"Just remember: They're all out to kill you"

Those were the sage words of advice imparted to me by Christine Fouchard, my drop zone's mother hen, just before I departed to attend my first boogie. I'm a couple of feet taller than her so she was looking almost straight up at me as she delivered that line and emphasized it by shaking her finger in my face. She went on to say: "They don't know you, they won't care about you, and none of them is going to go and explain to your mother why you're not coming home!" That last part was accompanied by her stomping her foot as she continued to shake her finger at me. I didn't take her seriously, obviously she was overstating the case. Or so I thought. Then I got to that first boogie and sure enough a whole bunch of people I had never met before and whom I had never given any reason to want me dead spent the whole weekend doing everything possible to get me killed. Or so it seemed. I spent two days with people landing on me, dive bombing me, hitting me from behind, sliding under me and stealing my air, docking on me and dragging me out of position, or docking on me and shoving me into everyone in front of me. I was kicked, punched, choked, and they took turns trying to rip my arms loose at the shoulders every time we exited the plane. All while hurtling earthwards at 120 miles an hour. It seemed to me that every time we landed, one or another of the morons who had just tried to kill me came over to explain what I had been doing wrong. Since it was the first time I'd been to one of these things I didn't know enough to tell them to get stuffed. It struck me that most of those people were suffering from delusions of adequacy and would have been out of their depth in a parking lot puddle, let alone on a big way skydive. At the end of that weekend I vowed to never attend another boogie or go out the door with anything bigger than a 4-way ever again. But I never have learned from my mistakes.

Here I am, 16 years and a couple thousand skydives later, headed to Perris Valley California to take part in a Perris Performance Plus Big-Way Camp, to be followed by an attempt at setting a new Canadian National skydiving record for the largest formation. Dragging a bunch of Canadians to California to set a Canadian record is just plain wrong for several reasons, but I could use the big-way training, and I was on the last record (59) and I'm damn well going to be on the next one. Some of the best Canadian skydivers will be making the trip to California along with some...........others........., including a few of the scary ones who tried so hard to kill me at that first boogie so long ago. But whereas before I only had to deal with a single planeload of yahoo's, this time I'm going to be doing my best to dodge and out maneuver 5 planeloads for a total of up to 100 people. I've been on skydives with up to 75 people in Florida and they went very well, but they were invitational events where only the best players got invited. Truth be told, the only reason I got invited was because Nathalie sent an email telling the organizer to put me on. The experts at P3 will spend six days doing their best to teach us how to safely pile out the doors of 5 different aircraft to all meet at one place in the sky without landing on anybody, hitting anybody, getting under them and stealing their air or any of the other stupid stuff all while hurtling earthward at 120 miles an hour. Really, what could possibly go wrong? It's not like we're going to be doing CRW. (A bizarre variation on skydiving invented by people who didn't think that jumping out of an airplane was lethal enough.)

I'll be getting picked up by some friends from Winnipeg at LAX on Monday afternoon and we'll head straight to the drop zone to do paperwork and get checked in. We'll do a couple of jumps on Tuesday to blow off the rust, which should be pretty sporty since none of us has jumped since October, and the skills camp starts early on Wednesday morning.

I just can't stop thinking about all those people who are going to try and kill me. Oscar Wilde said "The basis of optimism is sheer terror." With that in mind, I guess I'm feeling pretty optimistic.