Taft, California. 90 miles from Ventura, 120 miles from Los Angeles and about 2830 miles from New York City. There isn’t a tall building or tree to be seen for miles in this spacious desert town. In fact, there isn’t anything really interesting at all to be seen. Here, the brave skyfolk are the part of the few that have the balls to jump out of perfectly good airplanes.
These half-eagle breed of people fall through the sky to discover the true meaning of freedom. When I call them a half-eagle breed of people, of course I mean that metaphorically. Insinuating that they are literally half-eagle and half-human would just be downright silly. That sort of thing almost never happens.
The first person to make successful parachute jumps was the the Frenchman Andre-Jacques Garnerin in 1797. He would take to the skies in a hot air balloon, then once he reached a high enough altitude, he released the balloon allowing a parachute to deploy and land him to safety. Upon landing, his first response was probably “Sacre bleu!” Since then, skydiving has been introduced to the battlefield as a means of saving lives of air crew and a way to deliver soldiers quickly behind enemy lines.
But the type of skydiving we are all familiar with is the kind we do for funsies. Why would anyone want to jump out of an airplane? I don’t know. I jumped mainly because my editors made me, but also to overcome my fear of flying. There were plenty of other nervous first-time jumpers to talk with.
“It still hasn’t hit me yet,” said Jessica Pham, a student at UCSB. “It’ll probably hit me while I’m falling.”
The employees and regulars at Skydive Taft attempted to relieve my nerves with their own brand of encouraging pep talk.
“Just take a deep breath, get up there and go, man!” said Darren Weaver, a Skydive Taft employee and regular jumper himself. “Once you’re outside, the airplane ride and all that anxiety is just gone.”
Weaver’s next words were not as uplifting.
“I don’t like getting into airplanes either,” he said. “Airplanes fall out of the sky all the time.”
There were several hours of waiting before I actually got on the plane, leaving me plenty of time to imagine every possible worst-case scenario. I won’t go into detail but a lot of them involved a splattering of intestines and a medium-sized crater where my crumbled bones and carcass lie in the center. If that happened, I demanded my editors to at least try to rebuild me into the six million dollar man, but even better. Like the seven million dollar man.
Eventually it was time for me to harness up and strap myself to an experienced skydiver to do all the hard work on the way down. As I put on the harness, my concern quickly drifted from shattering like Humpty Dumpty to the state of my testicles. It was really tight and testicular torsion is a very real threat to male skydivers. But I soon got everything out of the way and was ready to board.
My nerves got worse by the second as we gained altitude. To take my mind off things, I started to sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” in my head over and over again. They rock.
When it was time to jump, I watched as everybody stood up and got sucked out of the plane one by one. Soon it was my turn and I really didn’t want to go. The instructor I was strapped to struggled a little bit to sort of roll me out of the plane. The next forty-five seconds are almost indescribable. As I watched the ground come up closer and closer, there wasn’t a sense of fear or panic like I expected, but freedom. I can’t explain it, but it’s the closest a human being can come to flying.
It was over just as quickly as it took the editors to come up with the idea, “Hey! Let’s make Eric jump out of a plane.”
