Jump
I’m standing in the drop zone at Twin Cities Skydive in Baldwin, Wisconsin, and I’m watching the sky. It’s about 10am, a late-August Sunday morning, and the sky is perfect and dull. Lawn chairs edge the drop zone, a field of mown grass among farms, and in the chairs a few spectators yawn. All over Wisconsin cows have been awake for hours, immobile, only working their jaws, as we’re doing now on this flat field under monotone blue. But then we hear a plane’s engine way off, see a plane reduced by distance to almost nothing, and suddenly the sky is dotted with divers in free fall. I let myself imagine free fall now, and for a moment my mind assumes what I can only describe as a psychic fetal position. Then the divers’ parachutes begin to deploy in colorful fusillade, they drift on rainbows to the ground, and the sky is once again predictable. Vicariously elated as the divers congratulate each other and gather their chutes, I am ready to sign waivers I will try not to read in too much detail—I am ready to dive.
We—my dad, brother, two women who appear to be mother and daughter, and myself—are taken through the parachute packing area (a fascinating place, and deserving of at least a long essay, if not a Herzog documentary) to a carpeted room with enough space for the ten or so chairs arrayed around a television. The walls are covered with photos of divers in mid-air, harnesses, and other paraphernalia I don’t recognize but hope is flawless and well understood by the staff—many of whom I recognize in these photos from the packing room. Several ladies who are all business deliver the not-too-surprising news that we all might die, and they scrupulously inspect the Initial Here boxes on the six page waivers we’re given while we’re shown a video. The video is five minutes of a long-bearded, creepily serious man who looks to be a living embodiment of any of a number of Dostoyevsky’s more wracked characters, who explains the existential situation we’re in, this Sunday morning in Baldwin: we are choosing of our own free will to leap out of a small aircraft at 13,000 feet, to free fall at a terminal velocity of about 125 miles per hour for a minute or so (during which time we’ll fall about 10,000 feet, or two miles), and then to fall the remaining thousands of feet to earth after our parachute may or may not have deployed properly. It will be dangerous, yes, but also beautiful, this man is telling us sedatedly.
Then the video ends abruptly. A man named Nick enters the room and says we’re going to practice our free fall position. Right away it’s clear that Nick is someone you want nearby when you panic because he probably will not panic and will level-headedly know just what to do. In fact, all of the experienced jumpers I meet have this quality about them, a calm that’s nothing like laziness, that comes of the slow attenuation of fear via daily encounters. Nick tells us that during the week he’s a pilot for a small local airline. The daughter of the mother-daughter pair says she’s a flight attendant. She says she’s imagined many times what it would be like to jump from a plane, and it terrifies her. Someone jokes that at least she’ll know how to open the door should we need to evacuate in mid-air.
We all practice our free fall position, which we’ll assume as soon as we’ve leaped from the plane cabin, by lying on our stomachs and lifting our legs, heads and arms back and up, so only our bellies touch the ground. One of the scrupulous waiver ladies explains that this position will let us fall like a shuttlecock beneath the parachute, a stable way to descend. The mother of the mother-daughter pair asks if we’re required to keep our eyes open when we leap from the plane cabin, and Nick earnestly says that he thinks it’s very important to keep our eyes open the entire time we’re in the air. We’re going to see things we’ve never seen before and may never see again, he says. Profundity relies so much on context, and right now in this small room where we’ve just practiced how to fall is exactly the context Nick’s answer needs to be profound.
