What It's like to Go Skydiving

Originally, I was going to title this article "How to Skydive," but what was I thinking? I don't really know how to skydive; I've just done it before. So, this article is meant to give you an idea of whether or not you would be too scared to go skydiving through a personal account of my needle-ly little adventure.

First off, you will be scared. (I had done some things prior to skydiving that some people would consider scary: rappelling down a waterfall, ziplining over a thousand feet above a thick forest, climbing
Mt.
Fuji, and walking into a massive bathtub with a bunch of naked Japanese men, to name a few; and I got scared right when I was about to leap out of the plane.) The question is whether or not you will be too scared to do it when you get to location. Chances are, you're not going to do it alone. When you decide to go skydiving, you will most likely have decided in a group, everyone egging each other on. You probably won't realize how scared you are at the moment you (or your friends) call to make the reservations, using the coupons that you managed to scrape by.

It might be a long ride to the skydiving location, especially if you're in an urban area, and you will feel the first fingers of fear creeping their way onto your shoulder when the driver hands you a contract to sign that basically says you can't sue the skydiving company if you die (while skydiving). When you arrive and realize how high the sky is (wonder why you never noticed before), you might reconsider. One of my friends did. She's never going to live that one down (not that I look down on people who are self-proclaimed "chicken-sh*ts"-I swear that's the word she used for herself-but I'm just a big fan of big thrills).

After you put on the harness, shake hands with your tandem instructor (if it's your first time, a tandem instructor will be attached to you on the jump), and get on the plane, you're almost there. If you're still not scared, congratulations, you're just about as fearless (and foolish) as yours truly.

There are many great skydiving spots in the world. The one my friends and I went to is on
Oahu
, maybe an hour outside
Honolulu
. I don't recommend going in the spring. It might rain. Don't worry, though. Nothing short of a lightning storm would stop the plane from taking off. They already drove you all the way over there; they're going to make some money off you. We went up when it was sprinkling. The raindrops added to the fun. The instructors claimed that skydiving is safer than getting on a bus or in a car: "You should have to sign one of these [the contract that says you can't sue in the event of your death] every time you get in a car."

Among the six pairs onboard, my instructor and I were the first to jump. I had seen a video of skydiving during the van ride to site and another one while waiting for our turn. I had been thinking about skydiving since about two years ago when a friend and I discussed about a group skydiving trip (it ended up that she wasn't one of the people I went with). I had seen many pretty crazy videos of skydiving on TV, on YouTube, and on Google.

But nothing could've prepared me for the paralysis that struck me first in my legs, traveling up to the pit of my stomach, coursing through my chest, and ending in my throat. I have no problems admitting it, I was scared witless, my heart threatening to hammer its way through my muscle, sinew, and skin. To this day, I wonder if I would've been just as scared had I not been the first to go.

To shine some relief on this tense situation, please allow me a side-note. Onboard with me was a female friend (our other friends had gone in an earlier group) whose tandem instructor decided that it would be fun to scare her before the jump. I completely agreed.

My tandem instructor told her, "Can you press that red button over there for me?"

"Which one?" she asked.

"This one," her tandem instructor said as he pointed.

She pressed it.

"What are you doing!?" both instructors growled as I roared with laughter. All she could was repeat "No!" as she clapped her hands on her thighs and, since she was convinced I had conspired with the two guys, attempted to punch me several times. To this day, I also wonder what that red button was for-aside from playing that all-important joke on my friend, of course.

As we got to the open door, the wind blasting toward us, my tandem instructor told me to bend my knees, lean back, sit on his lap, and leave everything to him. I leapt out of the plane, with him attached closer behind me than most homophobes would be comfortable with. I had on only a tank top and pants (hey, it was Spring Break). Big mistake. On the ground, the raindrops had felt like wet petals, but up in the air, falling at God knows what speed, they felt like needles of ice lancing into me. I was so occupied with the newly created red dots on my arms and shoulders that I didn't care how high I was.

If you ask me, skydiving is not about the view (it had rained too much in the past few days, thus making the waters too murky for any sort of view anyway); it's about the sensation: the wind howling in your face and ears, the full force of gravity acting on you, being that far up in the sky without being in a flying vehicle, knowing how birds probably feel (probably). It's a freedom that you can only feel a few thousand feet in the air. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you might suspect that something could go wrong, and you're right, but you don't care. Now you finally know what R Kelly's talking about in "I Believe I Can Fly" (literally).

It was great, absolutely amazing. I must've said something like that when my tandem instructor yelled in my ear to ask me what I thought about skydiving now that I was actually doing it. I meant every word. Throughout the fall, he navigated our direction with some wing-things attached to our gear. Sometime during the fall, probably near the end, he opened the parachute (I couldn't exactly turn my head back, and my ears were too shot to hear anything less than two millimeters away from them).

He told me that upon landing I would have to run with him, going with the momentum. No problem, I thought. Wrong. Problem. I had no energy when we landed. Or rather, my legs weren't used to the gravity. My tandem instructor (think his name was Shawn, by the way) carried my weight forward with him.

Thus concludes my trip falling from the sky. If you're interested, the company I went with was Skydive
Hawaii
.

Maybe I ought to try something like bungee jumping soon. Wonder if it'll be as scary. Either way, I'm going to wear more than a tank top and go on a sunny day.