They seemed quieter jumping at night. 

This rowdy group of skydivers could out-bellow and out-roar anyone on the ground. Backseats were removed so they could sit close together, knee to knee, packed behind the pilot and co-pilot chairs. The side door had also been removed so they could easily rise, move and jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

As the plane taxied along the runway, they joked and cursed. Some small-talk, running commentary continued the first few thousand feet. As the plane rose, chatter ceased. Even though, they had jumped hundreds, some thousands, of times, they became quiet in the thinning atmosphere, with the clouds below us in the rising plane.

They had taken me along for the ride on several occasions. Climbing into the air with a group of skydivers is a strange sensation. Even when they’re quiet, they are still there, bunched around you and beside of you in the back of a single-engine plane in the middle of the nowhere that is 10,000 to 12,000 feet up.

Then, suddenly, they’re gone. 

Plop, plop, plop. 

The plane rising slightly as each departing skydiver lightens its load. From the open side door, I could watch my friends literally vanish into thin air. One second, they were stepping out of the plane; the next, gravity had pulled them hundreds of feet below.

Gone.

A full plane suddenly empty save for the pilot and myself. Even if the pilot is chatty, even with the skydivers’ pre-jump silence, it is always more quiet on the return. The vacated plane becomes a mute hole of empty.

Even during the day.

At night, the silence becomes an almost tangible thing.

They had circled three cars in a field near the Waycross airport. Headlights formed a small dot of light from 10,000 feet in the air. The skydivers would fall through the night with that light as their only target for a landing.

The skydivers had introduced the pilot by name, but his name did not stick with me. Still doesn’t all these years later. All I remembered then and now is the name they called him when he wasn’t around: The Mad Swede. Part of that name came from his country of birth. I would soon have a better understanding of the other part of his nickname.

At 10,000 feet, the plane’s engine cut off. Quiet whistled through the missing door. I had a seatbelt strap wrapped around my wrist as the skydivers jumped into the night. Plop, plop, plop. The last one gone, I looked out the side of the door. Not a sign of them. Just the hazy spot of light so far below. The quiet of wind in my hair, buzzing in my ears.

The Mad Swede broke the silence.

“We beat them down, ja?”

Before I could say anything, or move to the co-pilot’s chair, the pilot banked the plane, flipped it upside around, and pressed the nose straight for earth.

The plane twirled. I was pinned to the floor like water staying in a bucket swung in overhead circles by a small child. I felt my stomach grab hold of my spine like a hand grabbing the rail of a speeding bus.

I crawled across the floor, pulling on the straps. I suddenly wished the door had never been removed from the plane.

No silence now. The roar of the plane’s engine in deep descent, the boom of the air gusting in that doorway, the sick churning of my heart, and the laughter of the Mad Swede.

“Look, look, we beating them, ja?”

I grabbed the seat and pulled myself into it as he brought the plane out of its dive, straightening it for a landing.

“You buckle up, ja?”

I fastened the strap in time for a bouncing landing, up, down, earth, up, down, a harder collision with earth, a wobbly, fast-paced roll toward the cars. Silhouettes of skydivers landing in the circle.

“We beat them, ja?”

“Ja,” I mumbled, glad to be back on ground, young enough at the time to have found the Mad Swede’s ride exhilarating, though not something I wanted to repeat.

Yet, it did come with a lesson: Sometimes, it’s not such a bad idea to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times.