Perfectly good airplanes

I did something last Thursday that I swore I would never do, something that the very thought of causes in me profuse, full body sweating: I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. While actually contemplating this event is scary enough, having a girlfriend who's idea of excitement involves more than a couch and a good book actually schedule it onto our calendar elevated my fears suddenly from a laughable event to a forseeable future.

I told myself that I would never jump out of an airplane, but a misspoken yes to an assumed joke led me down a path I never thought possible. It was this path that led to a date with a parachute last Thursday.

My fear of planes is based upon a deep rooted fear of heights; this fear comes thanks to a ruptured inner left ear, the byproduct of an injury sustained during an uncoordinated mud football moment my freshman year in college. The resultant vestibular disorder makes balance a very precarious game for me; my mind is constantly trying to tell my body that it is tilting or falling. This false feeling has led to many envisioned free falls from planes, skyscrapers, and cliffs and, with that, all of the dire ends and mangled body parts these falls would include.

I honestly thought that I wouldn't be able to sleep the night before, that in the days leading up to jump day a building of nervous energy would culminate in restless fits of nervous sweats and tremors. Oddly enough, I was calm the entire week leading up to the jump and slept peacefully Wednesday night. Surprisingly still, I even found myself looking forward to it from time to time.

That Thursday Katie and I woke at our normal 11 o'clock hour and hurriedly packed the car and left for Molalla, stopping off in Albany to pick up Katie's brunette haired friend and fellow grad student Amanda, a one time veteran of skydiving. The drive up was filled with jokes about my demise and calculated probabilities of my survival. Pulling into the gravel lot of Skydive Oregon we were greeted by sight of people on their final descent and I noticed nary a dead body anywhere on the grass landing strip (which part of me took to be a good sign while the calculated percentage part of my brain screamed that someone, somewhere soon had to perish). With smiles galore lighting up their faces, across my mind flashed an image of the contorted expression sure to cross my face should my parachute actually deploy and I land safely (gruesome would be the expression should it not).

We spent the next half hour wading through a mountain of paperwork, signing our lives away along with our right to sue for anything. No joke, the paperwork included the sentence, " I hereby sign away my right to sue for any fault due to negligence on the part of Skydive Oregon". Odd to me that this would be legal, that even when the fault lay in them, their employees, equipment or training, Skydive Oregon was without blame or responsibility. To say the lawyers had a field day creating that contract would be an understatement for sure; I somehow find it hard to believe that many, if any, lawyers choose to jump from this locale.

Paperwork finalized, and our lives now in the tenuous balance of life and death (with no financial windfall for our heirs should our demise come within the day), I met my tandem partner, a burly, blond headed and long goateed dude named Tim. Shaking his massive hand briefly - and confessing my sins in hopes of forgiveness and a smooth ride - he briefly covered safety and strapped me in to my harness and promptly showed me my waiting spot outside.

I began to worry a little about the breadth of my training as I realized I was outside a full 15 minutes before anyone else.

Finally the group ahead of us landed and we were off on our death march to the field (though this may have just been me as everyone else, including Katie, seemed quite content; some were even smiling - damn them and their audacity). After being held like anxious puppies by our harnesses to ensure we did not bolt out into the prop of the oncoming plane (Warning #2 of 6 from our "thorough" training), we climbed a steel ladder up into a rackety old, single prop plane that looked and felt as if it would fall apart immediately should the wind pick up past a stiff breeze. My only consolation at this time was the knowledge that we did have a parachute strapped to us should anything go wrong.

Making our way to the end of the runway, we bolted off and climbed our way up to our jumping altitude of 13000 feet. Perhaps it was a case of nerves playing tricks on my mind, but it sure felt like we toured half of Western OR before finally circling back towards our jump point.

Though my palms were sweaty, my nerves were surprisingly under control, and I gave Katie a couple of last kisses just in case (much to the chagrin of her fat tandem partner who took a little too much pleasure in strapping her close). As my partner and hers joked about tips in hopes of bulking up their day's pay, the red light came on indicating our need to ready ourselves for the jump ahead.

Before I knew it Amanda and her friend Gary were out the door and Katie's fat instructor was racing us to the exit. As the last ones out, I had a moment to look down at the world below and contemplate what I was about to do. In that instant, time stood still and my focus rested solely on the grassy field far below, when suddenly I felt my legs get thrown out from underneath me and felt, for a brief second, my stomach float to my throat.

Uttering a silent and quick "oh, shit" (silent at least in my own mind, it may well have been bellowed for all I know) Tim proceeded to twist and turn us in a procession of somersaults and spins; enough to make me queasy, but not enough to raise my fear level. Within ten seconds we were in an arched position and I was staring out at the clear skied expanse a July day offers as I watched the ground edge closer and closer to my frame of reference.

For an instant, as the ground and runway below loomed larger and larger, I feared Tim had suffered an unfortunate heart attack when I felt his legs wrap around mine and the parachute deploy. Instantly, we were floating serenely over the exact spot we took off from and Tim quickly taught me how to maneuver and control the chute and I was free to steer us down in spins and loops.

As the last one out of the plane but first ones down (the more you spin the faster you drop), we edged towards the ground and I was warned to put my feet up. Before I knew it, we were down and the journey was over, I was again on solid soil (thankfully, without so much as soiling myself). We had dropped 13,000 feet in a little over five minutes (8000 of them were in 55 seconds).

I don't know if I expected some giant epiphany, I know I at least expected nerves, but I felt no real fear until after we were driving off and I had a moment to contemplate what I had just done.

One of the greatest things about having a girlfriend who likes to try new things is that I am never bored, one of the worst (and this is only because I am a wimp) is that I am actually forced to go through with them all. I have had an eventful year and plan on letting Katie continue to challenge me and force me to do things far out of my comfort zone, as this surely was never close to my radar before meeting her.

I have to admit, I never thought I would be saying this, but I would recommend everyone try and jump out of a perfectly good airplane at least once, the feeling is unlike anything you will ever experience.