The Falling Sensation

All I thought when I dropped out was seeing this huge black shadow going like just like a huge bird going over me and all I was asking is that the tail plane didn’t decide to knock my head off or hit me in the back and, you know, pretty well cut me in half or something. It went over and by this stage I’m thinking you were supposed to count to ten or something before you pull the rip cord to release the parachute. I thought, jeez ten must have gone by by now and so, I pulled the rip cord and I can’t say I recall falling in that period of time, there’s no sensation of falling. Up in this blackness, there’s nothing to judge that you’re falling fast or not. But when a parachute opens, it opens with a jolt and I do mean a jolt because some of my friends, in fact, my pilot, he lost one shoe, the jolt was enough to take a shoe off. Others had both shoes taken off, fortunately, mine stayed on. And the way the parachute fastens on is you have a harness on the back with straps around, much like in your car and they all clip into one buckle in the center and as they clip in, there’s five of them, so there’s one over your right shoulder, one over left, one around the right leg, one around the left leg and one right up the center of your joint. And all these five end, and it’s like the car one, when you press the button, they all, instead of one releasing, these all release at once, it’s like a quick release. And when the chute opens, the jolt all centers and just in your groin. I’m deciding now, I’m going down, how, this would be, I guess about 10,000 feet when I went out. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, I don’t know where I’m going to land, I know there could be lakes, rivers, mountains, I don’t know what the terrain... I had seen pictures of European houses, some of them were three, four story, looked awful high, I could land on the roof. I knew they had pine trees around. The thought went through my head, I could end up on the top of a pine tree. Anyway, oh I thought it would be nice, a stack a hay. Maybe we’ll land in a field, a freshly plowed field. Well, I did land in a field, it wasn’t freshly plowed. One of the immediate things you do as soon as your feet touch it, you kind of pull your legs up, you know to brace yourself, you can’t really see when you’re going to land because this was, you know, 12:30 or so at night or 1:00 a.m. And as soon as your feet touch the ground, the idea is you hit this quick release which undoes all the belts. Away goes your harness, away goes your parachute because if you don’t do that and if there’s any wind blowing them along, the parachute in the wind will start dragging you along the ground and most likely you would start spinning and when you start spinning then you wouldn’t be able to hit the release button to get out of it, so you could be dragged through water or rocks or anywhere you know, bushes, it’s hard to say. Anyway, as soon as my feet touched, I hit the button and then I was free from the harness and parachute, laid there and thought, jeez I’m alright and got up and walked around. Then I went looking for my parachute, my harness. The idea we were told, one of the first thing you want to do is hide your parachute and harness. So I found a culvert and put it in there and started to walk.