Free falling

Old souls are especially prone to dreary confessions. My own contribution is succumbing, quite precociously, to perhaps one of the most predictable of bucket-list cliches: skydiving. This bit of introductory humdrum is not to suggest that I managed to undergo this experience with a natural nonchalance, or anything short of vigorous reluctance. Were it not for the brave-blood and shaming persistence of my beloved I would not now be negotiating that fine line between prose-worthy hyperbole and prosaic understatement.

The two days between registration and the actual jump were the most difficult. To the very last synapse, my circuitry was hard at work to communicate a quite imaginative array of disaster scenarios to my consciousness. I’ve long believed that my sorry relationship with technology is to blame for this Olympian ability to scare the hell out of myself. If I can barely work on a computer for four hours without a blue screen or error message, why should I expect to sit through an eight-hour flight without some fatal glitch? What trivial blink of inattention or ill-fated atmospheric coincidence might result in catastrophe?

I had experienced similar feelings before bungee jumping a couple of years ago. At the time, my anxieties managed to invest themselves in an especially vivid quotation from Vladimir Nabokov: “the cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The anticipation of a jump rocks the cradle just enough for the possibility of the abyss to confront us with something more than theoretical detachment. Cimmerian shivers are part of the package. Of course, one understands at some level that bungee jumping and skydiving are in fact quite safe, and this prevents one’s nervous contemplation from spilling over into total psychological meltdown.

While one stands on the ledge, however, physiology is king. Statistics are no match for millennia of evolution, whose prudent instruction has taken the ”abstinence only,” rather than the prophylactic approach, when it comes to jumping headfirst off of 1000-foot high platforms. The silent scream of mankind’s hard won survival instinct is deafening, but it must be ignored and overcome with an act of will that is at once the height of recklessness and of self-control. Therein lies the genius and considerable seductiveness of activities like bungee jumping—they elicit a profound and primal feeling of dread under conditions of relative safety. They allow one to flirt with death with a high probability of rejection. It is interesting to compare this with smoking, which, over time, is far deadlier than bungee jumping or skydiving, though (unfortunately) our bodies are not programmed to register bone-chilling fear with each puff.

As for my sky dive, the actual free-fall was completely different from what I had experienced during the bungee jump. Jumping out of an airplane at slightly above 14,000 feet, I had approximately a minute of free-fall—much more than my meager 7 seconds of bungee free fall. Moreover, whereas my bungee free fall was within relatively close proximity to a cliff face, my major points of reference during the sky dive were fellow jumpers falling at the same rate. This created a surprisingly peaceful sensation, much more akin to floating than to plummeting.

I have since made a point of learning more about sky diving as a sport, and I have discovered a handful of remarkable and undeniably insane men at the cutting-edge. Surely one of the most impressive records belongs to Joe Kittinger, who jumped out of a special capsule in a spacesuit from over 100,000 feet and landed safely in the New Mexico desert. Today, Kittinger is working in consultation with Felix Baumgarten, an ambitious Austrian professional skydiver, on a project to beat his original record. Baumgarten intends to jump from 120,000 feet, and become the first human being to travel faster than the speed of sound outside of a space ship or airplane.

Perhaps the most fascinating innovation in the area of parachute sports is the “wingsuit.” Instead of enjoying free fall, wingsuit jumpers take advantage of the considerable lift enabled by the wingsuit’s “flying squirrel” design. A state-of-the-art wingsuit allows an experienced “pilot” to fly three feet horizontally for every foot of altitude he loses—it is by far the closest thing to human flight. One of the most respected wingsuit pilots is the American Jeb Corliss, whose collection of YouTube videos is engaging enough to push the limits of even the most seasoned procrastinators.

Corliss is now actively involved in the “Landing Project,” whose goal is to allow him to be the first person to land a wingsuit jump without a parachute, by flying into a specially designed parabolic ramp. Needless to say, it’s a bit risky. Ueli Gegenschatz, who brought this project to public attention during a talk at a TED conference, has since died in a wingsuit flight. Geoffrey Robinson, engineer and wingsuit developer also perished perfecting his craft. In admiring such men’s ambitious pursuits, in which the slightest miscalculation is usually fatal, I take increased comfort in my own temperate profession, whose greatest danger is producing yet another mediocre dissertation on Foucault.