It's Raining Morons

This is about skydiving. I gave it a try once.

It was a long time ago, back when I was still getting a paycheck from the Feds for wearing a uniform and being ready to go kill Russians. I was a few weeks from becoming a civilian, so I thought about trying skydiving. I looked up a few places in the Yellow Pages (this was back in the day when "yahoo" was "a dumb-ass hick with three teeth" and "google" was "ten to the hundredth power"). There was a place in Suffolk, VA that did lessons, so I called them up and away I went.

My thinking was something along the lines of "well, if I get hurt, I'm still in the military, so they'll take care of me." In retrospect, if a decision to do something revolves around the possibility of a need for subsequent medical care, it's Probably Not Even A Good Idea At The Time.

I did a jump. This was in a "tandem rig".



(That's not me, by the way.)

The student is the one in front. You are hooked to the instructor who is behind you, in sort of a warped "siamese-twin" getup. My pre-jump instruction was pretty much "spread your arms and legs when we jump and don't forget to look up." So other than falling through the air, the first part of the instruction was sort of like a gynecological exam, except it wasn't as uncomfortable and it had a higher risk of dying.

The parachute was kind of weird, in a way. When I was a kid, there was a TV show called "Ripcord," which was kind of like "Sky King", except they fell straight down. So I thought parachutes have ripcords, those D-handled things that you yank so the parachute pops out. These ones didn't, not for the regular parachutes. The skydiver reaches around behind and into a little pocket at the base of the parachute pack. That is where the drogue `chute is, a little parachute that pulls out the big one. It looks sort of like the skydiver is pulling it out of his ass.

(The reserve, on the other hand, does have a ripcord. It also opens a lot faster because, if you've gotten to the point that you realize the main parachute is fucked up, you have to deploy the reserve parachute and when you're in the process of falling towards the good hard ground at 120MPH, waiting for the reserve parachute to gently deploy is a luxury you probably don't have.)

On that first jump, I didn't look up, much. The image of the ground rushing up at about 120MPH was mesmerizing. It was awesome.

So I made an appointment to come back in two weeks for three more jumps. That time, I hung around a lot in between the jumps. I was regaled with stories about "low opening contests", which are as stupid an idea as they sound. It's as dumb a concept as standing on a railroad track and seeing who is the last one to jump away before the train comes roaring by. One of the regular jumpers there was some Army paratrooper, who I guess couldn't get enough insanity on the clock. He talked about pain contests that they had, something along the lines of "cut yourself on the arm, pour in salt, and see who can stand it the longest." I noticed that no matter what level of insane behavior was discussed, the speaker was dead serious about it and the guys listening in were rapt in their attention.

That's when it hit me: These people were morons. But as I had already paid for the three jumps, I stuck around and jumped.

I got to see a lot of jump runs besides doing mine. On one jump run, the airplane (a beat-up Cessna 182), took off with the pilot and four jumpers. When they jumped, three parachutes were visible. The wife of one of the jumpers was there, she saw three chutes, and she freaked, until someone recalled that "oh, yeah, ol `Jim is jumping tandem with a student."

I did the three jumps. On the third jump, I didn't keep my legs apart and the two of us started spinning. I remember looking up on one spin and seeing the belly of that 182 against a clear blue sky. The instructor kicked my legs apart, we stabilized and free-fell ("free falled?") down to the opening altitude.

It was then I realized that sky-diving was little more than:

1) Jump Out of Airplane;

2) Fall:

3) Open Parachute; and

4) Land.

You then repeat those four steps until you either (a) have an attack of common sense and quit; or (b) die.

I opted for choice (a).

So, some years later, I was refueling at a small airport. They had a jump operation using a DeHavilland Caribou. I went into the bathroom as the Caribou fired up. I finished up, got into my airplane, started it and taxied out to the runway. When I reached the runway's threshold, the airport operator on Unicom asked that I hold until the skydivers landed.

And they did, a whole bunch of them, landing everywhere on the airport. And some elsewhere. I keyed the mike, sang: "It's raining morons, hallelujah," and took off before somebody could find a rifle.