Freefall

“If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it?” is a moniker I’ve never heard anyone use seriously, but I know that the answer for me is “Yes.”

I know this, because I walked through my apartment door one day, and found my roommates and friends huddled around a laptop. One of them looked up at me.

“We’re going skydiving,” he said. “Do you want to come?”

The wheels in my head took a few moments to start spinning. During that time, I was able to say “Umm…”, then “Maybe,” and finally “Sure.”

“Fuck yeah!” was the resounding response.

Two-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollars and one month later, we found ourselves on a small runway in the middle of Iowa. A prop plane buzzed to life, and approached us. We climbed aboard, along with three tandem instructors and six solo jumpers. The interior of the plane had no seats, and we sat on the floor, facing the tail. Once everyone was aboard, the plane started to move, and suddenly, we were airborne.

The scariest part of skydiving is not falling, nor is it the moment when you jump into the air. The scariest part is the first two-thousand feet of ascension. Looking through the window, I could still comprehend where the ground was. I could see trees moving, and the ripple of cornstalks blowing in the wind. My brain was running the calculus on how fast I would hit the ground, and what my last few seconds would look like. An expanse of green, rapidly growing, and then nothing.

I stifled the voice in my head that kept asking, “Oh, God, what have I done?” I told myself that it was too late, even though I knew it wasn’t. And anyway, I’d always be ashamed if I was the one to chicken out -- while we were in the air, no less. My friends and I looked at each other and gave half-smiles and thumbs up.

After a few minutes, the next-strangest thing happened: the solo skydivers jumped.

I had been on planes before, and had learned a few basics about being on a plane. One such basic: if at any point between takeoff and touchdown the number of passengers changes, someone has either had a baby, and/or something has gone horribly wrong.

So, when the door opened, and six people were one-by-one no longer in the plane, it felt like some fundamental principle had just failed. An existential-crisis-in-miniature was playing out inside of me. While my brain processed this new reality where people could be in planes, then not, it became my turn to jump.

I put on my glasses -- they looked like someone had stapled two plastic cones to an elastic band -- and my instructor clipped himself to my harness.

“Remember,” he said, “you can still breathe while in free-fall.”

Breathing, up to that moment, was not something I had been concerned about. Now, it was all I could think about. Would it be difficult? Did some people forget? Would I forget? It was possible, but were there caveats? What about bugs?

That line of thinking ended as we started to scoot our butts along the floor towards the garage-style, sliding door that took up the back quarter of the cabin. The door opened, and the rush of air flying past sucked away any other sounds.

I didn’t look down as I sat on the edge of the door. My ankles touched the underbelly of the plane, and my hands rested along the metal arch above me. I looked up, holding the position we had been taught. The instructor gave me a thumbs up, then pushed, and we were falling.

What came next was the most thrilling sixty seconds of my life.  I barely registered the initial flip we took as we fell away from the plane. All I could see below me was a patchwork of fields, and a hazy blue horizon near the edges.

I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t shut my eyes. All of my brain power went into holding my arms and legs at the correct angle, and breathing in, then out.

For a while, I couldn’t tell that we were racing toward the ground. It felt like the strongest wind ever was rushing up at me, trying to hold me. At no point did my stomach turn, and I never got that feeling of my heart leaping into my throat.

It lasted forever, and then it was over.

There was a jerk, and I felt the harness tighten around my legs and groin. We were pulled into an upright, seated position, and it was quiet.

The instructor asked me if I was okay, and I had to try several times before my dry throat croaked out an unstable “Yes.”

I spotted my two other friends who were on the same jump as me. All of us spun lazy spirals for the next five minutes. Even with a parachute, the ground was approaching fast.

“Legs up!” shouted the instructor, and a few seconds later we skidded across the ground, landing just outside a giant target that had been painted on the grass.

After the other two landed, we dropped our harnesses on the ground.

“Okay, you can go now,” said one of the instructors. The three of us looked at each other, perplexed and a little dizzy.

“Okay, thanks,” one of us mumbled.

We walked back to the car, and didn’t leave for several minutes. We just stood there, letting our heart rates come back down as the adrenaline receded. It felt unreal.

That night, all of us slept like babies.