus as the others saw the disorder around them, the fear would gather in them and they would decide to go home. But when I finally decided to make eye contact in preparation for supporting their decision, I was shocked to find that they didn’t have a clue because they thought all this was normal.
Before I knew it, I was on the plane sitting on the floor next to the open door as we took off. It didn’t help me to feel any better that I could hear the guy with the walkie-talkie in communication with the assistant as he tried to follow a parachute in his car, zigzagging through highways and byways while trying to keep his eye on a disappearing spot in the sky. I considered the children and family I would never have.
I am vain enough to not ride roller coasters because I don’t want that as the cause of death in my obituary. As we rose higher and higher in the sky and waited to jump, I decided I wanted to be remembered, if at all, as the fearless, selfless, courageous parachutist who had advised the other three jumpers who would jump after him that if by some chance the walkie-talkie failed they could pull the toggles to face the wind in order to drop slowly straight down rather than have their backs to the wind and end up dead in some unfamiliar state.
The following week, late one afternoon, two of the people who had jumped with me came into my office laughing and holding The Evening Sun.
They had five copies open to a series of pictures and a headline that read, “Eastern Shore’s ‘Parachutes Are Fun’ Shut Down as America’s Most Dangerous!” There were several pictures of skydivers stranded on rooftops or hanging from high tension wires, as well as a beaming portrait of our friend who had just been evicted from the bus.
Slowly, as I reach maturity and a belief in evolution, I thank God for my children and grandchildren and that their mother’s DNA has prevailed.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Feb 22, 2022 | Featured, Personal
When I was a kid people didn’t die, they just became invisible and didn’t answer the phone.
One of those disappearances for me was my friend Haven Story. He’s a little different, though, because after a couple of decades, I still believe he lost his phone and will return my calls when he finds it.
This scenario was always more likely because he appeared to be indestructible, like he had been gifted with nine lives.
You pretty much could always count on updates about him getting to you before he did. I heard one time when he was in New York City, he hitched a ride with the trash truck to get to his next party.
One night in the late ’60s or early ’70s, we were at a party that was wrapping up somewhere around three or four in the morning when he made a troubling but carefully considered announcement:
“I think we have run out of thrills!”
He looked around and put his smoking cigar into an empty beer bottle as he reached for a phonebook.
“But I have an idea! We’ve got to go skydiving — right now!”
About an hour away in Orange, Massachusetts, there was a skydiving operation that would open for the day somewhere around 10 o’clock in the morning.
Without hesitation, we piled into the car, drove into the night, parked in the parking lot, and slept for a few hours. We were there when it opened.
There were four of us who sat in the classroom as they explained what we would do and what would happen. The instructor laid out a parachute and packed it so it would open when the ripcord was pulled. We were also given an emergency parachute which we were told we should “punch, pull and flap like a towel to catch the air as we were falling.”
Haven was always animated in whatever he was doing. He had an endless sense of humor as he engaged with the world. He used his hands to express the enormity of his thoughts.
Wide-eyed with excitement, he was ready to jump. He wanted to be at the head of the line and first to jump as we entered the plane.
The plane was a big cargo transport plane with enough room for about 20 jumpers. We sat on benches with our ripcords buckled to the plane above our heads.
Our target was a huge sandbox 3,000 feet below. After calculating the wind speed, the plane circled so that when we jumped the wind would generally take us in the direction of the sandbox. Then we were instructed: “Jump now!”
The instructor was on the ground with a walkie-talkie. He could give us instructions after the chute opened so that we could guide ourselves with his help to our “tuck and roll,” which minimized the impact of our landing.
Haven went first out the door with an unabashed scream of joy into the free fall until his shoot opened and he reached up to the toggles to navigate his way down.
I, a little more reluctantly, jumped next and fell into the tumult of wind until my chute opened, I reached up and grabbed my toggles, and found myself involuntarily swinging my feet far above the ground, observing the earth and its fields, rooftops, and intersecting highways before focusing on the upcoming sand landing.
It was an overwhelming moment. A mix of fear and exhilaration.
I saw Haven land and tuck and roll and stand up immediately and start jumping up and down as I stretched my feet out and prepared to land.
Haven ran to meet me with his chute dragging behind him. His eyes wide his arms flailing around him. He grabbed me and said “Let’s do it again! Let’s do it again! Woooooooooow! Let’s do it again!”
