‘How many times did you fly it in the sand dunes, Zeke?’
‘I was there for a whole day, mate. I had heaps of glides an made quite a few adjustments. It goes bloody good now.’
‘I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it. It looks like something out of science fiction. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.’
‘Thanks, Arnold. It is, without a doubt, me most ambitious design, ever.’
‘It looks ballistic, man.’
‘It is, Tim, an it’s strong as. This wing will never break in a million years.’
‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.’
‘You better believe it, Steve, an buddy, you wouldn’t happen to have a couple of spare castle nuts, would ya?’
‘Sure, Zeke, sure. Hey, are you sure you tested that thing enough at the dunes?’
‘Yep! She’ll even fly hands-off.’
Everyone on the hill noticed Zeke’s new ‘supership’, however there were only a few that actually ventured into his proximity. They were his friends, the elite pilots, Arnold, Steve, Glenn, Adam and young Tim, who was still the boy who hadn’t learnt to be afraid yet. Also, there was Aureole, Glenn’s new girlfriend, who saw right through Zeke’s gruff exterior and spoke to him as if he were her little brother, calling him Ziki. Everyone else kept their distance. Adam was the only pilot in the group who knew about Zeke’s ambition to execute a full loop. He wasn’t a talker though. He figured that no one could deflect Zeke from his chosen path anyway.
Zeke clipped the karabiner of his frayed and worn harness into the A-frame loop of his glider. Adam held the nose of the supership while Zeke settled himself into position.
Adam then retreated out of the way as Zeke masterfully launched into the air. They all watched him for a while, making various comments, then they all returned to their own gliders and, one by one, launched into the air themselves.
Adam kept the most vigilant eye on Zeke, even while flying. He saw him execute high-speed dives followed by fairly conservative wingovers. He was impressed with the undeniable speed of the supership. When Zeke pulled the bar in, it just kept accelerating until he pushed out into his manoeuvre. Adam decided to soar high above Zeke and watch
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him closely. He knew what his big friend had in mind and he didn’t want to miss the moment, if and when it was going to happen.
Zeke pretty much kept most of his flight centred over the Stanwell valley. The wind was fairly south and quite strong and there was plenty of lift there. Adam did the same, just a couple of hundred feet higher. Glenn was flying two-up with Aureole while Steve and Arnold were setting up new gliders, test flying them, landing them back on top, sometimes making an adjustment, test flying them again, landing them on top again then packing them up and loading them back on their car ready to sell. On some days they tested as many as six gliders, which was as many as they could fit on their car at any one time. That was their work outside of the factory.
It was turning into an average flying day at Stanwell Park with everyone busy with their own flying activities. The wind was nice and strong, maybe a little bumpy, and it wasn’t too crowded. In the car park someone had a cassette playing Take It To The Limit as Zeke pulled into a steep, whistling, high-speed dive. Adam watched it from the beginning, from high above the valley. He noticed immediately that this one was different when Zeke failed to roll left or right at the bottom of the dive. Zeke levelled out at about the same altitude as the top of the hill, fairly centred over the valley, and pushed the bar straight out.
As far as anyone knew, no one had ever attempted what Zeke was attempting, so how was he to know that, perhaps, he may have pushed the bar out too far, too early, causing his wing to go into a slight, high-speed stall at the bottom of the dive. He lost a lot of speed because of that and to Adam’s disbelief, Zeke’s wing stopped flying exactly midway through the loop, just at the point of total inversion. Adam watched horrified as the supership stopped upside down in mid air. He watched helplessly as Zeke fell into the inverted sail. His hang glider then flipped forwards violently, the momentum of the forward rotation sending it into another rotation, then another and another. Zeke’s body was being flung around like a rag doll as his supership tumbled out of the sky, spinning like a ruler tossed into the air. No one would have been able to count the number of rotations, but they all saw the doomed glider suddenly stop tumbling and enter a vertical, freefalling dive. No one could be certain, but it looked like Zeke might have already been unconscious, perhaps from the unbearable G-forces generated by the tumbling, because it appeared that he made no attempt to regain control of his wing. Everyone heard the sound of breaking branches as they saw Zeke and his glider spear into the top of a one-
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hundred-and-fifty-foot gum tree, just behind the clearing in the valley, at what looked like at least sixty miles per hour.
