JUMP
October 26th, 2007
Harrisburg Magazine
Published October, 2007
You will climb to 3,000 feet in a tiny airplane hunched on your knees between a pilot and a large door, which you will use to exit the airplane. As you realize this, your mouth will become dry and your breathing will become shallow. Your instructor, kneeling behind you, will tug you sideways, freeing your pilot chute, then someone will yell “Door!”
The door will open and you will be overwhelmed with noise and speed. You will hear the propeller and feel the wind and stare down with gaping clarity at the tiny farmhouses and cornfields. You will stare at them the way you stare at a car crash on the side of the road.
Your instructor is yelling at you. He is yelling “Ready!” and shoving your ankles towards the emptiness. Your right leg enters the wind-stream and blows backwards like your instructor said it would. Again you thrust your leg outside until you’re standing on the metal platform over the landing gear.
You grab the strut and step onto the platform. The strut feels cold like a beer can and the tiny hairs on the back of your hands ripple flat against the wind as you climb away from the fuselage towards two red hash marks under the wing. Suddenly your feet leave the platform and you hang like Superman in your blue jumpsuit. You turn your head and look at your instructor one last time.
Your instructor is crouched on the landing gear like a ferret with wild brown eyes and a scraggly white beard. His name is Ken Plankenhorn and he holds the strut with his left hand and your pilot chute with his right. He nods at you and yells “Set!”
Think back. Remember to arch. Remember to count your altitude by counting your seconds: arch-one thousand, arch-two thousand, arch-three thousand. If you count to five and your parachute doesn’t open, pull your reserve. Remember to Look, Reach, and Pull. It’s important not to panic. Remember to check your riser. Check your canopy for line twists and holes bigger than a human head. Check your altimeter. Pull the toggles down after your riser settles, not before. You sat through five hours of class and you will remember nothing.
And then you let go.
What happens next is universally described as incredible, awesome, and amazing. You will experience for the first time in your life an indefinable freedom combined with an overpowering lack of sensory awareness. Several seconds will pass in which you are unaware of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
The sound of ripping fabric will wake you. Air is rushing past your head, ramming into your parachute, yanking lines from your shoulders, unfurling nylon cells and converting your parachute into a pressurized semi-rigid wing. You will watch this happen with the most intense focus of your life.
This will be followed by relative silence.
Looking up, you will check your canopy for line twists. Like a cartoon character, you will check yourself for bullet holes and missing limbs. You will then look at the tiny farmhouses and cornfields between your sneakers and you will yell as loudly as you can that you are alive and that what you see is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.
The voice of Richard “Mr. Dick” Gochenaur will come over the walkie talkie inside the pocket of your jumpsuit. Mr. Dick is the safety officer at Maytown Sport and Parachute Club. He has 1400 jumps and 45 years in the United States Parachute Association. He will guide you to a circular landing area filled with white stones called the pea pit.
“Left,”says Mr. Dick, at least you think he said left, and you pull the left toggle from above your head to below your waist. Your parachute pauses, then sweeps down and left with a swiftness that makes you never want to turn left again.
“More left,” says Mr. Dick. “Left, left, left.” Against your better judgment you continue turning left and you check your canopy because you fear it will collapse. Yet somehow you remain aloft, and with each turn you gain confidence.
Steadily the ground rises to meet you. You look down at the wind sock by the pea pit. As you get closer to the ground, you realize you are falling very quickly. You also realize that despite Mr. Dick’s expert guidance, you are not going to land in the pea pit.
Instead you are going to land on top of an airplane surrounded by weeds next to the runway. In parachuting, the first rule of object avoidance is avoiding the object. You cannot avoid objects with large sweeping turns because doing so often brings you 360 degrees back towards the object with only an increased rate of collision for your efforts.
Forty feet off the ground you perform a minor left turn and steer clear of the plane. Two seconds later Mr. Dick says “Flare, flare, flare” and you pull both toggles to mid-thigh. The landing is softer than stepping off your front porch.
You will never forget the loping simian gait of a bearded and hairy-knuckled Kenton Wilt, whom they call “The Missing Link,” bounding over to shake your hand and offer congratulations. If you ever jump out of an airplane, this will be the most satisfying handshake of your life.
What’s unique about the Maytown Sport Parachute Club is that its members treat each other like family, and they will treat you the same. These are not people with death wishes. They jump to live. They have wives and husbands and children. They have jobs in computer programming, truck driving, and facilities management.
For them, skydiving remains a safe but unforgiving sport. At the end of 2006 there were 30,618 licensed skydivers in the United States Parachute Association. 21 of them died. 2,476 reported having to use their reserve parachute. If you accept these risks, nothing compares.