Parachuting

When I got kicked out of College for writing a Marxist Thesis on “Public Participation in The Design Process”, when I should have been writing something along the lines of “The Impact of Rhododendrons in Victorian Gardens”, I managed to get a job in South Wales for a year, while I re-wrote my thesis and tried to get back to civilization. I worked in a New Town Government Office where excitement was in such short supply that me and some of the other boyos working there took to going out and trying to kill ourselves in a variety of vaguely sporting ways.

Parachuting is vaguely a sport, you don’t need to be incredibly fit, you just need to be able to climb into a small plane and then fall out of it at the appropriate time. So we enlisted in a parachute training programme at Shobdon Airport. A field with a shed and a strip of tarmac, somewhere in the border country of Mid-Wales.

Training involved learning how to pack a parachute and then pull the string thing that opens it up. If you’ve ever helped your Mum fold the sheets, the packing thing is a doddle. Some of the other stuff involved being strapped into a harness and hoisted into the air, thereby giving you an extreme wedgie. The trainers loved doing this to the only girl on the course as it seemed to emphasise all the bits that guys like about girls and in a way that rendered her totally helpless.

There was some talk about how to climb out of the plane; how to let go; how to count to 3 and shout Geronimo, look over your shoulder and check that you weren’t hurtling through space with a twisted hanky trailing behind you; how to steer and how to land. There was a lot of talk about how to land because this is where most people get hurt. Pretty obvious really. Your hurtling through space with a twisted hanky trailing behind you and everything is cool, exhilarating in fact. But if you try and land at the speed of gravity, that’s when it hurts.

So they taught us how to make sure that we had something to land with, air brakes I guess, how to turn into the wind so as to be traveling as slowly as possible and then, the second your feet touched the ground, how to roll like a banana. Having never in my life seen a banana roll, I was a bit suspicious of this bit. Most bananas just seem to go splat, especially if you drop them from two and a half thousand feet. But the Instructors insisted that this was how a banana would roll if this banana were a sentient being. Believe me, I have seen bananas that were closer to being sentient beings than some of these “Instructors”.

The fundamental of the banana roll is that you shape yourself like a banana and the moment your feet touch the ground, you collapse in a controlled rotary fashion. Keeping your weight in the harness which is still supported by the parachute and rolling your weight along your calf, up your thigh around your hips and over your back. The theory being that the stretching of the impact over this extended fall will make it more comfortable and less likely to push your coccyx up around your shoulders. Practically, it takes a while to get the hang of this and you end up with a bruised arse and a neck that feels like you’ve been in a one man scrum against the entire All Blacks Team.

All of the above can be taught in one day and on the following day, you are ready to jump. This is the tricky bit, especially in a place like Shobdon. The cloud level has to be above two and a half thousand feet and the wind speed less than 10 miles per hour. In the Welsh Borders, cloud level is pretty usually set at about 30 feet and the locals are renowned for having one leg shorter than the other. This is partly due to having relationships with family members and partly due to having to lean into the wind on a permanent basis.

So this is a near perfect scam. They take your money, do the training bit but the expensive part of having to put petrol in the plane never happens. “Sorry Boyo, but the conditions divn’t be good enough for beginners see? Maybe come back next week. Sure to be better then eh?” But of course, it never is.

As luck would have it, one of our boys had brought a pack of cards, so we settled down for a game, just to see if weather conditions would change, and the Instructors decided to join in. By close of play, we had won enough off them to cover the costs of the course and the following week, in an effort to get back at us, they doubled their losses. By the end of weekend three, we almost owned the plane and they were starting to panic. The day was drawing to a close and it looked like we were coming back the following weekend to take the field, the shed and Gwynns’ favourite black faced ewe.

Daffid cast a worried glance out of the window and a look of shock crossed his face. The windsock had dropped and…. was that sunshine flitting across the tarmac? They couldn’t face any more losses, so the Jump Marshall shouted at us to kit up and we were bundled out of the door. The little Cessna was cranked up and we were pushed in. As the plane started to taxi, we noticed that the windsock was back to its usual horizontal position and the sheep were all back to leaning at 45 degrees, but the Instructors were doing their best to look the other way.

The plane started to cough and splutter in protest as the pilot pointed its nose into the wind and we slowly picked up speed. Bales of straw and the occasional cow were now being blown past us, but with an upward lurch, we were up and then, with a downward lurch, we were down until after several repeats, the wheels skimmed the hedge at the end of the runway and we were off. Slowly we climbed and slowly the sheds of Shobdon aerodrome became smaller until they looked quite pretty. Finally we made it to two and a half thousand feet and the pilot took us over the landing zone. As we passed over a large red cross marked out in the field, the Jump Master dropped a weighted streamer, which was calculated to represent the descent rate of a parachutist. By watching the streamer land and gauging the distance from the cross, we could circle around and jump at an equivalent distance upwind of the cross, thereby landing somewhere within its proximity. Simple.

Anyway, the streamer was dropped and the Jump Master and myself watched in awe as it sailed off towards Liverpool. Richard Bransons balloon could not have moved quicker. The Jump Master, however, remembering his losses, told the pilot to circle, smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “No worries Boyo! Make me proud” And with an evil Welsh glint in his eye and a sharp stick in his hand, he maneuvered me out of the open side of the plane where, hanging on to the strut under the wing, I stepped out onto the wheel. Surprisingly, this was quite easy, as the following wind was so strong that I was in danger of being blown towards the propeller at the front end. At this point, he was supposed to gauge the distance and then tap me on the helmet, but I seem to recall a mad, high pitched laugh, before my helmet was smacked down into the wing strut and the knee jerk reaction caused me to fall backwards. I could see my legs coming up in front of me and the plane flying away, all the time realizing that my legs were supposed to be behind me and my face towards the approaching ground. The parachute neatly stowed in my knapsack was being dragged out and as every fold unfolded, it thwacked into the back of my head until with one almighty thwack, it tore itself away from the mothership and filled itself like half of Dolly Partons bra, jerking my head skywards as my legs continued their descent and almost snapped my spine when they braked.