We really couldn’t say no. The four of us jumped three more times that day.
I miss Haven.
I think I’ll try him on the phone one more time.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Feb 15, 2022 | Featured, Man Machine, Personal, Plays
About a week ago, I could take COVID-19 and its variants no longer. I couldn’t do Netflix anymore. I needed community.
A long time ago, I decided that what makes theater a community — and Netflix not — is the interactive energy of a live audience. But I had a problem now.
If I were to go to live theater now, I would be breaking a promise that I had made to myself almost two years ago.
It was during our final table read of The Grace of God & Man Machine. I had paid no attention to talk of some virus in China. Mind The Art Entertainment had committed to produce my play and soon we would be opening off-Broadway.
That night I bought a steak, a glass of wine, and a single ticket to see Hadestown on Broadway in front of a sold-out audience. Hadestown would provide me that same energy that I would soon be part of when my play would go live off-Broadway.
I was beyond happy.
The next day as I took a train back to Baltimore, I realized something terrible was happening. Pretty soon thereafter, theaters started to close and slowly an unconscious darkness opened in me.
My hope of a second life as a playwright, which I had dreamed of even as a boy, so unfairly started to drift away, week after week and then month after month. But more horrible was the loss of not being a part of live theater.
I made the promise, and over the months I hardened my resolve, that I would not go to the theater until I could be part of that collective energy. I refused to settle for some anemic second-best with half-empty seats.
So why did I nonetheless decide last Wednesday, February 9th, to go to a new play: Behold, A Negress by Jacquline E. Lawton, at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore? Why was I breaking my promise when the theaters were not fully open?
What was it, really, that I so desperately missed?
I chose to go to Everyman Theater because it always has been a theater bustling with people and when the lights went down every seat was always filled with a loyal subscription audience. I had been going there for opening nights for over 30 years. I could count on them. Somehow, they could always seem to deliver that energy.
The day before the performance I received a phone call reminding me that I must bring evidence of my COVID vacations and booster and wear a mask the entire time I was in the theater. I confirmed that I had gotten all the vaccinations and would be wearing a mask.
It seemed to foreshadow my disappointment and to add salt to the wound.
When I entered, I had my mask on and my vaccination records ready. An assistant at the door checked off my name.
I noticed the list was not extensive.
As I entered the lobby it was strangely quiet. There was no familiar group of chatting people lining up for a glass of wine before the performance.
When I entered the theater, even after social distancing there were a lot of empty seats.
I looked around and there was a pit in my stomach. This wasn’t going to work.
Before every theater performance, I have a ritual. I observe the set and the stage and try to imagine how different it will be when I look back at it after the play is over and the actors are taking their bows.
I looked at the set and then gave it a second look. I was intrigued by how perfectly it had been designed and how beautiful the high ceilings and colors were in a post-revolutionary Paris drawing room and how carefully an artist’s easel had been displayed upstage center.
The set alone had caught my attention. It felt good. I had inadvertently crossed the threshold and now I did not want to be disappointed.
The lights went down. The music picked up and the play began.
The first of the two lead characters enters in a stunning dress and without a word, in a minute, establishes her character though action alone. The second lead enters, also in a stunning period piece costume, to establish her character and the framework of the play with minimum exposition. I was hooked.
Artfully, everything was in place.
I will give nothing away other than it was a 90-minute play with two principal actors and one supporting character. The two leads reveal a multifaceted relationship through many artful twists and turns and even briefly use dance to create the excitement of creating a portrait to change the political mind of Paris.
The play itself is about the character it takes to risk one’s self and one’s art form to save the moral authority of a culture.
Wasn’t that what this theater was actually doing by performing this play at all?
Slowly, something wonderful and unexpected rose up in me as I looked back at that stage as the actors took their bows before a small but very enthusiastic standing ovation.
It was pride, and then deep respect for this theater that would protect its patrons but also not compromise the quality of any aspect of a magnificent production, despite the cost.
It was that but there was also something else.
What was this unique little community?
The actors playing the roles, the director and tech professionals creating the atmosphere, and the willing suspension of disbelief and presence of the audience?
Then I laughed.
No other community would have a catchphrase as its answer: “The show must go on.”
I had foolishly demanded the fiction of perfection and had missed the perfection of the thing itself.
I left laughing and looking forward to rejoining this little community of feral souls who create, with a live audience, the sustaining vision for its larger community, by example.
