This is the part of the story people like to hear: what it was like to circle slowly higher and higher in a tiny plane, crouched on its floor with my knees against my chest, hands over my chute handles, left shoulder pressed against the door. The other two first-time jumpers were crammed in behind me; if I didn't jump, they couldn't jump either. We all wore the same gear: heavy cotton jumpsuits, black boots laced up our calves, helmets and goggles, and our parachutes. The jumpmaster knelt between my legs on the only available bit of floor.
I watched out the window for the first thousand feet, then closed my eyes and breathed deeply. It took a long time to reach our jump altitude. At 3800 feet the jumpmaster opened the door, and when I opened my eyes there was nothing between me and the wing of the plane. 3800 feet is more than half a mile, straight up. Half a mile of air between me and the ground and not even the comfort of the plane's steel sides.
The jumpmaster clipped my static line to a D-ring in the floor. He tugged on it to show me it was secure, to reassure me that when the cord had played out to its full length it would pull my chute open. And then he started shouting the standard commands, short and harsh to be heard over the plane's engine: "Feet out!" I swung my feet out the door, rested my boots on the wheel cover, reached out with one hand to grab the wing strut.
* * *
The friends who had said they'd go skydiving with me all canceled, so I drove to the drop site alone, early on a Saturday morning. When I arrived, the students were pretty much what I had expected: twenty-six muscular college-aged men; three slender straight women, each accompanied by her muscular young boyfriend; and one fat dyke. They gave us jumpsuits to wear, and our trainer took us to a field for our first lesson: falling down. I was afraid, standing there, to just let myself go and fall over sideways, as the jumpmaster demonstrated. I'm five foot four. Not tall, but it seemed like a long drop to the hard dirt of the field. I tried it slow, wanting to lower myself gently with the muscles in my legs, but it didn't work--I hit with a thud, ending up lying on my side with my legs curled. This was not correct.
Correct was crumpling at the hips, knees, and ankles simultaneously, folding like the elastic-strung puppets I has as a kid, that collapsed at the push of a button. Correct was letting gravity, not muscle, take me to earth, hitting fast and rolling through the impact with my arms safely folded against my chest. Correct was elusive, the straight line of the roll, from calf to hip to back to shoulder, hard to find. I crumpled and panicked, flinging my hand out to stop the fall, jamming my wrist. I crumpled and hit the ground flat with my whole body, like a diver belly-flopping. I crumpled and rolled, ending tangled on my back. I crumpled and rolled, the side of my calf touching the ground, then my thigh, my hip, my back, my shoulder, the last of the momentum bringing me effortlessly onto my feet again.
The jumpmaster blew his whistle. I fell again, in perfect timing with my classmates. Whistle! I fell and rolled again and again, pausing between for only a perfectly balanced, knees-bent moment, waiting for the whistle. I fell, rolled, swung onto my feet laughing, crumpled again, falling in love with gravity and hard-packed dirt.
At morning's end I headed for lunch, unzipping my jumpsuit to the waist in a vain effort to cool down, and indulged in adventurous fantasies featuring Su Penn, Ace Skydiver and World-Renowned Daredevil. I was interrupted as I munched my hot dog by the manager of the drop site, who pulled me aside where no one could hear us, and said, "I hate to have to tell you this, but we can't allow you to jump. Women of your size can't jump safely. You're thirteen pounds over our cutoff weight."
"Can't jump?" I said. "I'm doing great. The jumpmaster said so. 'Nice job,' he said."
"Well," she said. "We can't be responsible for an unfit jumper."
"But I am fit," I protested. "Last Saturday I rode my bike fifty miles, and had energy left to go berry-picking."
"Well," she said, "We'll give you a full refund if you leave right now, or you can stay for the rest of the training, but if you fail you won't get any money back at the end of the day. We'll be watching you very closely."
I said, "I'll stay."
She said, "You think about it during lunch."
I thought about it as I was heading around the corner of the building to cry privately, and I thought about my mother patting my behind while dates waited at the door, trilling, "you'd look so very nice, dear, if you could only lose five pounds right here"; Jenny Craig offering to remove up to 50 pounds for only $29.99 (individual results may vary); a thousand comments from friends 25, 50, 100 pounds lighter than me: I look so fat in this dress, I really mustn't I'm trying to cut down, look at Amy I'd just die if I gained weight like that, oh I don't mean you of course, I know smoking is killing me but if I quit I'll blow up like a balloon, well of course I understand that women are held to an impossible standard of beauty but it's a health thing for me. Demons, called out in force by the manager's invocation.
