Year: 2010

So, it seems I touched on a nerve, or something twitchy, when I posted here last month about the scary hinterland that is the post A License Land of the Lost.

A lot of you have thoughts about this but are too wussy to post an actual comment, so instead I’ve had the following conversation with like ten different jumpers I know IRL.

Experienced Jumper: “So, Mar, I read your article. Interesting stuff.”

Me: “Yeah? What did you think?”

EJ: “Almost all jumpers go through this. You are not unique. Get tough. Jump with as experienced of people as you can find. This is the way you will improve.”

Me: “So, I need to be less Type A and just try to get on more jumps with anyone I can?”

EJ: “Yep. That’s exactly it.”

I also had the following conversation with all my newbie, sub-100 friends:

Newbie Jumper: “So, Mar, I read your blog. Interesting stuff.”

Me: “Yeah? What did you think?”

NJ: “I totally feel the same way. But don’t worry. We are still learning and we’re having fun, right?”

Me: “Totally. Yup, fun fun fun. Just wish I could jump with more people and learn faster.”

NJ: “Well, I’ll jump with you anytime!”

Cut to the next day, a cloudless sky and an open load.

Me: “Hey! Awesome day to jump! Who wants to jump with me?:

EJ1: “I’ve gotta jump with my four way team.”

NJ1: “I’m outta money. Sorry.”

EJ2: “I’m gonna fly video and get paid. And after that I have an AFF student.”

NJ2: “I’m working on my packing skills today.”

EJ3: “I don’t feel like packing my rig right now. Maybe later?”

NJ3: “I’m already doing a jump with the adorable new blond girl who just got off student status.”

EJ4: “How about you pay for a coach slot for me? No? Bite me.”

Me: “Seriously?” (sad face) “I guess I’ll do a high hop n pop….”

Okay. I may have exaggerated the overall response but seriously…two trips to the DZ now have garnered me very little enthusiasm for jumping with the new kid (me). Although, I did horn in on a six way belly and managed to hold my slot and not feel like the greenest of greenhorns. Which was fun.

I don’t say this to make anyone feel bad/guilty. It is no one’s job to jump with me or mentor me or somehow make this skydiving thing easy. Let’s face it: it’s not easy.

Learning to freefall is not easy.

Learning to freefly is not easy (from what tiny bit I’ve done.)

Paying for jumps is not easy.

Saving for a rig is nigh to impossible.

Saving for tunnel time: are you kidding?

Learning how to get on groups and find mentors – even for someone extremely sociable like me –  it’s tough.

I go out with a group of skydivers most Wednesday night for pizza and beers. They say I am pretty connected but I know I am still a rookie all the time when I spend time with this crew. I don’t know half of what people are talking about as they throw around initials and names of groups which always seem to start with the word Dirty.

I don’t even the answer to basic questions like this:

Pizza Cool Guy: “Hey Mar, what canopy are you flying now?”

Me: (proudly) “I downsized! I’m using a new one, the 170, and it’s going pretty well.”

PCG: “The 170 what?”

Me: (Blushing) “Uhhh. The red and orange and blue one. You know, the 170?”

PCG: “No, I mean what model?”

Me: “Yeah. Uh. It starts with an S?” (hanging head in shame)

PCG: (Shaking head disparagingly) “You should prolly figure that out.”

Me: “Yeah. I know.”

It’s like saying I drive a silver minivan, right? Sigh. So pathetic.

For some reason I cannot just memorize all these names and brands of canopies. They are just names. They all sound the same.

And yet everyone else looks into the sky and goes, “Hey! Look at Skygod’s new Spectron 2 Pulsar! What a beauty! It has 11 and a half cells. Totally state of the art! ”

Then someone else says: “I really prefer my ZLoft Velociraptor. The nose cone has ferber fiber. It’s so awesome!”

Then the naysayer has to jump in, “The ferber fiber is crap! I saw a study which clearly shows that the naperfiber in the Qw211 is much better for durability and speed!”

