Well, What Would You Do If Your Child Wanted to Skydive?

This is not an endorsement for jumping out of airplanes. Nor is it an endorsement of mothers who approve of their children jumping out of airplanes. People who jump out of airplanes may be killed or injured. Mothers who approve of children jumping out of airplanes, well, they will be tortured.

There is a T-shirt in the skydiving school in Perris Valley that taunts with a message along the lines of “What’s the matter? Your Mommy wouldn’t let you jump?” A colleague, when she hears where I’m going on my day off, confides that her own daughter is a master with a thousand jumps to her credit and yet she has never been able to bring herself to watch her do it. Another mother tells me that, without her knowledge, her son jumped--but, thank God, just once.

This issue of mothers and jumping out of airplanes is visceral. Why am I not trying to stop my daughter? Why am I aiding and abetting her? And, if I am so cool about all this, why am I not jumping with her?

Between the time the guy in the skydiving shop asks if I’m sure I don’t want to jump today and the time my daughter signs a legal waiver saying she’s jumping at her own risk, I do take a deep breath. It’s during the video she is required to watch of the attorney for the school and airport explaining in the plainest language possible that people who jump out of airplanes may be killed or injured and that no one here having anything to do with any of this can or will in any way be held responsible if that happens. No one responsible? Does that include me?

“Old enough to vote,” I said when my daughter turned 18. “Old enough to go skydiving,” she said and started printing out pages from Web sites. She has friends who want to go but, when it came time to commit, they couldn’t or wouldn’t. She went off to college last fall, and the whole scheme was put on hold until this summer.

Did she still want to go to Perris with an e? What was I saying? It was a summer unpunctuated with our usual trip together, and somehow the words just came out.

When the parachute doesn’t open, it’s called “bouncing,” my friend tells me. She has a friend (a Flying Elvis!) with thousands of jumps, would I like her to call and see if he has any recommendations? Which is how we have ended up here at Jim Wallace Skydiving at the tiny Perris Valley Airport in Riverside County.

This is a hot spot for the sport, home to two skydiving schools and an assortment of other airstrip businesses and ultralight aircraft. It seldom rains here, and flying and jumping go on pretty much all year long. If you’re from out of the area and want to spend all your money on jumping and not lodgings, you can pitch your tent in the gravel parking lot. Residents of the dusty tent city are divers from Europe and elsewhere.

Nearly all first-time skydivers do what is called a tandem jump in which they are attached by a four-point harness to an experienced diver. This is great news for mothers. Your child is jumping out of an airplane with someone who is as highly motivated as you at having this go well.

The great news for jumpers is that, for about $200 plus $75 if you want the video, you get the experience of free-falling (jumping with no strings attached and plunging toward Earth at 120 miles an hour) for about a minute, of pulling the rip cord to open your chute, of catching your breath and playing around riding the airwaves for several more minutes, and of touching down with someone who has done it all many times.

There were no other mothers on the ground to visit with while hanging around, but plenty of nice people. People not afraid of much, I think. Once you’ve jumped out of an airplane, what is there to be afraid of? And all the people here have jumped out of planes--perfectly good airplanes, as they like to say. I haven’t joined them because I can’t see myself in that moment where you actually exit the aircraft.

But that moment is the ultimate rush that keeps jumpers going back for more says Joe, the young man in the skydiving office. He has jumped 4,000 times and will later jump--with a video camera--right after my daughter. Jim Wallace, to whom my daughter will be harnessed, has jumped 17,000 times and is, we are told later by post-jump partyers eating burgers and drinking beer in the cafe off the runway, a legend. Earlier in the day, he has flown off to do stunt work for an MTV show, something with a rocky landing and a smoke bomb.

Before getting on the plane, instructors and students practice getting off it. On a cutaway of a plane, they balance in the doorway, right knee down and toes of left foot curled around the edge, arms in an X across the chest. This demonstration doorway is 2 inches off the ground. When this gets real, they will be more than 2 miles--12,500 feet--above Earth.

Once out of the plane, limbs are to go out spread eagle, head up, pelvis thrust forward. This is not the way we normally exit planes, on climate-controlled gangways after having kept our seat belts fastened until the plane has come to a full and complete stop. In this plane, my daughter tells me, they put on seat belts before takeoff, but as soon as they hit 1,500 feet, they unbuckle--heck, they’re wearing parachutes.

Walking single-file past the sign warning that propellers can chop off heads, the dozen or so full-fledged skydivers and two first-time divers--my daughter and fellow student Donna--board the plane. They are first in because they will be last off. I watch from the ground with the two other students they trained with, Donna’s friend Julie and Julie’s visiting-from-New-York-nephew Ryan, who have already gone. When Julie e-mailed her sister, Ryan’s mom, earlier in the week that she was taking him skydiving, there was an uncharacteristic silence. What was there to say? She doesn’t know it yet, but I do: Her son is fine. So are the scores of other sons and daughters I’ve seen land today.

We watch and listen as the plane circles and rises overhead. At last we see the chutes opening. They are beautiful against the sky and yes, at last I can see the one that I know is my daughter and it is thrilling. Down she and her jumping partner come, and, as if she did it every day like he does, they hit their mark and walk to a stop. We are both smiling. She was brave, and I’m the proud mom. The truth is--and really, I’m not crazy--I liked seeing my kid jump out of a plane.