by Steph Davis
Emily passed back my Visa card and the curling receipts with an incandescent smile that was impossible not to return. A practicing attorney, Emily spent all her spare time at the drop zone, doing everything from working at the manifest, where jumpers bought tickets and turned them in for jumps, to coaching new jumpers, and like most of the women at the drop zone, she always looked gorgeous. She wore low-cut T-shirts and expertly applied makeup. My idea of a beauty routine was being clean when possible. Around other climbers, I felt self-conscious for taking a second to smooth down my hair in the rearview mirror after wearing a hat pulled over my face all night. Here I was starting to feel that habitual disregard for my appearance was perhaps not the way to blend in. I scribbled my name on one credit slip, crumpled the other one into a ball, and dropped it in the trash. “Thanks, Emily! Can I get on the next load?”
Emily checked the computer screen by the open manifest window, with twenty-one jumpers listed for the next planeload. “There’s one spot. Is it just you? What’s your number, Steph? Oh, wait, I have it, never mind. Otter Nine, fifteen minutes. Have fun!”
In three weeks, I’d gone from knowing nothing about skydiving to being a regular at the drop zone, walking in every day with my own gear, and being able to pack it and jump by myself. I’d decided to commit to buying equipment even before I finished my seven AFF training jumps; I could start “saving” money on rentals as soon as possible by buying my own gear. I’d found a suitable used container and parachute for sale in the skydiving classifieds the first day I looked, and I just went ahead and bought it.
It was the right size for me, in good condition, and pretty. The Mirage container was a striking combination of red and purple, my two favorite colors, and the Spectre parachute was black, teal, and purple. The canopy was smaller than a student parachute but still oversize for my body weight at 170 square feet, which was appropriate for a new jumper without any canopy skills yet. It was good gear, and Brendan assured me I wouldn’t need to upgrade it for years. Twenty-five hundred dollars was a pretty big chunk of change to part with, about what I’d consider a reasonable price for a car. But just like my vehicle, I intended to take care of this rig and drive it until the wheels fell off, hopefully for the rest of my life. And now I wouldn’t be spending $30 on rental gear for every single jump. Now all my money was going directly into those $22 jump tickets. Compared to the $1,400 I’d spent in two days on my seven AFF training jumps, followed by several $52 jumps with rental gear, it seemed pretty reasonable. At least on this planet.
I bent over my skydiving rig and turned on the AAD, the automatic activation device, the tiny computer that tracks altitude and fall speed so it can deploy the reserve parachute for you in case you get too close to the ground without opening your main parachute. The digital numbers raced backward over the flat display until it finished at 0 with a piercing beep beep beep. I strapped the big metal altimeter to my left wrist, like a giant wristwatch, and hoisted the rig onto my back, stepping into the dangling leg-loops and cinching them tight on my thighs through massive buckles. Skydiving gear seemed heavy and ridiculously overbuilt from a weight-fanatical climber’s perspective. But then skydivers don’t carry anything up. That’s what planes are for. I buckled the wide chest strap, picked up my helmet and goggles, and walked out to the pickup truck in front of the hangar, ready to drive around the runway to the plane.
Riding the trailer around the runway to the jump plane
The pickup was hitched to an open flatbed trailer lined with weathered packing carpet, the sides corralled in by wooden planks. I climbed up and sat on the edge, squinting in the sun. I could see Brendan and the other tandem masters inside the other hangar, tightening the buckles of tandem harnesses on their passengers. The other up jumpers started to stroll out to the trailer, many of them buckling their chest straps as they walked. I looked around for Emily and her husband, Kiwi, hoping they would be on this load. I liked seeing Emily’s bright face and quick smile as she joked and talked with everyone around her. Seeing Emily’s vibrant energy somehow made me feel a little lighter.
Brendan walked out of the hangar, turtlelike with the giant, doublesize tandem rig on his back, and hopped onto the trailer, holding out his hand to his tandem customer to help her up the high step. He sat across from me, smiling with his eyes crinkled almost shut as the trailer pulled off, now crowded around all three sides with jumpers and tandem passengers. I craned my neck to check on Fletch, still curled comfortably under my truck, as we drove around the hangars toward the runway.
