Anyone Who Has Ever Been Asked For Something Having To Do With Skydiving has probably heard the "why" question. It is usually phrased something like "why do you risk your life just to fall out of an airplane?" and generally, if they have to ask, I just assume they can't understand. I usually give them some canned answer, some sound bite that's as accurate as anything else they'll put in the article. Some favorites:
"because the door is open"
"for the freedom and blah blah of flight"
"because it's better than sex"
But lately I've been thinking about it a bit more. A climber friend of mine, has been writing a bunch of stuff about risk and challenge, and I’ve been talking to her about what she's writing. Amy and I have been talking about what sort of risk people want (or need) in their lives. Mike Vederman's been writing his version of "why we jump" and what skydiving is worth to him. Mike recently mentioned that he liked skydiving for many of the same reasons he liked golf, which seems strange.
So why do I jump? What about it draws me to it? What's so great about it that makes it worth risking my life to attempt it?
The most basic thing about it, for me, is that it lets me fly. For as long as I can remember I’ve looked up at the sky and wanted to be up there. And I think that basic drive is responsible for a lot of the things I’ve pursued in my life - skydiving and even scuba diving in a strange way. And, for me, skydiving seems like the purest form of flight. Still imperfect - we'll never be birds. But for a few minutes we can come close. Why do I want to fly? Why does a sensible land animal, with two feet and no wings, desire the sky? I have no idea. But it's one of the things about my psyche that I just accept. When I consider the things I might have been drawn to - alcohol, drugs, money, and violence - I consider myself pretty lucky. And when I consider that if I had been born even 120 years earlier my feet would have never left the ground, I feel very lucky indeed.
One of my earliest childhood dreams involved running down a hill, leaping in the air again and again, until finally I just flew away. How many people get to live out their dreams like that? There's also something really basic about the challenge of skydiving that appeals to me. Every single jump I make is a test, in a way. You have to pull. You have to deal with mals. You have to fly a fast little canopy through traffic, through the pattern, and land safely on the ground again. The penalty for failing at any of that is death or injury. And I think there's a deep part of me that looks for tests, that wants to pit my skills against the forces trying to drive me into the ground. I think this may be a basic desire in many people. I see it in the macho posturing of drunk guys in bars, in kids playing chicken with the train, even in frat guys seeing how much they can drink. I think some people really need to be able to pit themselves against a dangerous opponent, even when it's something as basic as gravity. It also explains some of the basic contradictions inherent to my participation in skydiving. Some people get stuck on the s+ta thing - "you jump out of planes, then make a big deal about safety?" the way I see it, it's a contest between my skill, my gear, and gravity, and I’m going to bend the odds in my favor. For me that means I don't hook turn or jump super small canopies. For other people it means they always use an aad or whatever. I will always look for new challenges. But at the same time, I’m going to stack the deck so my skills are enough to save my life, even when the shit hits the fan (which it does with monotonous regularity.) A while back I heard a song that, I think, describes the longing for this sort of challenge. I forget the name of the song - I always think of it as "the whuffo song," in honor of the people who stay on the ground and then wonder why they feel like something's missing:

~~have you ever had the odds stacked up so high
~~you need a strength most don't possess?
~~or has it ever come down to do or die you've got to rise above the rest?

~~I’ve never had to, knock on wood
~~but I know someone who has
~~which makes me wonder if I could . . .

~~I’m not a coward, I’ve just never been tested
~~I’d like to think that if I was I would pass
~~look at the tested and think there but for the grace go
~~I might be a coward - I’m afraid of what I might find out.

We, as skydivers, are the tested. Every single one of us has conquered our basic fear of heights, performed under pressure, and acted to save our own lives. Most of us have dealt with problems that, unless remedied, would have killed us. Some of us have done more altruistic things, swooping down on people who aren't pulling and saving their lives as well. And for each one of these things, each test we pass, we're validating ourselves, measuring ourselves not against a relative scale of skill or merit, but against the absolutes of gravity, speed and our own fragile existence. That absolute scale is something else that attracts me, I think. Four-way competitions are fun, but I will never be as good as John Eagle, and it's not worth (to me) spending the rest of my life trying. But there are absolutes, where you are simply good enough or you aren't. I know I’m an ok rigger, for example, because from my first base jump, I assembled, packed and tested my own base rig - and it worked. I know I’m ok at jumpmaster-type flying because my friends don't get away from me. Those are the scales I use, and they don't change. I guess the thing that struck me about the skydiving-golf analogy was that, for me, the two most important parts of skydiving (flying and that absolute skill requirement) are missing from golf - or from pretty much any low-risk ground sport. I see a really big difference there. There are many other reasons that I like skydiving. It requires skill, and I like working at something and becoming better at it. It lets me do fun things with my friends. It lets me hang out with some remarkable people. But all these things are common with nearly every other fun thing I do, from community service to mountain biking to volunteer work on a domestic violence shelter somewhere. They are not unique to skydiving, although they are definitely good parts of it. I don't know if any of this is true for other people, but it seems like it's true for me. Now if I could just compress all that into a ten-second sound bite I’d be all set.