We have an hour to kill before we’re scheduled to get into our harnesses and board the plane, so I spend it watching the action in the drop zone and packing room and talking to a few of the jump masters—men (and they are, almost exclusively, men) who have passed the Accelerated Free Fall program, have completed many successful solo jumps, and can assist inexperienced student jumpers in free fall. It appears there are half a dozen or so students practicing jumps today, and there’s clearly a difference in demeanor between the students and experienced divers both in the drop zone and packing room. Students tend to land further afield (one landed in the next field over and needed a ride back to the main building) because they haven’t yet perfected controlling their free fall and maneuvering themselves with steering toggles after their chute has deployed. Also, the students do not race to the drop zone as many of the expert jumpers will often do. Skydive racing, as far as I gather from observing a few masterful jumpers, requires that the diver delay deploying his chute until the last reasonable second in order to gain fast distance in free fall, and that he maneuver his chute once it’s deployed so that instead of gliding gently to the ground, he swoops into the drop zone almost completely horizontally at a speed faster than he can run, then slides on his feet along the ground to a stop. The students tend to drop at more gentle speeds and do timid little slides that are more proof of concept than stunt, showing they understand how the thing’s done, but experience and its attendant finesse have yet to transform what’s still a rote skill into a single, graceful movement.
Differences in landing skill and confidence in the drop zone belies an important element of skydivers’ culture: the people who succeed and become the social center of the group tend to be the people who are in no hurry to get good and show off, but who respect their positions within the hierarchy and are humble about how much work advancing will require. At least to this outsider, skydivers’ culture and US media culture are vastly different: among skydivers, stardom isn’t based on style alone, but on the mastery that is gained from competently navigating many novel situations in the air, some of them life-threatening. When experienced divers perform for cameras, they’re performing primarily for themselves and other divers who have the experience to judge the technical mastery from which aesthetic style arises.
Experience and coolness are also evident in the packing room, where the attitude of the experienced divers who’ve just returned from a dive is one of focused enthusiasm—the disposition of experts doing what they love—among brightly-colored parachutes, which lend to the affair a carnivalesque “come one, come all” accessibility. Focus and control are just as important here in the packing room as they are in the air. Mistakes made here can be fatal for the diver—either oneself or the diver whose chute one packs. There are a couple of packers who don’t jump at all, at least not today, and do nothing but pack chutes with intense focus—I watch one packer angrily chase outside a trio of kids who had wandered onto the packing floor, and when I ask if he would explain what he’s doing as he works, he says he is really too busy to talk.
Many of Skydive Twin Cities’ employees, from jump masters to packers to the scrupulous waiver ladies, live during the skydiving season in a trailer park beside the drop zone, working in exchange for practically unlimited access to the facilities and whatever of their salary is left after diving expenses are deducted.
When it’s our turn to get into our harnesses, we meet our tandem masters. These are the people on whom our lives will depend once we’ve jumped from the plane. They’ll be harnessed to our backs and will do all of the maneuvering during our free fall before deploying our chutes to land us safely in the drop zone. My tandem master is Joe, a bald man somewhere in his mid-twenties who is both muscular and spry, a combination that reassuringly suggests competence, or so I am ready to convince myself, because by now I’m nervous. As Joe gets me into my harness, he says he’s been jumping for six and a half years and has been a tandem master for about three and a half. I ask how many jumps he’s done. He’s quiet for a moment, thinking, and then says that while he does record each jump, he doesn’t have the exact number with him, but it’s close to 2,500. Joe goes to the packing room to put on our chute, and I head out to board the plane.
The plane’s cabin is lined with low benches, which we straddle, each of us sitting in our tandem masters’ laps since we’re now harnessed to them. As the plane takes off, our tandem masters buckle our seatbelts through our harnesses. The seatbelts seem superfluous, like sunglasses at night, since we’re all strapped to parachutes, ready to fall. But statistically the plane ride is as dangerous as the jump will be, so precautions now are not unwarranted.
During the ascent, an experienced jumper doing a solo dive gives a detailed description of a recent accident in which an experienced diver tried to race another diver, tangled some lines on his chute, and plummeted. Behind him is a young man doing his last accompanied solo dive in the AFF course, and this kid looks nervous. His lips move slightly and he sort of pantomimes the hand maneuvers that will stabilize him in free fall. He is wan though he’s trying to appear gung ho among the experienced divers, who are now analyzing what must have gone wrong to tangle that guy’s lines. I’m in the middle of the cabin, behind my dad, and my brother is behind me; we’ll dive from the plane in this order. My dad won’t have to watch either of his kids fall away from the plane, which would probably only add to the tension he’s obviously feeling as we reach jumping altitude, the plane’s engine is suddenly quiet, and the cabin door opens.
