Falling 'n' Love
Oct. 8th, 2012 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldThis was my official entry for the contest. It’s actually a pretty substantial edit of a much longer journal entry I wrote way back in 2005. It was about four times as long and included a lot of stuff about my brother (who was with me on this adventure) as well as some additional excerpts from the waiver form I signed.
My biggest concern about this piece was that it was sort of conventional and “obvious,” such that there might actually be a number of skydiving entries for the judges to sift through. But in the end I thought it was simply the funnier piece. It received the most support from my peer reviewers, although I think the story still makes my mom nervous, even just reading it seven years later.
This is the exact version I submitted, 1,000 words exactly.
I’m not by nature a thrill-seeker. I’m perfectly content with the thrills that I find inadvertently, like an unusually well-blended smoothie. But skydiving always seemed like one of those things everyone should do before dying (if not *right* before dying), like running a marathon or falling in love. Skydiving seemed easier than those other things, since skydiving allows gravity to do most of the work and does not require high levels of personal charm.
I was in Las Vegas – where extreme sports like skydiving and bungee jumping and prostitution comprise a cottage industry, with ads promising Heart-Pumping Excitement! and Free Shuttle Service! – when I arranged a “tandem” jump, in which a novice skydiver is strapped to the front of an experienced skydiver who knows how to operate an altimeter and parachute without the use of adult diapers.
When the shuttle picked me up the next morning, the driver gave me and six other suckers a clipboard, a pen, and the scariest document I have ever read. It began:
“ALL FORMS OF SKYDIVING, AVIATION & ALL RELATED ACTIVITIES ARE DANGEROUS & CAN RESULT IN MAJOR PERMANENT INJURY, PAIN AND SUFFERING, &/or DEATH.”
Pain? Until I read this clause, I had just assumed that if things went wrong, it was The End. Suddenly I was worried about spending my last five conscious minutes as a semi-solid mass.
The next two pages were almost entirely about giving up the right to sue the company, its related entities, its employees, their pets, etc. ever again in perpetuity – while acknowledging that the "covered activities" may be subject to "singular or collective inabilities, failures, shortcomings, bad judgements, wrong decisions, mistakes, actions or inactions, errors or omissions, physical &/or mental blunders & all forms of oversight & simple or gross negligence.”
Forget death and pain. At that point I started worrying about my mom, and the possibility of having my remains mailed home in a manila envelope, along with my signed waiver preventing her from suing anyone for the postage due.
Eventually we rolled into a dusty airstrip. Milling about was a ragtag crew of Skydiving Professionals, most of whom appeared to have just awakened from sleeping in the hangar.
Our “training” consisted of a 20-minute video demonstrating the basic skydiving maneuver: The Banana Position, in which the novice jumper curls his or her legs backwards between his or her partner’s legs while tilting the head back. We also learned such important techniques as the Climb-Out, Clearing the Ears, and No Touching Anything!!!. At the end, a sober and serious man talked about how tandem skydiving is an experimental method that is currently being sanctioned only for study purposes, and noted that a full legitimization of the process is expected sometime in the early 1990s.
We were assigned jumpsuits, harnesses, gloves and goggles, as well as a padded “helmet” that would not have protected my head against an errant bird, much less the hard Nevada earth. I was then introduced to my tandem jumper, Ace, who exuded a shaggy, Zen-like confidence and the faint odor of Red Bull.
While Ace and his fellow experts geared up, I stared at the plane on the tarmac. It looked like it was made from tin foil and might tip over from a stiff wind, which incidentally seemed to be growing stiffer, though that may simply have been the tingling in my extremities.
Once we all filed in, the plane shook to life. We took off, climbing, climbing and climbing as the sliding door rattled violently. My thoughts turned to the legend of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, damaged his parachute and never got to say goodbye to his girlfriend.
As rote procedure gave way to the reality of my situation, my brain initiated its full-scale panic sequence, which resembles Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, only with a preliminary pants-wetting phase.
DENIAL: “You can quit now. Nobody will ever know,” I told myself. “You have nothing to prove. Gravity is soooo 16th Century.”
One by one, the jumpers slid along the bench and tumbled out of the plane. I was the only one left, creating a powerful peer-pressurized vacuum.
ANGER: “What is wrong with these people? Am I the only rational person left? What moron even came up with this macho bullshAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHHHHH!”
Ace pushed us both through the door. “The Banana Position” became a novel afterthought as my legs cramped into a painful rictus.
BARGAINING: “Please oh please let me survive this and I promise I will eat more vegetables and give change to panhandlers and file my taxes early and vote for Obama.” Though not exactly a praying man, I thought that maybe God might be listening because I was so nearby and screaming so loud.
The air whooshed into my lungs and my goggles and every crease of my body, rendering me literally senseless.
DEPRESSION: “I can’t make out anything up here – not Hoover Dam, not Lake Mead … I can’t even identify solid Earth. Also, I’m suffocating in mid-air while plummeting toward certain death. This was a bad idea.”
I felt a jolt and let my exhausted body go limp. The parachute burst into action and my free-fall became a gentle morning glide over the desert.
ACCEPTANCE: “I’m alive! And everything is beautiful! I love you, Earth! I love you, God! I love you, Ace!” Gradually it occurred to me that I had just paid $300 for a ten-minute flight and two minutes of sheer terror, but I accepted that, too.
It would be poetic to say that skydiving is like falling in love. Unfortunately, this is not true. They share some common elements, mostly relating to the collapse of one’s autonomic nervous system. But falling in love is based on mutual affection and respect, rather than mere gravity, and typically costs way more than $300.
