Who's he?
Just the only person ever to hijack a U.S. airliner and get away with it.
The night before Thanksgiving, 1971, Cooper, a bureaucratically suit-and-tied white man, jumped out of a speeding Boeing 727 into a raging thunderstorm high above Washington State, parachute on his back, $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills clutched, presumably, to his chest.
We the People never heard from him again. And only the half-decomposed remains of a few marked twenties, discovered a decade later by some kids on a riverside, testified he hadn't been just a dream.
What a beautiful story. A confluence, like all beautiful stories, of at least a few human dreams, wishes, golden mind-threads, some of them timeless, some of them historical and moment-bound.
It's an American outlaw story, of course, in the Bonnie-and-Clyde, of-, for-, and by-the-people tradition. D.B. Cooper hurts nobody. The hostages all go free. The blow, if there is one, is to the System, the Bank, the Corporation, Fort Knox, made on behalf, in some weird way, of those jogging away from the scene, down the tunnel to family and friends at the gate, those left with the gift of a fantastic story to tell the rest of their lives: The Night They Were on the Plane with D.B. Cooper.
It's a story of the eff-it audacity, the hilarious fury, of the power-to-the-people 1960s. Which didn't really get rolling until 1970 anyway.
It's a story of the triumph of the diminutive human over behemoth technology. John Henry defeating the steam shovel. How many times, after all, has each of us beheld the sealed portal in the emergency aisle, winced at the howl of those goose-vaporizing engines, gazed down the long aluminum tube of human heads, and sensed that death was sealed not only magically out but also, somehow, inexorably, in?
That we were, in effect,
corpses in the grasp of some giant robot like
Frank Freas's?
Now imagine
going out that portal, into the 300-m.p.h. maelstrom, plummeting from the
screaming robot's torso, bear-hugging 200,000 reasons to
live, betting it all there's such a thing as the future.
Even if it's a future, despite your flabbergasting audacity, no one else will ever (if all goes right) know anything about.
And that's the deepest, most golden thread in this story, I think.
It's a story of fame wed to anonymity. An act of radical self-promotion coinciding—it's a magic trick—with an act of self-erasure.
There's something in every moderner that wants to vanish from the world that educates it, disciplines it, hospitalizes it, gives it a Social Security number, demands it speak, vote, get a job, buy more shoes, raise two children, be the sweetest granny or grandpa ever, climb into the incinerator and assume a place in an urn on the mantelpiece already.
There's something that wants to erase the heavy burden
of selfhood inflicted on us the moment the chart gets hung on our crib in
the maternity ward.
But that something wants, paradoxically, to survive the self-erasure to enjoy it.
This is what D.B. Cooper did—or does, since it's the only thing he'll ever do for as long as we remember him. From the hatch of an airliner, belly of the beast, node in a person-processing system as airtight as any we moderners have ever concocted, he erases himself in a manner so fantastic it makes him famous.
The act is so perfect we don't even know if he survives it.
D.B. Cooper, who might have lifted his nom de guerre from a flying French comic-book hero. He's back in the news today, because the FBI may have learned his real identity.
Please don't let it be true.