A solo diver, a woman, pounds her buddies’ fists good luck before catapulting herself out the doorway. Watching her body twist and fall away from the plane, I feel my mind do a similar maneuver to evacuate my body. Fear is a powerful alternative to rational thought, and luckily I don’t have much opportunity to explore its intricacies because suddenly my dad’s tandem master slides them both down the bench and out the door, and I find myself crouched in the door, watching dad fall, but only for a second, because now I’m falling, too.
The experience of free fall is nothing like those nightmares of falling. It is quite outside the human experience altogether. You don’t feel like you’re falling because you reach terminal velocity quickly and so do not accelerate beyond about 130 mph. Also, there are no nearby references to suggest how fast you’re falling. The brain has no routinized way to process and record the strangeness of this, so as you fall you maybe try to grunt or speak or think something lofty and grand, but you cannot, the mind reels, and then it’s over. So at least on your first dive, the experience is primary and physical. What I recall of it is this: hovering in a cold, loud wind among clouds above a broad and far away expanse of farmland whose rectangles curve slightly at the distant horizon, simple geometry that conveys grandness of a scale that’s so woefully underserved by the word “big.”
Joe deploys our parachute, and everything is still. The contrast between this calm and the howling chaos of free fall provides sensory pleasure that’s also aesthetic, because as I appreciate the scenery I’m also appreciating my place in it, the feeling of drifting slowly down through it toward ground that’s not at all monotone seen from up here. The air is warmer now—we’ve gained three degrees for every 1,000 feet—and I relax into the steady descent, letting Joe steer us in swoops and circles.
Our landing is gentle and spot on target in the drop zone. I look around and see that my dad and brother have landed, and that the mother-daughter pair have also landed and are hugging and exclaiming to their family, who receive their hugs and exclamations with the pleased but slightly embarrassed expressions of a sideline audience straining to feel as intensely as the players seem to the immediacy of winning. Before we leave, we’re each given a certificate signed by our tandem master, a coupon for a free drink at a bar in Hammond, and a couple of bumper stickers. I shake Joe’s hand and thank him. I’m feeling sentimental and want to say something more, like tell him how glad I am to be alive, how he’s helped me experience something unforgettable, but all of these things seem corny and insufficient, and anyway I can tell by his smile, by all the divers’ smiles, that they understand all of this and that any more words would utterly lack the intensity of the actual experience.
We—my dad, brother, two women who appear to be mother and daughter, and myself—are taken through the parachute packing area (a fascinating place, and deserving of at least a long essay, if not a Herzog documentary) to a carpeted room with enough space for the ten or so chairs arrayed around a television. The walls are covered with photos of divers in mid-air, harnesses, and other paraphernalia I don’t recognize but hope is flawless and well understood by the staff—many of whom I recognize in these photos from the packing room. Several ladies who are all business deliver the not-too-surprising news that we all might die, and they scrupulously inspect the Initial Here boxes on the six page waivers we’re given while we’re shown a video. The video is five minutes of a long-bearded, creepily serious man who looks to be a living embodiment of any of a number of Dostoyevsky’s more wracked characters, who explains the existential situation we’re in, this Sunday morning in Baldwin: we are choosing of our own free will to leap out of a small aircraft at 13,000 feet, to free fall at a terminal velocity of about 125 miles per hour for a minute or so (during which time we’ll fall about 10,000 feet, or two miles), and then to fall the remaining thousands of feet to earth after our parachute may or may not have deployed properly. It will be dangerous, yes, but also beautiful, this man is telling us sedatedly.
Then the video ends abruptly. A man named Nick enters the room and says we’re going to practice our free fall position. Right away it’s clear that Nick is someone you want nearby when you panic because he probably will not panic and will level-headedly know just what to do. In fact, all of the experienced jumpers I meet have this quality about them, a calm that’s nothing like laziness, that comes of the slow attenuation of fear via daily encounters. Nick tells us that during the week he’s a pilot for a small local airline. The daughter of the mother-daughter pair says she’s a flight attendant. She says she’s imagined many times what it would be like to jump from a plane, and it terrifies her. Someone jokes that at least she’ll know how to open the door should we need to evacuate in mid-air.