I was about ready to take my refund and slink home, but I was stopped by stubbornness and my own need to know whether I could be a skydiver. I dried my eyes and zipped up my jumpsuit. I stomped past the manager to the training building. The impact of my elephant legs made the ground shake. The demons fled. We spent the first part of the afternoon jumping and rolling off progressively higher platforms, finally practicing with a mock-up of the plane we would jump from. When it was my turn. I took my position, balancing on the narrow wheel cover and clinging with both hands to the wingstrut. At the jumpmaster's command, I dropped from the wing, fell four or five feet, hit the ground hard, collapsed as I had learned to, rolled out the momentum as I had done in the field, and swung onto my feet. The jumpmaster nodded at me approvingly. I unzipped my jumpsuit, pushed my sweaty hair out of my face, and lounged against the wall with the men who'd also gotten it right. We were confident and casual. We watched the others climb onto the mock plane, jump, hit the ground stiffly, fall like boards, begin the roll but stick halfway. The jumpmaster pushed them the rest of the way over, pulled them to their feet, and sent them up the platform to try again, while we took our ease.
After we'd learned the basics--getting out of the plane, hitting the ground--we put on parachute harnesses and learned their workings. The rectangular canopies of modern chutes have two handles which hang from the ends; pulling a handle draws that end of the canopy down. We learned to steer the parachute to the left or right by pulling one or the other, and to speed our descent by drawing the handles down from shoulder height to our knees, so the canopy presented a smaller face to the air. Of course, in the pole barn where we trained we were not underneath parachutes; our handles hung from bungie cords trailing down from the ceiling, and manipulating them took no more force than you might use to open your refrigerator door.
We learned how to open our reserve chutes if the main canopy failed. Over and over we practiced failures, pulling one handle on the harness to "cut away" or release the failed chute--which would otherwise tangle with the emerging reserve canopy, so that main canopy, reserve canopy, and skydiver would accellerate together at the full gravitational rate of 32 feet per second per second to terminal velocity, which cannot, I think, be very pleasant--and another to release the reserve, first the red handle on the right shoulder, then the D-ring on the left. We practiced that so many times that it began to feel like no parachute ever opened normally, no parachute ever snapped smartly from its casing, blossoming into a perfect rippling nylon rectangle vivid against the blue sky.
They taught us to hit free-fall position as soon as we dropped from the plane, and they taught us the position for landing: feet together, knees bent, chute handles pulled down to our knees, no odd hand or foot jutting out, vulnerable, breakable. They taught us to become a single springy, soft-landing unit, and they drilled us over and over until it became comfortable and automatic.
At the end of the day, we were strapped, two at a time, into parachute harnesses hanging from the rafters for our final testing. The jumpmaster talked us through the steps of a normal jump, challenged us with failures, checked our landing position. Only two people from a class of thirty received perfect scores on the test; one was a former Marine; the other was 213-pound me.
* * *
This is what people like to hear, my thrilling story: The wind pushed against me as I stood on the wing of the plane. I watched the ground rush by, distant beneath my boots. I let go of the wing and could see only blue. My chute opened above me with a jerk and I spun to un-twist the lines. I steered it left and right, felt myself swinging out as it sharply turned. And, with the ground only a couple of dozen feet below me and the distance closing fast, I learned what they forgot to mention--that the parachute fights the wind like your cupped hand out the car window at 70 miles per hour, only a thousand times bigger. Pulling the chute handles to my knees while fighting the air resistance of the parachute was nothing like pulling those little bungies in the pole barn. I tried to hit the landing position and was stopped with my chute handles at shoulder height, like when you think a door will swing lightly open at the touch of your fingers and are stymied by its unexpected weight. At the door, you might step back, try again with your arm solid behind your push. Under the parachute, I hit the ground with one vulnerable leg before I could regroup to try again. I limped for two weeks and answered queries with the practiced nonchalance of a would-be adventurer, "Oh, it's nothing. Skydiving injury."
I knew before I jumped that it would be anti-climactic. I knew I'd had my real test and triumph the day of my training, when I did not let myself be shamed for wanting to learn to hit the ground safely from a half-mile up. And, having left the ground in a plane--as I had many times before, as millions do every day--but having returned, extraordinarily, without it, I know this: I was born to fall to earth.
© 1997 Su Penn