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Zen and the Art of Skydiving
creative non-fiction by Teresa Troutman
Many of the teenagers I’ve met in the 21st century share a common attribute. They all seem to believe they are immortal. In some past life of my own, I was once a teenager myself but I never remember me or any of my friends putting ourselves in harm’s way the way young adults do today. Then again, I didn’t have role models like Tony Hawke or movies like “Jackass” that make celebrities out of suicidal maniacs. I would be lying to say that I never took a needless chance with life and limb when I was younger. At least I was the ripe old age of eighteen before I tempted the gods of mortality by signing up for skydiving lessons. If I was going to be an adrenalin junkie for just one afternoon, it was going to be as a properly trained risk-taker, not just some freelance jackass.
What kind of image comes to mind when picturing people who skydive? Are they freer than the average human spirit; does dressing up in colorful wind suits and jumping out of sleek little Cessna airplanes open some secret part of the soul? Do they face their mortality each time they free-fall, smiling for the camera as they make daisy chains in the sky? Or perhaps a more accurate vision is of crazy fools who jump out of perfectly good aircraft. You know, WUFOs (“wufo you jump out of a good airplane?”). For me, it was just something I had to do before I died even if this led me directly to death’s doorstep. I wanted to fly, I wanted to be free, and I wanted to conquer the fear that comes with taking risks in life.
Death has always been an interesting conundrum for mankind, I guess. Most sane and mature human beings spend their lives running from their own demise and here I was, at eighteen, staring it right smack in the face as if I would find the secret my elders failed to see by playing it safe. Ha-ha! I laughed at the Grim Reaper. The Perris Valley Skydiving School assured me that I would have several failsafe protections to keep me alive; a static line would be attached to the primary parachute to assure me that the cord would get pulled as soon as I left the aircraft. There was a reserve chute to back me up if the main chute failed to deploy. The jumpmaster grinned and nodded supportively as I signed the release of liability waiver. Even if all else failed and I did cross the threshold, at least I would die knowing. No one was going to write on my tombstone “Here Lies A Sky-Diving Virgin.”
It looked much too easy to be the source of such foreboding.
So we join my life at a point where I had gone through a morning of pre-flight ground school which basically consisted of dry-run drills; jumping off chairs and then moving up to leaping off small buildings with a single bound. The idea was to hit the ground and roll, allowing my body to become a human shock absorber. No sweat. My first wind suit wasn’t very colorful; it was a drab garage worker’s coveralls. The jumpmaster required me to wear a pair of dirty, beaten-up, old army boots and a helmet that had seen one too many hard landings. My romantic illusions were further shattered when I saw the airplane I was going to bid a farewell to in the sky was not some sleek Cessna but a Howard Aircraft.
The Howard was “a duck” of an aircraft and I felt my goose was cooked just looking at this thing. It looked like something pieced together from spare parts at a World War II junkyard. I figured it like this; when the skydiving school bought the coveralls and boots at the army surplus yard, they must have thrown the Howard Aircraft in for free. The skydiving school used this plane for a reason. It was an added incentive for novices to take the plunge. Students would rather jump out of the airplane than trust the old Howard to land safely on its own. The Perris Valley Sky Diving School was the training headquarters for the British Sky Diving Team and our instructor wasn’t so much for “Geronimo!” as much as she was for a simple “Out yah git!” complete with cockney accent. I sat in the cargo bay crammed in like a sardine in the back of this little aircraft (again, I use the term “aircraft” lightly) 10,000 feet above the earth’s surface when finally this British jumpmaster stares me straight in the eye and said those three words that tested the steel of my soul.
“Out yah git!”
