No Hesitation
How I took off in eight airplanes before I ever landed in one
I arrived at my friend’s apartment a little after eight on a Friday night. He had this new thing called cable TV so we hung out there.
Tim said, “Frank and I are going to go jump out of an airplane tomorrow, want to come?”
“Sure,” I said with no hesitation. There would be hesitation, but much later.
The next day, we hopped into Tim’s truck and drove to Dalton, Georgia. On the way, the cars behind us were likely getting spattered with testosterone from that truck. We were, by God, going to jump out of an airplane. A feat few humans had ever attempted, and fewer survived.
We got to the dirt airfield outside of Dalton, where we met our jump-master, a soft-spoken man in his twenties. He checked our gear and gave us jumpsuits. We had to wear our own boots and helmets. Tim and I had motorcycle helmets, but Frank had an old football helmet and looked like Jack Nicholson on the back of Dennis Hopper’s bike in Easy Rider.
We went through lessons, learning to fall and roll. The jump-master told us what to do if this or that went wrong — not that it would. We were shown how to cut away the main chute and deploy the backup. This was in the days before tandem jumps. We used a static line to deploy the…
