G forces

About two years ago I went skydiving. Surprisingly (at least to myself) there was no feeling of fear. For one thing, it was tandem diving – you’re strapped to a guy who has already done this maybe 4000 times before. If you do the math, you realize that the odds of dying on the way down are lower than the odds of dying in the car ride on the way to the airfield.

For another thing, once you’ve gotten into the rickety little plane (which has no door, incidentally – just a big open hole in the side where the jumpers go out), and then have spent twenty minutes slowly climbing up to twelve thousand feet, before watching two of your friends fall out of the plane into the open air below, it’s not as though you really have a choice. You’re going to go out of that plane, so it’s pretty much like it’s already happened. Fear is not really an emotion that comes into play at that point in the game. The emotion is more like “ok, this is really strange.”

The first surprising thing was that you don’t actually jump out of the plane. You sit with your legs dangling out over the world, and then you just kind of lean forward and fall out, head over feet. Easy as falling off a biker, as a lady friend of mine used to say.

The first five seconds are the best. That’s the part where you’re actually accelarating at full G force. Which means you’re effectively in a zero gravity environment. There is no up or down. There are parts that are blue (that would be the sky) and parts that are not blue (that would be the ground), but there is no visceral sense that the former is up or the latter is down. They’re both just tumbling all around you. You’re actually strapped to a guy who knows what he’s doing, but he’s behind you, so you don’t see him.

After five seconds you accelarate to about 130 miles per hour. That’s called “terminal velocity” – a phrase with which I am not entirely comfortable, for obvious reasons. Basically that’s the point where the air itself is keeping you from going faster. All that air rushing up against your body keeps your velocity down to a steady 130 mph – the speed with which you would eventually hit the ground if you didn’t happen to have a chute handy.

I didn’t find this part of the free fall to be entirely pleasant. It was way cold, and I could feel my body being buffeted about by forces that were clearly larger than a human body is meant for. There was a part of my brain that kept trying to explain to the rest of my brain, rather insistently, that I was about to die. Fortunately the rest of my brain refused to listen.

After about forty seconds or so of being a human cannonball, the chute is pulled, there is an upward yank, and suddenly everything just seems to go quiet, as if time itself had stopped. When you’re sitting there under an open chute, with a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside. It feels as though you’re frozen in midair. But of course you’re still falling – just a lot more slowly.

This serene gliding continues for another twenty minutes or so, along with the odd (and false) feeling that you’re just suspended at one spot up in the air. It’s only the last twenty seconds or so, when you suddenly see the ground rush up against you before landing, that you realize you’ve been falling the entire time.

All in all, I found the entire experience extremely satisfying. Although I kept getting the nagging feeling that it reminded me of something. Which didn’t seem possible, since I’d never been skydiving before. And then I realized what it reminded me of.

Skydiving is kind of like a relationship. You start out enormously high. Then for the first little bit you are completely disoriented, in a really wonderful day. You don’t know what’s up or what’s down, and you don’t really care. This feeling quickly settles into the crazy rushing phase. Everything is way fast, way intense, and you feel thrill and danger all at the same time. Then, at some moment, this is replaced by a feeling of calm. The relationship becomes serene, somehow peaceful, a vantage point from which to see the world. You feel as though you could stay up there forever.

Until suddenly one day you see the ground rushing up toward you, and you realize things were not really as bouyant as they had seemed. Then you’re back on the ground, right where you started, a little winded, maybe just a little disoriented, and kind of sad that it’s over.

But of course you want to go right back up and try the whole thing again.