On Jumping Out of Airplanes

ONE OF the results of man's building of great machines to take him to sacred places at forbidden speeds is that he can not only arrange things so he is taken to great heights above his planet, but he can do it any hour on the hour to Chicago. Once man has been around his wondrous achievements long enough to take them for granted, he passes the experience down to his lesser numbers to let them inculcate it into his culture. Anybody, even the little beggar boy who scrapes up his $40, can go out to a town called Orange, Massachusetts and three hours later jump into the middle of the sky.

Man has always understood that he had a special relationship to the earth: he was attracted to it. It has been only in the last couple of hundred years that we've had some idea that the earth is in some small way attracted to us, though directly in proportion to its far greater importance. It is convenient when considering the throwing of yourself out of an airplane to ignore the equal and opposite force your body exerts on the earth. Especially when there could be an equal or greater number of people jumping out of planes on the other side of the earth. In Vietnam, for instance. (If everyone in the whole world flew over the same corner of the planet all at once and all jumped out at the same time, what would the world do?)

The effect of separating yourself from the earth mechanically and then letting go of the machine that was holding you away is almost exactly like the effect on a small thumbtack of the largest, most powerful magnet you've ever seen, at a fair or anywhere. You come screaming down to the ground at speeds that are constantly increasing themselves until they have you going much faster than you've ever known anything to move. And remember, when you started out, you, unlike the thumbtack, were not even so far away from what's pulling you in that you could see past its edge and around it.

They, the people who train you in the method and dangers of parachute jumping, attempt to make you forget all this.

The instruction is designed to make you think preplanned thoughts while you're falling. You are supposed to think about the muscles in your body, the tension of the pull of your back parachute opening, the positions of your legs used to manipulate your orientation in the air. You are to count, shout, "one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand" until your chute opens.

The reason they want your thoughts to be controlled is that if something goes wrong with your main parachute, you have to recognize the difficulty as being something different from the normal (never having seen the normal, however). After you have reached the decision that something is wrong, you must decide on the appropriate course of action and enact it. It--presumably, using your reserve parachute--then takes a little time to take effect.

You are shown a chart during instruction which has the numbers one to four in green numerals down a column. Beside them is a drawing of how the parachute opens during each of these first four seconds. In an imperceptibly more alarming color, purple maybe, are the numbers five and six. Farther down are an enflamed red and yellow twelve and fifteen. Furthest down is a deep magenta seventeen.

JUMPING from the height beginners jump from, 2500 feet, you can free fall for just 17 seconds before you reach the ground. From 2500 feet you can see a couple of hundred miles in all directions. We could see the mountains in three states. We could see the farms, and rivers, and railroad tracks mostly covered with snow which had fallen over the weekend.

When you first jump, your parachute is automatically opened by something clipped onto the airplane called a Static Line Device. The parachute opens and slows you down into the regular descent four seconds later. You count for six seconds. If at the end of that time your parachute hasn't opened, you look over your right shoulder to see what's happened.

These malfunctions are possible: Your parachute might never have left its pack. It might be a "streamer," which means it's out there, but just not filling with air. It might have holes in it. It might have one of its lines looped over the top, cutting the bowl in half, creating two much-less-effective bowls.

It takes, say, two and a half seconds to appraise your situation, decide to use the emergency parachute, and decide which way to put it out (it's a little different for different malfunctions). It takes from a second to a second and a half to reach down against a 125 mile an hour wind to find the ripcord on your stomach and pull it and then punch the bag to make sure the chute is knocked out. It then takes two seconds for the emergency chute to become fully open. At this point you are travelling at the terminal velocity for a falling human, 125 miles an hour; you started with less than half a mile to fall.

Six seconds to count, two and a half to decide, one and a half to act, and two to be acted upon are a total of 12 of your deep magenta 17 seconds.

If, in the course of these events, you are distracted by your circumstances, it could take you longer than 12 seconds.

Therefore you start out, when you are about to take your first jump, with your basic fear of death. Even though in 102,000 jumps at the Orange Parachuting Center they've never had anyone killed, you have to be thinking you're about to die (or at least could die) in order to make sure it won't happen.

The first thing you expect is that the actual jumping away from the airplane will be the most terrifying act. It is not. Before you leave, you are crouched on a step almost entirely outside the fuselage of the plane. This experience gives you the feeling of existing as a flying being. You are faced forward into the wind that you are beginning to develop a true understanding for; you expect then, when you step off, to just mingle with it a little further.

Another thing you expect is that a free fall before the parachute opens will give you a feeling of airy weightlessness, your body floating so far above the ground that your perspective on the land doesn't noticeably change. Such is not true; it doesn't happen that way at all.

THE THING you become immediately aware of as soon as you step out and fall is the peculiar relationship you have to the airplane. You want the airplane, you long for the airplane, you almost helplessly pine for the airplane. You want it because it is the last thing you could understand.

You see the progress of your situation in terms of the instantaneously huge distance between you and the airplane. Because the airplane is turning and accelerating and because your downward speed is accelerating while your forward velocity is decelerating due to wind resistance, the airplane loses the meaning it once had as a geometrical point of reference.

You are slowly turning over in the air because you've forgotten about counting and about maintaining aerodynamic form as your mind gropes amongst all that it has ever seen for an explanation.

The white landscape slides irrelevantly back and forth into view like an askew plane in space. You expected beforehand to have a feeling of neat perpendicularity towards the land you were falling to. But as you fall, your mind isn't aware of any geometrical relationship to the ground; it relates only to the airplane.

Quite apart from your mind, however, your bowels, as your center of gravity, have this extreme feeling of weightfulness. Your body tingles with the speed and your toes want to crawl back upwards away from the deep magenta 17.

You are unable to establish a mental understanding or even an emotional understanding of the wind. Because it keeps coming stronger and stronger, it lifts your lighter limbs like your legs, and it keeps changing directions because you are rotating in a movement you are still unaware of. The terrific wind separates you completely from your hands and feet. You experience the shoulders and thighs nearest you; but the outer limbs are lost to the environment.

Your mind is hiding inside your head, daring only occasionally to peak out through your eyes. What it sees it remembers as being all white and moving very fast at sharp angles.

On an emotional level, you are trying to stand up. You really want to be able to say something to yourself. You want to be able to tell yourself you know something, to establish that the dropping feeling in your bowels means this-and-that in relation to your body's existence in this environment as a whole.

But there is nothing you can say, there's nothing it can mean, there just simply isn't anything at all in your experience that you can call to mind to compare with this and conclude anything from. Falling through the sky is totally unknown.

People say they can jump without being afraid, which is quite true for them. If you were counting and think- ing the preplanned thoughts, you would probably be tensely exhilarted. But if you were aware of your environment, you would have to know that everything, including you, was unknown.

The mental state of fear is just a name we give to the helpless feeling of being confronted by something totally unknown, and then trying to find an answer to it and being unable. People fear death because they have to explain it and can't; and they can consciously not fear a vaccination because they know enough about the pain.

Because it is completely unknown, falling through the sky is ultimately terrifying. Your first reaction to the parachute's opening (after the one second lag it takes for your mind to catch up with your now slowed body) is "GOD IT OPENED IT OPENED I'M SLOWED DOWN I'M NOT GOING TO DIE I'M NOT GOING TO DIE."

That happens four seconds after you jump out. You smile the rest of the way down, floating very slowly for two and a half minutes down to the ground. You have a very clear mental understanding of your geometrical relationship to the land.

Landing is no more difficult than jumping off a ten foot bureau. And finally all relationships are reestablished.

The existential weight of this experience is obvious. In an age that just lets you do this thing to yourself, you should let it happen