And then four other people, two of which who have less jumps than me, start going on and on about the ring systems and closures on each kind of container and how everybody knows that the Outback Skysword has notoriously hard openings, but a superior glide ratio so it’s totally worth it.

And I stand there, illiterate and pitiful. Wishing a ninja would come sweep me off my feet and teach me how to skydive.

Cuz it would be awesome to be a ninja skydiver.  If I was a ninja, then nobody would even know if I screwed up. And I’d look like that. Totally.

Or, it would also be cool to be a zombie skydiver because I wouldn’t need to buy an AAD.

You know, cuz zombies are already dead.

I might need more sleep.

Okay. That’s enough whining for this week.

Who wants to help me choose a canopy? Or a Halloween costume?

Last week I watched the infamous and most lauded skydiving movie ever; Cutaway (2000).

That is to say: it is lauded by skydivers.

Wow. Did I say “most lauded”. As in, there was something to laud? Because holy crap people, this doesn’t speak well for the movie going sensibilities of skydivers!

Now I realize, that demographically speaking, most skydivers are young single men, who probably find Starship Troopers enjoyable. (I’m not even kidding. I’ve had this discussion. More than once. With actual men who claim to find Starship Troopers good! For reals!) And I know that the viewing pleasures of the Starship Trooper crowd is probably not well aligned for someone like me who does not have a penis and has the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice in her must watch list. BUT, in my defense, I also adore Tarantino films and Superbad and other reasonably modern and non-erudite cinematography, so I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and say that I have a right to review this film, as a skydiver. Okay? Are we all in agreement here?

So, strictly speaking, the movie is TERRIBLE! As in poorly written, clunkily acted, and just egregiously inept in many, many ways. However, it does feature some spectacular skydiving sequences.

In order to discuss, we must break it down. The skydiving was filmed by famed cinematographer and photographer Norman Kent. The skydiving footage is more than well executed. It is beautiful and exciting and well worth the price of the movie rental. And there is a lot of it. Every time I was sorely tempted to just turn the whole thing off, there would be another gorgeous jump sequence. The plot is however…painful.

The set up is sad and obvious in a way that hurts your intelligence unless you are seven years old: a young rule-bending cop (played with painful sincerity by Stephen Baldwin), Cooper, goes undercover in a drop zone ruled by an aging and intense maverick skydiver, improbably named Red Line (Tom Berenger somehow thinks intense is best portrayed by squinting and rattling out his lines like machine gun fire) and his scary and secretive second in command, Turbo. (Dennis Rodman, which is almost good casting because he is terrifying because he is tall and cannot act).

Shockingly, Cooper falls in love with Star, his instructor (a beautiful and personable young thing who would NEVER, EVER go for a halfwit shmuck like Stephen Baldwin after you see the lack of charisma he un-shines around the DZ). Cooper ALSO  is a NATURAL skydiver who is so talented and amazing that he quickly becomes a member of Red Line’s inner circle and competition big way team.

Oh, and also, someone at the DZ is running drugs and Cooper has to find out which of his new friends is in on the criminal aspects and who is just an eccentric skydiver type. The writers could have just skipped this part of the story line altogether (although it did provide reason for a few cool night jump scenes) especially since it has been done so often and better in other movies, like Point break. I would have enjoyed it more if they focused on the quest to built a champion eight way team for the nationals. Why not?

The usual skydiving tropes are present: the young kid jumper, the “old guy”, the scary guy, the young mountain dew type guys (improbably named “Rip” and “Cord”, how sad is that) with crazy hair and piercings, and of course, the hot blond.

