I am an acrophobe. High places make my knees weak and my head spin as if I might pass out.
My earliest memory of this phobia unfolds on a Boy Scout hike up a gentle Adirondack mountain. The path was wide, but merely glancing toward the steep drop triggered a chill of fear. Hugging the mountain-side of the trail, I zeroed in on the guy in front of me while my comrades laughed and cavorted. I became embarrassed, secretive of my solitary fear. Little did I know I would 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 last year, when a magazine ad for a one-day parachuting course caught my eye. "Accelerated Free Fall," it said. An unfortunate tagline, 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 and then pull your ripcord for a controlled 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 jumpmaster made it instantly clear that, while we were all in for a great treat, parachuting was serious business and it was possible for a jumper to hit the ground at 125 miles an hour. He called this "terminal velocity." A falling body accelerates at 32 feet per second until wind resistance prohibits further acceleration. The undesirability of hitting the ground at turbo speed was a dominant theme of the class. I became keenly interested in the reserve parachute -- your literal lifeline should the main "misdeploy."
As our training wrapped up, my classmates and I faced several possibilities: Unmentioned but obvious was the option of simply packing up and going home. Alternatively, you could schedule a rain check -- a complete redo of the course (at a modest discount) in the future. You could do a static-line jump, where willing participants hook their ripcords to a ceiling rod and shuffle out of the plane at a few thousand feet. The static line opens your chute almost immediately after you exit the plane, thereby preventing any lethal consequences.
The final option -- the raison d’etre of the course -- was this: Climb into a single-engine plane with no door, rocket up two miles, then leap out to experience the legendary free fall. With your jumpmaster alongside, you fall for roughly 50 seconds until your slicing through the air at 125 miles per hour. Then you reach for your ripcord and pull. If the chute doesn't deploy, you have 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 students who headed 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. I wasn't scared at all. On the contrary, I felt astonishingly brave. My girlfriend and my brother (both of whom tagged along to forestall last-minute chickening out) 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, but he had also evidently learned how to speak in a sawmill. He kept screaming, "Do you want to jump, skydiver?" We weren't even in the plane yet. And the question wasn't rhetorical at all. I was expected to scream back that I just couldn't wait. Yippee! Yeah, right.
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