I felt him tap me on the shoulder,
then again, and yell something in my
ear, and I peeled my hands off the har-
ness handles and thrust my arms out
wide, like I was supposed to. I tried to
think about arcing my body into a slight
bow: feet together, head up, my belly
pointing the way down. I stared at the
ground rushing up at us, and suddenly
I opened my mouth and spoke for the
first time since we’d started the flight up.
“Holy shit!” I yelled, and the wind
seemed to tear the words out of my
mouth to make room for more. “Holy
shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!” A small part
of my brain noted, amazed, that I could
even hear myself, could even produce
audible speech, with the force of the
air roaring by me. (Later, I would learn
that we had reached a peak speed of
163 kilometres per hour.)
I screamed those same two words
over and over through our entire 37
seconds of free fall. Once I got started,
I couldn’t seem to stop. My voice got
hoarse, my throat raw. I kept holler-
ing. Dimly, over the sound of my own
swearing, I heard Barry say something
about our chute, then a force seemed
to pluck at us from above—not a hard
jerk, but now my feet were dangling
below me and I could feel my weight
pushing down on the crotch straps of
my harness.
I stopped yelling. Barry reached for-
ward and offered me the straps that
controlled the parachute, to let me
steer. It took me a couple of tries to putFear Factor
Fast facts about what
scares us, from Eva
Holland’s Nerve■ We experience fear in two
ways: physically (a reaction by
our central nervous system to
unpleasant stimuli) and emo-
tionally (a reaction to a threat).■ Sigmund Freud theorized
that fears and phobias can ori-
ginate in a complex response to
a sexual attraction.■ Another theory is that our
phobias were imprinted in our
DNA by ancient humans, for
whom fear equalled survival.■ Stress and heart attacks
prompted by nightmares have
been blamed for a series of
unexplained deaths in the 1980s
among Laotian refugees living
in the United States.■ One in 20 people have a fear
of heights, according to a
Dutch study.■ Researchers have demon-
strated that we release alarm
pheromones when we’re
afraid—and that other people
can smell your fear.reader’s digest
94 april 2020