The Parachuting Accident

Zipperfinch Lake summer resident and cottage owner Ethel Rumor spent most of the summer of 1994 inside her cottage at the lake taking care of her daughter Geraldine who, at the beginning of the summer, had the scare of her life.

Ethel and Geraldine came up to Zipperfinch Lake at the end of May after Geraldine’s classes had ended for the semester at the community college down in the lower peninsula of Michigan. Geraldine was in her fourth year of her double major in the welding and refrigeration repair curriculum. The fact that it is a two year course may say something about Geraldine’s study habits. Geraldine also had many hobbies which occupied many of her waking hours so she found little time for homework.

Her most recent hobby, skydiving, was a very expensive sport but Geraldine had a large trust fund left to her by her father who’d passed away, or so Ethel and Geraldine said, back in 1982. Many close friends of the family claim that Mr. Rumor simply stole off in the dead of night leaving everything behind, most of all Ethel and Geraldine. These same friends claim he’s leading a quiet and happy life in a small town in Ohio.

Toward the middle of June, boredom with the bucolic life at Zipperfinch Lake overtook Geraldine. She packed her skydiving equipment into Ethel’s mini-van and drove to a city forty miles away where she hired an airplane to fly her over Zipperfinch Lake so she could practice her new hobby. She had already arranged to borrow Clive Jackpine’s Cadillac to enable her and Ethel to drive back to the city from Zipperfinch Lake to pick up the mini-van.

On that historic day in June, Geraldine beat her own personal free fall record. Geraldine plunged through the air for six thousand feet. Unfortunately, she’d only planned to free fall for four thousand feet.

At the two thousand foot mark, Geraldine pulled the rip cord. Her eyes widened as she stared at the rip cord in her hand. She felt the still full pack on her back and she said in a trembling voice, "I shouldn’t have let Butch help me pack my chute."

Butch Bloodshot is the fourteen year old juvenile delinquent son of Orville and Hilda Bloodshot who are permanent residents of the town of Zipperfinch Lake. One of his hobbies is practical jokes.

As Geraldine streaked earthward, she wailed something that sounded strangely like a fire siren, the volume of which, to the casual observer, should have been enough to shake small pine trees for miles around and strip them bare of needles. She frantically began performing the crawl stroke, trying to swim through the air to the lake where the sudden stop may not be so painful. She would have made it, too, had it not been for a phenomenon of nature called gravity.

The summer before had been an unusually good growing season on Elmer Ellison’s Farm, which is located three miles west of Zipperfinch Lake. As a result of the rare bountiful harvest, Elmer and his hired hand had put up a large haystack in the middle of the cow pasture, much of which the cows had not yet devoured.

As Geraldine hurtled earthward, she looked down and saw that she was heading directly for the haystack. While she was looking down, the group of heifers that had been nibbling hay from around the edges of the stack were looking up in horror at this screeching apparition from the sky that must have looked to them like a large, screaming bird of prey.

Geraldine plummeted into the haystack, spraining both ankles and cracking three ribs. The heifers took it upon themselves to stampede.

Elmer Ellison, upon hearing the screeching and the thundering of hooves, ran out of the barn and glanced toward the pasture to see what all the commotion was about. Seeing nothing, since Geraldine lay buried deep inside the haystack, he started down toward the fields to investigate the strange sounds he’d heard. At about the same time, his dairy herd, which hadn't witnessed the previous events, wandered up from the lower pasture to feed on the haystack.

Elmer was striding down the lane toward the haystack and the dairy cows were milling around nibbling on it when Geraldine clawed her way out and fell to the ground moaning and covered with hay. She rolled around in pain causing a slight squishing sound because the ground near the stack was now covered with what cows naturally leave behind when startled to the point of panic. The pain subsided to a bearable level so she wobbly got to her feet.

The dairy herd, upon seeing this ghostly, moaning hay and dung encrusted creature, took off bellowing up the lane at a speed unequaled by any herd of cows before. This was the same lane that Elmer was striding down, eyes downcast, and thinking only of his unfinished chores. Upon hearing the commotion, he glanced up. Bearing down on him was the frightened herd, bellowing and snorting. Farmer Ellison turned and started up the lane at a fast clip, running as fast as his boot encased feet would carry him, but he was no match for the speeding cows.

Mrs. Ellison observed the whole fiasco from the kitchen window and immediately called for help. An ambulance arrived at the Ellison farm where the paramedics assessed the situation. They loaded both Geraldine Rumor and Elmer Ellison into the emergency vehicle and transported them to the hospital where they both recovered quickly after hospital personnel hosed them down and treated them for their injuries. The attendants reported that they had to disinfect the ambulance's interior with a potent chemical before officials declared the vehicle safe for human use.

Geraldine Rumor gave up the sport of skydiving. Ethel and Geraldine’s neighbors at the lake reported that Geraldine took up the hobby of knitting as soon as her doctor had taken her off tranquilizers and her trembling and shaking had ceased. The only lasting effect is a slight twitch on the left side of her mouth whenever someone mentions airplanes or dairy products.

Elmer Ellison’s dairy herd was never the same again. Most of the cows dried up and the ones that still had milk gave it in such small amounts that the dairy farm wasn’t coming close to breaking even. The heifers continued to bolt if something as small as a mourning dove flew overhead. Elmer eventually sold the farm to a Wisconsin couple and took a job at a General Motors plant in Detroit. The Wisconsin couple turned the farm into a hunting camp.