AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!

That, if you were wondering, was the sound of me this Friday afternoon. See, my sister’s birthday is around the end of the month, but since we won’t be in the same city that week, we decided to arrange for her present now. If you know my sister, you won’t be surprised to hear that she likes to try strange and thrilling things. So, for her birthday, I agreed to take her skydiving.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!

Clearly, it couldn’t have been that bad, considering I’m still here to blog about it, right? Well, let’s start with the facts: 1) I am afraid of heights; 2) I am afraid of physically uncomfortable things, including most carnival rides (even mundane ones like Ferris wheels); 3) although it is so small to be statistically negligible (as compared to, say, driving an automobile or riding a roller coaster), there is a non-zero chance of dying or injuring oneself while skydiving; 4) did I mention I’m an abject coward?

But the thing is, once you’ve made the commitment to do something scary, the only thing worse than doing it when the time comes is not doing it. And believe me, I used every technique at my disposal to make that commitment: paying the deposit, telling all my friends and acquaintances that I was going, even writing out the first half of this blog entry a week before my actual jump.

The drop zone Deb and I jumped at is called Mile High; it’s in Kanata, near Arnprior, which is about a forty-minute drive outside of Ottawa, at the end of a pothole-pocked gravel road.

(Photos courtesy of Marilyn Ain, who took them with Mom as both waited for us on the ground)

We decided to do a tandem jump, where you are strapped to someone who’s been on a million trillion jumps before and knows exactly what he’s doing (our instructors at Mile High were male). The plane, we knew, would take us up to about 10,000 feet; when we exited, there would be 30 seconds of freefall followed by six to seven minutes under canopy. The entire process, from briefing to landing, was supposed to take about two hours. (I, on the other hand, had spent at least a week gearing myself up for it… amazing, really, how your mind can play little games of thought-war with itself: “It’ll be just like flying.” “Except for the whole FALLING part.” “OK, pretend you’re a superhero and you have to jump to save the planet.” “But I’m NOT a superhero!” “Fine, a**hole, then just close your *&#ing eyes!” “I didn’t pay $300 to close my eyes!!!!” And I have to admit, although I tried not to indulge in it, there is that strange part of you that makes you think, “What will my friends/relatives think reading this/remembering what I just said if there IS an accident?”)

My first impressions of Mile High didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The main building was an open barn-thing made of bare timber and corrugated plastic, with trailers branching off for business arrangements and briefing rooms. Out in front, all the staff sit in their lawn chairs having a soda. There’s a grassy area about the size of an ordinary high-school classroom marked off as a landing zone, and, occasionally, one of the guys gets up, grabs a golf club, and takes a couple practice shots across it. The contract they make you sign seems to be ten or so clauses all stating in different ways that you can’t sue the company if you break something or die. Debra’s instructor was wearing a T-shirt that said If it can’t kill you, it ain’t a sport – SKYDIVE.

Mine introduced himself as “Crazy Larry”.

So we paid up and watched what seemed like an impossibly complicated and yet extremely important safety video (“Rule number two: don’t grab my hands, or else we die.”) Then we had to wait about an hour and a half as it poured, and poured, and poured. I was getting antsy: it took me a year to to actually convince myself I could do this. If we had to postpone, there was no way I was getting up my nerve twice.

Finally, the rain tapered off, and they agreed we could get going. They gave us pastel-coloured jumpsuits with big grass stains on the butt. Once we had all the harnesses and stuff attached, we looked like the Ghostbusters.

I was kinda dreading going up in the tiny Cessna they had waiting for us, but the ride up was actually pretty smooth. I was watching the altimeter Crazy Larry had on his wrist, and it seemed to take forever circling around the compound to reach the altitude from which we were going to jump: 11, 000 feet.

(Wow, I still can’t think about this part without my heartbeat speeding up.)

When we got high enough, the instructors clipped us to their own harnesses and tightened them so our backs were tight against their chests. There seemed to be a million things to remember: shuffle-walk to the open door where the air is beating past, right foot out onto the step, left foot out, cross your arms, feel the instructor tilt your head back against his shoulder, think OMGWHATAMIDOINGHERETHISISCRAZYHAAAAALP (OK, maybe that wasn’t part of our instructions, but I did it anyway), and, when the instructor yells in your ear, “Are you ready to skydive?” scream back, “Yeah!” and then find yourself tumbling through the air and somehow ending up briefly upside-down as the plane disappears into a speck overhead.

Deb and Jeff on the left; me and Crazy Larry on the right.

Lift up your legs to “kick his butt”. When he taps you on the shoulder, uncross your arms. It was brisk and cold and all the wind was rushing in my face. I could feel it against my arms, my palms – my entire front. The ground beneath me looked the way it does outside a jet window, squares of green and tan separated by distant roads, like a museum diorama.

And you barely have a second to take it all in when there’s the second tap on your shoulders that means bring your arms in again, and there’s a lurch, and suddenly everything’s quiet, and you’re standing upright, doing what the instructor tells you: plug your nose and pop your ears. Stand on his feet so he can loosen the two bottom clips. Practice lifting your legs up for the landing.

It felt like the part at the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when Gene Wilder takes Charlie floating over the city in the Great Glass Elevator, just hanging there in midair, suspended over the movie model, because of course those cars and houses and so forth are too tiny to be real. Every so often, there’d be a stomach-twisting swoop as we turned to keep circling around the landing zone, which, though small, was a surprisingly clear target. I could see Deb below us.

I was afraid that once we reached the point where we were ladder distance away from the ground, my vertigo would kick in, but we seemed to go from high in the sky to down on the ground with no middle in between. One second, everything was so far away, and the next, we were sliding in on our bums.

Deb and I disagree on almost everything to do with the jump: she says jumping out of the plane was the best part, and I think it was the worst. She was excited to steer, and I was happy to leave that to my instructor. She wants to go again, and I think I’ll keep my feet on the ground (or at least inside the plane), thanks. But we do both agree that it was an awesome experience.

Although maybe I also learned that sometimes I should keep my funny faces to myself…