“Feet out!”

My feet are the closest of the three of us to the open door, so I ease forward and aim my them at the black non-skid surface of the platform. The next object beyond that little foot-square is a couple thousand feet below.

“Get out!”

I lean my body forward past my feet, and reach out to grasp the strut of the wing. Now my feet are dangling behind me.

“Look at me!”

That’s for the picture, showing me grinning from ear to ear with joy, fear, and an almost- hundred-mile-an-hour wind.

“Let go!”

I do. 

Bill Church, his girlfriend Patti, and I all shelled out a hundred bucks to take the first day of parachute/sky-diving lessons. We left from Binghamton in the dark, and drove a couple hours to get there on time.  In a few years, the business model will change to strapping you to someone experienced and jumping out for piggy-back freefall and a home video. This predated that, at least in rural New York State. This was actual day one of jumping out of plane school. It consisted of several hours of physics lessons on airflow and lift, learning how to pack your own parachute, all the steps of how and when to pull your emergency ‘chute, body position in the air and upon landing, and a written test. Oh, and of course a truly horrifying waiver form. 

We passed the written test, and got to load up, three at a time, plus pilot and guy who yells at you, and circle up to two-or-three-thousand feet, gawking out the open door of a little single-prop plane, thinking about our life choices.  Despite learning to pack a ‘chute, they fitted us with pre-folded ones, and rigged them to pull automatically a few feet behind the plane. 

I don’t know about you, but when I let go of an airplane wing, my brain just short circuits. We were supposed to practice trying to maintain that arms-out skydivey position you see in videos, but I had no control over my muscular function. By the time my brain rebooted and made the Apple Computer start-up noise, I was hanging vertically beneath a rectangle of colored nylon floating downward “slowly” over an unplanted farm field. Those few minutes between the sky and the ground were the most exhilarating hours of my life. I recall no cognitive memories; only sensations of coolness and gliding, with a soft wind in my face. It was much like coasting on a bicycle for a bit, but with a much better view.  

As I descended to where the trees became three-dimensional, the sensation of speed and the fear of heights returned. The ground transmuted to foreground from background. The school had optimistically chalked a circle target we were supposed to aim for as a landing spot. I was nowhere close. I was a football field away when I pulled the handles that stall forward progress for ground contact. Unfortunately, I was also eight feet in the air, and I plummeted like a rock onto my ass, so thank g-d for the big piles of dirt in that unplanted farm field. Could have been worse, because a few minutes later, Patti took too much speed into her landing and face-planted her helmet into the soft soil. She was much closer to the target though.

On the ground we survivors hugged and bled off adrenaline, and compared notes with our fellows, feeling oh-so-worldly to the classmates who had yet to ascend. We were still so pumped on the drive home that I took my little Pontiac 2000 over 90 mph on one straightaway.

The Polaroid of me lived on the door of my dorm-room for the rest of that year, so any visitors might see how cool I had been, and how happy I was, hanging from the wing of a plane.