Cover Story

The day before I went out to work on this story, I was talking with a friend of mine. I decided to tell him about the coming adventures for the weekend.

“Yeah, I’m going out to work on a story about skydivers tomorrow,” I said.

“Cool. You going to jump?”

“I’m going to try,” I said with a smile on my face.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “It’s kind of like tattoos and hookers. They’re addictive.”

Although this was the most colorful, many of my friends’ responses ranged from “Cool” to “Don’t bounce.” Personally, I was just hoping it wouldn’t rain.

I arrived at Emerald Coat Skydiving in Elberta, Ala., on the morning of Saturday March 11 a little anxious. I had hyped myself up so much for this experience that I just wanted to get it over with before I had any second thoughts. Unfortunately, Mother Nature didn’t want to play along.

Wind speeds were around 12 mph, with gusts hitting around 22 to 25. According to Jim Horak, Jr., one of the instructors who works out of Emerald Coast, 14-mph winds are considered safe for student jumpers with no limit set on licensed skydivers. “It’s common sense though. Anything above 20 is questionable,” he cautioned. After telling this to the other veteran jumpers hanging out around the drop zone, most of them were content to wait it out.

One of the first things I noticed about most of the skydivers is that they seem to come from different walks of life, although you couldn’t tell by listening to them. Conversations easily flowed about jump experiences, aircraft they’ve dropped out of, future trips to other drop zones and random bits of skydiver jargon I still don’t get.

One of the jumpers planning a trip was “Psycho Bob,” a 43-year-old air traffic controller out of Pensacola Regional Airport. Psycho’s only been skydiving for about two years and surprisingly enough his name has nothing to do with his affinity for jumping out of a well-operating aircraft. Years ago Psycho was on a charter bus trip and decided it would be a good idea to pop the emergency ceiling hatch and “bus surf” for part of the ride. After the cops pulled the bus over and called Bob a psycho, the name stuck.

“I just like doing different stuff… looking for an adrenaline rush,” Psycho tells me. “Just crazy stuff to push things a little bit further.”

Outside of riding the tops of buses and jumping out of airplanes, Psycho also occasionally plays around in another sport – base-jumping.

Similar to skydiving only in that you have a parachute and fall to the ground very quickly, base jumpers dive off the tallest structures they can get access to. “I’ve jumped a couple of bridges before,” Psycho tells me, “mostly up in New River Gorge, W.Va.” Once a year in October, the bridge, about 876 feet high, becomes a legal base-jumping point. According to him most base-jumping happens out west off of cliffs, but is also really big in Europe.

Jeff Stewart, who lives only two miles from the drop zone, has been skydiving for six years. Although he works on large air conditioning units in condos during the week, on weekends he is one of the videographers for Emerald Coast. “It felt like scoring touchdowns again,” Stewart said of his first jump. “That feeling was irreplaceable until I jumped.”

One of the more intriguing characters who hangs out at Emerald Coast is Donald Cripps. At the age of 76, Cripps has 2,192 jumps under his belt. Cripps first experienced jumping out of airplanes in 1947, when he was a parachutist with the U.S. Army. He made several combat jumps into North Korea. He didn’t start skydiving though until 1991.

“Well, I was retiring and I needed a good sport to keep me active, something I was interested in. I didn’t like golf and I don’t have the patience for fishing, so I figured that skydiving was the thing to be in,” he explained.

Cripps has been injured once during his retirement years. Some years ago, he ruptured a disc in his back during a hard landing. It hasn’t slowed him down much, though. To celebrate his 75th birthday, he jumped at Emerald Coast for his 2,000th skydive.

But I’m still waiting to make my first.

Although the winds haven’t yet died down, customers are already lining up to go on tandem jumps. Tandems are the entry-level of skydiving, where the jumper is strapped onto an instructor via a harness. It only costs $175 and about 15 minutes of ground school to jump tandem, and it also gives participants a cheaper and safer way to see if they want to pursue skydiving as a hobby.

Some of the customers in line are a group of college students from Auburn University Montgomery. All of them seem pretty hyped about the experience except for 23-year-old Christina Cook. As she quietly fills out her legal release form, I ask her if she is nervous about her soon-to-be first jump.

“Well, I took a Xanax this morning, so now not so much. But before that I was very nervous,” she says.

When the winds finally slow down, the ground crew starts to round up the first load of jumpers for flight. I ask if I can tag along to get some pictures of people jumping out of the plane. One of the ground workers tells me it should be no problem, “but first, we need you to put something on.”

She runs to the closet and pulls out a packed parachute and tells me to put it on.

“But I’m not jumping out of the airplane, I’m just going to take pictures,” I protest.

“We’re going to put you right next to the hatch for your pictures, so just in case you find yourself outside of the airplane you’re going to want this. If you fall out, just wait three seconds and pull this handle,” she says.

Earlier I had talked to other jumpers about what it takes to run through the whole training process of skydiving. Basically it comes down to hours worth of ground school and months worth of jumping, amounting to more than a $2,000 investment. I should consider myself lucky then, saving a good amount of cash and getting the short and sweet of it in about 10 seconds.