“What jump is this, Steph?”
“This is number forty-one.”
“What has it been, three weeks since your first AFF jump?” Brendan said. “What are you going to do on this one?”
“Hmm. Let me see. Wait, I think I’ll track!” I said, smiling slightly. “You know that’s all I do, Brendan.”
“I know. Well, tracking is the first step to flying a wingsuit. And base jumping.”
“Yeah. I guess. I just like it.”
As with climbing, or any other sport, skydiving has many specialized subsets. In just the last few decades skydiving has developed by leaps and bounds from the early days of round, silk parachutes. Jumpers quickly grow accustomed to the unnatural feeling of jumping out of a moving airplane and focus their attention on refining their body control during free fall. Once the basic skills of reading an altimeter, deploying the parachute, and steering it to a safe landing have been mastered, skydivers have a full gamut of technical skills to cultivate and practice.
The most traditional type of flying is called belly flying, or relative work (RW). Skydivers fall with their belly down in a deep arch, the most stable freefall position, and try to dock; that is, grab one another’s hands or ankles to make group formations—all in the forty-five seconds they have while speeding toward the earth. Teams of four to eight jumpers, like the army’s Golden Knights, spend months rehearsing together for competitions, perfecting a precision routine as they switch positions with one another during free fall. Other jumpers try to set big-way records, forming rings or multilayered stars in the air with hundreds of bodies, before breaking away in time to pull parachutes safely and float to the ground.
The belly fliers do lots of “dirt diving”—rehearsing their planned routines and docks on the ground and scooting around on small, wheeled dollies, so they can perform the sequence correctly while freefalling at 120 miles per hour.
The latest generation has evolved to free flying. Bored with the belly-to-earth position and the RW routines, free fliers zoom around one another like spirits while sitting or standing in the sky, or turned straight head-down to the earth, making their fall rate even faster. Free flying is extremely acrobatic and takes a lot of practice to refine. Many jumpers train in a commercial wind tunnel, a round, glass-sided room above a high-powered fan, which simulates the wind blast at terminal speed. This way, they can practice skydiving without even jumping out of a plane, dedicating all their attention to holding and flying a sit or head-down position without having to stop and deploy a parachute or worry about racing gravity, since they will never reach the ground inside the wind tunnel.
At the other end of the spectrum are wingsuit fliers. Wingsuiters wear a special nylon suit, sometimes called a squirrel suit, with arm and leg wings. The suit slows the jumper’s downward speed dramatically, converting it into forward speed, and actually allows the jumper to fly like a small airplane. In a wingsuit, a jumper can choose where to fly, change the forward speed and fall rate, and fly through the air in flock formation with other wingsuiters. The suit adds another dimension to flight, but it also restricts normal movement. Wingsuit fliers must learn stability in the air so they don’t go spinning out of the sky, and they also need to learn how to deploy the parachute with their arms semibound up in the wings and be able to get out of the zipped arm wings quickly if any problem occurs with the parachute on opening.
Tracking—soaring straight through the air like Superman—is als
o like flying, but without a wingsuit. Jumpers sometimes do tracking dives together, flying around in the sky like a flock of birds. But in a wingsuit a jumper can stay in flight for over twice the time.
The free fliers fall the fastest, the belly fliers the second fastest. Trackers and wingsuiters have the slowest fall rate. So the jumpers exit the plane in order of how they will be jumping, to lower the odds of anyone’s falling through anyone else’s open parachute—free fliers first, belly fliers next, then tandems, then trackers, then wingsuits.
After I’d demonstrated my basic body control with the required belly-flying maneuvers to graduate from AFF, I’d started to track on every single jump. Unlike most skydivers, who want to try many different skills and practice new maneuvers with others, I wasn’t interested in doing anything else or expanding my skills as a skydiver. I just wanted to fly, for that one weightless minute of time streaking through the sky. It felt like nothing I’d ever experienced.