All the pilots in the air immediately spiralled down into the park and ran over to the tree. The owner of the small kiosk in the park phoned for an ambulance. Zeke’s mangled glider was firmly wedged amongst the thick branches of the canopy, and there, dangling in his harness some one hundred and fifty feet above the ground, unconscious or dead, bleeding profusely and distorted from numerous fractures, was Zeke.
‘How are we gonna get to him?’
‘I dunno. Somebody’s gonna have to get to him quick.’
‘Nobody can climb up there.’
‘Anybody call the rescue squad? Arnold, run over to the kiosk and call them. Don’t forget to tell them that Zeke’s about one hundred and fifty feet up a tree.’
‘I’m on my way, Steve. They might want a fire truck with a big ladder.’
‘They all stood back from the tree slightly so as not to get dripped on by Zeke’s blood. They could hear the sirens blaring from miles down the coast as the rescue team raced around the cliffs towards them on their mission of mercy. The grass around the base of the tree had turned spotted red by the time the rescue truck pulled up in the park.
After assessing the situation, their leader declared,
‘We’ll have to wait for the fire truck, but I don’t know if its ladder is going to be long enough.’
The ladder truck raced in a few minutes later. They quickly set themselves up and began extending the metal ladder towards Zeke. As they raised the ladder to its full extension, one of the firemen yelled out,
‘We’re about twenty feet short.’
One of the rescue guys on the ground suggested,
‘I’d like to go up there and try to throw a rope around that big branch just above the pilot.’
He hung a couple of ropes over his shoulder, clipped a number of karabiners around his belt and raced up the ladder. Everyone on the ground watched in amazement as he skilfully weighed down the end of the rope with a few karabiners and threw it, perfectly first time, over the chosen branch. He then secured the rope around the branch and let the rest of it fall all the way to the ground. His team, immediately and without discussion, began preparing for their ascent up the rope. They took with them more rope, karabiners,
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pulleys and first-aid equipment. All the pilots could do was watch in admiration as the rescue squad went about their business with efficient expertise. Their lead climber scampered up the rope with the aid of special rope-climbing equipment. Everyone held their breath as they waited for the first words from the first man to reach Zeke, almost an hour after the crash.
‘He’s unconscious, but he’s still alive, just. He’s got fractures and his face is lacerated.
Looks like a wire cut him and his left eye looks bad. He’s lost a lot of blood. I can’t make out if there’s spinal damage, but I suspect a compound fracture of his right leg judging by its position and the blood-soaked overalls. … Hang on … he’s got a dog-tag around his neck. You bloody beauty, mate, you might have just saved your own life. He’s got his blood type on a tag around his neck. It’s type O, Rh positive.’
The ambulance had arrived by this time and they prepared the transfusion equipment for the rescue team. Working suspended, in tandem, they transfused Zeke where he was. They then wrapped special air splints around his limbs. They hauled up a stretcher and carefully manoeuvred it under him before cutting him free of the wreck.
One of the rescue guys stayed with him as they were both slowly and carefully lowered down to the ground using an elaborate pulley system that they had set up for the delicate task. They placed him in the back of the ambulance some two and a half hours after his crash. All the pilots winced when they saw his horrific injuries, especially the deep diagonal cut running across his face. Adam asked the ambulance man if he thought Zeke would be OK, but the ambulance man just said,
‘We just take em in, mate, you’ll have to ask the doctors.’
‘Where’s he going?’
‘That’s just what we’re tryin to work out over the radio. I think Sutherland will be the better option for his kind of injuries … yep, we’re takin him to Sutherland Hospital.
They’ll be waitin for him there. He’ll go straight into surgery. Gotta go.’
The ambulance raced out of the park with its siren blaring. All the pilots just stood around the tree, stunned, watching the rescue team pack up and the fire truck drive away.