The major theme is how sky diving takes over your life. As that is also a major theme of most of the contributor to this blog, it’s obvious that this has some veracity. However, like most things in this movie, this theme is taken to the extreme. Several characters literally renounce their old lives, successful careers and even their families in order to “cutaway” everything that is not skydiving. I’m not saying that never happens (we all know how our priorities shift in the face of a weekend filled with blue skies) but c’mon, must we quit our jobs? How would we even survive? There are no tandem customers seen after the first time Cooper goes to the drop zone. There is no business done other than drug running. I know we can all live (especially when sleeping in a tent on the DZ)  for far less than a mainstream person, but somebody’s gotta pay for the rig, the booze, the condoms, the tunnel time. Right? I guess suspension of disbelief is needed early in order to enjoy this film.

There are of course a few technical issues and continuity errors. The drogue comes and goes from the tandem sequence. The drug runners jump in on a 9 cell and then 20 minutes later jump off a building using 7 cell (base rig?) canopies out of the same containers.

The supposed skydive training is hilarious. Cooper bribes another tandem student to switch places on the plane in order to jump with the hot female instructor, Star. While learning to skydive, Cooper is almost immediately flying head down, freeflying like a pro, doing crew work, base jumping and other insane things that are not just implausible, but crazy. I’m surprised they didn’t show him proximity flying in a squirrel suit. But I digress.

All in all, it is worth the watch. Maybe, if I had a few cocktails, and it was raining, I’d watch it again.

The ending alone is epic. It is so bad that it almost redeemed the film.

And also, we cannot review this film without considering this great quote by Red Line:

Everyone thinks that I love this life, that I chose THIS. Who would choose this? It’s a God damn curse! Infructus!

Have you seen it? What did you think? What should I watch next?

I wish I was a new AFF student again. For reals.

Since graduating AFF and completing my A license I am feeling a little lost.

When I go out to the drop zone, I no longer have an agenda. There is no clear plan.

The instructions upon completion of your A license are essentially this: Learn. Be safe. Don’t do anything too stupid. Have fun. Bring more beer.

I feel conflicted. I know that I have many things to work on (my track, my relative work, my body control, my canopy piloting) to be competent as a beginner. But where to start? How to best make progress? Where’s my “stop being a newbie pansy-ass idiot” checklist?

My newbie friend and I hatch plans to go up and do two ways and three ways and then we are thrilled when fundamental skills like a good exit come off and encourage each other about all the stuff we are “still working on” (i.e. SUCK at). But while we learn little bits, we don’t really push each other the way a more experienced jumper would be able to  push us and teach us. We think everything we do is awesome, because we are dopey and don’t know any better.

I also have some more advanced friends asking me to jump, which is very enticing, but sometimes I worry I am going too far too fast when I try to “play” with them and do a sitfly or a head down when I still can’t consistently do fundamental skills like dock and fly relative. When I’m up with them I feel embarrassed. They are nice about it, but how long will that last?

And then there are the days when there is no one to jump with. All my friends are either occupied with working jumps (flying camera, tandems, AFF instructing etc) or doing cool things I cannot even try to do (freefly groups and big-ways). I look around the drop zone and think: “Hmm. Bummer. Nobody to jump with. Maybe I’ll go work on my packing skills. Whimper. At least I’m saving money…” (I am pathetic sometimes.)

I’m stuck in the newbie zone: I know enough to realize how much I suck, yet I feel like the path to feeling “skilled” seems not only long, but hard to find.

I never know what to work on next or how to make that skill come. I know tunnel time would help – tunnel time would allow me to create some muscle memory with immediate feedback so I can better understand how what I THINK I am telling my body to do and what it actually does are not remotely the same (as they so often appear to not be). But tunnel time is waaay costly, and I’m already stuck in the vortex of saving for my rig while trying to jump regularly and pay for rental gear. It’s a viscous circle with no apparent end.

So, now I’m just whining. Which is just stupid because my biggest problem is that I love to skydive and have a ridiculously awesome new passion and am being stimulated by a new challenge and seduced by adrenalin and how can I even begin to complain when life is this good? Right?

So, enough already. Less whining, more jumping. See ya up in the clouds.