Linda Collison's Blog

It’s National Nurses’ Week — Let’s Ride!Serialized fiction by L.S. CollisonNarrated by Geoff McIntyre

 

https://www.audible.com/pd/Nurse-Kit-Carsons-Knife-Gun-Club-The-First-Five-Episodes-Audiobook/

Included:Episode I: Friday Night Knife & Gun ClubEpisode 2: Saturday Night Knife & Gun ClubEpisode 3: Sunday Night Knife & Gun ClubEpisode 4: Monday Night Knife & Gun ClubEpisode 5: Tuesday Night Requiem

 

(In progress, episode 6:  Nurse Carson’s Night Off…)

 

The Legend of Jerry Bird

a new sports biography/memoir coming soon from Ground Rush Productions…

The legendary Jerry Bird outside of the Birdhouse at Skydive City. Chris Johnston, photographer.

Aerial Sports Biography/Memoir

Extreme Sports/History

History/American subculture/20th century

Oral History/Group Memoir

If you aren’t a skydiver, or if you recently started jumping, you might not have heard of Jerry Bird. Bird was the world’s first famous skydiver, known, respected, and loved by skydivers worldwide. Long before Redbull sponsored extreme sports, Jerry Bird was a legend during the golden age when the sport evolved from paramilitary accuracy and solo freefall maneuvers to group skydiving.

Jerry is a national and international champion, world record holder, innovator, gear designer, coach, teammate and friend, Bird brought us together in freefall in the second half of the 20th century.

Here’s a quick backstory of my connection to skydiving:

I started jumping out of airplanes in 1981; I was 27, a nurse by night, and a mother (single again). My beginnings in the sport is a story in itself to be told another time…  During the ’80s and early ’90s I became a jumpmaster (static line and Accelerated Freefall) and a skydiving instructor and worked at Skydive Colorado, formerly, Skies West. Once I taught the ground school, the First Jump Course (AFF) to a group of cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy (and imagined myself as skydiving’s Kelly McGillis.) I was part of a girls 4-way team (yeah, we called them girls teams back then, even though we were grown-ass women) and I made some good skydiving friends.

In 1986 I met Bob Russell at the drop zone — Skies West, on Colorado’s front range. Bob had more jumps than I did — he had started in 1973 and had once jumped with Jerry Bird. An officer in the Air Force, Bob served for five years then returned to CU Boulder as a graduate student in astrophysics when we met. When I started jumping he was on active duty in Australia so we didn’t meet until ’86. Bob got his AFF Jumpmaster rating before I did and he got his tandem rating. We were on a 4-way team together and one summer we ran Skydive St. Louis together. We competed locally a few times, and at Nationals, but mostly we were weekend skydivers.

Bob and I married in 1992. Skydiving was a big part of our lives for more than a decade. Then we moved to Hawaii and the ocean took over for a decade and we traded parachutes for sails…

Bob & Linda, no-contact RW, 1992.( Only our lips touched…)

In 2020 we began working on a documentary film about the evolution of sport skydiving. With our producer partners Chris Johnston and Bethany Baptiste we interviewed dozens of notable skydivers, skydiving pioneers all. Skydivers like Lew Sanborn (D-1.) Al Krueger (Captain Hook and the Sky Pirates), and Kim Emmons Knor (U.S. Women’s Parachuting World Champions 1962). And of course, Jerry Bird.

After our 2-day experience with Jerry Bird at Skydive City in Zephyrhills, Florida — a world renown center he helped to create in 1990 — Jerry invited Bob and I to his house. That’s when he asked me to write his biography. I am not worthy!  But the skydiving and cultural history — and Bird’s stories — needed to be preserved.

I agreed to help with the project but I wasn’t the one to write it — I wanted to hear Jerry and the pioneers tell their own stories their own way. Luckily for me, his longtime friends Sam Alexander and Raylene West had already recorded hours of interviews with Jerry and transcribed them verbatim.

Sam, Raylene and Jerry shared history together. Sam was on Jerry Bird’s All Stars team. Raylene was a novice skydiver and avid All Star fan who followed the team across the Atlantic to Bled (Yugoslavia, then) to witness their U.S. Freefall Exhibition Team’s demonstrations at the Parachuting World Championships in 1970. Jerry lived with Sam and Raylene (married, at that time) for awhile after his marriage to Diane crashed.

Sam and Raylene are the creators of this project and Jerry is the driving force, the star at the center. The book springs from Jerry’s oral histories and his voice comes through on the page. In the process Sam, Raylene, Bob and I met up in Florida and interviewed Jerry again — all the five of us.

Then began my research in earnest!

Five years after beginning the Jerry Bird project, we are close to announcing a release date for the book: Jerry Bird: The Making of a Skydiving Legend. We are in the copy-edited process. Next comes the interior book design, image placement, and cover design. Then, the proofs/advance readers copies will be sent to reviewers and a release date will be announced!