We all practice our free fall position, which we’ll assume as soon as we’ve leaped from the plane cabin, by lying on our stomachs and lifting our legs, heads and arms back and up, so only our bellies touch the ground. One of the scrupulous waiver ladies explains that this position will let us fall like a shuttlecock beneath the parachute, a stable way to descend. The mother of the mother-daughter pair asks if we’re required to keep our eyes open when we leap from the plane cabin, and Nick earnestly says that he thinks it’s very important to keep our eyes open the entire time we’re in the air. We’re going to see things we’ve never seen before and may never see again, he says. Profundity relies so much on context, and right now in this small room where we’ve just practiced how to fall is exactly the context Nick’s answer needs to be profound.
We have an hour to kill before we’re scheduled to get into our harnesses and board the plane, so I spend it watching the action in the drop zone and packing room and talking to a few of the jump masters—men (and they are, almost exclusively, men) who have passed the Accelerated Free Fall program, have completed many successful solo jumps, and can assist inexperienced student jumpers in free fall. It appears there are half a dozen or so students practicing jumps today, and there’s clearly a difference in demeanor between the students and experienced divers both in the drop zone and packing room. Students tend to land further afield (one landed in the next field over and needed a ride back to the main building) because they haven’t yet perfected controlling their free fall and maneuvering themselves with steering toggles after their chute has deployed. Also, the students do not race to the drop zone as many of the expert jumpers will often do. Skydive racing, as far as I gather from observing a few masterful jumpers, requires that the diver delay deploying his chute until the last reasonable second in order to gain fast distance in free fall, and that he maneuver his chute once it’s deployed so that instead of gliding gently to the ground, he swoops into the drop zone almost completely horizontally at a speed faster than he can run, then slides on his feet along the ground to a stop. The students tend to drop at more gentle speeds and do timid little slides that are more proof of concept than stunt, showing they understand how the thing’s done, but experience and its attendant finesse have yet to transform what’s still a rote skill into a single, graceful movement.
Differences in landing skill and confidence in the drop zone belies an important element of skydivers’ culture: the people who succeed and become the social center of the group tend to be the people who are in no hurry to get good and show off, but who respect their positions within the hierarchy and are humble about how much work advancing will require. At least to this outsider, skydivers’ culture and US media culture are vastly different: among skydivers, stardom isn’t based on style alone, but on the mastery that is gained from competently navigating many novel situations in the air, some of them life-threatening. When experienced divers perform for cameras, they’re performing primarily for themselves and other divers who have the experience to judge the technical mastery from which aesthetic style arises.
Experience and coolness are also evident in the packing room, where the attitude of the experienced divers who’ve just returned from a dive is one of focused enthusiasm—the disposition of experts doing what they love—among brightly-colored parachutes, which lend to the affair a carnivalesque “come one, come all” accessibility. Focus and control are just as important here in the packing room as they are in the air. Mistakes made here can be fatal for the diver—either oneself or the diver whose chute one packs. There are a couple of packers who don’t jump at all, at least not today, and do nothing but pack chutes with intense focus—I watch one packer angrily chase outside a trio of kids who had wandered onto the packing floor, and when I ask if he would explain what he’s doing as he works, he says he is really too busy to talk.
Many of Skydive Twin Cities’ employees, from jump masters to packers to the scrupulous waiver ladies, live during the skydiving season in a trailer park beside the drop zone, working in exchange for practically unlimited access to the facilities and whatever of their salary is left after diving expenses are deducted.