November 22, 2022–December 20, 2022 at Theater Row, 410 42d street NYC, The Grace of God & The Mind Machine will finally open.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Feb 8, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Poetry
Sometimes my subconscious rises out of its darkness to address questions I would prefer to avoid as I try to weave my past into the history I prefer to believe.
I generally succeed in avoiding these intrusions by being more focused on some other project.
My subconscious tends to work like the “Magic 8 Ball” of my childhood. When confronted with a question and tipped upright, its answer will float up to its little glass window.
Almost 20 years ago, if I had asked it: “Will I be divorced in four years?” its answer could have been: “As I see it, yes” and I would have laughed at the absurdity of that answer and asked another question like: “But don’t I love my family?” And its answer could have been “Yes definitely.”
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a sonnet a week for a year in my effort to master the sonnet form. For 52 consecutive weeks, I paid little attention to anything other than my desire to get the rhyme scheme right (abab/cdcd/efef/gg) in 14 lines of roughly iambic pentameter.
My mind was driving the school bus.
My subconscious went to the playground.
A few years ago, after I finally committed to being a professional writer, I went back to look at the sonnets and thought of them as individual weekly efforts. But then last year I reread all 52 from beginning to end at one sitting and discovered something very different.
The 50th sonnet, the third to the last one, stopped me in my tracks. It was a memory about how my first wife and I fell in love as we walked to work. It is a beautiful love poem but ends with odd and troubling lines:
…How could this love go wrong?
Our lives are drawn to a collective center.
The buildings are the highest when we enter.
When I wrote those lines, we had been married for over 20 years, but four years later our marriage would end — to a large extent because we had been drawn apart by our ever-increasing professional workloads.
We lost the very real love we had when we first married and for years after.
Why?
“The buildings are the highest when we enter.”
It answered the question: “How could this love go wrong?”
It was all in there, but I had been working on some other project instead of us.
I second-guessed my conclusion, but I immediately started from the beginning and reread all 52 chronologically again.
All of a sudden #50 was not just a single love poem that recognized the hidden demise of love and marriage. All of the sonnets had loosely related overlapping themes, but they were also independent observations all from the same universe.
They were little standalone vignettes. Little stories floating to the surface, from skinny-dipping advice to scuba diving with sharks to giving up smoking.
This was the subconscious playing in the playground.
What intrigued me most about this discovery was that while the objective mind had been obsessed about form and order and had been locked into that project, I was quite unknowingly having a different conversation that I was denying, with my unruly and more interesting subconscious.
“An Accidental Diary” is a very different kind of book because it is a story told in 52 perfect independent little chapters that are less than one page long. A reader is free to connect the dots or to read each sonnet separately as a world unto itself.
And hey! What a deal!
You get your money’s worth when you buy it. It is both the Magic 8 Ball and the questioner as two different books all rolled up into one.
You can buy it for Kindle or get the paperback within five days. Any purchase permits you to provide a review on Amazon if you are so inclined.
https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Diary-sonnet-week-year/dp/B09NGXSVM5/
Will you enjoy this book? “It is certain.”
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Feb 1, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Travel
For the last two weeks, I have posted about a trip I took 35 years ago to Drake Bay along the uninhabited rainforests of southwestern Costa Rica. I had met a young boy, Raphael, who took me scuba diving and fishing for little over a week while I stayed at an isolated lodge I had found down there. On the last day, I told him he could go anywhere he wanted and I would go with him.
He jumped at the chance to go way out into the Pacific to fish for the giant pargo in a tiny Boston whaler. It was the most frightened I have ever been.
Last week, during a trip to Bosque del Cabo, two hours south of Drake Bay, I committed to seeing if I could find Raphael. The driver who picked us up at the little airport at Puerto Jiménez agreed to take Susan and I up the coast through the rainforest if I could first locate Raphael.
Within two days, the assistant at the lodge had found a lead that Raphael, who would be around 55 years old now, had helped to build one or more of the new lodges that now populate Drake Bay. The assistant made phone calls and emailed these new lodges over the next few days, but we were still not able to locate him
With only three days to go, I booked an offshore fishing trip out of Puerto Jiménez to make my own inquiries about Raphael, and to determine how far we really had gone out to sea before we lost sight of land that day and night.
