Another thing you expect is that a free fall before the parachute opens will give you a feeling of airy weightlessness, your body floating so far above the ground that your perspective on the land doesn't noticeably change. Such is not true; it doesn't happen that way at all.
THE THING you become immediately aware of as soon as you step out and fall is the peculiar relationship you have to the airplane. You want the airplane, you long for the airplane, you almost helplessly pine for the airplane. You want it because it is the last thing you could understand.
You see the progress of your situation in terms of the instantaneously huge distance between you and the airplane. Because the airplane is turning and accelerating and because your downward speed is accelerating while your forward velocity is decelerating due to wind resistance, the airplane loses the meaning it once had as a geometrical point of reference.
You are slowly turning over in the air because you've forgotten about counting and about maintaining aerodynamic form as your mind gropes amongst all that it has ever seen for an explanation.
The white landscape slides irrelevantly back and forth into view like an askew plane in space. You expected beforehand to have a feeling of neat perpendicularity towards the land you were falling to. But as you fall, your mind isn't aware of any geometrical relationship to the ground; it relates only to the airplane.
Quite apart from your mind, however, your bowels, as your center of gravity, have this extreme feeling of weightfulness. Your body tingles with the speed and your toes want to crawl back upwards away from the deep magenta 17.
You are unable to establish a mental understanding or even an emotional understanding of the wind. Because it keeps coming stronger and stronger, it lifts your lighter limbs like your legs, and it keeps changing directions because you are rotating in a movement you are still unaware of. The terrific wind separates you completely from your hands and feet. You experience the shoulders and thighs nearest you; but the outer limbs are lost to the environment.
Your mind is hiding inside your head, daring only occasionally to peak out through your eyes. What it sees it remembers as being all white and moving very fast at sharp angles.
On an emotional level, you are trying to stand up. You really want to be able to say something to yourself. You want to be able to tell yourself you know something, to establish that the dropping feeling in your bowels means this-and-that in relation to your body's existence in this environment as a whole.
But there is nothing you can say, there's nothing it can mean, there just simply isn't anything at all in your experience that you can call to mind to compare with this and conclude anything from. Falling through the sky is totally unknown.
People say they can jump without being afraid, which is quite true for them. If you were counting and think- ing the preplanned thoughts, you would probably be tensely exhilarted. But if you were aware of your environment, you would have to know that everything, including you, was unknown.
The mental state of fear is just a name we give to the helpless feeling of being confronted by something totally unknown, and then trying to find an answer to it and being unable. People fear death because they have to explain it and can't; and they can consciously not fear a vaccination because they know enough about the pain.
Because it is completely unknown, falling through the sky is ultimately terrifying. Your first reaction to the parachute's opening (after the one second lag it takes for your mind to catch up with your now slowed body) is "GOD IT OPENED IT OPENED I'M SLOWED DOWN I'M NOT GOING TO DIE I'M NOT GOING TO DIE."
That happens four seconds after you jump out. You smile the rest of the way down, floating very slowly for two and a half minutes down to the ground. You have a very clear mental understanding of your geometrical relationship to the land.
Landing is no more difficult than jumping off a ten foot bureau. And finally all relationships are reestablished.
The existential weight of this experience is obvious. In an age that just lets you do this thing to yourself, you should let it happen