“Bollocks!!! Geronimooooo!!!” Was a bit late now, but it felt good shouting it. I looked around me and could see the spire on Liverpool Cathedral beckoning, I heaved on the right toggle and like an overburdened barge, the parachute swung round until I could feel the wind blowing full in my face. Then I heaved on both toggles and dropped like a stone. There is something about heaving on your toggle at two thousand feet that is quite exhilarating. It would have been nice to scan the horizon and maybe even moon a sheep, but I really felt it important to get back to terra firma as quickly as possible. Even with my rapid descent, I knew I was going to overshoot the cross, but I didn’t do bad, it eventually scuttled under my feet, I let go the toggles to slow my descent and hit the ground about 50 yards away. My banana roll however, was an unnecessary formality. The parachute was dragging me the minute my tippy toes touched down and we probably did another fifty yards sideways before I got wedged in a rabbit hole. Wow! What a rush! It wasn’t until I managed to stand back up that the real exhilaration of it all hit me and I let go another “Geronimoooo!!!”.

I stood in the field and watched as, in a succession of circles, three more parachutes billowed out and began their descent. As I watched the first, I realized that due to my pole position at the door, only myself and the Jump Master had witnessed the loss of the streamer. My fellow chutists were therefore making their jumps in blissful ignorance. The first guy seemed to get the gist of things pretty quickly and only overshot the cross by about two hundred yards. He also had his fall broken by landing smack in a hedgerow. The second guy was blown a further two hundred yards and landed in a farmyard between the outbuildings and the powerlines. His chute billowed up against the farmhouse door and windows until, huffing and puffing, the red faced Farmers Wife fought her way past it and then started slapping him because she’d “Not finished washing them this 5 minutes since, look you!” But the last jumpist was the lone girl on the course and I watched as the wind carried her away to a fate unknown.

The rest of us gathered up our chutes, liberally sprinkled with rabbit poop, thorns, berries and Windowlene, and made our way back to the Clubhouse where celebratory beers awaited. After about the third beer, we began to wonder about the girl and where she might have got to. The ground crew had watched her through binoculars for as long as they could and then jumped into the van in pursuit, but they had been gone a long while. While we were on the fourth beer, we saw the van slowly turn into the field and make its way towards the Clubhouse. Then behind it, we saw the lonely figure of the girl, walking and carrying her chute. She looked a sorely bedraggled figure and as she got closer, the following wind carried with it strange odours. She was escorted to the back of the Clubhouse where there was a tap and we listened to sounds of splashing and whimpering.

Eventually, she came forth, wet and bedraggled and, over another beer, we got to hear the story.

Having left the plane, she had been carried away by the excitement of it all, long before she realized that she was being carried away by the wind. By the time this realization set in, she was out of sight of the airfield and being blown towards lands unknown. She saw a road and figured that she might land somewhere near it, at least she could flag down a car and ask directions. There were fields all around, but there was also some kind of farm/industrial development. Large round tanks, some filled with Green, some with Grey and some with water. Rotary arms swept over their surface spraying fluids, but others were stationary, sinister. She started to panic slightly, whichever way she turned the wind seem to veer and blow her inexorably towards the tanks. Finally she accepted her fate and readied herself for touchdown. She landed smack in the middle of the largest tank and sank to her knees in wet sticky mud. Fortunately her parachute dropped below the rim of the tank and pushed up against its wall, so that it wasn’t pulling her over, but her feet seemed well anchored in whatever it was in there. She pulled in the ropes and bundled up the chute, gathering it into a large ungainly skirt. It was then that she tried to move her feet and with an awful squelching sound released a stench that had her heaving and now she realized that she had landed dead centre in one of the settling tanks at the local sewage works.

Fighting her rising bile she made one sticky stride after another. Each raised foot releasing enough methane to re-inflate the chute had she been of a mind to re-fashion it into a balloon. Eventually she reached the side of the tank where a steel runged ladder led up to freedom and air. She was relieved that despite the sucking maw, she had maintained her balance and stayed upright and clean from the knees up. It was at this point that the old gadgy who ran the place had finally come across to see what was going on. Looking down into the tank he saw a damsel in distress. He reached down the ladder to give her a hand, but she had both hands gripping the ladder as she climbed and was simultaneously struggling to push a great pillow of nylon and rope. Then he saw how he could help. She was wearing a harness and on the front of the harness was bright red handle. He reached down, grabbed it and with a manly tug aimed to lift her bodily out of the tank.

Unfortunately, the red handle pulled out her emergency parachute which, as it appeared over the rim of the tank, was immediately buffeted by the wind, rapidly inflating until, like a great billowing sail, it spread itself and yanked her backwards off the ladder to land shoulders first in the enveloping mire. She gave herself up to the forces of nature and was dragged, like a slow motion dogsled, to other side of the tank.

The old gadgy, having looked at the results of his heroism, promptly ran away.

The girl dragged herself up the ladder at this side of the tank, bundled up both her chutes and squelched her way to the road, where she sat and cried. Shortly the rescue van turned up, but having got a good whiff, decided that it would be best if she walked and they would lead the way back, with the windows wound up tight.

So ended a very eventful day. Once cleaned and changed into dry clothes, the girl was allowed back into society and our little band drove away from Shobdon, never to return. Parachuting, not so much a sport, more of a manic charge into the unknown.

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