I Will Stay On Land

I say the following sentence from experience. The first time you jump out of an airplane, there's really only one way to celebrate, and that's with a corn dog.

My friend Sam is getting married this weekend. For his bachelor party festivities, the plan was to play some video games on Friday, sky dive on Saturday, and then hit Sixth Street that night. The middle part of that didn't really appeal to me. I have a little thing about heights, plus, as an innate coward, I'm not such an adrenaline junkie. My plan then was to skip the sky dive, but hit the rest of the celebration and have a large time.

The problem with the video game geek-out fest was that there was alcohol involved. As the beverages flowed, our conversations kept returning to sky diving. At first, I held strong; I wasn't going. And then, like many other strange choices in my life, alcohol and peer pressure led me to a weird place. That weird place was inside an airplane at 10,000 feet with a crazy man strapped to my back.

I wasn't scared when I put the suit on. I wasn't scared when they gave me the training. I wasn't scared when I got on the plane. As soon as that door on the plane came open, though... all I can say is holy shinola. I really wanted to turn around to my instructor and say, "Wait, I'm not even supposed to be here!" I couldn't though, because he was tied to my back. Also, he was legitimately insane and I knew he'd throw me out of the plane out of spite.

There were 6 in our group, and I was the last one to jump. I got to watch everybody's faces as they jumped, and they were all absolutely terrified. I would say that we were so afraid, we were past the point of screaming or crying, where all we could do was pray silently and hope that if we peed our pants, we did so discreetly.

Everybody jumped, though. When they had, it was my turn. The guy latched to my back forced me towards the door. I was resigned to my fate at that point; I knew I was going out that door, and I just hoped it would be quick and hopefully the volume of my girlish shrieks would cause me to black out. We inched our way closer and then, everyone on the plane started screaming at us.

"Red light! Red light! Get away from the door!"

He anchored us back to the bench in a hurry. I had no idea what these people were talking about, but red light did not sound good. I wondered, is that the code for a tornado or maybe an engine flame-out? Was he just going to launch us out the door without giving me time to assume my practiced safety stance?

Somebody must've seen my frantic state because a voice explained, "A red light means we're too far away from the landing area."

They turned the plane back around. The instructor and I are still sitting right in front of the open door, with the red light blinking in our faces. I sat there like that for maybe three or four minutes, just waiting for doom to strike. It was awful.

Then, the instructor said we were good and he positioned me in front of the door. He made me count to 3 with him, and then we did a few backflips out of the plane. I should say that he did a few backflips, while I screamed helplessly and clawed my harness.

Once we stopped spinning (which he later told me he did on purpose because I seemed cool), it was actually pretty neat. We had about a minute of free fall, which was loud, fast, and windy. The free fall was fun in an "I'm about to die and this is a good way to go out" way. Then he pulled the cord and I knew I probably wouldn't die, unless we landed inside the power plant or near the railroad tracks.

I don't think the instructor had any idea how reluctant I was to do this. He thought I was a major skydive fiend, thus all of the backflips, him letting me steer the parachute a while, and his declaration, shouted in mid air, that we should try to land on our feet. Everyone else just landed on their asses like big sacks of beans, but he thought we could do better. His plan was for us to hit the ground running, thus keeping our momentum from carrying us into the sewer. It sounded complicated, but once I saw that ground, I knew that I'd do whatever it took to get back to it in one piece.

The landing was fine. When I finally got untangled, I was pumped. I hypothesize now that I could've thrown a dump truck a good 80 yards due to all of the adrenaline. Not seeing any dump trucks, I settled for a corn dog with my friends. It was crazy, it was fun, and I'm not doing it again.

Posted by Cody at August 27, 2007 6:40 PM