Accelerated Free Fall
By Kent Doyle
I am an acrophobe. High places make my knees weak along with the feeling I might pass out. My earliest memory of this unfolds on a Boy Scout hike. We were walking up a gentle Adirondack mountain. The path was wide, but there was a steep drop off one side, and merely glancing toward the edge sent a thrill of fear through me. Staying on the inside, I kept my focus on the guy in front of me. The others were laughing and cavorting about. I did my best to appear equally light-hearted, but it was hopeless. My fear of that edge unnerved me, and because it had no visible effect on any of the other boys, I became embarrassed. Secretive.
Little did I know I was to spend my subsequent years crawling onto window ledges in various efforts to shock my nervous system into collusion. Yet I never came close to curing myself.
Until about 30 years later when a magazine ad for a one-day course in parachuting caught my eye. “Accelerated Free Fall,” it said. Kind of an unfortunate line, I thought. But I liked the premise: A single-day, five-hour course culminating in a drop from an airplane at 11,500 feet. From there you’d free-fall 8,000 feet, then pull your ripcord for a controlled 4,000-foot descent. Survive this, I hypothesized, and emerge a phobia-free man. My non-refundable check for $450 was in the mail that night.
It was a glorious day at the “landing zone” in upstate New York. The head instructor, or jumpmaster, made it clear from the beginning that while we were all in for a great treat, parachuting was serious business and it was possible to hit the ground at 125 miles an hour. This was called “terminal velocity.” A falling body accelerates at 32 feet per second per second until the wind resistance prohibits further acceleration. The undesirability of hitting the ground at turbo speed was the dominant theme of the class. The saving grace was to be our parachutes. I was keenly interested not only in the primary chute, but also in the reserve, should the main “misdeploy.”
We were told toward the end of the class that we could opt for one of several possibilities: We could go home and never come back. (They didn’t actually mention this, but it was obvious.) Or we could go home and come back some other time for a complete redo of the course (at a modest discount). Or we could take a static-line jump, which involves a bunch of people hooking their ripcords to a ceiling rod and shuffling out of the plane at a few thousand feet. The static line opens your chute almost immediately after you exit the plane, thereby preventing anything too lethal from happening. And if you freeze up at the door, the people behind you are likely to furnish a gentle push.
The other option was to climb into a single-engined plane with no door and corkscrew up two miles to 11,500 feet where you would leap out and experience the legendary free fall. Your jumpmaster would exit alongside you, and you would fall for roughly 50 seconds until you were slicing through the air at 125 mph. Then you’d reach for your ripcord and pull. If the chute didn’t deploy (or didn’t deploy well) you had six seconds to break free of the main and try it again with the reserve.
Much to my surprise, I wasn’t one of the 15 or so students who decided to head for home. I wasn’t even among the 20 who chose the static-line jump. Two people elected to go all the way and I was one of them. And I didn’t feel scared at all. To the contrary, I felt astonishingly brave. My girlfriend and my brother (both of whom I had brought along as part of my strategy to forestall chickening out at the last minute) stood with me next to the plane looking suitably impressed.
The jumpmaster, however, was starting to annoy me. Not only was he flirting shamelessly with my girlfriend; he had evidently also learned to converse in a sawmill. He kept screaming: “Do you want to jump, skydiver?” We weren’t even in the plane yet, so his tone seemed idiotic. And the question wasn’t rhetorical at all. I was expected to scream back that I just couldn’t wait. So I screamed, but I frankly hate this sort of public inanity and wished he would shut the hell up.
I choose my spot on the plane’s floor prudently far from the open door, but continued to feel no fear. The plane took off instantly, and began a series of corkscrew turns with the nose angled up. Staying over the landing field, we climbed and climbed. I was most impressed with my newfound bravery, and wanted to muse on it, but the jumpmaster made this difficult by leaning into my face every few minutes and screaming again: “Do you want to jump, skydiver?” Spittle sprayed from his mouth into my face every time. Now, though, he did need to scream over the racket of flying with a large open door. Meanwhile, the pilot was calling out our altitude: 3,000 feet, 4,000 feet. I continued to feel good and was enjoying the view: 6,000 feet, 7,000 feet.
