1/ Friend saw my restaurant stuff and sent me an email I'd sent from an account long since deleted. Forgot I'd written this, thanks Steve! Roughly, "How I got into professional skydiving."

2/ In the summer between the first and second year of graduate school, the most seasoned tandem master and AFF instructor, “Ozzy” Brad came home one night and said, “Keith, you’re very good for your experience level, but if you really want to keep jumping you have to get paid…

3/ …to skydive, otherwise you’ll just need a high-paying job to support an expensive hobby, and you’ll languish making a few jumps a day on the weekends. Eventually, you’ll be not good at either. I’m going to teach you to fly camera.”

4/ This was exhilarating, and of course he was right. He flew one-on-one positional jumps with me to teach me the wingsuit, loaned me his camcorder and helmet, taught me to sight it, a biteswitch for still photos, ride an exit up close, and safely do the job.

5/ After maybe 20 jumps like this, he insisted that I fly camera for every student he had that hadn’t elected the photo video shoot.

6/ He taught me to edit as well, and the drop zone owner soon put me on every plane with a student that might buy the photo/video package, since I sold my 80% of my spec videos after the fact: He charged $110, and I got $50.

7/ It was an absolute racket all around, I started making 8 jumps a day on weekends. It doesn’t matter per se, but I was 25 and making $1200 a week as an engineer M-F, and anywhere from $400-800 a weekend skydiving by the tail end of summer.

8/ I quickly spent that money improving my gear, buying a second rig for back to backs, getting my own wingsuit, helmet, camcorder, still camera, and editing rig.

9/ When winter hit, I started flying to Florida on long weekends and over holiday breaks to get coaching, fly camera for big ways, or learn “relative work,” skydiving’s most prestigious competitive discipline.

10/ This repeated for another summer, and on Sept 15th 1999 or so, I woke up early, and experienced, viscerally, a fear that if I stayed in engineering I would likely wind up identical to many of the senior engineers I had met in my time at Lockheed and also Telaxis.

11/ I had a real chance to do something with skydiving, and certainly only one youth to take it with. I gave my notice and two weeks later packed up my beaten up Honda Accord and drove to Eloy, Arizona.

12/ Mecca to professional skydivers and the single busiest drop zone in the world.

I arrived in Eloy and, no surprise, there was no hope of finding work. In the winter, the entire US north american skydiving workforce condenses into California, Arizona, and Florida.

13/ A lot of European pros too, and Eloy more than them all. I happily jumped and lived right up until my savings were exhausted.

14/ (I’d had to return a hefty signing bonus, long since gone, when I left my radio design job.) I had enough money to live, but couldn’t keep jumping like that. I was living in a tent, and started to wake up with the sun to stretch, run, and do "dry" skydiving exercises.

15/ The owner of the dropzone gear shop hired me for 2 shifts a week making minimum wage, and I was lucky for that. New professionals scrabble hard in Eloy, and when you’re broke any work is worth taking.

16/ The only other people up and in the hanger at dawn were Arizona Airspeed, the best 4-way RW team in the world, rivaled somewhat by the French. Eloy was their home dropzone.

17/ After seeing me across the hangar for two weeks, they invited me to join in daily stretching, runs, and meditation sessions. It helped that my boss at the gear store was married to one of them.

18/ Suddenly, Kirk’s mother in law passed, his wife had to return to Switzerland to be with her family, which meant Kirk had to get the kids off to school in the mornings.

19/ “Hey Keith, could you fly morning camera for us for a couple weeks?”

Those jumps are, to this day, some of the best memories of my life. Literally flying 120 mph and 48” above the best skydivers in the world.

20/ The Swiss team arrived in Eloy, they were being coached by Airspeed. They were ranked 5th in the world. To them, I was Airspeed’s reserve camera flyer, and I could fly. Well. Then, a week later, their cameraman found out he could not get mandatory military service deferred.

21/ “Hey Keith, could you take over camera and compete with us in the World Meet next summer?”

Next thing I knew, I was making 8-10 jumps a day, 4 days a week.

22/ We flew to Portugal, sponsored by a rural drop zone, and not far from Granada, where the world meet would be held.

On April 12, 2001, we arrived at the dropzone earlier than usual. Spring rains had wiped out most of the first 6 weeks of our training regimen.

