Someone (I’m looking at you, Mom) had clearly told him about the bit of frostbite on my wrist. “But what I really need is a pressure suit.”ĭad showed up in my bedroom doorway before dinner. It flushes out the nitrogen so it doesn’t form bubbles.
“I prebreathe pure oxygen down on the ground, for forty-five minutes. But it can also happen by ascending to high altitude with normal nitrogen in your bloodstream.” So, yeah, it happens when you scuba dive deep, absorbing lots of nitrogen, and then come up too fast. “Nitrogen bubbles form in the bloodstream when you drop the pressure faster than it can be offloaded by the lungs. She waved her hand in a “go on” sort of way. “Uh, it can happen when you go to altitude.” I thought the bends were a diving thing.” Mom’s mouth worked for a bit before she managed. She looked at the ceiling, puzzled, then her mouth formed an “o” shape. “West Texas? It has to be in the nineties there, if not warmer.” “No, I was only nine miles away from the pit.” I thought about agreeing-it was winter down there, after all. Mom could smell evasion at a hundred yards. I had a half-inch blister on the back of my right wrist and it was turning dark brown. “Looks like frostbite,” Mom said two days later. When it blurred past ten thousand feet, I took a deep breath and jumped home to the cabin in the Yukon. With the air pulling at my clothes and shrieking past my helmet, I watched the GPS’s altimeter reading flash down through the numbers. Jumping directly back to ground level would probably have burst my eardrums. I let myself fall, working my jaw vigorously to equalize the pressure in my inner ears. I jumped away, appearing twenty-five thousand feet lower, in warmer and thicker air. But then the mask fogged, then frosted, and I felt a stinging on my wrist and a wave of dizziness. I jumped back to forty-five thousand feet and loitered, falling and returning, never letting myself fall more than a few seconds.
I reached two hundred miles per hour within seconds, but I didn’t want to go down yet. The curvature of the earth was pronounced, and though the sun was out, the sky was only blue at the horizon, fading to deep blue and then black overhead. The aviation GPS strapped to my left arm read forty-five thousand feet above sea level. The electronic thermometer strapped around my right sleeve read forty-five degrees below zero. I was breathing pure oxygen through a full face mask and the rest of my body was covered in heavily insulated hooded coveralls, gloves, and boots.
Cent: Tell him about breaking the guy’s jaw-he’ll like that
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