It was three weeks ago Wednesday, and like every Wednesday it was time for the UED group's weekly lunch-meeting. Since the speaker on this week's topic finished early, Ava, one of our newer gooeys (the pet name for folks in the GUI (aka UED) group) took the chance to field questions about her skydiving hobby.

I've thought about skydiving before, almost done it on several occasions but it was never the right time. I can't say the same thing for bungee jumping. My freshman year at Cal some of my hallmates were very into the idea, driving two hours to 'a train bridge where there are these guys' who will take $40 for two jumps. Forget about waivers and insurance; I'm not sure these guys had names. At any rate, I did end up bungee jumping three years later from a 250 foot crane above Boston Harbor under entirely different and unexpected circumstances, but that's another story.

Last week Ava sent out an email letting the group know about a skydiving trip this Saturday. I signed up.

I'd always been more afraid of skydiving than bungee jumping. At 250 feet, there's not much you can do but completely trust the equipment. There's no emergency bungee and, with a fall of only three seconds, there's not much chance to correct any error that might take place. From 14,000 feet and 60 seconds of freefall there's plenty of time to pull a MacGyver, or at least an emergency chute.

As the time to dive approaches though, I'm finding a lot more anxiety than I had before, and I'm figuring out why.

First off, I've never seen anyone skydive. I've seen Navy parachutists a couple times at sporting events, watched dives on TV and quicktime, and I've heard and read several firsthand accounts of friends' skydiving experiences, but I've never gone along, never seen someone I know jump out of the proverbial 'perfectly good airplane.' All my experience with airplanes are ones where the last thing in the world you'd want to do is jump out. I've been in a lot of planes: jets, seaplanes, four-seater Cessnas, planes with cabins smaller than a minivan with easy-to-reach door handles. I love to fly, and jumping out is one of those things that, though easy, you just don't do, like swerving into oncoming traffic on the highway. That's a lot to overcome.

I dream about flying more often than anything else. For a long while I wanted to learn paragliding, and I read up on it, read the faqs, first-person accounts, and lurked on the SF Bay Paragliding mailing list for over a year. I'd read about people's triumphant days catching thermals over Mt. Tamalpais, flying along the coast at the Dumps, and wherever there was a good updraft.

I read for a while because I wanted to get a fair idea of the danger involved. When a paraglider has a close call, they write it up, identifying what they did wrong (if anything), and how they (we) could avoid or recover from a similar circumstance. I read with fascination and amazement about the occasional technique workshops. One workshop, for example, involves gliding thousands of feet above a lake, pulling in your 'chute to go into freefall, and either re-deploying or deploying your emergency 'chute. If something doesn't deploy quite right, the drag, combined with the water-impact should offer protection.

Safety is on everyone's mind, and every three or four months word would come of a paraglider who had a fatal accident. Locally, in Mexico, overseas, the accident seemed to have very little to do with the experience of the pilot or the conditions. Random.

A frequent poster to the group died while I was a regular reader. He was a passenger on the Alaska Air MD-80 flight that went down off the California coast after its tail elevators malfunctioned. His wife, a flight attendant on the same flight, went down as well. The sorrow on the list (quite rightly) overshadowed the irony.

Over time I decided that, while I'd enjoy taking the passenger seat on a tandem flight, I probably wouldn't want to get into the level of dedication needed to be a paraglider.

Back to skydiving, it's one of those things I want to do once, to add an experience to the pile, part of living a large life. I'm glad I bungee jumped. I might do it again if the circumstances were right, but I don't feel the need to pursue it or proselytize to others.

As with paragliding, for a while I followed the skydiving newsgroups to get a feel for the sport and the attached culture. I found that there are typically a few dozen skydiving deaths a year, out of several hundred thousand jumps and upwards of a hundred thousand participants, and that in recent years, a good percentage of those have been accidents involving the plane, and not the canopy (again with the irony).

I was a newsgroup lurker when there was an accident at Skydance in Davis. A tandem dive (instructor and student strapped together, using a single canopy) went awry and both instructor and student perished. It was the only accident at SkyDance in the last 10 years, and toxicology reports indicated a high blood-alcohol level in the instructor.

Skydiving isn't something I'm going in to blindly. The risk is minute, less than a hundred things I do every year, but with a much more comprehensible disaster scenario. Even with bungee jumping, my analytical mind told me that the #1 bad thing that could happen would be if the cord broke. This would be most likely to happen at the moment of maximum stress, which would be when I was at the bottom of the dive, with a zero velocity. Jumping over Boston Harbor, this would have meant a 15 foot drop into water. Not a bad compromise.

As I mentioned, I only intend to jump once, which has also got its problems. If my goal is to enjoy the thrill of freefall, I'm not likely to be comfortable on my first dive. I don't see there being too much potential for mishap while jumping out of the plane itself, and so for the 60 seconds of freefall, I'd still be thinking about whether the canopy would open, only at that point there would be no turning back. Would this fatalism (poor word choice, but you get the gist) allow me to enjoy the experience in a que sera mentality? Or will I panic until the canopy opens?

Anyhow, the train's pulling in to Santa Clara, so I'd better wrap up. The dive is tomorrow, and I'll bring my video camera. I still don't know if I'll jump, though I'll probably have to pay the $160 jump fee as the price for putting off that decision until after jump training. I want to see other people do it. I want to see the looks on their faces, and glimpse their pre- and post-jump mentality. I want to get comfortable with the idea that people do this all the time.

I may or may not jump. :-)