Xaos rains: ... down upon the north Georgia mountains.
Next time, go one state west and drop your drawers:
"O moooon of Aaal-a-baaaa-ma,"
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Nonsense, says another fag who's jumped.
So, last weekend I got to fulfill another of my childhood ambitions, and found it even more gratifying than the blue hair thing. I finally worked up the nads to go skydiving. The jump instructor was even thoughtful enuff to make sure I was assigned a jumpsuit that matched the hair color du jour.
Your hair is blaze orange?
I was terrified going up, but there was this curious detachment once I was standing on the edge of the doorway ready to jump that lasted til I touched down. It wasn't really exhilirating in a "Woo hoo!" sort of way,
Lord, I thought it was. I was absolutely ecstatic.
We had one-way radios velcroed to our chests qnd went out in a preset order so the ground control guy could talk to us by name (reassurance, mainly) and give us maneuvering instructions (useful for not landing on power transmission lines, too). So the chute opens and is in one piece, all is well and I'm floating, and the guy sez: "pull the right lanyard down all the way and hold it".
So I'm doing a big 360, of course, and he can see me spinning. Then he sez: "Now look up!" Of course, the turn swings you out a ways, and coupled with vertigo, makes it seem like you're not under the canopy at all: "up" is just deep blue sky. Quite a thrill.
At this point the guy sez: "Pretty neat, huh?" And I was so full of joy, hollering "YES!! Far fucking OUT!!" loud enough for them to hear me on the ground, which was still a couple thousand feet below.
As for fear, I had discovered eight years earlier that I was really uncomfortable with heights. At Glacier Point in Yosemite Valley, you stand on a promontory that juts out maybe 50 feet past the edge of a very sheer cliff and look across the valley to El Capitan or along the valley toward Half Dome. But below you is nothing but air for about 3000 feet to the valley floor. I was holding onto the railing for dear life, white-knuckled and shaking like a leaf, very queasy about where I was just then.
By contrast, sitting on the sill of the airplane's open door, waiting for the jumpmaster's slap on the back and the command "Go!" and looking straight down 3300 feet to the fields of Waunakee, Wisconsin ("The Only Waunakee In The World"), I was completely calm, unfazed.
The ground training, on the other hand, learning how to deal with chute malfunctions (on average, 1 in every 400 jumps has one, in fact one person in my class did, but got down OK by dumping the main and opening the reserve), was totally intimidating; everybody in the class was turning green while hanging from a hook in a harness, frantically trying to open the reserve chute manually while the instructor was behind, shaking the shit out of your whole body (not doing your crotch any favors, either). Nobody got it right before the third try. That's when I realized "Hey, you can die doing this!"
but it was very very fun. There was this sense of time slowing, sensory input being really vivd and so forth; guess I was expecting to die or something.
I thought that was an especially neat part. It seemed to be lasting so much longer than I had expected, it was like being in dream time. It was 24 years ago this month and I can recall everything about it right now.
Safely clear of the high-tension wires, I was coming down in a plowed field, getting set for it, not looking at my feet or the ground, ready to roll backward. The squawker came on: "He's going to land on the cows". I hear another guy say: "Nah, he's going to land in the cow shit", and he was right, as it turned out. Hit my head on the raised edge of a furrow as I was going over, got a little whiplash out of that, but it was still the most fun physical thing I've ever done.
No real point here, other than to highly recommend trying this to anyone who has ever been interested in skydiving (preferably with a parachute).
Well, really straight-acting ones like Ivana B. Butcher oughta be able to do it without, dontcha think?
Some guy, I think it was in Omaha, had two chute failures in one
and the same jump. This is generally very bad for your health.
But with amazing presence of mind he spread-eagled to maintain
the slowest free-fall speed (about 60 mph) and splatted face down
right on the concrete runway. Stood right up, broken nose and
bruise on one knee, and walked away.
