Enivrez-Vous: 11,000 Feet and Falling

First. Jump. Ever.

So over the Thanksgiving weekend back in semi snow-covered Wisconsin, I got to go skydiving (best gift any granny's ever given)! It's been one of those things I'd add to a "Do Before You Expire from This Sweet, Sweet Life, Ya Old Bastard" list. Maybe I should get on that...

Anyway, the fellas at Sky Knights would be assisting and facilitating our collective first jump ever. The whole time home, I had the moment playing out in the back of mind, getting a little nervous at the thought of jumping from a plane at 11,000 feet and attaining terminal velocity. I mean, chances are if you've attained your terminal velocity, plummeting towards Earth, you will end up a puddle. So to experience that and survive? Worth it. Now I know how adrenaline junkies are created. Krakauer wrote about that in Into the Wild about extreme climbing:

Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.

By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence--the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes--all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

At such moments something resembling happiness actually sits in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard...

I've heard it called the "sublime" before in aesthetics. That rush that results from surviving the precipice, that moment of transcendent joy and, like Krakauer said, clarity of purpose. I can see it being described as a spiritual experience.

Anyway, this was the reason I automatically said yes to doing this. It's something I've always wanted to experience. That, and I like the views from high up.

So when it came to day-of, the nervousness built little by little as we approached East Troy's airport.

We were four, and we went up two at a time. My sister was the first to jump, then her friend. Then it was me and my cousin to board the single engine Cessna.

Everything felt normal. The smooth, steady ascent and the broad view of the horizon and homeland beneath. We got to about 10,500 feet, when you could see the skyline of Chicago loom in the distance down the lakefront and Milwaukee stretching and yawning to the morning sun. It was time to get the leather helmet and goggles on. My insructor flung open the flimsy door, and air thrusted in, roaring. We harnessed up to one another, then I dangled my lower half out the plane, so my instructor could position himself behind me. My legs were flapping in the 200+ mph wind. Instictually, I braced myself in the door frame with both arms, only to get them chopped away by my instructor trying to position himself. We gave each other the thumbs up, and for 4 heavy seconds we scooted or tilted forward until the wind caught us and flung us out, flailing and rolling in mid-air, feeling the feeling of falling. Quickly, the wind blasts you in the face and you (asymptotically) reach that point where the Earth is pulling and pushing you equally, seemingly unable to make up its mind; it's surreal, because you know you're plummeting at an extremely fast rate to the Earth from several thousands of feet, but you feel nothing, not even like you're falling. Hands and arms outstretched, back arched, facing down, I was overcome by a sense of pure calmness. I didn't make a peep. I reveled in what I was feeling and seeing. And thinking back on it and on what Krakauer said above, that's how I'd describe it. There was clarity; that is, my mind was truly uncluttered and absolutely absorbed in the moment. When the chute went up, there was a mighty jerk, especially in the groin where the harness was strapped very tightly. It figures: coming back to the reality on Earth is like a kick in the balls. My high was at its peak though; that moment, after the chute goes up and you're admonished back to a slower descent into Earth's arms, is truly a peaceful one. You hear nothing but the lonely flap of your chute. Your feet dangle over the broad landscape your feet have wearily and excidedly trodden, the long stretch of country highway you drove at least twice every week for years for work and school, the same small-town countryside your good friend is buried under... It's nice to see it this way, all of it in one breadth under your feet, not close to a single part of it.

A Speck in the Sky...

Coming down, the instructor let me steer the chute, riding the currents. At one point, he told me to pull my left down all the way to my hip, and spun fast and hard, the ground swirling under me. A minute later we spied the landing spot, looped around, and slid onto the grass ass first. "Safe!" I exclaimed, as if scoring the winning run.