Forest Walk
The only other person to walk by was a linguist back in the 80s, but she just spent a while dissecting the phrase 'help me down' before getting distracted by a squirrel and wandering off.
The only other person to walk by was a linguist back in the 80s, but she just spent a while dissecting the phrase 'help me down' before getting distracted by a squirrel and wandering off.
Megan is walking through a wide landscape with Beret Guy who owns a big part of it. Megan is surprised that he owns such a big property, however, Beret Guy is known for his inexplicable businesses such as in 1493: Meeting and from 1032: Networking; we know he probably has enough resources to be able to buy it. Alternatively, he might have simply inherited it from his mom (see 502: Dark Flow), or may not understand the concept of owning it. Nevertheless, he walks here every day, and from the context of the comic, it seems pretty much no one else comes here.
They meet a rather disheveled-looking bearded man hanging from a parachute caught in a tree. The man shakes a stick at them and demands to be helped down to the ground. Beret Guy simply addresses him as "Mister Cooper" and asks if he promises to return the money he took. The man angrily refuses, and Beret Guy casually says he'll see him again tomorrow, suggesting that this conversation has become a daily routine. Megan asks if the man was D. B. Cooper, which Beret Guy immediately confirms. He then comments on an owl nest as another bit of "neat stuff" found on his land, suggesting that he finds Cooper's presence to be just another mildly interesting part of this land.
D. B. Cooper is the identity given to a man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in 1971. He collected a $200,000 ransom (equivalent to $1,250,000 in 2020) and famously donned a parachute and jumped from the plane over the state of Washington. He was never seen or heard from again. Despite lengthy FBI investigations and nationwide publicity, the hijacker was never identified. A few thousand dollars of the ransom money was found in a river, nearly 10 years after the hijacking, but the remainder has never been recovered. The only things known about him are a police composite drawing and the name "Dan Cooper", under which he had purchased his airline ticket (he was called "D.B." as a result of a miscommunication with the media, and the name stuck).
The high-profile case followed by the never-solved mystery has led to a massive amount of speculation as to his identity, background, and what became of him. Many consider the most likely scenario to be that he didn't survive the parachute jump, and simply crashed somewhere that his body was never found. Others imagine that he escaped with the money and simply managed to evade capture. The comic is insinuating that, after leaping from the plane, he got entangled in a tree in Beret Guy's land and has been there ever since.
Uncanny situations are nothing new to Beret Guy since he possesses many strange powers. Hence, the concept of a famous criminal hanging from a tree for nearly 50 years doesn't seem any more interesting to him than an owl's nest. In keeping with the typical bizarre-ness of Beret Guy's life, it isn't explained how a man could survive for half a century hanging from a tree, why he'd choose to remain trapped there for his entire life rather than return money that he's in no position to spend, or why Beret Guy wouldn't simply report his whereabouts to the police. All of these are simply accepted as unremarkable realities of life, for him. Randall already referenced D. B. Cooper a few times before this comic.
The title text may refer to the linguist from 2390: Linguists who is more interested in the linguistic nuances that people use than in actually responding to their call for assistance. It is not known how many others have walked through Beret Guy's land, in the interim, or whether it is their nature or the general aura from Beret Guy, but the linguist did not much more than ponder the phrase "help me down". Megan also seems in no particular hurry to intervene.