Skydiving for sissies

Don’t let fears of flying, heights or soiling yourself stop you from skydiving: the rise and fall of a frightened Mirror reporter

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Plummeting towards the earth at 193 kilometres an hour isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. Like most women, I don’t understand the allure of extreme sports, and you’ll never catch me pulling any punishing Jackass stunts. As someone who’s not a thrill-seeker, and who’s not fond of either flying or heights, I can’t quite believe I did this, and apart from gaining the experience to write this story, I don’t quite know why.

There’s got to be a little masochism involved in any activity as counter-intuitive as jumping out of a plane at 12,000 feet. Whatever their dark, twisted motives may be, some people crave that sense of danger. But skydiving’s main attraction is adrenaline, a serious addiction according to a band of instructors in St-Jérome, roughly 40 minutes away from Montreal. Three years ago, in honour of their drug of choice, they dubbed their skydiving school Parachutisme Adrénaline.

Freefall and flapping faces

The price ranges from $265 on weekdays to $285 on weekends for your jump, any time from May to mid-October, weather permitting. First-time skydivers have two options: the tandem jump or instructor-assisted deployment (IAD). Tandem involves only 20 minutes of training, as most of the work is done by the instructor you’re harnessed to, whereas IAD requires a four- to five-hour course because you’re going out alone, though your parachute is opened by the instructor almost as soon as you exit the plane.

The big difference is altitude: tandem jumpers freefall for roughly 40 seconds, from 12,000 feet; IAD from 6,000 feet, with virtually no freefall. To up the adrenaline, pro jumpers can go solo from up to 60,000 feet, a much more hazardous undertaking requiring oxygen.

There’s plenty of oxygen at 12,000 feet, so much so that faces ripple like flags. For this reason, people with chronic respiratory illnesses and other serious conditions are discouraged from skydiving.

While it’s not a very physically demanding activity, it’s still considered a sport, though not an extreme sport, as one of the instructors assured me—speak for yourself, buddy! And if you weigh more than 215 pounds, you need to call ahead to make special arrangements.

For $90 extra, an Adrénaline instructor will film and edit a roughly 20-minute DVD and shoot about 80 still photos to document your experience, and it’s worth it. Both the stills and the personalized mini-doc are professionally shot, and the DVD is light and funny thanks to the staff’s interview and editing style. You can even bring your own MP3s for the soundtrack, but only on weekdays, and you have to give advance notice.

Paralyis over panic

Terror, fear, panic, anxiety, butterflies. I expected any or all of them, and I had a sinking feeling whenever I anticipated the view from the plane door, but somehow I got by with a shield of silence, fidgeting and a minor mental shutdown. Some people get hit with the fear, but maybe my instinctive numbness under pressure was an advantage—not that I’m terribly brave, paralysis just beats panic. But I really have to credit Adrénaline’s laid-back professionalism for offsetting a potential freakout.

The place looks like a converted ranch, a randomly arranged little patch of land featuring a runway, a few picnic tables, a grassy drop zone no bigger than a schoolyard and a half, an open-walled structure that looks like it once sheltered animals and two trailer-sized bungalows—one is a merch store and office, the other contains the editing suite, another office, a bathroom and a rec lounge. After signing a waiver relieving Adrénaline of liability in case of my accidental injury or death, I got suited up in their harness and one-piece uniform. It was a little big, but the superhero-style primary-colour combination is pretty cute.

Proprietor, instructor and videographer Jean-Nicolas Lagacé, who interviewed me every few minutes between suiting up and touching down, enthusiastically informed me that “Danger!” was inscribed on the back of the suit. His big-brother ribbing wasn’t directed exclusively at me, but also at my instructor Olivier Blanchard, who would have had to deal with the hysteria had Lagacé’s softball scare tactics worked on me.

Safety first

Luckily, the type of accident I was most (secretly) worried about was the bladder- or bowel-voiding kind. Statistics show that you’re 70 times more likely to die in a car than while parachuting. Most fatalities and accidents (bruises, scrapes, sprains and the occasional broken bone) occur during a bad landing, which is incredibly unlikely when you’re strapped to someone who’s done it hundreds or thousands of times. And in all of Lagacé’s 2,400 jumps, his parachute only failed once, and every pack includes a reserve chute, so don’t sweat it.

Training consisted of kneeling in and jumping out of a life-size wooden replica of the plane’s interior—don’t touch the pilot, put your right leg out, lean out of the plane, arch your back, bend your legs back so your feet rest on, or at least near, the instructor’s ass. I committed these steps to memory, or so I thought.

There’s nothing like wedging into a pool-table-sized Cessna with six guys. Their constant stream of jokes, mugging, teasing and Batman-theme-singing was a tonic for my nerves, but I could have used some gin with that. (Note to Jackass-types: Adrénaline will turn away the stoned or wasted, with extreme prejudice. I promise that skydiving doesn’t require any enhancement.)

Minor mental lapse

After we reached the right altitude, and the other four jumpers took the exit, it was that time. The searing din of the wind and the grim reality of situation were so stupefying that I went into an emotionless auto-mode, the way I imagine Laura Bush deals with her life. Sadly, that defence mechanism erased the first 10 seconds of the fall from my memory, along with all my training, but the DVD shows us tumbling a few times before straightening out, and Lagacé later told me that I didn’t look too happy. A few simple, pre-planned hand signals snapped me out of it—the first thing I remember is Blanchard hitting my leg repeatedly to get me to assume the correct position, and Lagacé “flying” over to grab my hand and grin at me. Then I was okay.

Suddenly our parachute opened and Lagacé (wearing a different kind of chute) fell away at a shocking speed, leaving me and Blanchard standing upright, floating, in dead silence. This was my favourite part of the fall. Blanchard instructed me to pull the harness to the middle of my thigh, so that I was essentially sitting in the sky, drifting over green hills and fields. For a few moments, I even got to steer, an easy job with modern rectangular chutes. Only a couple of minutes later, I was told to extend my legs, the Adrénaline site (and Mirror photographer Rachel Granofsky, my ride and female moral support) came into view, and we landed on our asses with a thud in the mud—thankfully, the mud was not of my making.

I spent the next few hours functional but stunned, still phased by the dreamlike quality of the experience. When I called my boyfriend, he said I sounded drunk. I wasn’t, but I do advise all would-be skydivers to have a beer handy at home. And if you have any reservations, remember that millions of people go parachuting every year, including me, apparently. And if I can do it, so can you.

For more information, go to www.paradrenaline.ca.