Today's story takes place in Ohio. For my birthday, my mother gave me some amount of money and told me to use it to learn to fly. I wanted to go hanggliding, but much of Ohio has the wrong geography for that, and the amount wasn't quite enough for a flight lesson, so I decided to jump out of a plane. There was a place not too far from Oberlin where you could take a two hour course and then they would take you up; so I signed up there. The class was about 20 minutes of knowledge one might need when jumping out of a plane. This advice included the nugget that we weren't to have long in freefall and should pull our cords about 15 seconds after leaving the plane; but this was our first jump, and it would probably take us that long to start counting, so to just scream FUCK! at the top of our lungs about 5 times and then pull. (this was good advice)
The rest of the two hours was looking at a map of the surrounding farmland. We were supposed to land on their property, but again this was a first jump, and if we screwed up, we might end up at the neighbors'. Most of the farms we were to gather up our parachutes as best we could and find the nearest gate (gates were marked in red on the aerial view). There was one place where they were breeding thoroughbred race horses, and we were on no account to open any gates there; the woman had raised the lowest bar on the fences towards our goal and we should be able to roll under. "And THIS field. This field here- there is a bull. If you land here, fuck the parachute- there is a knife in you jumpsuit pocket, cut your lines and run for whichever fence is closest. Jumping out of a plane isn't dangerous. That bull though- that bull is dangerous" (I'm not sure whether this was good advice. Should one run from a bull? or back away slowly? Don't know, didn't have to find out)
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