leap of faith, part deux

Do any of you know what it's like to jump out of a plane at 13,500 feet - 2 miles above the earth? Neither do I. My skydiving experience last weekend was almost entirely an out-of-body experience. Who can honestly say they skydive with all of their faculties intact?

OK, so really I was scared out of my mind, and, yes, I do remember most of the details. There was the 20 minute tandem jump video that was so haphazardly cut and pasted back together that the bearded skydiver man on the TV never seemed to convey a complete thought. There was the 2 hour wait following the oh-so-brief briefing. There was a near panic as we watched the video of someone who had just finished their first tandem jump.

And then.

It was time.

We suited up in our sexy blue "falling out of aircraft" one-piece outfits-with-limb-handles. We were fitted with hotttt puke-blue helmets (should there exist such a hue). We waited. We made anxious conversation. We met our jump masters. Mine was named Ernie and had made over 9,000 jumps, and yet I couldn't shake the premonition that I would be crashing into the ground at 120 mph in a matter of minutes.

We walked out to a grassy runway, where the tiniest yellow plane you can imagine rolled up to our modest waiting area of about 6 wooden benches. We boarded the plane, strapped ourselves in and climbed into the atmosphere - with the plane's door hanging wide open!! At some point someone handed me a piece of candy. And despite the fact that I knew if I didn't crash into the earth I would die a pitiful death from choking on a mint, I unwrapped it and popped it into my mouth without hestitation. Before I knew it, I was unbuckling, strapping myself to my jump master, and looking out of the doorway, 2 miles above ground and scared out of my mind. It is a truly strange feeling to realize that you don't have a whole lot of say in the matter when you have a moustached man named Ernie strapped to your back. Seconds later, I was hurling myself into an empty space, filled with nothing but the sound of wind all around me.

After that initial holy hell, why did I just jump out of a plane feeling, there wasn't much else to do than look at the cameraman and smile. So I did just that - and, in the end, received some truly nerdy pictures as a result.

As we fell through layers of atmosphere, each warmer than the next (it was about 100 degrees on the ground), I realized that it wasn't so bad. The fact that I was hurtling towards the earth at an alarming rate was so inconceivable that it took the shock of our blessed parachute (canopy, in professional skydiver talk) opening to make me realize that, yes, I did indeed just freefall for about a mile.

Would I do it again? Sure, why not... But I do think that I've met my daredevil quota for the year.