And that’s how my frenemies pushed me out of an airplane…
Two friends, my wife, and one bitter-sweet idea = a story.
Today is two days before my birthday, a Saturday, when I realised Mimie, my wife, had conspired with two of our friends to celebrate me by pushing me out of an airplane. The legal name is skydiving.
They’d been planning this for weeks. And I only found out about an hour before jump-off time. When I was told, I ran upstairs, not to prepare or pray, but to “relax my mind”, which in practice meant lying flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering if a sudden headache might be convincing enough to cancel.
Then I called my mum, to see her face, you know, just in case.
Heavy sigh.
The journey there was long. I couldn’t get it out of my head. On the outside, I was a hard guy. On the inside, I was a trying-to-be-hard guy. The thought that I wouldn’t be doing it alone helped. Kyle, one of the evil planners, would be jumping too.
“Calm down bro, people jump everyday”, I said to myself, “people jump every hour”, myself said to me.
Heavy sigh.
When we arrived, we signed this long agreement and liability waiver. I skimmed it, noting every paragraph threatening “serious injury”, “catastrophic malfunction”, and “pancake-like impact”.
Then came a delay. “You’d have to wait like 3-4 hours”, said a Filipino lady who I thought was really too honest to be a salesperson. “A perfect excuse to escape”, I said. But apparently, the stubborn people I came with weren’t buying it.
Like patient dogs, we waited two long hours.
Heavy sigh.
Eventually, it was time. The instructor came to strap me in. I couldn’t picture his age range; he looked 30 and 78 at the same time, rattling off these crazy rules and instructions I couldn’t comprehend. The only thing on my mind was the question I finally blurted out:
“How long have you been doing this, and have you had any casualties before?”
“Oh…No. I never even think about that”, he said, casually. “Been doing this for twelve years”.
I felt calm. A bit.
“How long does the jump last?“ Kyle asked an instructor while we were on the bus to the runway. “One minute free fall, and seven minutes parachute”, said the instructor. Out of nowhere, a woman, clearly a psychopath in uniform, chimed in: “Two minutes if the parachute doesn’t work”. Everyone laughed. I did too. Then I decoded that sentence in silence for the rest of the ride.
Heavy sigh.
We hopped on the plane. It smelled faintly of gasoline and fear. It was cramped, the kind of space you’d expect smugglers to use.
The fear didn’t really set in till we got to 13,000 ft. It got real when it was time to jump. My friend Kyle shuffled to the door. One second he was there, the next, gone. Flicked into the sky like a coin. That’s when I knew I was either about to have a cool story to tell from this eight-minute jump, or none, if the fall took two minutes.
Heavy sigh.
The instructor clipped me to his chest like a toddler backpack. “Just relax,” he said, which is, of course, the easiest thing to do when someone is about to shove you out of a moving aircraft.
And then… it was my turn. My legs refused, but the push came anyway. Out. We jumped. The first ten seconds were terror: instant dizziness, violent air, my body spinning uncontrollably. I could hear the instructor scream something in my ear that sounded like “Isn’t this amazing?????” but could have easily been “We’re both going to die!!!!!!!”
Something something something. The free fall went on for about sixty seconds.
Then the parachute yanked us upward. Suddenly, it was quiet. We floated. And I could see the Palm Jumeirah below us. Nice view, sure, but also the kind of view you can enjoy on a helicopter tour without having to jump off of it.
We glided for about 8 minutes before finally landing on a field where other jumpers were scattered around, pulling off their gear and looking far more heroic than I felt.
Then came the questions from Mimie:
Was it fun? - Yes.
Was it worth it? - Yes.
Was it an experience? - It is.
Would you do it again? - “Only if I lose both memory and sanity at the same time.”
“Now I understand why they call it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You do it once, and never again.” I said.
As the adrenaline wore off and the ground felt solid again, I realised something: I wouldn’t have signed up for this on my own, or even thought of it as something to do “for fun”. But I’m glad I did. As David Sedaris once said, sometimes the only reason you need to do something is to get a good story out of it. And now, I do. And I’ll tell everyone about it for as long as I can.