A Man Walks Out of the Woods

The wind hits him like a wall. In this story, he does not fight it. He waits a few seconds and pulls the ripcord. The round canopy cracks open. He cannot steer it, so he simply hangs there in the sleet and falls through the clouds toward a dark country of farms, logging roads and second-growth forest.

He lands hard. The story gives him what the rigger predicted: a badly hurt ankle and torn hands, but nothing worse. He rolls up the parachute and pushes it under brush. He keeps the money.

Now he has to walk. The searchers will not come for days, and when they do, they will look near Lake Merwin and the Lewis River, where the first maps put him. If the later crosswind maths is right, he is miles away, over the ridge toward the Washougal River. In this story, he limps to a road by morning, in a raincoat over a business suit, looking like any traveler whose car broke down the night before Thanksgiving.

There is a strange line in the FBI file. Near the dam, at about 11:30 that night, someone broke into a grocery store and took survival things: jerky, cigarettes, gloves. It is tempting to give that to our man. But the same report says the burglar left prints of military boots, and Cooper wore slip-on shoes. So the story leaves that burglar to someone else.

Into the next spring, soldiers, agents and volunteers search the woods. A submarine dives in Lake Merwin. An Air Force SR-71 tries to photograph the flight path from high above. They find a murdered girl's remains, broken treetops and scraps of plastic, but nothing of the man.