We left around 7 o’clock from Puerto Jiménez in a covered boat about three times the size of the Boston whaler Raphael had used. The captain was about 35 and his mate was about the same age as Raphael was when we went out to sea years ago.
There was only one other boat going out that morning. The two were in radio contact in search of tuna and sailfish throughout the morning. We watched for the gathering of birds diving into the ocean, feeding off squid or schools of fish driven to the surface by the dolphins. These schools would bring the tuna and sailfish, which we wanted to catch.
It was a beautiful day. The cumulonimbus clouds climbed into the sky over the shoreline as we traveled out on a slow rolling tide. Around 11:30, we hooked an 80-pound yellowfin tuna which took about 25 minutes to land.
The shoreline was still visible at 10 miles out. I asked about Raphael, but the captain didn’t really know anyone all that well as far north as Drake Bay.
Before we left, I had asked the resort owner’s assistant to keep trying to locate Raphael. My time was running out. I had only one more day before we had to leave at 5:15 in the morning to get on the only plane leaving Puerto Jiménez for San Jose, take the mandatory COVID test at 8:00 to ensure we could return home on our Delta flight at 2:30 that afternoon.
As we arrived at the dock to meet our ride back to the lodge, I unexpectedly saw the assistant was also at the dock. After we loaded the tuna into the back of the truck, the assistant was strangely quiet as she rode in the passenger seat next to the driver. From the backseat I asked if she had been able to set up our meeting at Drake Bay. She paused, turned her face toward me, and winced as she looked back at me. “He is dead.”
After the long and bumpy ride back to the lodge, I asked Susan wouldn’t it be easy just to lie about that?
I decided that I would pay our bill early, rather than before our exit the following morning. I wanted some time with the assistant so that I could cross examine her indirectly about the seriousness of her inquiries.
When we met, she went very carefully over the bill and the tips we had designated for the staff. She meticulously double checked the math in a way that sadly made me realize how careful and professional she was.
I asked her about what her most recent research had revealed and she confirmed the care that she had put into trying to find Raphael. She pulled out her phone and played back the voicemail reply she had gotten from an old guide who had retired from her work in Drake Bay years ago. The assistant translated each sentence from Spanish into English as she played it back.
The caller explained she had been in the back of a taxi cab in San Jose several years ago with a driver who asked where she was from. When she said Drake Bay, the driver told her he had grown up there. He said his father was a carpenter who had built several buildings as they went up around Drake Bay, including the first lodge that had been constructed there in 1985. His father and mother were one of the first families to populate the southwestern stretch of the Pacific and rainforest around Drake Bay. His father’s name was Raphael.
I persisted and told the assistant I would be willing to meet the cabdriver at the Delta terminal in San Jose after my Covid test. I would feed him lunch and also give him about $100 in colóns as a friend of his father in the hopes that he would meet me.
She agreed to keep trying.
The next morning, we took the early morning flight, did the Covid test, and checked the bags, but I did not go through security at the international airport. I sat on the floor next to the Delta desk.
I waited and waited at the Delta terminal until there was no time left. I went through security and as I boarded the plane to leave, I gave my remaining Costa Rican currency to an unexpecting vendor and asked nothing in return.
It is so easy to lose people and so hard to find them.
Even if I had been successful, I’m sure his son would have pocketed the money and returned to his cab and his daily life.
Thirty-five years ago, there was something courageous and determined about Raphael’s refusal to cut the line and return to safety — and I had refused to stop him.
Looking out the plane window as we took off, I thought even when he is completely forgotten he will be safe and respected in my memory.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jan 18, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Travel
As a young man my heroes proved their courage by welcoming and taking on great risk. I am amazed at how my heroes have changed over time.
In a few days, Susan and I will fly to the Osa Peninsula and the rainforest of southwestern Costa Rica. This will be the first trip there for Susan, but for me it will be a reunion with a place where I experienced real fear for the first time in my life.
In the late 1980s, I decided to go to Costa Rica to find the deepest rainforest I could find. I wanted an adventure and to be left alone.
I flew to San Jose, spent the night and got a little plane to fly me to a grass runway to be transported by a crazy American expat in his little boat to go down a muddy river to the Pacific and then south along the virgin jungle coastline to a remote lodge he had put together in the Corcovado rain forest.
The place was run by a small family for the expat. I knew I was in for a great adventure because the expat had a huge untrimmed beard and claimed he had a wife in Texas and a wife in Costa Rica and immediately told me, quite confidentiality, that he was an operative for the CIA. He had some issues. The place was empty except for me during the entire week I was there.
