I know some people had been wondering about how he's been doing, based on this article, I'd say he's doing well.
Blaine Wright had a plan when he walked into Jessica Blackman’s fifth-grade class at Cold Springs Elementary School Friday.
“I’m going to ask them if anybody knows what happened on Oct. 29 to raise their left hand,” said Wright, the Whitefish skydiver who slammed into the ground outside Washington-Grizzly Stadium on that windy day. “I’ll know by her hand.”
Her is 11-year-old Olivia Earling, who was hit when Wright crashed on a retaining wall on the stadium’s southeast corner. She suffered some bruises, but recovered far more easily than Wright, who broke 19 bones that day.
Olivia’s left hand, well that’s a whole other story. But as her mother Patti said Friday, it’s always a whole other story with Olivia and bad luck.
On a recent family trip to Florida, Olivia got her hand caught in the light fixture of a hotel swimming pool.
“Basically, the jets of the pool pushed her and she got her ring finger behind this fixture,” Patti said.
She broke free, but not before the tip of her finger came off.
So when Wright asked the kids to raise their left hands to his question Friday, he knew one left hand was going to be pretty special.
Her left arm shot up, bound in a forearm cast.
“It’s you, Olivia!” Wright shouted. “I knew I’d find you that way.”
Thus began a back-and-forth conversation that sounded as polished as a comedy routine.
“When I hit you, were you screaming bloody murder?” Wright asked Olivia.
“No, I was screaming for help for you,” she shot back.
“So it’s been a pretty tough year for you?” Wright said.
“I don’t know about this year, because I get hurt a lot, starting back when I was 4,” Olivia quipped. “My mom says I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time a lot.”
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She was in the right place Friday, though, when Wright made an appearance designed to cheer her up after the Florida fingertip debacle.
“This is just the best thing for her, because she’s been a little low,” Patty Earling said. “He’s been so good to her and he’s really touched our family.”
Their Oct. 29th encounter began far apart, then drew dramatically close.
The Earling family was at the Griz football game, tailgating at an RV on Campus Drive on the stadium’s east side.
Wright was circling in a plane with other members of the Silvertip Skydivers, awaiting word on whether it was too windy to jump.
Due to some faulty wind readings, the jumpers got the OK to dive and made their jumps. But as Wright, who has more than 3,000 jumps under his belt, turned back toward the stadium, his chute appeared to collapse.
“Honestly, I don’t remember what happened,” he said Friday. “I don’t remember steering away from the stands, but I know that’s what I did. I would always sacrifice myself rather than go into the stands.”
He came down on the intersection of a grassy slope, a retaining wall and the sidewalk.
His waist area hit the concrete wall, mangling his pelvis and rupturing blood vessels that later threatened his life.
He also hit Olivia.
“I would say it was a nick, because you hit my legs on the first bounce,” Olivia said.
Wright was taken to St. Patrick Hospital, then flown to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he spent a week in intensive care and more time in acute care. It was there that he received a note from Olivia.
“Dear Blaine Wright,” it said. “I’m the girl you hit but I’m OK. At my school, you are all we talk about. Maybe next time we meet, we can shake hands instead, OK?”
They did better than that Friday, as the pair locked arms in a Monte-worthy bear hug. Later, Wright presented Olivia with a Silvertip Skydivers T-shirt emblazoned with her name, as well as a framed picture of a formation skydive Wright took part in in 2006. That jump linked 400 skydivers, the current world record.
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Wright spoke emotionally of the moment he learned that he’d hit the girl.
“It destroyed me to find out that I hit someone,” he said. “I cried for 20 minutes.”
And he cried softly again Friday when he retold the story.
In between the tears and the T-shirt, though, Wright answered the thoughtful, inspired questions from Olivia’s classmates.
How many bones has he broken in all? 35.
What bone would he still like to break? Well, none, but the right arm is open for business.
How high was that jump in Thailand? 25,000 feet.
Have you ever jumped off a building? No, but he’s base jumped from cliffs, antennas and bridge spans.
Are you going to skydive again? Yes, but probably not until 2013.
Though Wright’s recovery from the crash has been remarkable, he has been using a cane for walking support, and only recently was able to push up on his left leg while going up steps.
His pelvis will never be what it was, and he wonders how a jump harness would feel, particularly at impact.
Still, he is a man in love with skydiving, a man who made his first jump in 1974 and wants very much to jump again.
But he still hasn’t watched any video of what went wrong on his last jump, and maybe he won’t.
“Maybe I don’t need that in my head,” he said Friday.
Instead, he has the memory of Olivia’s letter, the smile on her face Friday and the memory of their epic conversation in fifth-grade math class.
“So, did you see me coming down?” Wright asked Olivia.
“Yes,” she announced. “I was running away.”
The class cracked up.
Missoulian city editor Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or by email at [email protected]
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