It takes 15 minutes to climb 3,962m above Fentress Airpark, Texas, in a Twin Super Otter. That's plenty of time to think good and hard about the meaning of life.
But this group of a dozen sky divers doesn't seem worried. They're happily chewing gum and chatting while the propellers buzz like an army of oversized mosquitos. Out the window, the airstrip below looks Lilliputian, and the gravel target they'll try to hit is the size of a pinhead.
"Two minutes," the pilot calls out.
That sends the group into a flurry of activity -- yanking on helmets, straightening goggles, adjusting altimeters fastened to their wrists. A few touch hands for luck, to remind each other not to do anything stupid. Then they shuffle forward, eager to get to the door that has just rolled open, letting in a blast of icy air.
One by one, they grab the rail above the door. They swing a few times, then lurch into the great beyond.
"The truth is, the type of people who sky-dive on a regular basis are the type of people who enjoy jumping out of airplanes," says Scott "Douva" Lewis, a sky diver and sky surfer with 850 jumps to his name.
And a lot of them live in central Texas, too. Any weekend the skies dawn blue, Skydive San Marcos in Fentress bustles with people packing parachutes, cheering as sky divers land or watching the jump videos that stream across a television on the covered patio.
This sky-diving center -- or drop zone, as the regulars call it -- sees roughly 27,000 sky dives a year, according to owner Deb Chappell. Of those, about 4,500 annually are first-time jumpers. The rest are made by sky-dive junkies, the "fun jumpers" who return over and over to get their fill of falling out of the sky.
Sky diving is the closest you'll come to really flying, they say. And flying is what it's all about.
"That's how a struggling artist, a corporate executive, an erotic dancer and a minister all end up hanging out on a Saturday night," Lewis says. "They share the indescribable bond that only comes from leaping out of a plane together and hurtling toward the ground at the speed of a NASCAR race."
First comes nearly a minute of free falling. The ground screams toward them at 193kph. Then, just 1,046m from Earth, they tug a cord that sends out a pilot chute. That chute, the size of a garbage can lid, catches air and pulls out the main chute, the much larger rectangular canopy that floats the sky diver to the ground at a soothing 48kph or 64kph.
Occasionally, things don't go as planned. According to the United States Parachute Association, 21 people died while sky diving last year. That's down from 25 in 2003 and 33 in 2002. Since Skydive San Marcos opened in 1984, two people -- both experienced sky divers -- have died in accidents.
But that's why there are reserve chutes, the carefully packed backups that deploy in case of emergency. Every sky diver hopes he never has to use one, but jump long enough and he will.
Standing at ground zero at Skydive San Marcos, this is what you see and hear: the buzz of a plane engine high overhead, then silence as its engine cuts. Bits of what looks like confetti dropping from the aircraft. In another minute, colorful canopies, drifting across the sky. And finally, the hard flap of nylon and the gleeful whoops of the sky divers.
The jumpers swoop toward the gravel landing pad one at a time, their orange and green and turquoise canopies rippling, then flaring at the last minute to ease them gently to the ground.
RSS