What's the dumbest thing you ever did?

[Abax]

My friend and I had started skydiving before college. When we were working, money was no object, so we skydived all weekend, every weekend. But as we got a few years into college, funds were a little tighter, so we began to look for ways to skydive on the cheap (each climb to altitude in a plane was about $15 back then). We looked for some mountains to run off the edge of (like we did in Alaska a couple of times), but couldn't find anything high enough and steep enough with a good landing area. So I got the idea of towing our parachutes to altitude behind my friend's Suzuki Samurai.

There was a precedent for this. The round parachutes you've seen towed behind boats were actually adapted later for skydiving. In fact, my friend and I had both learned to jump on the skydiving version of these things - ParaCommanders. So we were just reversing the process by taking a parachute and adapting it to be towed behind a vehicle. I bought 500' of ¼" nylon rope, rigged up a quick disconnect for the parachute end, then we set off for the nearest deserted county road.

It actually took a little more effort than we thought to find a road that was absent a lot of wires crossing it, even out in the country. But we finally found a stretch of dirt road that was clear of obstructions for almost 2 miles. Since it was my idea, I got to go first. I hooked up the rope to the bumper of the Suzuki, attached it to my risers, and gave my friend the go ahead. At first, I was taking about 25' strides down the road, not quite able to lift off the ground. But I soon figured it out and pulled on the brakes and my square parachute pulled me into the air. I experimented with a few very gentle turns, mainly concentrating on keeping behind the Suzuki. As the wires at the end of our select road became more obvious, I figured it was time to make sure the release worked properly. I set myself free from the tow rope quite easily, about 200' above the road. "Hey, this isn't too bad!" I yelled.

But that was about to change. Towing the parachute had pulled it out of shape - far from the shape it would normally assume while flying. My canopy rocked far back, then rocked far forward as it changed back to its normal shape. That maneuver cost me most of my altitude and airspeed. All of a sudden, I was landing hard and fast. I didn't even have time to line up on the road. I drilled into the hard mud and corn stubble of a sun-baked ditch. Those jumps under the old ParaCommander came in handy, as I performed what's called a "parachute landing fall" to use up the tremendous amount of energy that was trying to pound me into the natural adobe. I came to rest on my back, the wind knocked out of me, but otherwise unhurt. I turned my head a little to the right, and lying just inches away in the dirt and corn was a big chunk of tilted concrete rubble, perhaps a piece of some now-defunct irrigation system. I had missed hammering into this 3' x 4' piece of concrete by the tiniest margin!

Just seconds after I landed, a man in a faded yellow Cadillac traveling in the same direction as our brief flight came upon me in the ditch. He stopped on the road in a cloud of dust and hollered out his window. "Are you Okay son?" It was all I could do to muster enough breath to tell him I was Okay and "just resting here while my friend comes back to pick me up." A few moments later, my friend had retrieved the rope and returned to my landing site.

"I don't think I need to do that!" my friend exclaimed.
"Me neither!" I replied. From that point on, we resolved to stick to jumping out of airplanes, a much safer endeavor.

Here's my friend and I after jumping out of a perfectly good airplane:



Abax