#2
SKYDIVING RULE #2:
Be at your fighting weight when you skydive. You will have to sit on a stranger’s lap. Not that this made me feel better, but parachuting has been around for almost a thousand years. Chinese drawings of parachutes date all the way back to the 1100s. In 1495, Leonardo Da Vinci designed a pyramid-shaped, wooden-framed parachute that daredevil Adrian Nicholas tested out in the year 2000. Da Vinci’s design worked, proving it to be (in retrospect) the first working parachute. Skydiving, however, did not take off as a sport until after World War II. With an abundance of surplus parachutes and former soldiers with the courage to jump, that’s when skydiving really became a hobby. The first commercial skydiving centers opened in the mid1950s, and around the same time, Raymond Young coined the term “skydiver.” Fun fact, after the release of Point Break in 1991, skydiving showed a huge surge in popularity. A fellow skydiver crawls to the airplane’s garagestyle metal door, and throws it open. There it is: my imminent death. I look around at the other skydivers. One climbed Mt. Everest without oxygen. The next jumped off cliffs in squirrel suits and ate raw eggs for breakfast. This is what I imagine, anyway. Each diver gives me a fist pump before walking to the door, as I counter with my very best James Bond face. “Oh, we are jumping out of an airplane? I wish I didn’t have to do it tandem, ha ha ha.” I am calm, cool, collected. Still, I get a few “Are you okays?” so I am not sure how convincing I was.
SKYDIVING RULE #3: Go with the eighty-two-year-old ladies checking it off the bucket list. Board the plane full of eighteen year olds rebelling against their parents on their birthdays. Just be braver than one person on the plane, and you are golden. Watching other people falling out of an airplane is freaky no matter how much you are expecting it. They disappear, and you are left in shock thinking, “What happened to them? Where did they go?” Then you remember, “Oh yeah, they are skydiving.” And finally, you remember you are expected to do the same. I tell ya,
if they didn’t strap you to someone, no one would ever skydive. Everybody would just change his or her minds. When we get to the door, I remember I promised to meet a friend for lunch. Poor scheduling on my part, but shoot, I just couldn’t jump. I explain this to Fernando, but he tells me, “If that’s the case, the quickest way down is to jump.” I didn’t sign a contract; I don’t have to do this. Fernando pulls my head back against his shoulder. I tilt it back down. He pulls it back again. I am already doing this wrong, but there is no turning back now. Out the door we go, and I don’t know where I am. I can feel my lips flapping against my face as I wail like a banshee. After I rupture Fernando’s eardrum, I eventually stop screaming and listen. The WHOOOSH sound was not the sound I had expected. Where was the epic guitar solo? I thought free falling sounded like “Eye of the Tiger” or complete silence. When your inner ear can tell you are moving, you get that stomach dropping feeling. This feeling is one of the chief reasons many people steer clear from skydiving. What these people should know is a few seconds into the jump, that stomach-dropping feeling goes away. When you reach the peak terminal velocity (90 miles per hour), you are falling so fast, your inner ear cannot sense you are moving. So, a few seconds into the drop, that feeling of falling is replaced with a feeling that you aren’t moving at all. This is where you get comfy. I spread my arms wide, push my belly button out and make my body like a banana. I remember some things from skydiving school, just not the important, lifesaving things. The free fall lasts for about two minutes, while the parachute ride lasts about seven minutes. The camera guy is right below me doing a “Stick your tongue out” gesture, and I oblige. I imagine that these photos, this video, will be incredibly flattering. I throw a couple hang looses, and discover my repertoire of hand movements is pretty limited. When you are falling, you feel compelled to look at the ground, thinking you will inevitably crash into it in a few minutes. The color of the Sierra Madre Mountains, the blue and green outlines of the lakes below, is indescribably beautiful. FERNANDO POINTS OUT TIJUANA TO THE SOUTH AND CATALINA ISLAND 80 MILES TO THE NORTH. TO THE EAST, I CAN SEE BIG BEAR AND THE SALTON SEA. I CAN SEE THE OCEAN GLITTERING IN FRONT OF ME—THE COAST STRETCHING ALL THE WAY DOWN TO ENSENADA.
170 |
| APRIL 2014
Fernando pulls the shoot at an altitude of 5,000 feet. We whiplash upwards as we counter the force of the fall. He whispers into my ear, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I think maybe we should move in together. He points out Tijuana to the South and Catalina Island 80 miles to the North. To the East, I can see Big Bear and the Salton Sea. I can see the ocean glittering in front of me—the coast stretching all the way down to Ensenada. It occurs to me then that there are millions of people below us, but that no one knows we were here. You feel so small, and everything else— all the details of your life—fall away. You can’t beat that feeling. I refer to Patrick Swayze in Point Break on this one, “It’s 100 percent pure adrenaline. Other guys snort for it, jab a vein for it, but all you gotta do is jump.” The skyscrapers of downtown are wrapped in gray mist and reined in by a miniature Coronado Bridge. Rivers and trails run rampant over the brown of the Sierra Madres, and I cannot tell where the drop zone is. We are too high up. Fernando says, “Life is too short. You have to enjoy every day.” Grounded guy. Who knew Buddha was a skydiving instructor? The thing about skydiving is it allows you to experience life at a distance. It puts things in perspective. It makes you wonder at the world, and if we get too caught up in the day to day, we can forget to do that. In that way, skydiving can act as a reminder of sorts. Fernando pulls the handles (in the industry, they are called “toggles”) of the parachute taking us left and right. I tell him to take care of me here, because this was the part I am most afraid of: the landing. My Mom decided to tell me, that morning, about her good friend who broke both her ankles skydiving by landing the wrong way. Thanks for that, Mom. We gained speed. Fernando tells me to lift my legs as high as I can straight out in front of me. I make a mental note to buy a yoga membership. We come to almost a complete stop, and touch down easy—so much better than the ankle-breaking landing I expected. I highfive the camera guy inches from my face, and take off my harness quickly. I hurry off the field because I have business to attend to—like arranging my heliskiing trip and signing up for “Fear Factor”. I was on top of the world that Monday, a feeling that lasted well into my week. Why skydive? I think we need to remember the adventurers inside ourselves. When we pay attention to them, we get to the heart of what life is about. What better way to be adventurous than jumping out of an airplane?