600 Feet!

I played navigator to a friend, while driving today. I had to be most alert during the short stretches that led to turns. I noticed that the GPS reported distances a bit after they had been reduced. At one point the GPS system (we used a Tomtom system, which we like very much) chimed '900 feet,' after we had passed the point where the display had said '900 feet.' Just to throw in some numbers, I guestimated (i.e., I estimated the distance, though it was more of a guess) that we had passed a little under one-third of the distance in question by the time that the GPS system chimed in. So, just for simplicity, I guessed that by the time I heard the chime we had about 600 feet before the next turn.

Well, guess what? We weren't going fast (certainly not fast, by free fall -- skydiving -- standards), but we crossed those 600 feet incredibly fast! At that point I wondered how Mr. Jevto Dedijger might have felt, looking down at the ground from the Kockertalbrucke Bridge (pardon my spelling -- I do not have his book, "BASE 66," here with me), near Heidelberg, Germany, right before his 'S' jump in BASE.

Okay, okay, the whole point of my exercise was to get a feel for how he might have felt, but I got more than I had bargained for; for when we whizzed through that distance I was left with a knot in my stomach as I tried to fathom how much discipline Mr. Dedijer must have had to pull his rip cord during the jump. It was quite scary, and I cannot truly imagine that morbid feeling of watching the ground rushing up faster and faster, to meet you, eventhough I have watched the ground rush up when I jumped off an 8 feet high wall, and when I put my parachute into a tight spiral during my first (and so far, my only) skydive.