I moved to the open doorway in the sky and got out. It was a very mechanical thing, really. Contract this muscle, relax that one, body in motion, mind completely blank, move to the doorway and then…
The problem is that one simply doesn’t just jump out of a Howard. First, a diver has to climb down this little ladder on the side of the aircraft where the sound of the engine is deafening. Then, as the scenic, pastoral squares of irrigated fields and endless desert sandscapes drift by below, I was to grab onto the wing strut with both hands, step off the ladder and sort of fly along with the aircraft, Superman-style. In the funky, blue coveralls, it was more like Mr. Goodwrench-style. Theoretically, I was to hang there in the wind, thousands of feet above sea level, hoping that somewhere in my turning-to-Jell-O soul that I really wanted to do this. I was to remain hanging in space like this until the little lady yelled “Out-You-GIT!”
I put both of my hands on the wing strut. I stepped off the ladder. I flew like Superman for a millisecond before I lost the grip with my left hand. Suspended in time, I flew with the aircraft by only one hand, which was slipping from the metal, knuckle by knuckle. For a brief instant, I loved that Howard and I wanted to embrace it forever, never to leave it, never to know the pain of having to say good-bye to so beautiful a piece of machinery. Like a painting by Michelangelo, Howard and I were touching distance apart, the tip of my index finger reaching for the aircraft as my hand slipped from the strut.
Howard flew off without me. In a trained reflex from the morning’s exercises, I arched my back into the proper falling position. The sudden lack of human sound was overwhelming and beautiful. I wasn’t falling, I was flying. It was freedom.
I was supposed to be counting one… two… three… but in reality I just picked an arbitrary moment in my awe as the ten-second mark and looked up to make sure my primary chute had deployed. Ahh, ‘round is sound’ is the saying the army teaches their paratroopers and my war-surplus parachute floated above me round and sound with no buckles, no rips, the silk canopy was a ring of perfection.
I looked below to get my bearings and saw, in horror, a circle of turned dirt – the landing zone – directly below me. If there was no wind, this would have been a perfect position but there was a five-mile an hour breeze coming in from the west. I would be carried downwind to one of three unfavorable landing areas: over the plant nursery with lots of hidden sprinkler heads to break an ankle on; over the alligator farm (yes, alligator farm) or back over the airport runway, buildings and unpaved parking lots.
I found that the round parachute did have some minor maneuvering capabilities. By pulling at these little plastic toggle thingies hanging from the parachute, the contraption could spin slowly to the right or slowly to the left. I pulled the left toggle… I drifted over the runway. I pulled the right toggle… I drifted over the runway even more. I saw the Howard land below me. Lucky Howard.
The Earth began to flatten out, structures becoming recognizable. A booming voice from the control tower P.A. tried to speak to me like the voice of God.
“Do not land on the runway… Do NOT land on the runway…”
Well, what the hell was a runway there for anyway?
“Pull your right toggle,” the voice commanded. I had my right toggle pulled down to my kneecaps, to no effect. I drifted away from the runway, over the airport buildings and, with the ground looming ever closer, over the airplane parking lot. All those sleek, little Cessnas parked in neat rows with very little open ground for a human dandelion seed to seek safe haven in her foolish fall.
Doing a quick vector analysis, using my brain power for what might be the last time in this mortal body, I projected that my rate of descent and angle of fall would land me on the wing of one of those parked, light planes and wondered what the owner would tell his insurance adjuster: “A skydiver jumped into my aircraft!” The expected response followed, “Excuse me, but isn’t that supposed to be the other way around?”
After falling for what seemed to be the far side of eternity, the moment of truth arrived. A parked plane came at me with frightening speed. I lifted my feet and just missed the wing and then, with a wire fence not more than ten feet away and coming at me at a high rate of speed, I felt my feet touch the Earth.
Now the human shock absorber training was to come into play. We had practiced this: your feet hit the ground, then you roll, letting your legs collapse in a controlled manner letting the Earth move up your body, impact dispersed without a care. Now, let’s talk reality. My feet hit first and a nanosecond later my butt went WHAM into the dirt. The impact was so great, I put a couple more cracks into the dry, desert earth. Something in my lower back and went crunch and then the wind caught my chute, dragging my body sideways, twisting my earth-planted knee around in a way knees are not meant to be twisted. The pain was so great, I wished I would pass out. I might have actually blacked out for a time; I have no memory except a mad gasping for air and a body burning in agony. The airport truck came out to see why I hadn’t stood up to give the “Hey, I’m really okay” sign.
