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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Dane Allred



Flight to the Ground


Man has been fascinated by flight since the beginning of time. Leonardo da Vinci imagined the helicopter, and proposed a model for a hang-glider. As I consider the airplanes flying through the air, I wondered about how much they weigh. A Boeing 737 weighs 83 thousand pounds, but has a take-off weight ability to carry 154 thousand pounds. It carries 6800 gallons of fuel. The plane is 110 feet long, and 117 feet wide. One hundred and thirty-seven people can fly on the on a 737.

The specifications seem like empty numbers, but when I see thousands of pounds of people, metal and jet fuel streaking across the sky, it simply amazes me. I don’t know the engineering and design that gets us from a short flight at Kitty Hawk to a daily routine where thousands of planes land every day without incident. Flying is an exciting, exhilarating adventure, unless you are flying so much it becomes mundane. I was sitting next to a businessman on my first flight, and he was asleep before the flight took off. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was to fly through the clouds, and I took dozens of pictures through the small side window. The businessman slept the entire flight.

I like flying so much I’ve spent a good deal of my time flying through the air to the ground, without the plane. One time I flew backwards from a six-foot wooden ladder. I was painting the ceiling in the carport, which has since been made into a garage. But standing at the top of the ladder is never a good idea, and as I held the paint cup in my right hand and painted with my left, my wife came home and told me how good I was doing. As I wobbled slightly, the ladder flew away from my feet.

I started to fall backwards, with my feet staying up and my head started down, and as I performed a backward somersault, I grasped the paint cup firmly. I did not let go of that cup. I was determined to hold it as I fell. This means paint flew from the cup in a perfect circle around me, across the roof, across my car which was parked behind me, and on the concrete. A beautiful white circle described the path of my perfectly executed backward somersault. There was even a white line of paint on my wife. She was worried about me, of course, but since I was okay, she was not very happy when I told her she needed to go wash the latex paint from her clothes.

I learned how to do back-flips by practicing on a rubber inner-tube. I would bounce up and try to spin backwards, usually landing on my head. But since I’m pretty hard-headed anyway, I eventually learned how to do it. So when I fell off the ladder, those old instincts kicked in, and I didn’t get hurt. The same thing happened one day at school. I was walking on the stage, and just behind me was a set of five or six stairs. As I walked backward, I went backward down the stairs, and did another back-flip. Students were standing on the stage in front of me and saw me tumble backwards. They were momentarily concerned until I popped up from the floor and declared I was all right. It really is a strange kind of talent, but it probably has saved some broken bones. But I wouldn’t recommend this course of training for anyone else.

I also flown to the ground from the top of a fifteen foot ladder. Again, the ladder flew away from me since it was leaning on a grape arbor which decided to collapse. I fell to the ground this time without doing a somersault, this time landing flat on my back. Amazingly no serious injury was done, except to my pride. I was painting again, and this time I painted the side of the house green. I went into the house, took some ibuprofen and laid down to rest.

I even had a dream about the next time I flew through the air. I wanted to put more Christmas lights on the walnut tree in the front yard. I had a dream I fell out of the tree while putting up lights, and while I’m not a great believer in dreams as prognostication, I should have paid attention. Maybe I was just spooked, but it happened just as I had dreamed it. I fell and broke the fibula in my right leg. It took three x-rays and about six hours in the emergency room, and the doctor confirmed I had a hairline fracture. He suggested I go home and take some ibuprofen.

I still like to fly.


This is another episode of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Dane Allred”. From the weekly broadcast of “Abundance”. Tune each week from 7 to 8 P.M. Mountain Standard Time (9 to 10 EST) or listen on any web browser at www.k-talk.com.