An Excerpt From An E-Mail Describing My Experience Skydiving On Sunday

This past Sunday I went skydiving on a whim with my old pal Martin “El Jefe” Larrea. My participation was vital in order to get the $15 discount for a group of ten, so I went along with a bunch of pretty young Spanish-speaking ladies and their put-upon boyfriends/husbands to try jumping out of a plane. I was alternately fascinated and terrified by the experience. I have a nontrivial fear of heights and this was the first time I’ve been genuinely frightened in a long time. Sure, every once in a while I’ll get a car too far sideways or miss my braking point on a track and I’ll be concerned, but I’m talking about authentic fear here. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to grind this fear into the ground, so I’m going to get my skydiving license, or at least qualify for solo jumps.

Anyway, the email, as sent to a friend who asked:

I’m mis-describing what happened here. I had to squat at the open door of the plane facing the outside, with the clouds and the noise and the terror and whatnot. The jump master crouched behind me. On the count of three I was supposed to toss myself out and he would also toss himself out. Well, I was intellectually prepared to do that but it was absolutely freezing at 10,000 feet and I made the mistake of looking down, which caused me to launch a long interior monologue about whether I wanted to really do this or not. While I was interior-monologuing the jumpmaster went on the count of three. He maybe weighed 180lbs to my 245 so he didn’t shove me out of the plane so much as he tipped me forward and out.

The physics involved meant that as we fell out we tumbled. So it went like this from my perspective.

• Hmm. Very cold out there. And let’s look down. This is a completely terrible idea. I mean, I don’t even know this person and
• WHAM
• Blind terror of falling and tumbling for a moment
• Opening eyes to see plane flying away quite peacefully without me, much to my sorrow
• Some sort of complicated aerial maneuver on the part of my jump master to roll us over
• HERE COMES A CLOUD
• FALLING THROUGH CLOUD
• GLASSES FOGGING
• FUSS WITH GOGGLES
• Okay, that’s bettter. We appear to be falling towards the ground at some amazing rate of speed. It’s very cold. I see other people falling as well.
• Tap on right shoulder. I know that means to grab my harness for the para
• OW MY BALLS AND INTESTINES AND EVERYTHING AT THE MERCY OF THE PAINFUL STRAPS
• Well, although I am almost overcome by nausea we appear to be just hanging in midair by the agency of some device I cannot see. This isn’t frightening at all, really, just hanging a mile off the ground by my left testicle.
• “Can you see the blah blah college over there?” No, I’m fighting waves of intense desire to puke.
• “We’re going to do some spins. So let me know if it’s too much.”
• It’s too much.
• But I refuse to be the sissy who says something like that. Later on, when I’ve landed, I’ll find that most of my fellow skydivers had no such compunctions.
• Nausea, super-tight chest strap prevents breathing during spins
• Five minutes of hanging in midair wondering if perhaps I’m in the middle of reversing my vasectomy through blunt trauma
• Absolutely letter-perfect landing in the dead middle of the “X” as seen in the enclosed photo.
• Immediate use of my prodigious IQ to figure out how to get the holy fuck out of the harness before I vomit.
• Receipt of commemorative certificate.

And that’s about the size of it! But I have nothing but good things to say about Skydive Greene County and everybody involved. I can’t wait to go back. The ride up to 10,500 feet, which happens in a Beech A-18 taildragger converted to turboprops, is fascinating enough on its own.