They didn’t know what to do. Sometimes they took a look at Zeke’s precious blood, spilled on the grass at the base of the tree. Sometimes they looked up at his broken supership, stuck high up in the branches. Most of the time they just stared into space. Adam was the first to make a positive decision.
‘I’m going to pack up and then go to the hospital.’
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‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Me too.’
‘We’ll see you there.’
‘We will as well.’
Zeke didn’t regain consciousness before his surgery. They worked on him for sixteen hours straight. Two teams of surgeons set up a rotation system. They set a new record for the number of metal pins, nuts and bolts that they ever put into one patient.
Later, after it was all over and the surgeons rested in their common room, the totally drained, chief surgeon expressed his personal battle with faith to a colleague who wasn’t there for Zeke’s surgery.
‘This guy should be dead. He looked like he got run over by a truck, but that heart of his just wouldn’t stop beating. It just kept beating. Actually, if you want to know the truth, and I don’t like to admit it, but I gave up on him a couple of times. I looked at the mess and just thought, there’s no way I can fix this. For a while we all went quiet around the operating table. We had given up our faith and the only thing we could hear during those moments of self-doubt, those moments of total silence in the theatre, was the beep, beep, beep of his heart beating away, refusing to give up … and somebody said … they said …
come on, if he can keep going, so can we, and we all ploughed in again and started drilling and screwing and suturing … and he just lay there in front of us, all in pieces, sleeping like a baby, with his heart beating away when it should have stopped ages before, saying to us, challenging us, and this is the hardest part to accept, giving us strength, silently speaking to us in beeps, saying, hang in there guys, we’ll get through this.’
They wheeled him into intensive care and hooked him up to all the machines. Adam, Steve, Arnold, Tim, Glenn and Aureole came in to see him. They had already been at the hospital for nearly eighteen hours, right through the night, and had all made phone calls notifying their families of their whereabouts. They were shocked to see Zeke lying on his bed, still unconscious, with metal pins sticking out of all his limbs. The breathing machine hissed rhythmically as he slept peacefully, seemingly the only one in the small group of pilots missing out on all the drama. Adam spoke to his friends,
‘I talked to one of the doctors and he reckoned that Zeke’s not out of the woods yet.
He said that he could still slip into a deeper coma. He couldn’t say when he was going to wake up, and then he said, if he wakes up.’
Tim exclaimed,
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‘Jesus, look at the stitches across his face. There must be a hundred stitches.’
‘Looks like a wire cut him when he hit, and I wonder what that big dressing over his left eye means?’
Later, one of the doctors, who came in to check on Zeke, told them that they weren’t able to save his left eye.
They took turns at sitting by Zeke’s bedside. Sometimes just one of them sat with him, while the rest slept stretched-out on waiting room benches. Sometimes two or three stayed with him. They wanted to be there when he woke up.
‘He was trying to do a loop, you know.’
The story of Zeke’s accident quickly spread around the hospital staff. They all marvelled at the small band of vigilant flyers refusing to leave their friend. Both, doctors and nurses came around to talk to the group and listen to stories about Zeke, his inventions and legendary flights. At night, the nurses brought them blankets and pillows to sleep on and, when it was occasionally free, they offered them a bed.
Tim and Arnold made friends with two pretty, young trainee nurses, named Anita and Rachel. They started seeing them at every one of their breaks and met them in the hospital cafeteria where they amazed them with unbelievable stories from their flying adventures. Timmy and Anita, and Arnold and Rachel went on to become best friends, and couples, who stayed with each other for the rest of their lives.
After three days and three nights,
‘Ziki! Ziki! You are awake!’
Aureole was the only one present at Zeke’s bedside as he opened his eye. She called the nurse who came over to his bedside and began attending to his needs. Twelve hours later, they wheeled him out of intensive care surrounded by all his closest friends. They all sat around his bed.
‘It never broke, did it? My supership never broke.’
They all looked at each other trying to replay Zeke’s tumbling descent in their minds.
‘Come to think of it, Zeke, I don’t think it did break.’
‘Yeah, I think you’re right, it stayed together.’
‘Yeah. If it had folded up, you probably would have ended up the same as Kenny.’
‘Yeah.’
…….
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