Alex is absolutely terrified of heights. In the weeks leading up to our jump, he really drove this point home.

Alex had planned to record the chronology of the day leading up to the jump. This did not come about. In his words, “When you think about the fact that you’re going to be falling 14,000 feet, you tend not to write about it.”

Here is what he got:

10:15 – woke up

10:30 – 11:02 – Nick called and told me he was on the way. I started to make a mix of music for the day that would just make it wonderful to dance to. Ended up with a mix with some Aesop Rock, Eagles Of Death metal and TV On the Radio with a splash of Blood Brothers.

11:04 – pick up our photographer Valerie

11:05 – 11:41 – Dance party on the way to Taft

11:41 – arrive in Taft.

While this is is a pretty entertaining synopsis of the morning, it could pretty much describe any day of Alex’s life.

After we arrived in Taft, we confirmed our reservation and found out our jump time. In the meantime, we met up with Wayne Berryhill.

We had met Wayne the week before when our jump was rained out. While we were waiting to see if the rain would clear up, he regaled us with dirty jokes, clean jokes, and a brief history of his insane life.

While getting our jump set back a week was a bit of a bummer, the plus side was that we got to hang out with Wayne and the rest of the Skydive Taft crew.

“Everyone at Skydive Taft is wrapped up in some sort of badassery, so it kind of took a lot of the fear away,” Alex speaks the truth. These guys and gals are well versed in staying alive while being strapped to the back of some terrified wannabe daredevil. Thinking about that really takes the edge off.”

We also met up again with Jade Tatom, who had caught our attention the week before due to his crazy camera-rigged helmet. Jade is completely off his rocker.

We weren’t at the hangar for very long before Wayne pulled us aside and gave us our basic jump tutorial. He showed us how the body position of the jumper can affect the overall jump, which made all the difference

Wayne also told me that he was going to be my instructor during the jump. This means that he will be the guy strapped to my rump for the duration of my descent to earth.

Alex’s jump instructor was a guy known only as Jester. No offense to any of the other guys who jump there, but on first impressions, Jester wins the award for ballsiest jumper. The guy took a dive out of the plane sporting a Hawaiian shirt.

He also got Alex down to the ground in a timely fashion. Alex said, “The fact that i’m writing this shows that he does his job damn fine.”

I got to sit in the co-pilot’s chair on the flight up. This was the second most awesome thing I did that day.

While Jade was giving out complimentary high-fives to everyone on the plane, a Justin Timberlake song came on the radio,

Alex gave a pretty tame explanation of his reaction, considering how he totally lost it and started dancing when it came on. “I thought to myself, no matter what happens, at least I got to hear Justin Timberlake before I die,”

A couple of the other jumpers gave him weird looks, but I’m guessing that’s because they either don’t know how to dance, or they have girlfriends who listen to way too much dance music. Either one of these can cause a negative reaction to Timberlake.

Then we fell out of an airplane. Alex and Jester were the last ones out of the door. Alex recounts:

When it was Jester’s and my turn to jump we went up to the door that’s wide open to the world. I had to put my feet on the edge of the plain and so the tip of my toes were hangin over. Jester tells me to look at the camera, and there is Jade with a camera just losing it, and yelling ‘Woo!’ with so much passion.

Then we count to three and Jester just yells ‘Geronimo!’ and then I am falling toward the Earth. We did a few flips right when we left the plane. The only reason I know this is because Nick told me so. I don’t really remember the fall too much, I think my eyes were closed. It’s a really weird experience its almost dream like.

The whole time, I am just trying to stay alive, and Jester keeps moving my head toward Jade, whose just yelling and giving me thumbs up. Then, the parachutes go out and then were just floating.

Jester starts to tell me what we’re going to do and gives me the reigns to help guide us in a bit and play a round. The freefall was really awesome but due to my fear of heights I can’t say that the way down was my favorite thing in the world. But I made it down, and even though I couldn’t really function for the next few minutes, I remember being pretty happy to be alive.

Nick recounts: I remember a bit more vividly what happened. We did flip, and we had a really long freefall. My eyes were tearing up majorly because I didn’t put my goggles on right, but there was no way I was going to close them.

Skydiving is one of those things that is truly hard to describe by comparison. I suppose that this is why people always say that something is like skydiving, rather than skydiving being like something else. You can’t really compare in to any other experience.

However, it is really fast, and really awesome. When Wayne opened the chute, we both totally lost it and began yelling complete nonsense to one another. Our conversation was like the verbal equivalent of a Judas Priest song.

At some point of the day, whoever is in charge of the galaxy decided that getting to sit in the cockpit, bumrushing the Earth at 120 mph, and making Alex fall out of an airplane,weren’t enough activities for my day. Soon after my canopy was pulled, I also almost saw somebody die.

The guy who jumped right before me had waited too long to pull his main chute, and his reserve had automatically gone off at 4,000 feet.

I saw him spiralling down with both chutes deployed. I was on such an emotional rush from the freefall, that although I told myself, “That guy is going to die,” it really did not register.

When we saw it go down, Wayne changed our course and we started barrelling towards the guy. Then Wayne started screaming, “He’s okay! He’s up!” I couldn’t see because my eyes were so watery, plus I have terrible eyesight.

I’ll let the pictures fill in the rest of the story for you. We also have the video the Jade took hosted on our website, www.therip.com.