WHITEFISH - It's not the people he spared by a single heroic act, but the little girl he knocked down that has occupied the thoughts of Silvertip skydiver Blaine Wright.
But Wright, whose body smashed onto concrete outside of Washington-Grizzly Stadium on Oct. 29, is thankful to be alive today, and thankful he got the chance to deliver a message to the girl:
"I'm sorry I scared you."
Ever since the horrific skydiving accident outside the stadium brought him to the brink of death, Wright has been flooded with letters and cards from hundreds of Missoulians, most of whom he doesn't know.
One day, a card arrived at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where Wright spent 24 hours at death's door, a week in intensive care and three days in surgery for 19 broken bones.
It was from Olivia, the little girl.
"Here it is," said Wright, pawing through a thick stack of envelopes at his Whitefish home, where he faces an uphill recovery and at least nine more weeks in a hospital bed before he can walk again.
"It says, ‘Dear Blaine Wright. I'm the girl you hit but I'm OK. At my school, you are all we can talk about. Maybe next time we meet, we can shake hands instead, OK? Love, Olivia. P.S. Some other kids hope you feel better, too.' "
The doctors who treated the 53-year-old Wright had doubts he would survive.
It wasn't his cracked skull or pelvis broken in seven places or his collapsed lung or his fractured vertebrae, all caused by Wright's plummet onto a concrete wall after a "bucking headwind" blew the skydiver far off target during the Silvertip Skydivers' traditional pre-game jump into Washington-Grizzly Stadium.
More dire than those was heavy internal bleeding in Wright's pelvis, which caused his blood pressure to dip to near-fatal levels over and over again.
Wright knew none of this on the Life Flight journey to Seattle from St. Patrick Hospital, and was barely aware that his sister Beth Cole was by his side in the plane.
The only thing Wright knew - and can remember nearly a month later - is that he was desperate for air.
"I have very little memory of the first couple days, but what I do remember is that I couldn't breathe and I was begging for them to help me to breathe," said Wright, a world-champion skydiver who has made around 3,000 jumps over his 38-year career. "It was terrifying. I felt like I was suffocating and I couldn't understand why they wouldn't help me."
They couldn't help him, not in the air. And the flight was long. The same weather system that caused whipping winds in Hellgate Canyon also created a 70 mph headwind en route to Seattle.
Once at Harborview, a Level I trauma center, Wright was finally given the air his collapsed lung caused to run a deficit, but it would be another 24 hours before doctors finally told Cole that her big brother was going to live.
Cole, a Hellgate High School teacher, didn't leave Wright's side for a week.
"She was amazing," said Wright, an independent aerospace engineer. "She made sure I was OK. There was such a barrage of information. There were five different surgery teams involved in my accident, and she had to interface with all of them."
The barrage of information began to trickle in to Wright about a week and a half after he arrived at Harborview. Only then did he begin to appreciate how seriously he was injured, how close he had come to death, and how miraculously the medical staff at Harborview had performed.
"They put all of it up on a computer monitor," Wright remembers. "Before that, it was, ‘Oh, I hurt again.' It was quite generic until I saw those X-rays. And that turned into an appreciation for what those guys did for me."
Blaine Wright does not like wind. No skydiver does.
The Silvertip Skydivers club, of which Wright has been a member since 1975, closely monitors wind conditions on the ground and in the air before approving its famous jumps into Washington-Grizzly Stadium for University of Montana football games.
Even mild winds can become treacherous in the Hellgate Canyon, as air funnels through a narrow corridor then bounces off buildings and other structures, sometimes creating "rotors" of wind turbulence that rapidly change speed and direction.
"The scary thing about that stadium is that if there are winds, they can be very squirrely," Wright said. "I don't care to jump in there if there are any winds of any significance at all. This particular time, we should not have jumped in."
Just before jump time, the club contacted the skydivers and told them the wind speed on the ground was within an acceptable range.
