(3 of 3)
"Don't ask people why they keep jumping," says Jeff Poulliot, 25, a Delaware laboratory technician with almost 400 jumps. "Everybody gets his own thing out of it."
Can it be the danger? Perhaps. Thirty-three jumpers died last year, and one was killed last week at Zephyrhills when he collided with another jumper and failed to open his chute. The casualty rate in parachuting is high compared with some other potentially dangerous sports, such as scuba diving and skiing. Jumpers kid each other all the time about augering in. But no one really thinks that way. "It's a sport," says the USPA's Ottley. "It's not a brush with death."
To maintain it that way, the USPA and the Federal Aviation Administration keep a tight grip on equipment and procedures. Every experienced jumper packs his own parachute, and every chute is inspected and tagged. When three jumpers held off opening their chutes until they were well below 2,000 ft., the safe minimum opening altitude, Meet Director Jim Hooper grounded them for the rest of the meet. "Jumpers," he announced on the p.a. system, "I know you're here for a good time, but 'smoking it in' is not part of having a good time."
No need to cheat death in a plunge to earth. Just be the last person out the door at 10,000 ft., and while the first jumpers are 1,000 ft. or so below you, falling flat and stable at 120 m.p.h., you are diving to catch them at 150 or 160 m.p.h. You are John Wayne piloting your own body in a movie dogfight. Reach the star and dock yourself neatly and smoothly. Or do a series of back and front loops a mile in the sky on a trampoline with no bottom. That's thrill enough.
After dark, when the jumping is done at Zephyrhills, you hear the sound of a thousand pop tops being ripped from a thousand beer cans, and the sweet smell of pot fills the air around the campgrounds. In the morning, many of the jumpers look wiped out. But later, with a whiff of the chill, clear air at 12,500 ft., they come alive again.
Sky diving makes us all feel more alive. It does something else for us too. No matter what our ages, no matter what our jobs, no matter what our responsibilities in the real world, as long as we can jump out of airplanes, we know we will never have to grow up. -