Sean Casey - Freelance Writer

The needle on the instructor’s altimeter reaches 10,000 feet. The plane’s exit door is thrown wide open. Outside, the wind howls. Beside me, a fellow jumper screams. The reality of what’s next sinks in.

The tandem pair in front goes first. Within three seconds, they cartwheel out of the plane and disappear into the blue horizon. My instructors taps me on the shoulder.

“We’re next!”

Second thoughts. What the hell am I doing? This is not the way to get over heartache. A bottle of tequila would have been so much wiser.

No time to protest. My legs suddenly dangle off the plane’s edge. No countdown is given, no “are you ready?” offered. The instructor simply leaps forward, pushes us outwards.

The plane disappears. The world below opens wide.

***

I have been terrorized by heights since birth. Childhood nightmares involved plummets toward the earth at terminal velocity. I shut my eyes tightly every time we drove over a bridge. Ladders and diving boards inspired mistrust and vertigo.

As an adult, nightmares became daymares every time I flew overseas. Though a devout atheist, I lapsed briefly back into a repentant Catholic on take-offs and landings, and sought divine intervention from bottles of wine in between.

Heights and flying, flying and heights. Skydiving combined these ultimate two fears into a package of sheer terror. For years, I promised myself I would one day take that plunge and face those fears. Only talk, however. One day I would be wheeled around in a retirement home, still promising to take a dive.

At least, that would have been the case, had it not been for an uncalculated moment of insanity caused by the end of a relationship. One moment I was at home, feeling sorry for myself and counting the number of bumps on the stucco walls. The next, I was in the grass fields of the skydiving centre in Abbotsford, receiving instructions on how to tandem dive.

The lesson lasted no more than five minutes. Cross your legs and arms. Tilt up your head. Arch your back as you plummet toward the earth. Safety lessons for paint ball games last longer. Jump gear was handed out: technicolour jumpsuits, tight leather caps and goggles. Circus carnie clothing, appropriate for being shot out of a cannon.

Like a death-row inmate minutes away from execution, a strange calm of acceptance descended as we approached the plane. Packed together tighter than passengers in a Guatemalan chicken bus, nothing was said as the plane took off and climbed cloudwards. The tandem instructors tied themselves to their human cargo. The plane became parallel with the summit of Mount Baker. Gravity eagerly awaited our descent.

***

My brain blue-screens as we fall through the atmosphere. The utmost important rules of survival had been violated: thou shall not jump from insane heights. Mental computation is impossible: invalid operation, situation cannot be processed.

It’s pure serenity as we free-fall. Momentary nirvana in the atmosphere. No desires. No doubts. No worries about ex-girlfriends, dead-end jobs, or economic futures. Rinzai Zen Buddhists call it sudden enlightenment: instantaneous understanding of the universe, caused by an intense, shocking experience. The ground dances below as we approach it at several thousand feet a minute. For sixty seconds or sixty-thousand years, everything is in its right place.

There is a whoosh as the parachute deploys. We’re jerked violently upwards, torn away from gravity’s grasp. Caught in the safety of the chute, the brain reboots. Reality comes back online.

It is only then that I remember to scream.

***

I babble incessantly to the tandem instructor as we float downwards. Thank you so much, this is the greatest moment of my life. He struggles to share my enthusiasm. He’s jumped ten times already this day, and many thousands of times before that.

“Let’s do some spins,” he says. He yanks hard at one of chute’s toggles, and sends us into a horizontal spiral. It shuts me up for a few minutes as the world whirls round.

***

There’s a scene in James Clavell’s Shogun where the novel’s protagonist attempts seppuku, only to be stopped at the last moment. For the next several days, the protagonist lives in a transcendent state of awareness. Having tasted death for a brief moment, the perception of reality becomes altered. Life is brighter, more vibrant.

Below our feet, Vancouver spreads out like a quilted patchwork. The grass glows neon. The horizon holds no boundary. Held tightly in the parachute’s embrace, the world below has never looked more promising.

Photo courtesy of Tandem Skydiving Hawaii

Tags: Jumping Out Of Planes