Complete and Creative

What It’s Like to Go Skydiving (2/2)

…continued from

To shine some relief on this tense situation, please allow me a side-note. Onboard with me was a female friend (our other friends had gone in an earlier group) whose tandem instructor decided that it would be fun to scare her before the jump. I completely agreed.

What was I thinking wearing only a tank top?

My tandem instructor told her, “Can you press that red button over there for me?”

“Which one?” she asked.

“This one,” her tandem instructor said as he pointed.

She pressed it.

“What are you doing!?” both instructors growled as I roared with laughter. All she could do was repeat “No!” as she clapped her hands on her thighs and, since she was convinced I had conspired with the two guys, attempted to punch me several times.

To this day, I also wonder what that red button was for—aside from playing that all-important joke on my friend, of course.

As we got to the open door, the wind blasting toward us, my tandem instructor told me to bend my knees, lean back, sit on his lap, and leave everything to him. I leapt out of the plane, with him attached closer behind me than most homophobes would be comfortable with. I had on only a tank top and pants (hey, it was Spring Break).

Big mistake. On the ground, the raindrops had felt like wet petals, but up in the air, falling at God knows what speed, they felt like needles of ice lancing into me. I was so occupied with the newly created red dots on my arms and shoulders that I didn’t care how high I was.

If you ask me, skydiving is not about the view (it had rained too much in the past few days, thus making the waters too murky for any sort of view anyway); it’s about the sensation: the wind howling in your face and ears, the full force of gravity acting on you, being that far up in the sky without being in a flying vehicle, knowing how birds probably feel (probably).

It’s a freedom that you can only feel several thousand feet in the air. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you might suspect that something could go wrong, and you’re right, but you don’t care. Now you finally know what R Kelly’s talking about in “I Believe I Can Fly” (literally).

It was great, absolutely amazing. I must’ve said something like that when my tandem instructor yelled in my ear to ask me what I thought about skydiving now that I was actually doing it. I meant every word.

Throughout the fall, he navigated our direction with some wing-things attached to our gear. Sometime during the fall, probably near the end, he opened the parachute (I couldn’t exactly turn my head back, and my ears were too shot to hear anything less than two millimeters away from them).

He told me that upon landing I would have to run with him, going with the momentum.

No problem, I thought. Wrong. Problem.

I had no energy when we landed. Or rather, my legs weren’t used to the gravity. My tandem instructor (think his name was Sean, by the way) carried my weight forward with him.

Thus concludes my trip falling from the sky. If you’re interested, the company I went with was Skydive Hawaii.

Maybe I ought to try something like bungee jumping soon. Wonder if it’ll be as scary. Either way, I’m going to wear more than a tank top and go on a sunny day.

(Note: Between the actual writing of this article and publication on this blog, I actually have gone bungee jumping.)