There are plenty of high places you can fling yourself from with a parachute strapped to your back - but in the U.S., apparently the only place you can do it legally is from the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls. And on Memorial Day, people were doing it all day long. They walk in small groups to the middle of the bridge and then one at a time, they climb over the rail and jump, waiting a a second or two to deploy their chute. And then they glide down to a grassy target 500' below on the left bank of the river.
Thinking about parachuting wasn't too hard (not that I considered it seriously), but I found it incredibly disconcerting standing 15' away watching someone simply climb over the rail of the bridge and ... jump.
After a long day in Twin Falls, I grabbed an ice cream and headed north and east twenty miles or so. This spring I had read Jamie Ford's Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, and besides leaving me wishing I knew the geography of Seattle's International District better, it left me curious to visit the internment center at Camp Minidoka. It's pretty desolate country, save for the large irrigation canal that snakes past. This must have been a shocking change for folks uprooted from Seattle - even if the circumstances weren't already so unsettling. After the war, most of the site was sold off to private farmers, but it is a national historic site and there are interpretive signs and some relic structures. There's also a monument to the Japanese at the camp who fought in the war -- it was a little sad to see no flags or flowers or special attention on Memorial Day, unlike all the other cemeteries and monuments I'd passed that weekend.
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