We hopped off the trailer and walked over to the Otter, which was waiting with the engine running hot. I shielded my eyes from the propeller blast and turned away from the hot fumes of jet fuel as I climbed up the four-step ladder into the open door near the tail. In the plane, I bent my head and shuffled all the way into the front, pressing into the corner of the bench behind the pilot. Brendan slid in across from me with his tandem customer. The other tandems piled in, pushing against my shoulders, then the belly fliers, then the free fliers.
I closed my eyes as the Otter climbed, imagining my body speeding straight as an arrow through the sky, the cold air slicing clean around me. Jumpers started to jostle around, putting on helmets and goggles, powering on video cameras, giving one another fist bumps with gloved hands. I opened my eyes and checked my altimeter. Ten thousand feet above the ground. I tucked my hair up under the back of my helmet and pulled the small bungee cord on the side of my plastic goggles tight. They started to steam up immediately. I tipped the bottom edge open a little, letting some air in. Brendan reached over and gave me a little palm slide and fist bump and shuffled toward the door with his tandem passenger. I watched the free fliers bunch up in front of the door. They locked eyes, rocked their heads back and forth at one another in a one-two-three exit count, and dropped out into the sky in a sit position. The tandem passengers got all wide-eyed as they tumbled out into the air, strapped to the front of the tandem masters, one after another, the cameramen smiling straight into their faces from behind the crazy-looking camera helmets as they followed them out.
I was alone at the door now. The cold air roared as I stood in the open plane with both hands clutching the silver bar on the top of the door, ducking my head to keep from hitting it. I looked at the oval runway thirteen thousand feet below. I knew the pilot was waiting for me to exit so he could turn sharply and dive toward the drop zone. I looked up at the wing outside, arched my back, stretched my arms behind me, and stepped off the solid metal floor and into the sky.
Tracking with Jay at Mile-Hi Jay Epstein
The air seemed to hold my body the minute I left the door. I fanned my arms back by my sides like a snow angel and stretched my legs out straight with my toes pointed hard, flying through the sky like Superman. It felt fast, like being a race car. The cold air rushed over my cheeks and mouth, tearing spit out when my lips parted, making my eyes tear up behind the tight plastic goggles. It rushed loudly past my ears under the thin helmet. Longs Peak sat straight ahead of me, high in the horizon. I almost felt like I could fly straight to it. I turned my head slightly to the left and tipped my wrist up to check my altimeter. Nine thousand feet. I turned left and flew south, watching the green fields below me, the tiny houses and roads like models in an architectural mock-up. Six thousand feet. I turned left again, flying east, starting to see canopies in the air below me. Three thousand feet. I reached back and felt the firm leather of the hacky-sack handle stitched to the top of my pilot chute and yanked it from the spandex sleeve at the bottom of my container into the air behind me. The pilot chute inflated and jerked my parachute out of the container, swinging my body from flat to vertical as the canopy bloomed out above my head into a massive rectangle of air-filled nylon, the thin parachute lines stretching straight from my shoulders to the canopy like an enormous cat’s cradle. Everything went quiet.
Bright canopies zigzagged below me. I watched the first one touch down, landing to the west, and set up for my box pattern at the west end of the landing field. I checked my altimeter: one thousand feet. I flew straight, made a right-hand turn at five hundred feet, and made another right turn at three hundred feet for my final leg, heading into the wind in the same direction as everyone else. I flared the canopy, pulling my arms down as my feet touched. My parachute floated down, crumpling blousily to the grass. Suddenly everything was still, quiet, and finished, with just the sound of my fast breathing. I felt a dizzying mix of exhilaration and pride at having fallen out of an airplane thirteen thousand feet above the earth and then impossibly survived. I’d streaked across the sky like a falcon, floated down to earth like a dandelion seed. My whole body tingled.
I coiled up the lines, tossed the parachute over my shoulder, and walked across the big, flat field to where Brendan had landed with his tandem passenger. She was covered in smiles, like everyone else. The jumpers gathered around the flatbed, tossed their unpacked parachutes into a fluffy mound in the center of the flatbed, and vaulted onto the side planks. The truck accelerated and bounced on the dirt road next to the runway. The Otter sped down the tarmac beside us, overtaking the trailer and lifting into the air with the next load of jumpers. I watched it get smaller in the sky, seeming to disappear into Longs Peak as we drove around the curve at the west end of the runway. I felt the wind on my face, my canopy pooled over my feet, my shoulders jostled by the people sitting next to me. I felt light.