Still, there was something strangely transcendent about it. For a cheap thrill, skydiving somehow brought me closer to humanity, and nature, and God. (But, thankfully, not too close.)
My biggest concern about this piece was that it was sort of conventional and “obvious,” such that there might actually be a number of skydiving entries for the judges to sift through. But in the end I thought it was simply the funnier piece. It received the most support from my peer reviewers, although I think the story still makes my mom nervous, even just reading it seven years later.
This is the exact version I submitted, 1,000 words exactly.
I’m not by nature a thrill-seeker. I’m perfectly content with the thrills that I find inadvertently, like an unusually well-blended smoothie. But skydiving always seemed like one of those things everyone should do before dying (if not *right* before dying), like running a marathon or falling in love. Skydiving seemed easier than those other things, since skydiving allows gravity to do most of the work and does not require high levels of personal charm.
I was in Las Vegas – where extreme sports like skydiving and bungee jumping and prostitution comprise a cottage industry, with ads promising Heart-Pumping Excitement! and Free Shuttle Service! – when I arranged a “tandem” jump, in which a novice skydiver is strapped to the front of an experienced skydiver who knows how to operate an altimeter and parachute without the use of adult diapers.
When the shuttle picked me up the next morning, the driver gave me and six other suckers a clipboard, a pen, and the scariest document I have ever read. It began:
“ALL FORMS OF SKYDIVING, AVIATION & ALL RELATED ACTIVITIES ARE DANGEROUS & CAN RESULT IN MAJOR PERMANENT INJURY, PAIN AND SUFFERING, &/or DEATH.”
Pain? Until I read this clause, I had just assumed that if things went wrong, it was The End. Suddenly I was worried about spending my last five conscious minutes as a semi-solid mass.
The next two pages were almost entirely about giving up the right to sue the company, its related entities, its employees, their pets, etc. ever again in perpetuity – while acknowledging that the "covered activities" may be subject to "singular or collective inabilities, failures, shortcomings, bad judgements, wrong decisions, mistakes, actions or inactions, errors or omissions, physical &/or mental blunders & all forms of oversight & simple or gross negligence.”
Forget death and pain. At that point I started worrying about my mom, and the possibility of having my remains mailed home in a manila envelope, along with my signed waiver preventing her from suing anyone for the postage due.
Eventually we rolled into a dusty airstrip. Milling about was a ragtag crew of Skydiving Professionals, most of whom appeared to have just awakened from sleeping in the hangar.
Our “training” consisted of a 20-minute video demonstrating the basic skydiving maneuver: The Banana Position, in which the novice jumper curls his or her legs backwards between his or her partner’s legs while tilting the head back. We also learned such important techniques as the Climb-Out, Clearing the Ears, and No Touching Anything!!!. At the end, a sober and serious man talked about how tandem skydiving is an experimental method that is currently being sanctioned only for study purposes, and noted that a full legitimization of the process is expected sometime in the early 1990s.
We were assigned jumpsuits, harnesses, gloves and goggles, as well as a padded “helmet” that would not have protected my head against an errant bird, much less the hard Nevada earth. I was then introduced to my tandem jumper, Ace, who exuded a shaggy, Zen-like confidence and the faint odor of Red Bull.
While Ace and his fellow experts geared up, I stared at the plane on the tarmac. It looked like it was made from tin foil and might tip over from a stiff wind, which incidentally seemed to be growing stiffer, though that may simply have been the tingling in my extremities.
Once we all filed in, the plane shook to life. We took off, climbing, climbing and climbing as the sliding door rattled violently. My thoughts turned to the legend of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, damaged his parachute and never got to say goodbye to his girlfriend.
As rote procedure gave way to the reality of my situation, my brain initiated its full-scale panic sequence, which resembles Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, only with a preliminary pants-wetting phase.
DENIAL: “You can quit now. Nobody will ever know,” I told myself. “You have nothing to prove. Gravity is soooo 16th Century.”
One by one, the jumpers slid along the bench and tumbled out of the plane. I was the only one left, creating a powerful peer-pressurized vacuum.
ANGER: “What is wrong with these people? Am I the only rational person left? What moron even came up with this macho bullshAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHHHHH!”
Ace pushed us both through the door. “The Banana Position” became a novel afterthought as my legs cramped into a painful rictus.
BARGAINING: “Please oh please let me survive this and I promise I will eat more vegetables and give change to panhandlers and file my taxes early and vote for Obama.” Though not exactly a praying man, I thought that maybe God might be listening because I was so nearby and screaming so loud.
The air whooshed into my lungs and my goggles and every crease of my body, rendering me literally senseless.
DEPRESSION: “I can’t make out anything up here – not Hoover Dam, not Lake Mead … I can’t even identify solid Earth. Also, I’m suffocating in mid-air while plummeting toward certain death. This was a bad idea.”
I felt a jolt and let my exhausted body go limp. The parachute burst into action and my free-fall became a gentle morning glide over the desert.
ACCEPTANCE: “I’m alive! And everything is beautiful! I love you, Earth! I love you, God! I love you, Ace!” Gradually it occurred to me that I had just paid $300 for a ten-minute flight and two minutes of sheer terror, but I accepted that, too.
It would be poetic to say that skydiving is like falling in love. Unfortunately, this is not true. They share some common elements, mostly relating to the collapse of one’s autonomic nervous system. But falling in love is based on mutual affection and respect, rather than mere gravity, and typically costs way more than $300.
Still, there was something strangely transcendent about it. For a cheap thrill, skydiving somehow brought me closer to humanity, and nature, and God. (But, thankfully, not too close.)