When awareness returned, I made certain that I could still move my legs. I could. The jumpmaster in the truck sighed in relief when he confirmed that I wasn’t paralyzed and said something incomprehensible about “thermals” and “updrafts” that sometimes created problems for even the advanced skydivers. He waited until I could talk again and helped me to my feet. I stood. In a daze, I picked up my chute and rode back to the jump school. I had to ride sidesaddle. In the truck’s mirror, I could see that my skin had turned as white as a ghost’s. I had come close to becoming one.
During the ride home from Perris Valley, laying in the back seat of my friend’s car, I felt feverish, adrenalin still flowing. I closed my eyes to try and sleep away the pain and it was then that I saw a vision. It wasn’t a dream or a figment of my imagination; it came from deep in my subconscious jungle into my conscious mind. In the darkness, a black panther stalked me. It turned toward me and let out a blood-curdling scream; its golden cat eyes staring coldly into mine. The image froze suddenly, transforming itself into a piece of Japanese-styled art: a panther frozen in oriental angles. That panther was my totem, my Jungian archetype, my personal symbol of Death. I was no longer laughing. Still, almost thirty years later, I’m still glad I took the dive. I learned a great deal from the experience, very little having to do with skydiving. I learned the benefits of taking a risk will not always be worth the effort especially in terms of loss of life and limb, pain and suffering. Is there anything in my experience that I can use to convince kamikaze teenagers that they, too, are mortal? There’s something to be said about the value in learning from personal experience about life’s little surprises, whether the teacher comes in the form of thermals, updrafts, gravity, the laws of physics in relation to the fragility of the human body. Adults can tell plenty of cautionary tales and, in a perfect world, some kids may even listen. However, no one could have talked me out of diving into the sky from that Howard aircraft when, at 18 years old, I still believed I was immortal.
For me, in time, the bright purple, orange-sized bruise on my left butt cheek disappeared completely although the damage I did to my left knee still reminds me that a second jump is out of the question. The truth is, I take still take risks all the time, but now I prefer to stay on the inside of perfectly good airplanes.
Blood Upon the Risers (as sung by the 82nd Airborne)
He was just a rookie trooper and he surely shook with fright
He checked off his equipment and made sure his pack was tight;
He had to sit and listen to those awful engines roar,
"You ain't gonna jump no more!"
(CHORUS)
Gory, glory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, glory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, glory, what a hell of a way to die,
He ain't gonna jump no more!
"Is everybody happy?" cried the Sergeant looking up,
Our Hero feebly answered "Yes," and then they stood him up;
He jumped into the icy blast, his static line unhooked,
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
(CHORUS)
He counted long, he counted loud, he waited for the shock,
He felt the wind, he felt the cold, he felt the awful drop,
The silk from his reserve spilled out and wrapped around his legs,
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
(CHORUS)
The risers swung around his neck, connectors cracked his dome,
Suspension lines were tied in knots around his skinny bones;
The canopy became his shroud; he hurtled to the ground.
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
(CHORUS)
The days he'd lived and loved and laughed kept running through his mind,
He thought about the girl back home, the one he'd left behind;
He thought about the medic corps and wondered what they'd find,
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
(CHORUS)
The ambulance was on the spot, the jeeps were running wild,
The medics jumped and screamed with glee, rolled up their sleeves and smiled,
For it had been a week or more since last a 'chute had failed,
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
(CHORUS)
He hit the ground, the sound was "Splat," his blood went spurting high,
His comrades they were heard to say: "A hell of a way to die!"
He lay there rolling round in the welter of his gore,
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
(CHORUS)
(slowly, solemnly)
There was blood upon the risers, there were brains upon the chute,
Intestines were a'dangling from his Paratrooper suit,
He was a mess; they picked him up, and poured him from his boots,
And he ain't gonna jump no more
Gory, glory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, glory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, glory, what a hell of a way to die,
He ain't gonna jump no more!
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