Living Architecture- Monday with Marley

Two short downhill days behind them was warmth and safety and death.

They could not know that ten days ahead of them was warmth and safety and life.

Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa had another tough decision to make.

Monument: scrap metal and stone with twisted cross: Andes

Two days ago they had to make the decision to leave fourteen friends huddled in the twisted tumbled-out fuselage of Flight 571. The twin-engine Fairchild FH-227D had been ferrying forty five rugby players and their friends and family to Chile.

Everyone knows that in an accident you stay put. Your best chance to be found is to stay put. Even if you are stranded and starving in the steep deep snow of the Andes and eating the bodies of your frozen dead friends, everybody knows the thing to do is stay put.

Parrado and Canessa chose to hike out and find help or to die trying. Stay put, no way.

Nando carried the hand-quilted bedroll across his once broad shoulders. His head remembered the red cold hands shiver-stitch patching with needle and thread scraps of clothing from the dead making the bedroll he and Roberto shared during the long cold nights. His heart remembered the hope in the eyes that held the hands that shivered the needle.

That sleeping bag kept him and Roberto alive. He would take it back to his friends and save their lives.

Nando shook his long black hair and adjusted his dead friend's belts to hold the bedroll tight.

"Venga amigo." Nando squeezed Roberto's arm and told him to follow. "Vamanos."

The two friends dropped into ten days of freezing hell and rescue.

Sometimes you have to go with your gut.

You can't stand forever on decision's edge. Go back and be safe or jump off and give up to what might be.

There is gravity about the edge. It's scary here. But it's a razor whose edge must cut one way or the other.

Flight 1549 over the Hudson River - look closely up to find the airplane.

In a vacuum fifteen pounds of feathers dropped from the parapet of a high-rise building will hit the ground at precisely the same time as a fifteen pound bowling ball. If the feathers were packed as tightly as the bowling ball the package would crack the concrete sidewalk exactly the same way as the bowling ball.

A Branta Canadensis weighs between nine and seventeen pounds when fully grown.

When a flock of Canadian geese get caught between the air and an airplane traveling one hundred eighty miles an hour it means about fifteen hundred pounds of feathered flying bowling balls are whacking into the airplane.

That's a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle slamming into twin Rolls Royce Model V2500 turbofan engines only about three and a half feet wide spinning at a power ratio of 5.4 to 1 at over a hundred revolutions a second.

Freaky Feathered Forging of another Razor's Edge.

Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III, Sully, sat in the cockpit of his Airbus A-320 running through the routine take-off list when he was instantly thrust on the edge of a razor with the lives of one hundred fifty five people including his own weighing on his split-second decision of where to land his eighty ton aircraft.

Sometimes you just have to go with your gut.

Captain Sully made the right decision. Everybody survived; a miracle crash landing.

The miracle to me was that split-second razor's edge of going with your gut.

Sometimes something outside our control sets us on the cutting blade and we choose, wrongly or rightly.

Sometimes we consciously climb up on the razor to put ourselves on the edge of choice and that's a choice in itself.

Another choice in itself is to cower on either side of the razor's edge afraid to make a decision. That's why we hear to often, "If only I had ..."

The two sides of the razor blade of decision are Wisdom and Habit.

Captain Sully had thousands of hours of flight time. His checklists were memorized but he still read them religiously. He was a pilot with good habits but it was wisdom that allowed him to choose the Hudson as a landing strip. It was Instant Wisdom.

Nando and Roberto stood cold on a fifteen thousand foot stone razor's edge. They were rugby players. Rugby is a rough game. Tough people play it. Nando and Roberto had a habit of winning. They stood up high and made the decision to go for it, to win. Their guts told them they could do it.

Nando and Roberto jumped off the right-wise side of the razor's edge.

Sully jumped off the right-wise side of the razor's edge and way more than one hundred fifty five people love him for it.

There is gravity about the edge. It's scary here.

But from the edge we understand that the fall is forever and that the
GIFT OF FLIGHTISRESERVEDFORTHOSE WHO JUMP!

Develop the habit of jumping off with wisdom and your landings will always bring you home.

View from my office on the edge of CastleRock Texas.

PS. Twice I made the wrong-unwise decision to fly my Quicksilver hang-glider in winds or in areas I shouldn't have. Broke both legs twice. Of course, my stomach was much tighter then. I was on crutches for eight months.

Then I bought my first real airplane, a Model E 1946 Aircoupe with seventy five horse power. Hired a check pilot to check me out in my Aircoupe. I made the decision to take off going downhill with the wind from fifty five thousand foot high Gallop New Mexico to Phoenix. It was downhill all the way. The guy in charge, though, decided we would take off climbing up the three percent sloped runway uphill into the wind.

I should have made the decision to get out of the airplane.

The Gallup Herald read the next morning, "Tribal Architect crash lands in down town Gallup, leaves other pilot standing next to airplane, rents another aircraft and flies home to Phoenix."

My little plane was totaled by the insurance company. It was worth more in parts.

That was a tall sharp razor education on decision making.

Sometimes you just have to follow your gut.