23/ We ran, stretched, blocked out formation sequences, meditated, visualized… and languished with frustration. 10 skydives seems like a lot, but even at 13k feet exit altitude each jump amounts to maybe 45 seconds of actual training time.

24/ The rest is spent breaking apart early enough for 5 skydivers to create separation and safely deploy. Even 7 days of this amounts to only 52 minutes of immersed training, and training 7 days isn’t sustainable or smart.

25/ Losing most of the 6 weeks had hurt badly, we should have stayed in Arizona? Should we go back? Florida? Italy?

April 12th was windy and cold, but technically within threshold. We were anxious and part of our job was to show other jumpers it was safe.

26/ We loaded into the Twin Otter. At 13k, we exited too early. Not dramatic until normal conditions, but turns out the upper winds or “uppers” as they call them were even stronger than those at ground level. At 5000’ my first altimeter warning went off, signaling break.

27/ I watched Martin, Marcus, Nina, and Mike break and track away. I stayed in “the hole,” falling straight down, which is customary. At 4250’ my second altimeter went off and I began to deploy.

28/ Normally this would have me under canopy by 3500’ or so, 3000’ if it unfurled a bit slowly.

3000’ came and went as I struggled under a streaming mess of nylon. We had planned to do 3 jumps back to back.

29/ I only had 2 rigs of my own, the 3rd I borrowed from Martin, who weighed about 40 pounds less than me. I could manage and even enjoyed flying the main parachute. It was slick, particularly loaded by my extra weight and that of my gear.

30/ The reserve however was even smaller, fine to land in good conditions but too small to get any drive with me under it. If I cut away the main and deployed the reserve, it would certainly open but I’d need to essentially land an F-35 in a driveway. NOT. GOOD.

31/ I fought and fought, shaking the risers like a maniac to clear the slider, which I could see clearly was tangled up with the grommets on the canopy itself. “Okay, I’ll fight it to 1500’, then I’ve got to spray and pray.

32/ Fuck” That said, I was calm, skydivers train very diligently for malfunctions. Mains malfunction every 800 jumps or so, reserves ALWAYS open. I’d had two cutaways in my novice 900 jump career.

33/ At 1000’’ my AAD (automatic activation device) would cut away the main and deploy the reserve if I were still in freefall, designed for unconscious skydivers.

2700, 2500, 2200, 2000, 1700… SLAM.

34/ The slider shot down the lines and my camera loaded head slammed my chin into my sternum. It had opened fast, a “snapper” as they say.

35/ Good in these circumstances, actually I inspected the canopy, stowed the slider, checked the lines, unstowed the toggles for steering, and looked down. Ok, still fucked.

36/ The uppers had pushed me a mile downwind and the malfunction cost me any hope of training altitude for drive to make it back.

The dropzone we were jumping was in an airfield that had literally been cut off the top of a mountain in WW2.

37/ The mountain was surrounded by a dense forest. Gorgeous really, unless you have to land a too-small canopy with precious little altitude to trade for forward drive to get to anything even close to a decent landing area.

38/ Panic faded quickly and I spotted a tiny clearing I could probably make it to. I began to work the back and front risers, slowing my decent and then gaining penetration into the wind in turns.

39/ There’s a thing about turbulence, which can shift a canopy 10-50’ ft in any direction in an instant. When wind rolls over a surface that then drops, it begins to roll, creating up/down turbulence.

40/ When wind encounters a series of vertical obstacles, building or in this case trees, it begins to shear and creates left/right turbulence. 20 mph downwind of a plateau dropping down a mountain side, and then plowing into an ancient forest of thick trees- I had both.

41/ Things were going great, all things considered. I was about 50’ off the ground, set on perfect approach for my tiny landing strip under my too-small canopy. Laser focused, suddenly a gust put me into direct collision with a tree.

42/ Skydivers are taught that punctured lungs kill much faster than broken backs and legs, with no hesitation I dove the canopy to the right and plowed into the ground at about 90 mph. I lost consciousness after the first few rolls.

43/ A later excursion would show that it was about 50’ of tumbling, and early on my helmet had smashed into the ground and the wide angle lens had been ripped off. It was 8 inches into the ground when I dug it out on crutches 6 weeks later.

44/ Those irritating rains had saved my life by keeping the soil soft for which ever part the roll I took head first into the ground.