In Longmont, I had three friends who knew me before I appeared in their world at the drop zone—Brendan, Jay, and Chris. I liked that they didn’t ask me about anything other than here and now, because here and now was working for me. I liked the intense, fun-loving energy around me, the feeling of being part of a group. Even more, I liked being a stranger to the new friends I was making in this new world. I’d been embedded in the climbing community for so long that I had no anonymity anywhere I went in it, which was especially uncomfortable with the current, low state of my life and my mind. Here I didn’t know anything or anyone, and no one knew anything about me except what I offered, which wasn’t much. I liked being a beginner, being brand-new. When I was at the drop zone, I felt clean and hopeful. Maybe my new friends asked Brendan what my story was, why I’d appeared one day and was virtually living at the DZ with no signs of having anything else to do. Maybe they didn’t. As long as they didn’t ask me, I didn’t care. As a rule, I didn’t like talking about myself anyway. A lot of skydivers have complicated stories, I’d been finding. When I let myself think about my own story, I got a hollow, sick feeling in my stomach. My mind flicked back to those moments in El Cap meadow and I felt like throwing up and crawling under the truck with Fletch, until I urgently pushed it out and draped the gray cloud layer back over my thoughts. Here, in this world of open sky, exhilaration, and new everything, I had better things to think about.
The trailer stopped at the hangar and everyone hopped off, buzzing into the different sections of the DZ. I carried my parachute in, dropped it on the flat carpet, and walked backward from it, letting the lines uncoil from the daisy chain I’d looped them into, then stepped out of the harness and let the rig fall to the floor. I was already boxed in by other unpacked rigs spread in lines down the floor. I grabbed a milk jug filled with sand and set it on my container, to keep it from sliding forward as I picked up the lines and followed them down to the parachute. I had the lines hooked on my shoulders, with the fluffy parachute draped down the front of my body and my arms buried in the folds, when my older brother walked in, six feet tall and lanky, with his messy dark hair and easy smile.
I dr
opped my pack job back on the floor and rushed over to Virgil as he wove around the parachutes stretched between us on the packing carpet.
We hadn’t seen each other in months. I could tell by the strength of his hug that he was relieved to find me in one piece and appearing emotionally stable to boot, surrounded by jumpers and parachutes.
“Did you just get here?” I asked, stepping back to look up at him.
“Yeah, I got a car at the Denver airport, and I have a job interview tomorrow at the Colorado Springs hospital. So I can do a few jumps today.”
“Can you believe we can jump together?!” I exclaimed, almost unable to believe this was real.
Virgil was older than me by two years. Like me, he tended to be self-deprecatory and quick to smile, exuding an air of somewhat scholastic athleticism. He was astonishingly driven, though calm and gentle at the same time—the perfect temperament for an ER doctor. Like most people who knew Virgil, I was somewhat in awe of his intelligence and generous nature. He never had a bad word to say about anyone and was always willing to offer medical advice or care to our many injured athletic friends. He was continually being promoted and asked to teach at the university hospitals where he worked, which suited him, since he was basically unable to stay still.
Steph and Virgil at Mile-Hi
Only a year before, I’d suggested to Virgil that he should take up skydiving. We’d both started climbing sixteen years before, though I’d been at college in Maryland and Virgil in Missouri. While I’d started off on safe, established climbs at local crags, he’d juggled med school with first ascents of unnerving, unfriendly routes in Missouri and then Tucson during his residency at the university hospital. Thwarted by recurring shoulder injuries, he’d reluctantly turned from climbing to downhill mountain biking and snowboarding, and then cold, lonely surfing in Arcata, California, where he’d moved with his wife. He kept getting hurt crashing his mountain bike or surfboard, and I suggested, half jokingly, that skydiving might be a less injurious sport for someone like him, who went 100 percent all the time, between twenty-four-hour ER shifts. At least people didn’t seem to get chronic overuse injuries when jumping, I’d pointed out, and as far as I could tell, they only impacted the ground when they seriously messed up.