"Snivelling at 4000 Feet": A Friend's First Jump Essay

[craichead 0]

I just thought I'd share this with you all...it's very well-written essay about my friend's first tandem experience. She hesitated to send it to me at first because she felt guilty that she wasn't "hooked" after her jump--like she somehow disappointed me and AndyMan, her "skydiving parents."

I told her that it was okay that she wasn't hooked, we were just glad that we could share our skydiving passion with her and that she enjoyed the experience. If she hadn't had a good time, then WE would feel guilty!

_Pm

Snivelling at 4000 Feet
by Kendra Greene

Skydiving, sort of like jaywalking or petting a stray dog or eating a sloppy joe just before a job interview, is the sort of thing you could do and probably nothing would happen.  But if it did, for any reason, through any conceivable chain of events, no matter what, you would simply have no excuse for what happened.  It's not the sort of thing you go into just knowing you'll regret it, but rather the sort of thing you can imagine having to explain, possibly while wearing a cast, and being met unconditionally with no sympathy.  Not for you and certainly not for your fool predicament.  This isn't the sort of thing you can explain to skydivers.

Two years ago, Piriya jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and it changed her life.  I've never asked, but I suspect she was hooked before she even hit the ground.  What I do know is that she had an unshakeable goofy grin for days afterward, and it wasn't long before she was busy logging jumps and shopping for altimeters and trying to figure out why on earth I wasn't going with her.

I don't have a fear of falling.  I don't mind heights.  In fact, the thought of skydiving inspires in me no visceral reaction of any kind.  I tried explaining to Piriya that really the only part that got me was being strapped to someone I didn't know for a prolonged period of time. "Clearly," she said, "you've never seen a skydiving instructor."

When I was a freshman in college, the captain of the men's cross country team sat me down at a party he was hosting with the promise that we would talk until I could give him a good reason not to drink with him.  These are the sort of conversations you can't win, the sort of conversations that reward argument about the same way quicksand rewards thrashing.  These are the sort of conversations you have with the converted.  And they are the sort of conversations Piriya and I had about skydiving.  For a long time, the only way to sidestep to less contentious topics was to remind her that I still couldn't justify spending the money on it.  It occurs to me now that, after a while, these conversations came to coincide with Piriya's attempts to find me part-time jobs.

Last week I accepted an invitation to dinner and found myself surrounded by skydivers.  If you are one, a skydiver, it's a big part of your life and, eventually, the conversation fell into the familiar paces of why wasn't I trying it, too?  I hardly had a chance to say something polite but non-committal when Piriya added, "and we'll pay for it."  I can't say that sold me on the idea, but it did change things.  I had nothing to counter with.  A few days later, waiting to meet Piriya and the train that would take us out to the dropzone, I was still undecided about jumping.  What I did know, what I was sure of, was that I wanted to witness this thing, whatever it was, that draws my friends out of the city every weekend.

It is hardly an overstatement to say that Piriya and Andy spend every weekend at the dropzone.  It's how they met, in fact.  They're married now, and it seems the only reason to stay away is the Chicago winters that effectively end the season from November to March.  A shoulder injury from an off landing has kept Piriya grounded for months, but she still goes.  She had to start working in the pro shop so she'd have something to do while all her friends were busy jumping, but she's still there.

And I can't blame her.

Skydivers may be the single most pleasant group of people I've ever spent time with.  Friendly, engaging, generous, interesting.  What everyone kept telling me about skydivers that weekend, and they were all skydivers so they should know, was that nobody knows what anyone does for a living.  People from all walks of life do it, they'd say, gesturing across the bonfire at a group that, for all we knew, included a doctor, a bartender, and a landscape architect.  The point was, they explained, that no one ever thought to ask, sometimes years passed before it even came up.  (The other thing I learned about skydiver social customs was that single women don't stay single long, and that skydivers don't "break up," they just "lose their turn.")

When Piriya introduced me to her dropzone friends, naturally my jumping status (or lack thereof) was part of the introduction, followed by Piriya's belief that I could use some convincing.  I braced myself for a hard sell, a wide-eyed enthusiasm, an intensity appropriate to an adrenaline-junkie. It's not what I got.  What I got was a the thoughtful silence of people who seem never to have needed to articulate their passion, people who had no convincing arguments because it wouldn't have occurred to them that there was another point to argue.  I expected "You gotta do it, man!" and was met with something more akin to, "Well, why wouldn't you?"  The more people I talked to, the more the whole thing sounded almost meditative.  "It's like, you're some place you're not supposed to be, and you just have to think about how lucky you are to be there, to get a chance to see things like that."

One of the people I'd met that first day, one of the Toms actually, was Loud Tom, and he was the only one who seemed interested in disarming whatever reason I might have to not jump.  "You like great views?  You're the kind of person that takes the window seat on airplanes?"  I do.  I am.  But, I had to point out, I also hate rollercoasters, my ears don't handle so much as elevator trips up tall buildings especially well, and I don't have the health insurance to cover so much as a sprained ankle.  Tom was unmoved. "It's not like a rollercoaster, your ears will clear in a couple of days," he made me follow along as he pinched his nose and exhaled, practiced getting my ears adjusted after an imaginary jump, "and nothing's going to happen to you because you'll be with me and I won't let it."

