Taking the Leap

Holla,

There are certain events in everyone's life that are so monumental, so hard to believe, so foreign from our everyday experience that they seem to take on a feeling of fantasy. It can often feel like we are recounting a dream when attempting to recreate these experiences within our memory. There seems to be a glossy hue surrounding the exact details, often making the event difficult to describe to others or even to yourself after it has occurred.

These experiences takes on different sizes and shapes for each person that experiences them. It could be a monumental point of your life, such as your wedding day, or the birth of a child, or your first kiss. But it could be something small and simple at the same time, like the first time you saw the ocean, or scored a goal, or tried a dipped cone from Dairy Queen. It's difficult to put the exact emotions from these events into words, and you're often left with a goofy grin on your face as you attempt to do so.

Last week, I experienced a few of these goofy-grin moments while hosting a friend that was in town. The biggest of which was sitting on the edge of a plane's open cabin door, looking at the vista of Southern California 10,000 feet below my dangling feet. There was a brief moment that I sat there, with a large man named Eric strapped to my back, while watching my friend falling below me, that I said to myself, "What the F have you gotten yourself into?"

I had consciously made the decision to skydive weeks earlier. I made reservations, paid the fee, and didn't think much about what was about to transpire, until I was walking along, fully strapped into my jumping gear, toward a small plane on the tarmac.

There had been small outbursts of nervousness and trepidation prior to this moment, but nothing in comparison to the emotions that started to reign down upon me as we left the ground. My friend, myself, and two jump instructors were sitting in a tiny cabin, watching the runway grow smaller below us, while the cabin door was wide open. Less than a foot away from my left foot, I watched San Diego progressively decrease in size.

I attempted to disguise the boiling emotions of my insides from the rest of the passengers. I laughed at the jokes of the jump instructors, attempted to engage in conversations, and think of anything other than certain death, however, these attempts ultimately proved unsuccessful. My friend could clearly see the nerves that my stonewalled face was expressing, and quickly pointed this fact out to everyone else in the plane. Surprisingly, discussing my fears did nothing to quell these emotions, and I quietly contemplated throwing up.

After circling over the coastline and heading back inland, we began preparing to make the jump. Eric, my instructor, told me to get on his lap, so that he could strap himself to me. The effect of sitting on another man's lap, although not something that I would enjoy doing regularly, did provide some amount of distraction from the upcoming events.

Which brings me back to sitting on the edge of the plane again. Soon after getting strapped in, we had shuffled from our corner of the plane toward the open doorway, after watching the other instructor and my friend disappear from the cabin moments earlier.

Thankfully Eric didn't give me much time to think about the situation that I was in. Before I could back out, or request a countdown, or even wet my pants, he said, "Let's go!" and we began falling through the atmosphere.

After tumbling a few times, seeing the plane above me in one of my mind's snapshots, and then the quickly approaching ground in the next, we flattened out to a standard free falling position. Arms extended, I could see the mountains of San Diego to the east, and the ocean extending out to the horizon in the west. I saw my friend in full superman pose well below me, a small speck in the air, set-off from the scene of the Tijuana slums that extended into the south. I heard myself yelling, and involuntarily cussing at the top of my lungs, before realizing that I was doing so. I looked at the brown fields that were spinning below me, and before I could envision death by impact, the man on my back told me to cross my arms, and he pulled the shoot.

We had fallen from 10,000 feet to 4,000 feet in the manner of 45 seconds. A full mile in the air, accomplished in less than a minute. I had experienced a multitude of emotions; fear, exhilaration, joy, certain death, the need to pee myself, among others, in a minimal time period.

I was soon landing on the ground, getting unconnected from Eric, and not knowing exactly what to do next. I ended up running around in a dirty field in a couple of circles and then finding my friend to discuss what had just happened. I knew that it was an amazing experience, but my mind had just been overloaded, and I couldn't fully comprehend the moment at that time.

I still don't think that I can. It still seems like a hazy dream, even after spending an hour writing about it. It is an experience that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, but one that still doesn't seem quite real. Trying to explain the emotions and the experience to my friends and family over the past week was a difficult affair. I don't think that I ever effectively orated everything that was going through my mind while falling through the air. Hopefully, this blog post will provide a little better of an idea of what it was like.

More to come...