 

P.S. And the beat goes on… Our 20 year old grandson Isaac is now a skydiver! After making two tandems, he graduated from the AFF program and is working toward his A license. A lot has changed in the sport of skydiving over the last 50 years, but some things remain the same. Like, Gravity. Ground rush. Adrenalin. Camaraderie. And the legend of skydiver Jerry Bird.

Isaac and Bob, skydivers

 

 

Coming soon from Ground Rush Productions…

 

Jerry Bird — The Making of a Skydiving Legend

Linda Collison, Editor

Sam Alexander and Raylene West, Contributing Editors

 

“Skydiving is about the relationships and the friendships that you make.” – Jerry Bird

Jerry Bird was once the most famous skydiver in the world. In the 1960s when the sport was beginning to branch out beyond parachute landing accuracy and solo style maneuvers, a group of American skydivers took freefall flight beyond the baton pass to the next level. At first, the old-school paramilitary jumpers were leery of this new breed who seemed to scorn style and accuracy competitions, as well as some of the guidelines they developed. The paramilitary jumpers, along with the FAI (World Air Sports Federation) dismissed the freefallers as “fun jumpers” and at first didn’t recognize group body flight as a legitimate sport. The fun jumpers called themselves “relative workers” and most of them didn’t care about parachute landing accuracy; they cared only about building “stars” in freefall. Jerry Bird was one of these, but he flew the nest of Southern California, taking the sport of freefall star-building around the world.

This is the story of how Jerry Bird changed the sport of skydiving in the second half of the twentieth century. He and his All Stars turned the world on to the challenge and the exhilaration of flying together to hook up with others in that brief dimension of freefall. Captain of national and international champion teams, Bird is remembered for his inclusive team building and coaching methods, his innate abilities and organizational skills. In 2010 he was inducted into the International Skydiving Museum Hall of Fame.

A compilation of writings by many notable skydiving contemporaries who knew and flew with Bird, the book is built around Jerry’s own stories transcribed in his inimitable voice. As such, it is both an historical sports biography and personal memoir of one man whose name became legendary among skydivers around the world and his influence on the sport is seen today.

 

Contributors:

Linda Collison is an author and a retired skydiving instructor (AFF and Static Line)

Raylene West is a retired skydiver, a hang gliding pioneer, and an enthusiastic cheerleader for Jerry Bird’s All Stars.

Sam Alexander is one of the original Jerry Bird All Stars and a hang gliding pioneer.

Star-Crossedto be reprinted 20 years after its release by Alfred A. Knopf.

We enjoyed great reviews and sales for a few months but sales dropped off quickly. I obtained a reversion of rights when I had interest from Tom Grundner of Fireship, a small press headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

My first historical novel Star-Crossed was subsequently published as Barbados Bound by Fireship Press, followed by Surgeon’s Mate and Rhode Island Rendezvous, as the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventures trilogy with the enthusiastic support of Tom Grundner.

Tom has passed on, as has his spouse and partner Mary Lou, who managed the business after his death. Fireship Press has been consigned to the deep, and once again I have my rights back..

Star-Crossed (Barbados Bound, under the Fireship pennant) will be reprinted as the the first book in the Star-Crossed Saga under the Old Salt Press banner.

The great thing about historical fiction is, it never gets old. Watch for the pre-order options, new cover reveal, and the release party, details to follow.

See also https://www.lindacollison.com/farewell-tom-grundner/

 

Rocky Mountain Wineries…

The Colorado River that slices its way through the Rockies was once called the Grand River. And so the Smiths, originally from Missouri, named their vineyards and winery after the famous river, the same one that farther downstream carves the Grand Canyon…

Rocky Mountain Wineries; a travel guide to the wayside vineyards. Boulder, Pruett Publishing, 1994.

Thirty years after publication, Bob and I (the authors) still love to visit the vineyards of Palisade — Colorado’s first federally-designated American Viticultural Area (AVA). At the time we wrote the book Colorado had only nine wineries; only four of which were located in Palisade.

Our guidebook — the first to focus exclusively on American wineries east of Colorado, is 30 years out-of-date, I am happy to report.  In 2024, the state licenses over 150 wineries, cideries, and meaderies. Yet our book is historically accurate, and some of our favorite wineries and vineyards remain in production. We had a wonderful few years doing the research. NOW MORE RESEARCH IS NEEDED!

Grande River Vineyards has consistently grown and made a variety of excellent wines — wines that reflect the unique terroir of Palisade. Here are a few photographs I took when Bob and I recently spent a little fall crush-time at Wine Country Inn. We visited a few rows of grape vines that were planted in the late 1980s, when we first tasted Steve and Sharon Smith’s wines.

