So, I just need to preface my story by telling you two things:
- I would absolutely, 100% tandem skydive again in a heartbeat. It was WONDERFUL, I loved it, and dissociating myself back there got me through my last dental cleaning.
- The literal first thing I did after touching ground and being unclipped from my instructor was roll over onto my hands and knees and dry-heave onto the grass.
But I did not actually vomit!
But anyway! My fiftieth birthday earlier this summer was excellent. I ate a lot of cookie cake and spent the whole day with my favorite people, accruing experience gifts like a dungeon crawler collecting loot boxes (Guess what I'm currently reading, lol!). The little kid and I solved a murder mystery. Mr. Craft Knife and I decided to ride a ferry up the coast of Norway this winter so we can see the Northern Lights. And the big kid arranged for the two of us to go tandem skydiving, something that we've talked about together for years, but always with that sort of "someday, I wish" vibe.
Turns out that Someday, I Wish is an actual calendar date in August!
The big kid has always been my fellow adventurer--remember the time we strapped ourselves to cables and walked around on top of the CN Tower?--and given a choice among all the people on the planet, she's exactly who I'd want to throw myself out of a plane with.
I mean, look! It even says DANGER right there on her harness!
MY harness doesn't proclaim any such thing!
It was a perfect day for skydiving, and although it took a good two hours from arrival to flinging ourselves out of an airplane, sitting in the shade of an airplane hanger, reading my Matt Dinniman and watching parachutes meander down to Earth was a quite lovely way to spend an afternoon.
The big kid and I each got our own personal photographer for the trip, but since Mr. Craft Knife and the little kid had also wanted to tag along to watch us fall out of an airplane, I gave them my camera to take photos, too, so the big kid and I basically had a whole entire paparazzi experience. We got photos of ourselves from one side--
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| Fun fact: I wasn't sure what to wear, so I got onto Skydive Indianapolis' Insta to see what everyone else was wearing and then matched it, including cropping a pair of my leggings with scissors. I did a great job, because even my instructor is rocking the cropped leggings look! |
--and the other!
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| You can't tell, but that's me BEAMING and waving from inside the plane. I was so excited to finally be off! |
My only previous look at the inside of a plane used for skydiving was in this SNL video--
--and shockingly, they don't actually look like the inside of a sound stage! This plane had two long benches running parallel along the inside, and we straddled those, facing the back of the plane, our instructors behind us, so they could busy themselves strapping us to them while the plane got high enough:
I'd had it in my mind that I'd better not forget to just double-check that my instructor had attached us before we jumped, since, you know, he was the only one entrusted with the actual parachute, but my god. When this dude was done, I was basically carabinered to him like I was in a metal-forward Baby Bjorn. When he was ready to skydive, he shuffled himself over to the edge of the plane, and I, too, found myself there like luggage strapped to the roof of a car:
My photographer did protest at how tightly he strapped on my goggles, though, and made him loosen them a little bit, which he did not want to do but after looking at my photos I am SO GLAD he did. Goggles so tight that they cut straight into the apples of your cheeks that are already doing weird things in the 120 mph wind are NOT a cute look for the photos that you paid a lot of good money for. The big kid's instructor kind of did her dirty that way, but hey--the important thing to him was that her glasses stayed on her face. And they did!
Anyway, guess who got to go first?!?
Check out my cool as hell photographer clinging like a spider to the OUTSIDE OF THE PLANE.
That's how she gets the shot of my face the first time I see the world this high and not through an airplane window!
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| Those fucking goggles! Very jealous of the proper skydivers who get to wear the cool-ass helmets. |
And here we go!
I swear that I was feeling pretty normal about things, everything considered, but I cannot stop cackling every time I look at that photo. Omg my FACE!!!
The big kid was next, so her photographer also got a couple of shots of me while her instructor was shuffling them into place. Do I look less close to mental collapse in her photos from the plane?
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| Also, my head is supposed to be BACK. My instructor was griping to his co-workers on the flight up that none of his students had done a single thing he'd told them to do all day, and I guess I'm one of them. Sorry, Dude! My brain wasn't online for instruction-following just then! |
This one's a little better, mostly because you can't see my face as much, lol:
And okay, to be fair, I had not exactly visualized what the jump would feel like, but I also had not anticipated that we would do so much tumbling end-over-end. It was fine, though! Just gotta let my dude get settled and release his drogue, and then it became the most insanely disorienting/best experience of my life:
All better!
So, to me, it actually did not feel like falling. Like, at all. It did not even occur to me at the time that I was falling. There's not really any perspective--even if you look at the ground, it's so far away that it doesn't look like you're falling towards it. It's just blue and white all around you, and honestly hard to see anyway partly because of those goddamned goggles but also because there's so much wind. Like, yes, you're feeling the wind because you're falling at terminal velocity, but if you've never done that before then that's not actually what falling feels like. So it's just weird and disorienting and awesome.
It's funny because the big kid actually did not prefer this part of skydiving. You'd never know it, though, because unlike her mother, who has a cartoon for a face, she is the picture of stoicism:
She still loved it, though! She just liked the parachute part better:
The freefall, though, was my own personal absolute favorite thing ever. Check me out--I'm FLYING!!!
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| The little kid made fun of me because in almost every photo my hands are locked into thumbs-up position. The photographer thumbs-upped me, I thumbs-upped her back, and then forgot that my hands existed and therefore never changed it up! |
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| I'm pretty sure my instructor physically un-thumbs-upped my hands for me, lol. |
Sooo... I had a little bit of an issue when my instructor deployed our parachute. I was 100% completely fine through the tumbling end-over-end and the falling through the air belly-first at 120 mph, and even the jolt of the parachute was totally fine, but I guess then the instructors have to steer us over to the actual landing site, and they've got to do whatever parachute-steering maneuvers they have to do to get us in the right spot and make sure we're not knocking against the other parachutes, and so on. And for us, this meant that all of a sudden my happy freefall fun time was taken away and instead we did a bunch of spins.
A whole bunch of spins.
If there's one thing that you might not know about me but should, it's that I. Do. Not. Spin. My eardrums are kind of fucked up and my sense of being upright and on balance in the world is iffy at best. Spin me, and any hope that I will ever be able to rearrange myself properly on this planet is over, at least until after I've had some ginger ale and a very, very, very long nap.
So all that fun, all the flying in an airplane and then jumping out of a plane and then falling through the air like a goddess, and I'm taken out by some spins.
Meanwhile, though, look how Mr. Craft Knife got photos of us up so high!
My parachute is the one at the bottom. Apparently we are spinning AND we are sideways. I had no hope.
Leveled off, at least! And we seem to have stopped spinning, yay!
Here's a good shot of the big kid's parachute:
Right behind me out of the plane, and right behind me back on the ground!
So, um... did you notice anything about that photo of my beautiful, brave daughter parachuting to the ground?
Yeah...
But I did not vomit! I just really, really, really felt like I was going to.
Ugh. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, it had to have been SPINNING!!!
Anyway, NEXT time I go skydiving, I will take two Dramamine an hour before I jump.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!