We are finally up in the air, somewhere around 10,000 feet above solid earth, and the door opens to let the first of the divers take the plunge. As they begin to fly out and I start getting my images, different scenarios start to play out in my mind. What if I do somehow fall out of plane? I would like to think my survival instincts are at least honed to the point where I would pull the cord if it happened, but then what? Would the chute open? In the name of safety, they had buckled me into the plane through one of the leg harnesses attached to my parachute. Although I may not be able to completely fall out of the aircraft, visions of the upper half of my body being dragged outside the plane while in flight went through my head as I took pictures of tandem jumpers dropping out of the plane. No matter how I looked at it, I knew I would eventually get back to the ground.

About two hours and several hundred pictures later, the tandem jumpers from Auburn University Montgomery made their landings at the drop zone. I walked up to see Christina Cook, the timid jumper from earlier in the day, running up to her friends with a big smile on her face as they all hugged each other. Did she enjoy it?

“It was ^x%x*% awesome! I was horribly scared and did not sleep last night, and it was for nothing, it [the jump] was awesome. Once I get paid, I’ll do it again,” she says.

It was getting late in the day, so I decided it was time for the moment of truth. I talked to the crew, signed my legal waivers, and went through the short ground school for my first tandem jump.

Jim Horak, Jr., the man taking the wind readings that morning, was assigned as my jump instructor. As I suit up into my harness, we talked about the jump. He asked if I would like to do some spins when we first fall out of plane. Sounded like fun to me. In order to do this, I would have to form into a ball near the edge of the plane’s door and then just roll out of it with the instructor. Not only did it sound like fun, I thought it would be easier to force myself out of the airplane.

Once again I find myself around 10,000 feet up. As everyone prepares for their jumps, the instructors start making jokes about releasing some of the tandem jumpers during mid-fall and the possible lack of integrity in the equipment. The hatch is opened and the jumpers begin to line up.

“Who’s your buddy right now?” Horak ask me.

“You and whoever designed our parachute!” I yell back as the wind blows through the small fuselage of the plane.

“Yeah, him too!”

I slowly make my way to the threshold and lean over, watching clouds and what little I can see of the ground pass below. I form into a ball and we start to rock as Horak yells into my ear.

“Ready!”

I hope so, but if not I’ll let you know when we touch ground.

“Set!”

Sure, why not.

“Go!”

I close my eyes and we fall out of the aircraft, although I don’t remember doing it. I can remember the feeling of spinning in the air and weightlessness, but for the most part I blank out during what I’m guessing were the first three-to-five seconds of freefall. My mind just goes somewhere else.

It all changes when I feel my instructor pat me on the shoulder. I wake up and spread my body out to slow our descent, as taught during the ground school course. This was when everything really starts to kick in. The wind is screeching through my ears as we make our free fall through the clouds toward the ground. Complete shock and amazement are running through my body as I quickly fall towards earth.

Random spouts of fear surge for a split second here and there as I start thinking about what would happen if the harness breaks or the parachute fails. Once again, I’ll hit the ground either way.

Horak pulls the parachute open and our descent slows to a slow glide. Adrenaline completely going through my system, eyes completely locked on the world below my feet. More instinctual spurts of fear pulse through my body as the instructor makes necessary adjustments to my harness, creating a slight slipping feeling in my gear.

“Why don’t you move your head around a bit and have a look around,” Horak yells at me as we continue our glide towards the drop zone. It wasn’t until he said this that I realized my body was somewhat locked in shock. I try to loosen up and about 10 seconds later I start to feel comparatively relaxed. Horak guides us through some clouds during our fall, and as he does this everything around me just looks more and more amazing.

After landing at the drop zone and getting all the gear off, I went to smoke a cigarette to calm myself down. My flight was one of the last jumps of the day, so after most of the tandem jumpers left I decided to stick around at the site and have a couple of beers.

“So are you going to do it again?” Psycho Bob ask me as he cracks a can open for me.

“Yeah, oh yeah,” I tell him.

They’re cooking out at the site, but I turn down their dinner offer and head back home, thinking I might go out after I get back to my apartment and drop all my gear off. Instead I end up passing out from exhaustion soon afterwards, most likely my body crashing from the dip of adrenaline in my system.

So is skydiving addictive? For me, yes, but I’m guessing not everybody is going to be into jumping out of airplanes. It was also one of the most uniquely awesome experiences I’ve ever had, something I really can’t compare with anything else.

I’m hoping I can jump again soon and if my budget allows, I’ll try to pursue a license. I’m even trying to drag some friend along for my next tandem. Some are more reluctant than others.

And as a side note to my editors, I’d like to thank you for allowing me to write this story and exposing me to skydiving, but for the love of God don’t ever send me on a story about hookers.

Dan Anderson is a regular contributor and photographer for Lagniappe. E-mail him at ambigouslyexact@hotmail.com

Contact Dan Anderson at dan@lagniappemobile.com.

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