Screenshot

For the past week I’ve been posting memories from a cruise on the upper Amazon River Bob and I experienced 25 years ago. Shortly after our return, I wrote a brief piece — a psychological essay? a prose poem? flash nonfiction? — about one particular afternoon on that cruise. Titled “New World Eden,” it was published by Chaminade Literary Review, Chaminade University, Honolulu.

99 pennies for your thoughts…

In a recent conversation with J. Eric Miller, a creative writing professor at MSU Denver, he said to me, “You wrote it about 25 years ago. Does it ever startle you to go back in time like that? To read the writing of some version of you?”

I’ve been thinking about his question for a few days. And my answer is to write a memory of another episode that happened one night during that cruise. It touches on my fear of dying and my awe of living.

The two brief episodes — written 25 years apart — are combined as a single piece of creative nonfiction and published electronically. Available for download on Amazon Kindle for 99 cents. Be warned — it is brief — but expressive, I hope. And worth the 99 pennies!

You can download New World Eden for free between August 1-August 5, 2024. Or buy me a cuppa coffee, I’ll recite it for you, and you can tell me what you think.

Dr. Miller will be presenting an interactive lecture on writing creative nonfiction at this year’s Steamboat Writer’s Conference, October 18th and 19th in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I can’t wait for the deeper dive…

Check Steamboat Writers website or Steamboat Creates website for more information, and to register.

Hope to see you there!

Screenshot

From the logbook:

Thursday, February 25

The Yagua people are a healthy lot. They perform some dances for us, but I got the feeling this is done mostly for tourism now. Yagua means red; they paint their faces red from the seed pods of some tree.

I get chosen as a dance partner by a young boy, perhaps 12 years old. Every time we circled around the hut Bob took a picture!

After the dances it was trading time. There was a real feeding frenzy when I brought out my bag of goods, which I collected that morning by going through my suitcase:

T shirt

sleeveless shirt

bandanna

crayons

sewing kit

new towel

new bar of soap

In a heartbeat all were gone and I was clutching a handful of masks, necklaces and dolls, a dazed look on my face. The only thing left was the soap and that I gave away to a woman who needed it for her baby.

Bob traded for some belts, necklaces, and paintings on bark cloth. (Twenty-five years later, we are enjoying this artwork from the Peruvian Amazon.)

As we walked to the boat the kids kept trying for that last minute sale, or trade. Then, on the water, we were surrounded by the boat people with their floating stores, a paparazzi of peddlers, pushing their wares.

“Amiga! Amigo!”

 

After trading with the Yagua we went to see the artist Francisco Grippa in his studio in Pebas. The first thing he did was to serve us refreshment — locally brewed beer.

Francisco Grippa, artist

His work over the years has been inspired by Cubism, Impressionism, Modern Art. He even had a period of political satire art — The Last Supper with Richard Nixon at the table, was one example.

Afternoon River Dreams

We stopped for swimming and canoeing, near a small settlement on a black water tributary. Children waited in dugout canoes, to take us up the river for a dollar.

A big girl, 9 or 10, in a white dress, her name was Lydia, took Marilyn and me. A young girl of 7 or 8 took Bill, a young boy took Pat; soon the procession of canoes plied up the tributary along the far bank where the current is less.

It was that time of day between afternoon and evening, the time of telling light and moving air and silken water. The children picked flowers for us from the bow of the dugout canoes, brilliant reds and whites, and they taught us to pick up floating seed pods and skip them like stones across the river.

And I see white-haired Bill lying in the back in his dugout, fingers trailing in the water, giggling like a child and I realize I am dreaming. Or maybe we are in heaven or someplace not of this world…

Floating islands of water lettuce and hyacinth, miniature worlds populated by spiders, beetles, visited by butterflies, each a reality of its own, drifting on the current of time.

 

Copyright Linda Collison; 1999, 2024

Wednesday, February 24

Awake early (6:00 AM) to tour a river village. They get up early too, I guess.

This village appears a bit more prosperous than the last, though it is just as muddy. Chickens and pigs peck and root through the mud, smoke from kitchen fires filters through the palm-thatched roofs. Inside, the huts are cool and dark and relatively clean.

Amazon roofing material

Victor says he can smell masata (fermented manioc) from last night’s carnival celebration

A woman swings her infant in a hammock and the chief, an older man with splayed toes, shows us a toy for children made of bones. Spinal bones. You slide the bones up the string (held vertically) then let them go and they rattle down, clicking and clacking . The string, by the way, is a vine, of course.

These people are reserved. They do not make eye contact. Even the children don’t stare, they glance shyly. Smiles are infrequent. They seem self-contained, not sullen. Only once did I ever hear a small child cry.  The ones in the first Peruvian village, Pebas, had been conditioned to smile; those children took our hands and led us like little pied pipers to and and from the boat.

