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In my defense I must say that the decision to deliberately crash into the trees would have been a difficult one. Even now, knowing what was going to happen, I am not sure I could make it. But that is what I should have done. I might have failed in my attempt at a tree landing. I might have been injured. I might even have died. But I would have been able to exercise some control over my destiny. I would still have been a pilot.
Instead, I tried to fly through the clouds.
Visibility vanished in a heartbeat. In an instant, the familiar world of colors was gone. The ocean, mountains, coast, and even the Sun were nowhere to be seen. I was alone in a world of pure white.
I was not immediately concerned. Surely, I thought, the clouds could not be very thick. In a few seconds I would be able to see the Sun.
Seconds passed.
Many seconds passed.
There was no sign of the Sun.
I grew concerned, but I was still able to deny the gravity of my situation. Surely it only seemed that I had been in the cloud for a long time. Surely I would see the Sun in a few minutes.
Minutes passed.
I felt a stirring of real fear.
At last, at long last, it became evident that something was terribly wrong. Either the clouds were thicker than I thought, or I had been turned around. I was not going to see the Sun in a few minutes. In fact, might never see the Sun again.
I reviewed my options, but I had none. I could keep trying to fly in a straight line - futile in the absence of any visual reference to the ground. I could try to turn and fly out of the clouds - even more futile, if such a thing was possible. I could throw my parachute, but this did not seem like a good idea. It was a windy day. If I came down under canopy, I would go into the trees at more than 20 MPH. This would almost certainly leave me injured and unable to move. In this terrain, in this kind of weather, I would never be found. Unable to move, I would eventually die of exposure.
All I could do was keep flying at max glide - I knew from experience that this was the speed at which my glider was most stable - keep looking ahead, and hope I spotted the terrain in time to react. This was not much of a hope. I did not know how much altitude I had lost, for I was afraid to look at my altimeter, but I was almost certainly below the level of the surrounding ridges.
More minutes passed.
The clouds turned from white to gray. I did not know what this meant, but I was fairly sure that it did not mean anything good.
I tried to persuade myself that I was dreaming. It was the only way I could think of to escape the situation. I was in serious trouble, I was helpless, and I was probably going to die, but if it turned out that I was only dreaming, then everything would be OK. If only it would turn out that I was dreaming.
But I wasn't dreaming, of course. No matter how much I might wish otherwise, I was really in trouble. This was really happening.
At last, at long last, I resigned myself to death.
There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to die. There was no doubt at all. I was no longer a pilot in any meaningful sense of the word. Lacking any sense of attitude or direction, I was just a helpless passenger aboard a glider that was almost certainly headed downwind back towards the ridge. My last sight would be a brief glimpse of a cliff rushing up at 50 MPH to kill me
At such moments, as one stares into the abyss, one is supposed to have a sudden attack of religion. One is supposed to pray to some god -- ANY convenient god -- that you always did believe in them, you are sorry for all of your sins, and if he, she, they, or it will just get you out of this mess, you will head straight to the nearest church, temple, or neighborhood reading room.
Such a thought never crossed my mind. Oh, I did considered it in an abstract sort of way - i.e. "How interesting. I'm about to die. I suppose I could pray to Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy, in the hope that she might rescue me, or promise my soul to Odin if he will accept me into Valhalla." But this seemed like a pointless waste of time. If I only had a few minutes left to live, why should I waste them praying to some oppressive myth invented by a bunch of ignorant desert nomads? I had better things to do!
I realized two things. The first was that my life until that moment had been miserable. I had spent too many years in a place that I hated, living under horrible conditions, with a companion I was learning to despise. Why had I endured this nonsense when life was so short? It was now precisely too late to change things. Even worse, THERE WAS MONEY LEFT IN MY BANK ACCOUNT THAT I WAS NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO SPEND! OTHER PEOPLE WERE GOING TO GET IT!
This sucked. If I got out of this mess, things were going to change.
My second realization was that I hadn't told my friends that I loved them. This seemed like a terrible omission. Now I was going to die, and they would never know. If I ever got out of this mess, I was going to call everyone I cared for and let them know how that I cared.
The mists below parted for an instant, and I saw trees rushing past less than 100 feet away. I did not recognize the trees. I did not have the slightest idea where I was. I only knew, as the clouds closed in again, that this was the end. Sometime in the next few seconds, some hard thing was going to reach up and claw me out of the sky.
Then, suddenly, the clouds were gone! One moment I was surrounded by gray, the next I could see again!
The change was so sudden and shocking that it took me a moment to realize what had happened. When I did, I realized that things hadn't changed all that much for the better. I was not in a good place. I was below cloud base - I distinctly remember a lid of gray above me - but I was also way back in a narrow valley, deep down in some kind of rotor. I must have flown straight towards a ridge, been picked up by ridge lift, cleared the terrain by less than 100 feet -- those must have been the trees I saw -- then been dropped by the rotor into the valley on the downwind side.
By reflex I turned to fly down the valley, while I edged towards the downwind side to look for lift. I thought I knew where I was (I was wrong), and I thought that if I made it around a bend in the valley, I would be within sight of the landing zone.
But I was still in the rotor, sinking like a stone, and I did not have all that much altitude to begin with. It was by no means clear I could make it out of this valley, and all too likely I would not.
At last, too late to do me any real good, I had an attack of common sense. "Paul," I thought, "you have made nothing but bad decisions for the last five minutes. It's time to make a good decision. You are going to go down, why not pick a good place to land and put this glider on the ground while you still have some control over the situation."
There weren't any good places to land - not really - but I picked the best place I could. I headed towards what I thought was a flat spot (I was wrong) near what I thought was a settlement (once again, I was quite wrong) and set up a landing approach.
It felt strange to be setting up a landing approach for what was obviously NOT going to be a landing. Pull in, out of the harness, hands on the downtubes. Turn base, turn final, keep speed up, watch out for the rotor of the trees, and keep aiming for that spot which is NOT FLAT IT'S NOT A LANDING ZONE IT IS A STEEP SLOPE COVERED WITH TREES THIS IS NOT A LANDING THIS IS GOING TO BE A CRASH!