Tom has a day job that involves his name being embroidered neatly on the jacket he was wearing, but as you might guess with a skydiver, I couldn't tell you any more about it than that.  Weekends, anyway, he's a tandem jump instructor, tall and lanky which someone later told me is supposed to be ideal for that sort of thing, with a colored eyebrow ring and a number of ear piercings.  "I don't want to be that person who gets up there and then realizes it's a bad idea," I finally told him, at the end of a list of all possible reasons I could decide not to jump.  "That only happens to girls who need a lot of attention, and they end up jumping anyway.  You're not one of those girls," he assured me.  Then, with a twinkle in his eye he followed up, "Are you?"

. . .

There are a lot of things I remember about the weekend, most of which have nothing to do with skydiving.  The near-forgotten pleasure of putting up a tent.  The way you can be woken by four trains, a few low-flying airplanes, and a barking dog and still sleep better than you have in weeks.  The all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast some pilots had put together one hangar over.  How many conversations I had because someone just walked over and started one.  One thing I don't remember is quite how I got signed up to jump.

Jump school is short.  It takes approximately an equal amount of time to initial the fifty different ways the legal disclaimer advises you that "skydiving is inherently dangerous."  And then you wait to get assigned a flight and an instructor.  The plane at chicagoland skydiving is decorated with colorful dots all over the tail and is called the "Spotted Otter."  I was on the ninth load; people who go up in the first one are called "test dummies" because no one's figured out the winds for the day and it's unlikely the jumpers will land on the field.  I watched Sunday's test dummies come down and all but one landed in the corn or the soybean fields that surround the dropzone.  I should mention here that Chicagoland Skydiving is based in Hinckley, Illinois, a town with only a handful of stoplights and, curiously, the home of the debut game of the Harlem Globetrotters.  Which is all to say that there's a lot of corn to land in, if it comes to that.  Tom assured me it wouldn't.

Tom, a man clad in a lime green jumpsuit with jungle print patches who likes to joke about being narcoleptic or having taken an extra dose of his medication, had been awarded the responsibility of getting me safely to the ground from 12,000 feet.  He taught me how to kneel at the plane's open door.  How to rock out into an arch.  How to pull my hair back so he wouldn't end up with a mouthful of red curls. He offered me a flightsuit, but made it clear the 70 degree day would be too hot for it.

It occurred to me while I was waiting for my load to come up, that skydiving, at least your first time, is one of those activities you should really do with a group of friends if you can help it.  Which made it particularly nice when Piriya closed up the pro-shop long enough to ride co-pilot on my flight, and Andy volunteered his videography services. Skydiving flights have the goal of getting you to altitude as fast as possible, which means a sharp climb up, the sort of thing that makes you wish the darn thing would just level off and let you out.  Perhaps they do that on purpose.  Tom joked and teased all the way up, and didn't seem to care that our altimeters had different readings.  Apparently it's not that important.

It's cold up that high, up at 12,000 feet, and I began to wish Tom hadn't talked me out of the flightsuit. Soon, though, my thoughts were occupied with how to cross my arms to fall out and then spring into an arch and look for Andy and remember to look at the horizon and smile and not look down because everyone looks down and breathe because no one remembers to breathe and we were out! and upside down and unstable and then fine again.  The time it takes to reach terminal velocity is relatively short, which is good because it's the getting to that point that throws your stomach.  And then it's the dark ribbon of the horizon. The wind rushing past you.  The ease with which another person can move toward you, take your hand, swing you around as if with no effort.

When you hit 6,000 feet, you try to pull the parachute, yanking at an orange cylinder on your right hip that's harder to find than you might think.  Our parachute snivelled, Tom's and mine, deployed but wouldn't open for a thousand feet.  Time enough for Tom to start explaining what was happening, time enough for him to decide that in 500 more feet we'd have to cut and go to the reserve.  We didn't, the shoot opened, hard, my legs swinging up in a clean arc from where they'd been tucked up behind my back.  Tom loosened up the harness and we fell slowly toward the ground under a full canopy.  We watched Andy fall away from us, pull his chute some thousand feet below.

"You like carnival rides?" Tom called out.
"Hate 'em!" I shouted back.
"Then you won't like this at all!"  I could almost hear him grinning as he swung us sharply to the side.

Back on the ground I had the same sort of zen feeling I had in the air, of the whole thing being no big deal, and  started to wonder if I'd done too good of talking myself through it.  If in deciding not to be nervous I'd sacrificed the sheer enjoyment of it.   I had had a good time, was glad I'd done it, would recommend it to anyone interested, but I had kind of hoped for a little bit more, kind of expected to be one of those people with passion in their eyes and plastered across the face with that permanent grin.

