Flying Without a Net
Tired of the same old, same old? Get off your duff and sign up for a life-changing adventure.

By Bob McFadden
Elaine Martin stood in the buffeting winds at an airplane’s open doorway. The landscape of Virginia’s Tidewater rolled by two and a half miles beneath her feet. She watched her skydiving companions recede rapidly from view, racing for terra firma in 120 mile-per-hour free falls.

"I begged to be in the first group so I wouldn’t lose my nerve," she recalls. "As soon as we got into the plane, I went into a state of denial and all my fear went away. I just couldn’t believe I was going to jump out of a plane."

She crossed her hands over her chest, the signal for her tandem jump partner, an instructor from WestPoint Skydiving Center secured snugly to the back of her jumpsuit by hooks and harnesses, to propel them into space.

Before the jump she had worried, not about dying, but about being terrified all the way down. Now, trying to absorb so many new sensory experiences, she didn’t have time to think about anything at all.

She had no sensation of actually falling, though she felt the speed of the free fall. "It wasn’t like being on a roller coaster, where you get that pit-of-your-stomach sensation. ... It’s almost like a fan beneath you, holding you up."

She waved and hollered at a nearby video cameraman who was falling alongside and documenting her jump. When Martin and her instructor reached 5,000 feet he popped the chute open and triggered a sudden braking action. Only 40 seconds had passed since leaving the plane.

They leisurely floated downward for the next five minutes. At least it seemed leisurely until the end, when the onrushing ground made Martin acutely aware of just how fast they had been coming down. The landing was smooth, even though the pair ended up on their backsides.

Her jump was over, but the adventure was only beginning for Martin. She experienced that same rush over and over for months while relating the tale to friends and watching the videotape of the jump. "I just really didn’t understand before what adrenaline junkies go for," she says now.

Martin used to be someone who played it safe. Now that person is gone. "It really was just a great life-changing experience."

A couple of months after her jump, Elaine Martin was driving on the Interstate when her car suffered a flat tire. Ordinarily, she would have waited for someone to come to her aid. But that was the old adventure-challenged Elaine Martin.

"I thought, ‘You have jumped out of an airplane. You can do this,’" Martin says. Out came the owner’s manual. Fifteen minutes later the flat was in the trunk and she was on her way, another adventure met.

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Virginians may not be as staid as the literature would have you believe. There are many people who believe Virginia is for adventure lovers. In fact, the Old Dominion is filled with businesses that cater to people looking for a day removed from the ordinary, whether the call of the wild comes via rafting, parachuting, scuba diving or some other endeavor.

Martin made her parachute jump through a group called the Adventure Club, which seeks out extraordinary activities for members under the aegis of a supportive group atmosphere. Martin, a member since 1994, is now the club’s president.

A director of community services for the Department of Health in Richmond, she describes engaging in adventurous pursuits as "an opportunity to find where your personal limits are. And you find they’re further than you thought they were."

The Adventure Club itself is an offshoot of an unsuccessful adventure charter business. Some ex-customers formed the group to pursue interests not shared by family and friends. Not all of the group’s activities are daredevil thrill rides. Some are as placid as tubing down the Shenandoah River, hiking the Appalachian Trail, scouring the streets of Richmond on a scavenger hunt or sharing an unhurried evening get-together in a restaurant sampling foreign cuisine. But to get the heart racing, there are still opportunities to balloon the Blue Ridge Mountains, sail over the Chesapeake Bay in ultralight aircraft or glide the waters of the Eastern Shore in a sailboat.

The group’s activities range far and wide, whether soaring over Botetourt County in sailplanes, or rafting the challenging whitewater of West Virginia’s New River and Gauley rivers. The group even goes international on occasion; members have traveled to the United Kingdom, Costa Rica and New Zealand.

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Marilyn O’Fallon became involved in adventurous pursuits while looking for a new life after ending a marriage of twenty-something years. "I just really had never done anything for myself that I wanted to do for myself," she said. "I was always devoted to my family or to other people."

She admits to a passion for "death-defying whitewater" and an enthusiasm for scuba — she led an Adventure Club trip to San Diego last summer to observe feeding sharks in the open ocean through the safety of an underwater cage. Lessons from her adventures extend into her personal life. "Whenever you step out into an unknown — whatever it is — and you work through that and overcome that, you gain."

A Portsmouth mortgage banker, O’Fallon maintains a wide array of interests that have led to membership in other adventure clubs in the United Kingdom and New Jersey, two ski clubs, and two hiking clubs. She also serves with a Tidewater search and rescue squad.

O’Fallon doesn’t dismiss the risks in adventure. The specter of those risks was driven home in 1995 when several skydivers she knew were killed in a plane crash at West Point. Though it dampened her enthusiasm for skydiving, she is secure in the club’s emphasis on working with reputable and safety conscious vendors and in the fact no one is pressured into undertaking anything.

"I would never do something dangerous and dumb at the same time," she says. "There hasn’t been anything presented to me that would put me in immediate danger."

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Alan Hagerman’s childhood in rural Pennsylvania may well have prepared him for riding balloons and whitewater rafts later in life. "We were mountain biking before it was called mountain biking. ... We’d ride like crazy down the old fire trails and jeep trails," he says. It was a desire to get away from his ubiquitous computer screen, though, that drove him to try bungee jumping and, in turn, skydiving.

The Virginia Beach resident and Web site builder strives to balance his life by indulging his need to step out and experience the extraordinary. "Some guys grow up and they buy the little red sports cars and motorcycles, and they have to drive those around all the time. My vice is the Adventure Club."

While he still organizes regular skydiving outings for the club ("I love to see the grin when they land."), he has cut back on a lot of his old adrenaline-fueled activities. "I’ve got a 4-year-old daughter who is the apple of Daddy’s eye. I’m more conscious of that," he says.

Hagerman relishes his outdoor adventures, such as the two-day kayaking class he took from Adventure Challenge in Richmond, learning exit procedures, handling techniques and how to read the danger points on a river. Taking it up a notch, he found challenges in the world-class whitewater of West Virginia’s Gauley River, a popular destination for many adventure charters. One two-day camping trip was made memorable by a veritable feast that awaited the exhausted paddlers in camp: steak, iced beverages, salad, the works. "You ate like a king."

Now he often leads trips to explore the history and wildlife of the Tidewater region by canoe or kayak, cruising Back Bay, the Dismal Swamp or the Chesapeake Bay. "I’m so comfortable now in so many different environments because of this. ... I’m not scared to be on the water, or not sacred to be in a situation."

"To me, it’s almost a religious experience to get off the couch and do something." Hagerman decries the all-too-familiar routine practiced by those who plod through a 9 to 5 workday and cap it off with a happy-hour pit stop on the way home to an evening in front of the box.

"There’s so much to do in your own back yard. Virginia has a lot to offer, or drive an hour to North Carolina and the Outer Banks and go hang gliding off the dunes," he says. "There’s just so much to do and see. You only go around once. Might as well get it in while you can."