Danger In The Sky
There was a detail that I left out the other night as I regaled you with the story of my jump from the sky. That’s where for a slight second we had an “oh no, that’s not good” moment. I looked up and we’re not quite under canopy. At least, not as it should’ve been, the canopy was out, but it hadn’t opened as it should. The weird thing, I wasn’t afraid. I knew that if the main didn’t open up, we would cut it away and we had the reserve. But don’t stress over it, I’m just telling you what our back up plan was. We didn’t have to resort to it.
I didn’t previously write this because no one ever wants to know what could possibly go wrong. That and in the event my mom reads this she’ll freak and try to tell me that I can’t jump ever again. (Sorry mom, not going to happen). But here’s the deal, this is an education for those people that don’t want to know. Because in matters like this, you have to know, you have to know what your next step is if something like this happens to you during your jump from a perfectly good plane ;)
At no point during your fall to earth do you give up, you keep doing what you have to do, right up until you either land and live or you have a brutal crash landing and your goggles fill with blood. You keep going, at no point do you take the time to make peace with your holy one. (You should’ve done that before you left the ground, because if you do it while you’re in the sky you’re wasting precious time in which you could be saving your very own life.)
So, as I previously said, I wasn’t afraid, could’ve had something to do with the fact that I had Dave strapped to my back and he knew what to do in these situations. So I just hung there and watched him as he tugged on the (thingy’s with handles) and fixed our canopy and then said ‘that’s good’. Even if he had said, ‘oh shit, that’s not good’ I don’t think I would have panicked, really, only that situation could tell us if I would have panicked, but you can’t panic, you’re falling from the sky, I was strapped to another person. Panic would have caused chaos. Kicking and screaming isn’t going to help anyone in this situation, in fact it would only have put us in more peril.
I just had to write this because I don’t think that my post Saturday night told everything, and I want to remember everything, right down to “oh no, that’s not good” because there’s a lesson in that. A very important one that if this ever happens again, I’ll want to remember it. So that I can recall how calm everything was and let the situation be surrounded with calmness again.
By staying calm and knowing what you have to do in the event that something goes wrong, skydiving is so much fun. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say here, even though something could’ve gone horribly wrong, it didn’t because we were calm and we (Dave) knew what he needed to do.
It may sound weird, but I feel as though I have nothing to fear while skydiving. I felt as though I was one with the sky and the air on Saturday. And it was such a cool feeling. I still feel like I’m flying. It’s a beautiful feeling.