December [1997] jump report

"Wrap it up , ...I'll take it." heard on a texmex radio

The El nino effect has brought alot of warm but cloudy weather to Kansas in December. I've used all this IFR time to finish a large studio assignment ,do all the Season's parties with some amount of grace and then have a weeks worth of flu. As is often the case in anybodies life , all this down time from skydiving has given pause for personal reflection . As a result, a whole new crop of creative ideas has sprung up on my list of things to do and accomplish . Along with it has come a clearer sense of what I've already pulled off. It's sort of a Rudy-shot thing... .

I'm still vibrating off the Homegrown unofficial/unannouced reunion just before Christmas. It gave me time to put some demons to rest. Over the past 20 years I've had many close skydiving friends die , it's a Litany-- Art, Eric, Wolf, the Major, Herby, Boo, Brad, Nick, Jim, Garrison, Braindead...and , truth, I don't think I've ever come to grips with it all. End the end, I just always keep skydiving...maybe just alittle to hard....maybe to keep ahead of the demon I've always imagined just behind me . At the reunion, I had to talk to Scotty. He is facing a losing battle with brain cancer. He will likely be the next air burial I go on. After talking with him the dark side seems lighter somehow. More focused.

The reunion party also brought into clear focus a view of the state of skydiving that has severe implications on the future of the sport. I didn't notice it until that night at the party while primering my featurette video, a 20 minute reel culled from 3 and half hours of vertical RW shot over the last year and a half. To my amazement, some of the homegrown didn't know about VRW and the one's who did jeered it like dumb pagans. I got around the moment by just saying their was alot going on with RW in the vertical world worth exploring.

My first reaction was to take a chauvinist freefly stance and make fun of the flat world they lived in, but, I didn't. The next week, reflecting on this event, I realized the larger implications of this generational clash of freefall experts. The sudden appearance of the gap has coincided with the trend towards fracturalizing and regional camps with different sets of rules and standards. This break in the legal face of the industry is giving air traffic control and the insurance industry all the rope they need to hang all of us and put skydiving out of the finacial reach of 95% of the population. If the industry can't instigate manuvers designed to unify the grass roots of skydiving, ... '..bar the doors, Katty"

I think the problem lies in education. The industry keeps missing opportunities to raise the consciousnous of the public about Parachuting and freefall. The biggest sin is the failure to teach history and commradary in the instruction phase and to throughly explain the various competitions available to the parachutists. It could be so easy.... cause its the gate everyone has to go through.... .