"I spoke with the ground a minute before we exited the plane," Wright said. "And the word was that the wind conditions were acceptable. I don't know if the winds came up after we exited the plane, or if in fact they were not acceptable."
Wright was the lead skydiver, as he almost always is. The lead skydiver's job, once the chute is deployed, is to criss-cross the stadium, read wind speeds by flag movement on the ground and determine the best route to get to the landing spot - the grizzly bear on the stadium's 50-yard line.
Skydivers want to descend to the target in a headwind, if there is any wind at all. Crosswinds are unpredictable and can cause a chute to collapse. Tailwinds can cause too much speed for a safe landing.
Wright knew there was trouble once he turned his chute to the west and into the headwind.
"When I turned back to the west, I had no forward drive at all," he said. "There was enough of a headwind that it totally negated my forward speed. And my parachute has probably a 25 mph forward speed. I was hoping that the wind would subside as we got lower to the stadium. But there came a point where it was evident to me that I was not going to make the stadium floor."
As Wright descended, the opportunities to hit a bailout landing spot quickly disappeared.
About 60 feet above the stadium floor, the skydiver knew he was on course to crash into the student section. He turned hard and to the left to avoid the crowd.
"You just don't go into the crowd," he said. "You just go do something different. And that's what I had to do. ... My preference is to have only one person hurt, and that would be me. I wouldn't want to have to deal with nightmares of putting someone in a hospital I don't know, and could never apologize to."
Wright said he was not aiming for the small lawn outside the southeast corner of the stadium. But even if he were, that headwind he was battling quickly became a tailwind, and it rocketed him forward, causing him to clip a tall tree.
"It added to the speed of my parachute, and I picked up a lot of speed," he said. "I saw the tree coming at me and really, that's the last of my memory."
Witnesses said they heard Wright's bones crunch and pop when his body hit a concrete retaining wall before slamming onto the sidewalk.
Little Olivia was standing right there, and got knocked over. She was scared, but she was fine.
Wright has jumped into Washington-Grizzly Stadium on 100 occasions, and his feet touch the grizzly bear "five out of six times."
In 1977, he broke his ankle parachuting into one of the infamous Aber Day keggers up Miller Creek. In 1999, he broke a femur blade-running at Big Mountain.
He's also had mishaps while water skiing, gelande jumping and kayaking, racking up 19 broken bones in all that time. He doubled that total on Oct. 29.
Today, Wright's thin, lanky but muscle-toned body has shrunk, deprived of the thrill-seeking activities that have always driven him.
"The atrophy after just three weeks is amazing already," he said. "My legs have basically disappeared. I went from extremely good conditioning to nothing so quickly."
Wright is bed-bound and would be largely helpless were it not for the support of his sister and a host of friends who stay with him, many of them from the tight-knit skydiving community.
Tim Cashmin, a Bozeman native who has skydived with Wright for more than 30 years, drove from his Santa Monica, Calif., home to stay with Wright for two weeks. Himself the survivor of a traumatic, near-death skydiving fall, Cashmin felt compelled to help his friend.
"My knee-jerk reaction is that if there was anything I could contribute, I will be there," he said. "Through the grapevine, I kind of heard what was going on. I thought if there is anything I can bring through my experience in the recovery process, I will be there."
Cashmin still skydives today despite his crash. And Wright, too, is "probably" heading that direction. But that decision will rest on whether his body fully heals.
"It's going to require I have a full recovery and that I'm not putting my body in any extra peril," he said. "If I'm not structurally sound to do it anymore, of course I won't. But I've been told I can expect a full recovery, so I'll probably jump again. ... But right now, I'm not aiming to hurry back to the sky or to the slopes."
Wright will essentially have to learn to walk again, and build his strength slowly when he leaves his hospital bed. He knows one of the first places his legs will take him - right to the feet of a little girl he toppled over on Oct. 29 outside Washington-Grizzly Stadium.
"Olivia doesn't know it yet, but I'm going to come visit her school," Wright said. "And I'm going to bring her a kids' Silvertip Skydiver T-shirt."