That is where I met Raphael, the teenage son of the farming family that managed the place when it was not the rainy season. He was assigned to take me fishing and scuba diving in a tiny Boston whaler.
Raphael had to pump the scuba tanks with a gas-powered compressor and catch our bait before we went out each morning to dive to find shark caves, fish offshore past Caño Island, or to go up the rivers to live within a world of howler monkeys that threw sticks at us from above and massive blue morpho butterflies and macaws that flew around us as we traveled into the rainforest.
Rafael did not like diving because he was afraid of sharks, which he claimed had killed a married couple the year before. I fashioned myself as a bit of a daredevil so I told him I was not afraid.
On my last day there, I told Raphael he could go wherever he wanted and I would go with him. Neither of us knew the other’s language but he told me he wanted to fish for giant pargo offshore out way past the island, where the drop off brought the big fish to feed in the current. All we had was light tackle. These fish can grow to as much as 40 pounds and tend to go deep and run. I’m pretty sure that Raphael did not share with his parents what we were going to do.
We packed extra water and cold beer and some sandwiches. He brought an extra tank of gas. We left in the late morning and easily caught several mackerel for bait. Rafael cut them in half and secured them on our hooks as we motored out into the Pacific. We went way out further than we had gone before. When I lost sight of land for the first time, I became a little afraid. After a while, Raphael switched the gas tanks.
I was at the bow of the boat and Raphael was back at the motor. We sat silently for several hours without a bite. As the sun started to go down, I wanted to go home. We had not seen land for a couple of hours by now. I became a little more afraid as we drifted with the current but I kept it to myself.
As the dark came, I waited and then looked back at him but his rod was bent over and when he looked back he grinned and said one word: “Grande!”
The fish was running deeper and deeper and heading further out into the Pacific. Now I was frightened, but told myself it could be I was just out of my element and I just should trust Raphael.
Raphael, on his unexpected day off, was too excited to give in to the fish. The stars started to come out and we kept being pulled out to sea. The night came, and Raphael kept reeling in the fish and then letting more line go out until there was no line left but his giant fish would not tire as it kept pulling us deeper and deeper into the dark.
The sea was calm and with the dark I had no sense of which direction the land was anymore. The moon rose in the night sky. There was a blanket of bright stars above us now and nothing but silence and the lapping of the gentle waves against the side of the boat until the line broke.
As we prepared to go, we threw the remaining mackerel overboard and the phosphorus all around lit up as our discarded bait was devoured by surface fish.
Raphael pulled the cord to start the boat but it wouldn’t start. He tried and tried again but the motor would not start. We had already used the extra tank of gas to get us out there. We were drifting in the dark with the stars above us as we were taken by the tide.
I said nothing. I was deeply afraid, but was I wrong to be? I didn’t think so.
Raphael tried and tried again until finally there was a sputtering and the engine died and then when Raphael tried again it started. He cautiously revved the engine several times and after examining the stars he then turned the boat and headed toward what I hoped was home.
Despite it all, it was stunningly beautiful. As we skimmed across the water for more than an hour, we lit up the phosphorus around us. Dolphins joined us on both sides of the boat with the glowing phosphorus trailing behind us as we careened over the water with the stars stretched over our heads.
Raphael kept checking the stars.
I was certain we were lost but Raphael refused to show fear. Was I overreacting? Finally, a dim light appeared in a shadow that must be the edge of the rain forest. The lights of the little lodge were all on and there were flashlights coming from the little dock.
As we got closer, I could see several people standing silently on the dock holding the flashlights and pointing them out at the sea. We had no running lights so it appeared they were guiding us into them. We slowed the boat and pulled up to the little ladder.
I felt foolish that I had been so afraid and accepted the hands offered to me as I climbed the ladder and stood on the dock.
Raphael tied up the boat and when he climbed the ladder his mother greeted him and slapped him harder than I’ve ever seen anybody hit before in my life. His family had been waiting ever since the sun went down. I was later told it had been hours of uncertainty.
When I visit Costa Rica this time I am sure that the virgin rainforest will have other lodges now but I have also changed. My heroes now are common people as they almost invisibly care for others.
I have come to understand better now the fear that boy’s mother felt as she waited on the dock in the night and shined her flashlight out at the sea.
