Lib Lane refuses to sit around and twiddle her thumbs. Instead, the 85-year-old grandmother jumps out of planes.
ithin a few minutes of meeting Elizabeth Lane, Brad Kendrick realized his first impression of the gregarious Rattan native was seriously flawed.
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“I thought she was about 65 years old, maybe 70 at the most,” Kendrick recalled.
Wrong. Elizabeth Lane is 85; more than fifteen years older than Kendrick’s original assessment, and so blessed with vibrant energy that Kendrick’s mistake is easy to understand.
Mother of four kids, grandmother to nine and great-grandma to 14 more, her friends and family call her “Lib.” For years she worked as the choir director for the Baptist Church of Rattan and as caregiver to elderly patients in Dallas.
takes a Dive. Granny
Now she jumps out of planes. She’s also been scuba diving, kayaking, and para- sailing. “And I’ve been pulled around behind a speed boat on one of those tube things,” Lane recalls.
She’s been up in a hot air balloon twice, but found the ride a bit boring. “You’re just sitting up there,” she exclaimed.
What’s more incredible, not one of Lane’s adventures took place before 1996. That year she lost her husband Louis to heart failure. A mere 68 years old at the time, Lane was hardly content to sit around nursing grief. Instead, she wasted little time doing “all the stuff I’d been wanting to do for years.” Her first trip, to Nassau, took place that year, followed by a trip to Puerto Rico and her first scuba diving experience.
What follows from this point reads like an adrenaline junkie’s bucket list —balloon rides, cruises, racing over the frozen Alaskan landscape behind a pack of yapping sled dogs.
A smiling Elizabeth Lane returns from a dive at the Davis Airport near Sacramento, Cali.
8 | february 2013
But it is the skydiving, Lane says, that beats all. Three times she has toppled out of airplanes flying at 14,000 feet, the earth roaring toward her at 120 miles per hour. Her most recent jump was 18,000 feet. Amazingly, she confesses that not once has she worried about having an accident or, for that matter, dying. “I don’t know why but I just don’t worry about it,” she says.
Her granddaughter jumped with her once, for the most part her grandchildren prefer to watch their “Ma-mere” land from safe seats on the ground. “I usually tell them before I go up, “I’ll see you kids when I get back or I’ll see your grandfather—one or the other,”” Lane says.
Each jump has marked a birthday for Lane. While a heart surgery in 2006 slowed her down a bit, Lane says she is planning to celebrate her 86th with one more dive. After all, she says, it doesn’t take any energy or speed to fall from a plane.
Listening to her travel stories, it’s curious she never pursued these experiences when she was, well, younger.
Hardly one to mince words, Lane pipes up, “I didn’t do it because I didn’t want my husband to worry and gripe at me about going.”
Instead, she watched the sky dancers on television and dreamed. On her last dive, she witnessed ten divers doing aerobatics as they dropped. Gesturing toward the divers, Lane told her guide, “ I wish I could do something like that.” He granted that wish. The next thing she knew, Lib Lane found herself falling, flipping, and grinning from ear to ear.
So, what’s next for Lib Lane? Would you believe zip lining? ■
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