BRADY FLANIGANStaff Writer

The Tullahoma Municipal Airport is a one-room terminal parked on a patch of grass at the north end of town. It’s wrapped in the trappings of mid-century modernism, like something you might find in a forgotten Havana airfield—low-slung and sun-faded.

Entry doesn’t require a baggage check, and there are no exhausted travelers curled around their carry-ons, sleeping against the windows. On this particular Friday, the terminal was empty. Just a stale pocket of sticky air, sealed off from the wind. 

Standing behind the counter were two young men, fixed to their phones, waiting for the next plane to refuel, or the next wanderer to stumble in asking directions to Skydive Tennessee.

“Those hangars on the left? It’s the second one over,” one of them said without looking up. It was about fifty yards as the crow flies, and a short enough walk down William Northern Boulevard to justify leaving the car in the lot.

The whole second hangar is Skydive Tennessee’s. The money moves through a corrugated-metal room attached to the side, no bigger than a railroad caboose. Inside, there’s a desktop and a woman behind a counter, a display case with iridescent skydiving goggles and a rack with T-shirts. Four generations of men sat inside this train car, waiting for an appointment to get thrown from a plane. 

What made an 83-year-old great-grandfather named Barney Lewis, his 55-year-old son Billy, 42-year-old grandson Cedric Fields, and 20-year-old great-grandson Gavin Fields arrive on a Friday afternoon to do this is nothing cosmic. It was nobody’s dying wish. No black-ops mission. 

Cedric’s wife, Laura, bought a Father’s Day gift card for Skydive Tennessee, and The News received a tip about the occasion. Maybe it was nothing. Just a chance to do something unusual on a Friday. But something about four generations stepping out of the sky—separately, together—felt like the kind of small moment that deserves to be recorded, even if nobody’s quite sure why. These were four men from four generations, converging around the old truth that everything falls eventually. 

Barney was a baby of the Silent Generation—a Navy man with arms covered in saltwater-blue tattoos. Somebody who might’ve felt bombs rumble from the shores of Vietnam.  

All of them had tattoos like Barney’s. Billy drives trucks. He was wearing a cross around his neck and a shirt that said, “if it’s got tires or [redacted] I can make it squeal.” In some lines of work, they call that a résumé.

Billy’s nephew, Cedric, is a Rutherford County detective. He’s a short, stocky guy with a bald head and a Tennessee Tri-Star on his right bicep. He carries many of the markers of a cop, except a sense of ease that’s earned from spending a little more time behind a desk and out of a squad car. His son Gavin was a silent character, with hair like Robert Plant’s at the height of Led Zeppelin, and 20 years old.

Before they were allowed to fly, they were required to watch an instructional video. 

The instructional was not the hour-long, fold-out-table lecture one might think is required to rocket toward earth from two miles high. Lectures about removing belts, boots, and laptops from TSA have been longer. It was like a commercial playing in the waiting room of a bank. They watched, but their eyes wandered to the ground, the ceiling, each other, back to the screen.  

It was a VHS-looking video of a man with a belly-length beard speaking from behind a wooden table—mostly about the liability waiver. If you become an asphalt stain, you can’t sue. But how could you? After the video, the girl behind the counter told them they could head into the hangar.

Barney was first to meet his instructor. He would be strapped into Justin—“but they call me Spidey,” Justin said. Unlike the comic book hero, there’s not much New York in Justin. He speaks through what might be the ashes of a SoCal accent. Tall and lanky, with shoulder-length hair, Spidey talks mostly in quips while he pulls the reins on Barney’s harness. 

“You excited to go up? Don’t worry, I won’t drop you. Actually I will—but only because you asked for it.”

Spidey was one of those rare characters you only meet a few times in life. The kind who says they used to live in a van, and you envy them. Barney asked if he’s ever taken someone up his age, “oh yeah, someone’s got you beat. Dropped a man in his nineties once,” he said.

Billy was standing beside his father, staring out the hangar toward the sky. It was a blue day in a week of blue days, but a rare one. Ideal 72 degrees and an intermittent breeze like a fan on a swivel—just the right number of bone-china white clouds in the sky. Everything was mocked up to be a Norman Rockwell canvas, except Billy’s instructor Eric, who stood behind him with his arms around Billy’s waist, tightening his harness in an awkward hug only two motions away from the Heimlich. 

Eric was a tall, Michel Foucault looking character, bald with a good foot-and-a-half on Billy. He explained that his daughter was a diver too, and just completed her thousandth-something dive. 

The plane was parked just outside the hangar, in the sunshine. A little grey thing with propellers dangling from both wings, running at a high-pitched whine like a golf cart. In another life, it could’ve been a scaled-down B-52—something to prep Tullahoma boys for Normandy during the radio days. It had everything except the size and the holes from flak.

“Remember to arch your back when you jump, like you’re sticking out your belly, so the wind can level you out. No matter how pretty it is, keep your mouth closed, or it’ll knock the wind out of your lungs when you jump,” Eric said.

Billy and Barney walked toward the plane while Cedric and Gavin suited up. Their instructors pulled them aside and videoed them. “Well, what are you feeling? Ready for the big one?” The four of them were the only tandem jumpers that day. The rest of the plane was filled with soloists. 

The plane bounced like a Brougham Cadillac. Even from inside the hangar, it had that smell: burnt oil, cigarette smoke, diesel. You could almost believe the seats were red velour. Because of the number of jumpers, the four of them would have to jump separately. Barney and Billy would jump first, and when the plane circled back, Cedric and Gavin would jump. 

Once the plane took off, it would climb to 14,000 feet and sweep to the west. Someone would slide open the metal door, and a plane’s worth of memories would begin falling toward earth at 120 mph. The woman at the front desk said the best view would be from just outside the terminal.

“See those picnic tables?” she said, “they’re going to land on the far side of the runway in 20 minutes.” 

Laura and her daughter came to watch. They stood outside the terminal trying to spot Billy and Barney in the sky with an iPhone camera.

By the time Barney and Billy appeared in the sky the soloists had already landed. Everyone else rocketed down like artillery. They fluttered down like antique hot air balloons between the clouds. Both of them landed in the grass on the far side of the runway, behind a single-engine that had touched down to refuel. 

Cedric and his son Gavin were still in the sky with the second group of jumpers. The plane had disappeared in the ocean again, and now its only signature was the way the engine whined—high pitched as it circled back, then rumbling as it traveled away. 

The plane was gone though, and once again it took a professional camera, an iPhone, and Laura’s daughter’s eyes, all staring towards the electric blue, waiting for more chutes to appear.

The next bursts of color appeared to the east, with the hangar in the foreground. There was a dab of black-and-white in the sky with a little dot hanging below, like a seed tick. Then the next chute—a smear of yellow and blue.

A woman and her daughter were standing beneath a tree nearby. Her husband was one of the soloists. This was his final dive before he was approved to jump without a partner. Her daughter’s attention was stuck on a redtail hawk, swooping low over the hangars. Within a moment all eyes were on the bird, fluttering still in the wind. 

Barney and Billy unstrapped and made their way to the picnic tables while the other two were coming down. 

“Well, how was it?” Laura asked Barney, “ready to go again?”

He chuckled, “Hell, no!”  

He turned toward the sky and squinted. The next group hadn’t landed yet.

“But I’m glad we did it,” he said, almost to himself.