When it’s our turn to get into our harnesses, we meet our tandem masters. These are the people on whom our lives will depend once we’ve jumped from the plane. They’ll be harnessed to our backs and will do all of the maneuvering during our free fall before deploying our chutes to land us safely in the drop zone. My tandem master is Joe, a bald man somewhere in his mid-twenties who is both muscular and spry, a combination that reassuringly suggests competence, or so I am ready to convince myself, because by now I’m nervous. As Joe gets me into my harness, he says he’s been jumping for six and a half years and has been a tandem master for about three and a half. I ask how many jumps he’s done. He’s quiet for a moment, thinking, and then says that while he does record each jump, he doesn’t have the exact number with him, but it’s close to 2,500. Joe goes to the packing room to put on our chute, and I head out to board the plane.
The plane’s cabin is lined with low benches, which we straddle, each of us sitting in our tandem masters’ laps since we’re now harnessed to them. As the plane takes off, our tandem masters buckle our seatbelts through our harnesses. The seatbelts seem superfluous, like sunglasses at night, since we’re all strapped to parachutes, ready to fall. But statistically the plane ride is as dangerous as the jump will be, so precautions now are not unwarranted.
During the ascent, an experienced jumper doing a solo dive gives a detailed description of a recent accident in which an experienced diver tried to race another diver, tangled some lines on his chute, and plummeted. Behind him is a young man doing his last accompanied solo dive in the AFF course, and this kid looks nervous. His lips move slightly and he sort of pantomimes the hand maneuvers that will stabilize him in free fall. He is wan though he’s trying to appear gung ho among the experienced divers, who are now analyzing what must have gone wrong to tangle that guy’s lines. I’m in the middle of the cabin, behind my dad, and my brother is behind me; we’ll dive from the plane in this order. My dad won’t have to watch either of his kids fall away from the plane, which would probably only add to the tension he’s obviously feeling as we reach jumping altitude, the plane’s engine is suddenly quiet, and the cabin door opens.
A solo diver, a woman, pounds her buddies’ fists good luck before catapulting herself out the doorway. Watching her body twist and fall away from the plane, I feel my mind do a similar maneuver to evacuate my body. Fear is a powerful alternative to rational thought, and luckily I don’t have much opportunity to explore its intricacies because suddenly my dad’s tandem master slides them both down the bench and out the door, and I find myself crouched in the door, watching dad fall, but only for a second, because now I’m falling, too.
The experience of free fall is nothing like those nightmares of falling. It is quite outside the human experience altogether. You don’t feel like you’re falling because you reach terminal velocity quickly and so do not accelerate beyond about 130 mph. Also, there are no nearby references to suggest how fast you’re falling. The brain has no routinized way to process and record the strangeness of this, so as you fall you maybe try to grunt or speak or think something lofty and grand, but you cannot, the mind reels, and then it’s over. So at least on your first dive, the experience is primary and physical. What I recall of it is this: hovering in a cold, loud wind among clouds above a broad and far away expanse of farmland whose rectangles curve slightly at the distant horizon, simple geometry that conveys grandness of a scale that’s so woefully underserved by the word “big.”
Joe deploys our parachute, and everything is still. The contrast between this calm and the howling chaos of free fall provides sensory pleasure that’s also aesthetic, because as I appreciate the scenery I’m also appreciating my place in it, the feeling of drifting slowly down through it toward ground that’s not at all monotone seen from up here. The air is warmer now—we’ve gained three degrees for every 1,000 feet—and I relax into the steady descent, letting Joe steer us in swoops and circles.
Our landing is gentle and spot on target in the drop zone. I look around and see that my dad and brother have landed, and that the mother-daughter pair have also landed and are hugging and exclaiming to their family, who receive their hugs and exclamations with the pleased but slightly embarrassed expressions of a sideline audience straining to feel as intensely as the players seem to the immediacy of winning. Before we leave, we’re each given a certificate signed by our tandem master, a coupon for a free drink at a bar in Hammond, and a couple of bumper stickers. I shake Joe’s hand and thank him. I’m feeling sentimental and want to say something more, like tell him how glad I am to be alive, how he’s helped me experience something unforgettable, but all of these things seem corny and insufficient, and anyway I can tell by his smile, by all the divers’ smiles, that they understand all of this and that any more words would utterly lack the intensity of the actual experience.
posted by evelyn at 1:23 PM
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