Skydiving

ON THE WAY to Skydive the Ranch in Ulster County, New York, a pastoral expanse encompassing a shallow pond, a runway, and an aircraft hangar that houses a couple of 22-passenger Twin Otter aeroplanes, Red Bull-sponsored professional skydiver Jeff Provenzano (nickname Jeffro) assures me that he too was petrified on his first tandem dive. ‘We’re more likely to get hurt on the drive to the drop zone than we are during the jump,’ he says. Then he immediately makes an ill-advised U-turn in front of a speeding SUV.

Over his 20 000-some jumps, Provenzano has performed stunts for movies, trained special-forces teams, and hung from helicopter struts as if they were tree branches. The man is unflappable in the face of the absurd. Later, when the door to our Twin Otter rolls up like a movie screen at