Valentine's Day Sky-Diving

I spent all this morning psyching myself up for the jump. I'm normally a brave person, but the idea of jumping out of a plane had me rattled. With skydiving, you have a lot of time between realizing that you're gonna be painting the ground red and it actually happening. But, as I repeated to myself, the odds were for me, and even though it wouldn't be a pleasant way to die, it would definitely be an impressive one (imagine the obituary!).  So I was feeling pretty confident - even cocky - as I zipped into a speedsuit and my jump-partner, Randy of Out of the Blue Skydiving, tightened my harness.

The six of us (Dean and I, our jump-partners, and our cameramen) were squeezed inside this tiny little propellor plane before I remembered - I'm terrified of flying.  I'm an atheist, but you know that saying, there are no atheists in foxholes.  Flying is spitting in God's face; that metal tube is really just a giant middle finger to an omnipotent and vengeful deity; if humans were meant to fly, we'd have been born with wings!  And on and on.  Given the options between jumping out of the plane and staying in the plane, suddenly jumping out didn't seem like such a bad idea.

And it wasn't.  Skydiving is wonderful, and I would do it again in a heartbeat if I had the money.  The first few seconds are admittedly terrible - that roller-coaster feeling of your stomach hitting your throat cranked up to eleven - but then you hit freefall and you feel like you're flying instead of falling!  It ended way too quickly, just as I was really getting into it and wondering if Randy would hear me if I asked him to flip us over or something, the chute popped - far more gently than I would've predicted - and we were floating down to earth.

Penrose Airport from 5,000 feet in the air

Here's the exciting part; I could tell something was wrong after the chute popped because Randy was shifting and twisting an awful lot.  Then suddenly we started falling again.  I learned later that our first chute had malfunctioned - the lines were seriously tangled and it would prevent us from landing safely.  Randy had to eject that chute (hence the second fall!) and pop the back-up chute, during which we fell another 1,500 feet. We ended up landing safely (on our feet even), and everyone kept teasing me by telling me how lucky I was that I got two rides for the price of one!

People keep asking if I was scared.  Honestly, I wasn't.  It all happened too quickly for me emotionally react; I was aware what was going on, but it was like my neurotransmitters hadn't caught up to it.  Mainly I was thinking, "Of course this would happen to me."  By the time I was able to think things through, I was safely on the ground, and then there was no point in panicking.  In the end, I was pretty happy that I had such a good story to tell my friends later.  I asked Randy how many times this had happened to him before, and he said 26 times in his 5700 jumps!