Pebas

Later, when we are on the boat passing by their houses, children wave and laugh (Laughing at us, I wonder?)

After lunch we took another rainforest hike, the higher ground beyond the flood plain. This is supposed to be an example of primary rainforest but Roger says it has been cut some. We see a merthiolate tree which is used as an antiseptic (Mercurochrome?) The bark exudes a yellow-brown liquid. We also see a milk tree which bleeds when cut, a milk of magnesia-like fluid that is good for treating diarrhea. It is all very interesting but the mosquitoes attack when you are standing still, which we frequently do when Secundo is orating.

Lunch — siesta. Bob and I skip the leper colony tour…

I had a nice conversation with Tom about Ambrose Bierce (Incident at Owl Creek)

This afternoon the sun was illuminating the east bank of the river and we had a remarkable display of birds — blue and yellow macaws, a flash of color as they burst from their roosts in pairs… All of us sitting on the upper deck of the river boat witnessing the rainforest around us as we glide along with it…

Sunset on the Amazon and the river is glassy, reflecting the heaped up clouds, the arms of the trees, the birds.

The night excursion is memorable mostly for the frogs and the night sky, the planets Venus and Jupiter, still close in the western sky, reflect in the black waters. Above us, a gibbous moon sails.

I get up during the night, late. The moon is reddish on the western edge of the sky and the frogs and insects are still singing and the Southern Cross is high above. The diesel engine thrums reliably, the air is delicious.

Arco‘s captain at the helm

 

Arco‘s first mate at the helm (captain looking in through the port)

Later that night the fog drops like a curtain and we collide with something — a log? the bank? — it jars us from our sleep and I listen for a distress call, the cry for All Hands! or Abandon Ship! But all is well, this steel hull is tough and soon I fall back to sleep

 

 

 

From the logbook:

Tuesday, February 23

Awoke to the sound of rain; the second nicest way to wake up!

This is the rainy season and this is the rainforest, so might as well make the best of it!

After breakfast, we cross the river and stop at Letitia, Columbia, a border town between Peru, Columbia and Brazil.

Letitia is colorful and lively, people everywhere, out in the streets, buying, selling, loitering, going about their business. Crowded, messy, a jumble of stores and stands, little apparent order to my eye, and everything so different, you just want to stare and stare. Sometimes I wish I were invisible so I  could stare harder and longer.

We are based at the Hotel Anaconda, the nicest hotel in Leticia. There is a swimming pool here, a covered lobby with white plastic table and chairs, the kind found now around the world. Whoever invented them must’ve made a fortune! We’re not staying here — it’s just a gathering place for us. Our home is on the boat.

A shopping frenzy — I feel like a spendthrift — maybe I am. But what fun to shop in a foreign country, especially one exotic and inexpensive. Tee shirts, a dress, Columbian coffee beans — which were hard to come by — we had to try 5 or 6 different shops. What most stores carried was instant coffee, which is what most people here drink. Espresso machines and bean grinders on the Amazon??

We bought (Bob bought for me) small emerald earrings, amethyst earrings, a bottle of wine and a bottle of Pisco, the local spirit.

Fruit markets on one whole street, a burst of yellows and greens. The indoor market is selling fresh fish and slabs of meat and there is a preponderance of forelegs — bovine forelegs — hanging around. We saw a lady selling all sorts of dried herbs. In another store we found una de gato — cat claws — a vine from the jungle purported to have many medicinal qualities. It’s a bag of ground up powder.We pass it up, but who knows? Who knows what properties we are leaving behind? (Paul Simon’ lyrics comes to mind, 25 years later…. there is a frog in South America has the antidote for pain… That song, “Senorita with a Necklace of Tears,” would be released in 2000.)

Segundo and Victor are working hard for us. They show us the town, they translate for us, they barter for us. Victor introduced us to the jeweler where we bought my earrings.

Segundo is a great storyteller. We warm to his subject, he loves to explain to us, to tell his stories which he spills forth slowly, enjoying his influence, his ability to teach. He is a bright and likeable man, but once he begins a story or a lesson, be prepared to listen for quite some time as he spins his tale like a loving spider shapes a web.

Motorcycles are the primary form of transportation and here in Letitia, Columbia, a helmet law seems to be in effect, the little bucket-type are sold everywhere, worn everywhere. Well, the drivers wear them…

We saw a transvestite, or the recipient of a sex change operation, trying to get her motorcycle fixed. (I’m sorry if I offended anyone. I scrawled this in my logbook in 1999. I wrote what I saw because it interested me.)

As we leave the music increases, lively Latin music blasted out into the street. The cantinas are filling up.

But it is back to the boat for us, where a good lunch awaits, and an afternoon siesta for me and Bob.

Continued…

Copyright Linda Collison; 1999, 2024