Eight-thousand feet is almost two miles up. The houses and barns were toy-sized. The farm ponds looked like frozen peas. I started to think how very high we were, and that despite my loud expressions of largely unfelt enthusiasm, I really didn’t want to do this. By 9,000 feet, panic had become a Cuisinart in my groin. I wanted out. I wanted to curl up in the fetal position in a back corner of the plane and stay there until we reached the ground. Except that my brother, my girlfriend, and about 100 macho idiot skydivers were standing on that very ground looking expectantly up at me.
My mind darted from one improbable escape scenario to the next. Finally, within the last 1,500 feet of our ascent, I devised a plan. I would buy my way out. I’d offer the jumpmaster money, big money, to invent a scenario in which I could not jump, yet still retain a shred of honor: A plane malfunction. A parachute malfunction. Somebody other than me getting sick. We’d fly back to the ground and I’d be in the car and on my way home in minutes. “Too bad,” I’d say. “I’ll do it next week, or next month. What a disappointment.” Secretly, though, I’d be free – driving joyously down the turnpike.
Suddenly the pilot called out: “Ready to jump.” I think he probably meant this as an order, but I took it as a question and the perfect open-ing for my bribe. The jumpmaster screamed: “Do you want jump, skydiver?” one last time and I wished to hell he’d come up with anther line. He had a crazed look in his eyes, too, like a dangerous lunatic. Still, I figured I could probably take him if I got in the first blow, but that bastard pilot would probably come in on his side. The jumpmaster gestured toward the door. I think he could see in my face that my enthusiasm had waned. This was the moment to scream out my offer. I had been contemplating a couple hundred bucks, but decided to open at a grand and accept any reasonable counter offer.
I crawled over to the door. The wind was a raging torrent. I, who couldn’t stand on a second-floor apartment balcony without becoming woozy, reached out and grabbed the wing strut. The wind blew me almost horizontal, as if in a cartoon. I got one foot on a tire and assumed the position. The jumpmaster flashed his maniacal grin and a thumbs-up. “Holy mother of God!” I mouthed even though I am not Catholic.
Oddly, I have no memory of making a conscious decision to jump. The jumpmaster and I exchanged glances, and the next thing I knew all four of my limbs were flailing wildly in mid-air — a marionette in the hands of a hyperactive four-year-old. I could feel an expression of abject horror spread across my face. The jumpmaster was right behind me. He must have sensed that something was amiss because now he was flying toward me. Just then my training kicked in. I puffed out my chest, spread my arms and legs wide, and became stable just like they said I would. The jumpmaster drifted into my field of vision and pointed at my altimeter, which was winding down at an incredible rate. My fifty seconds of joyous flight felt like three. I pulled my ripcord. After the gentlest of shocks, I was upright and drifting down on the proverbial cloud.
I landed like a sack of cement and lay on the ground as several people rushed toward me. “You okay?” I heard, but didn’t answer immediately. Then: “You’re a skydiver!” My jumpmaster was still screaming at the top of his lungs. I considered beating the shit out of him, but instead replied: “Perfect in every respect.”
According to the literature, people who complete the Accelerated Free Fall course almost invariably go on to become certified jumpers who enjoy lifetimes of skydiving fun. Jumping again has never crossed my mind and I’m still terrified of heights. Nevertheless, I took the liberty of pronouncing myself cured – not of acrophobia, but of any further desire to exorcise the affliction. It’s fitting in nicely with my new old-guy image, too, which thankfully calls for less courage and more wisdom. Here are my wise words for the day: Avoid outright stupidity whenever possible, which could lead to a face full of spittle at 11,500 feet. Or worse.
