Free Falling My Way Through This Reading Period

You see, my parachute didn't open.

There I was. Falling through the air, high over western Massachusetts.

Last weekend I rented a car and headed to Turners Falls (about 90 miles west of Boston on Route 2), set for what I was sure would be the experience of a lifetime.

I was going skydiving. Static line jumping, mind you, not accelerated free fall or anything fancy like that. In static jumping, the main ripcord is attached to the plane, automatically opening the canopy at the beginning of the fall. (That's how the theory goes, at least.)

So, at 8:30 Saturday morning, four other people and I dutifully began signing away our legal rights and started down the long road to the ultimate natural high.

I looked over my right shoulder again--just to make sure there was nothing there. There was nothing there.

I was falling--spinning now--as my rigid body knifed through the air at crazy angles.

There was Rob and Eric, two juniors at UMass, both lanky individuals jumping for their first time. There was Scott, 22 years old, driving a pickup truck and wearing a vain attempt at a moustache.

There was Mary, a middle-aged volunteer firefighter who kept making bad jokes, made worse by her incomprehensible nasal twang. Her 60 year-old husband kept videotaping us.

There was Kevin, our instructor and mentor, an old 82nd Airborne vet who (as it said on the license he passed around) had made 2054 jumps in the six years he had been a member of the United States Parachuting Association.

I was caught in the greedy grip of gravity, falling at 9.8 meters per second squared. The training took over.

"Look right!" I screamed, not bothering to fight the panic. Both my hands closed over the red release tab attached to my right harness strap and pulled it from the velcro strip.

"Pull!" I screamed, ripping the red release tab down. "Throw it away!" The red release tab and yellow wires disappeared.

"We're going to put you in stress situations," Kevin told us. "Our goal is to prepare you for every contingency that could happen to you up there."

So saying, he hauled out a fully packed parachute pack and started showing us the mechanical intricacies. Every system had a redundancy. There was even an electronic device to trigger the reserve if the jumper was falling too fast too close to the ground. I could experience total main canopy failure, pass out and survive easily.

We looked at the airplane we would be flying in: a Cessna 182 with a modified door.

"Look left!" I continued screaming, even though I was 2700 feet high in the air. It was part of the training; it was automatic.

I grabbed the silver release ripcord--a Dshaped handle about belly level on my left harness strap--and pulled down as I screamed, "Pull!" I threw it away from me--using both arms--then went into the hard arch position: pelvis thrust out, arms, legs and head thrown back, and started counting again.

"Arch thousand, two thousand..."

We were in the classroom until about three in the afternoon. Then, the simulation training started. These were the "stress situations" Kevin had been talking about earlier.

First, we worked with a mock-up of a plane and wing, learning the sequence of commands that would get us from inside the plane to the final jump position, holding the wing strut, left foot on the wheel, right foot dangling in the 75 mph wind.

Then we stepped off the wheel onto the ground, threw ourselves into an arch and counted to four, while Kevin held flashcard pictures of parachutes in various states of malfunction over our heads.

Line twists. Failed slides. Streamers (parachutes that open but don't slow you down). The proper reactions were drummed into us. When to dump the main canopy and go to the reserve. When to fly the main. How to fly the main. How to fly the main. How to land in power lines (don't move, don't let ANYONE touch you under ANY circumstances). What to do if a parachute opens in the plane (if it gets outside, "expedite the jumper from the aircraft as soon as possible").

And we practiced the simulations, over and over and over again.

The opening shock of the reserve parachute snapped my head forward and back, but heck, who cared. As Kevin would have said, my vertical rate of descent was slowed.

I quickly looked up to check for problems with the canopy, but it looked good. With shaking hands, I reached up and grabbed the steering toggles, waiting for instructions over the radio.

Packed behind the pilot's seat in the Cessna, second in the jump order, I began to doubt my mission. I stared at the altimeter on my chest as the plane wore upward through the rapidly closing clouds. 1000 feet, 2000 feet, the ground looked too far but too close.

I began to wonder how the four seconds of free fall would feel, the rushing air, the height. What if my parachute didn't open? Look right--pull-throw it away, I said automatically.

What was going to happen when they opened the door. There was nothing to hold on to. I would be blown out...

"Nice job, John," Kevin said.

He unhooked my harness from the simulator.

"The clouds are too low," the pilot said. "We'll have to go back down."

I didn't get to jump the next day, either. But all five of us swore we'd be back. We had no choice, really. Skydiving had reached in and captured our imaginations. We had seen the other side. We were hooked. Skydiving was the most fun I've never had.

Come reading period, you know where to find me.