The night before, in one of the conversations about why I could possibly resist jumping, I explained that everyone I knew who had tried it became addicted and I saw no reason to go looking for an expensive addiction.  And now I was just a little disappointed not to be hooked. Sitting at the bonfire that first night, I was on the one side next to a mother of three who had gone back to bartending, actually took a second job to pay for all the training it would take to get her certification, put it all on her credit card before she even took that first jump because she knew that she'd love it.  On my other side was a former tandem instructor who laid it out simply.  "Out of five hundred people I've seen jump, maybe five really didn't like it.  Maybe five or six stayed with it.  So your chances of being at either end isn't good, but your chances of going out and having a great time is huge.  Life's all about experiencing things, and you pick the things you want to experience again," he paused here before summing up.

"So you go out, you give your instructor hell, and you enjoy it."   Simple as that.  Easy.  Like falling off a log.  From twelve thousand feet.

__
"Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

[mr2mk1g 10]

That is a really wonderful text.

[yoink 321]

fantastic writing. Really.

[ladyskydiver 0]

Nice write up.

Life is short! Break the rules! Forgive quickly! Kiss slowly! Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret anything that made you smile.

[tigra 0]

Nice!

I also have a very close friend who has made one tandem. Not hooked, but at least she sees what I see about the people and the experience. Sure, it would have been nice to drag her in to my addiction, but out of all my whuffo friends, she's the only one who has made a jump, and that means the world to me!

[skydver 0]

could not have said it better myself........im glad i loved it

[soarfree 0]

Thanks for posting that story. I enjoyed reading it.

And it'll be great for my whuffo friends to have a less biased viewpoint to hear from with regards to doing a tandem!

Well behaved women rarely make history - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

[The111 0]

I know what other people at the DZ do for a living. And I've been asked myself many times...

But good article otherwise. :)

www.WingsuitPhotos.com

[tigra 0]

Honestly, I don't know what many of my friends at the dz do for a living, including friends I might have dinner with or see socially during the off season. And there's plenty of people I jump with whose real names I don't know! I might know a first OR last name, or maybe just a nickname. I think that's pretty typical!

[MarkM 0]

That's very well written. She should see if she could get it published.

[Jeth 0]

Great read!
I took 2 friends for a tandem when I went back for my AFP. One of them got hooked and will be doing AFP next year. (She figured she would -- likes extreme sports) The other one didn't. She said she loved the experience, but didn't have any desire to learn how. So I guess its like that TM said - a few hate it, a few get hooked, and the rest just have fun.

I wasn't expecting to get hooked, and it does suck to have such an expensive passion, but it's all worth it when I get in the air!!

"At 13,000 feet nothing else matters."
PFRX!!!!!
Team Funnel #174, Sunshine kisspass #109
My Jump Site

[AndyMan 7]

Here's a few pics to accompany her story.
_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[nael 0]

That's an awesome write up!

One of my best friends did a tandem to see what all the fuss was about - she didnt like it much either. She said it was ok, but not worth the money. Her ears hurt during freefall apparently. She doesnt understand why I spend all my money jumping, and I dont understand why she doesn't spend all her money jumping!

www.TerminalSports.com.auAustralia's largest skydive gear store

[piisfish 135]

nice smiles on nice pics.
and a great text.

scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

[BIGUN 1,053]

A great read. She is a talented writer. She captured two instances of truth.

One was that skydivers "turn off" the outside world when they cross the front gate of the DZ. We don't care what one does for a living, how much they are worth or wherever else one may stand on the socio-economic ladder. We are all equally fascinated with a single object called skydiving and that's all that matters - today.

The other was; we all understand that it's not for everyone and everyone has their own reason for doing it or not doing it and as a group respect that. We also respect her for having tried it before candidly deciding it wasn't for her, rather than the the reasons for not doing it before tried.

Nobody has time to listen; because they're desperately chasing the need of being heard.

[Spudmuffin 0]

Great essay...and great pics!

• Quote

[GeordieSkydiver 0]

Quote

"It's like, you're some place you're not supposed to be, and you just have to think about how lucky you are to be there, to get a chance to see things like that."

You got it.

Lee

Lee _______________________________

In a world full of people, only some want to fly, is that not crazy?
http://www.ukskydiver.co.uk

[mdrejhon 8]

Quote

One of my best friends did a tandem to see what all the fuss was about - she didnt like it much either. She said it was ok, but not worth the money. Her ears hurt during freefall apparently. She doesnt understand why I spend all my money jumping, and I dont understand why she doesn't spend all her money jumping!

The ear pain was one of my worries. It was really, really, really, really, really painful on my first jump. First jump, the pain was like a 9 out of 10 on the "pain-o-meter" scale. Now it doesn't even register a 1 out of 10.

But now, I don't even notice any pain at all. Either my ears got used to the sudden pressure changes of freefall and landing, or I make sure that my sinuses are not "totally blocked up", which may have been part of the problem on my first jump.

[Ron 7]

Wow...That was good.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334