Brave or crazy?

In October 2000, I took my very first solo vacation: a trip to Hawaii. I stayed on the north side of Oahu, in a little B&B  in the little town of Kailua. One afternoon, I drove to Haleiwa to watch the surfers, and when I stopped at a sub shop for a sandwich, I spotted a flyer for a drop zone at a nearby airfield. Two hours later, I had an appointment for the following morning to jump out of a perfectly good plane.

Have I mentioned I’m afraid of heights?

From the email I sent to some friends afterwards:

When the tandem instructor, John, started waddling me toward the edge of the door, I was yelling, “I’m not ready!” I didn’t realize I’d be first out. I wanted a moment to prepare for this literal leap of faith. I wanted to be AWARE. But even as I was saying I wasn’t ready, I crossed my arms over my chest. Even as I was asking for my reflective moment, I was aware of the voice in my ear saying Ready (rock forward), Set (rock back), Go!

And on “go” we pitched forward and I screamed, a throat-ripping shriek of shock and terror and joy, and time stuttered, and I must have shut my eyes because even though I have photos that clearly show us falling away from the plane upside down, I have no memory of it. The next thing I remember is the horizon wheeling around at a 45 degree angle. The wind was rushing over me and I was grinning madly, both because I was having FUN and because the wind was forcing my mouth open and if I didn’t smile my cheeks would flap in the breeze like sheets on a line.

So there I was, wind in my mouth, exclaiming how beautiful it all was, and I didn’t feel at all like I was falling — just soaring. I even hammed it up for the photographer, throwing kisses and giving a big thumbs up. I was an angel, a bird, the wind itself. And then the chute snatched me up hard and I cried out, not just because I wanted to keep flying, but because the harness was biting fiercely into my thighs and a buckle had slammed into my arm. But I was distracted by the silence and the beauty. The blue blue sky, the clouds I’d just fallen through without noticing. The lush mountains folded against each other, the straight rows of sugar cane, the miles of beach, the turquoise lace-edged ocean that went on forever. John was pointing out the sights. There was the town of Haleiwa, there the airfield we’d taken off from, there a nude beach, there Waimea Bay where the surf was up, there on the horizon the dim distant outline of Diamond Head. And much too soon John was telling me to grab the straps above me and pull my knees up, and the ground came up beneath us, and my knees were shaking from adrenaline and gravity, and all I could say, over and over, was, “That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

For almost nine years, I’ve been coasting on the residual energy of that jump, the ability to remember it in a tight spot and tell myself, “A girl who can do that can certainly do [whatever I happen to be resisting at the time].” Lately I’ve been thinking it might be time for a booster dose.

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