As our car turned onto the cracking gravel drive in Caddo Mills, my stomach twisted in excitement. Coming around the corner, all I could see was a small metal building and an extensive field, decorated only by a few plastic chairs and two small prop planes.
There were six of us standing by the check-in counter at the Dallas Skydive Center. The other two members of our group were out behind the building throwing up, one from illness, the other nerves.
“Can I see your licenses?” the girl behind the desk said. “One at a time please.”
I handed mine over first, followed by my mom and then the others. Unbeknownst to me, the order we checked in was the order in which we would be jumping and less than 20 minutes later, I was strapped into a thick harness, squished into the small plane with my mom, our two tandem jumpers and the pilot.
Fifteen minutes, 13,000 feet and a few awkward strapping and buckling maneuvers later, we were finally situated. After checking my goggles and all of the buckles holding us together, my tandem jumper opened the door to the prop plane and we swung our legs out onto a small metal landing attached to the outside of the plane.
“How many times have you done this?” I asked him.
“Third times the charm,” he said, as he flashed me a wicked grin. And with that, he launched us out of the plane.
As we somersaulted through the sky, there was nothing I could do to hold back my ear-splitting grin. The sixty seconds of freefall before the canopy released were some of the most exhilarating seconds of my life. After I took a break from barrel racing, nothing has seemed to fulfill my adrenaline rush the same way, but jumping out of a plane definitely did it. With 140 m.p.h. you don’t experience a “holy cow I’m plummeting to my death” kind of thing, but it seems almost like floating, you feel weightless. The drop gives you time to look at everything around you, you can see the light wrapped around the edge of the skyline, the texture and different shades of the ground and you get to see and feel the sky in a way that would be impossible from the ground. I’m not sure that another experience quite like that exists.
After the freefall, the tandem jumper pulled the canopy and it deployed, thankfully. Strings attached to the canopy give it the ability to spiral, so the entire ride down was a thrill ride, not just the initial jump.
Everyone who jumped with me said without a doubt it was something they would want to do again. My friend’s cousin, who had never even been in an airplane, was ready to go back up and jump again. The overall feeling of the dive was unlike anything I ever experienced and I think skydiving should be mandatory for everyone to try at least once in their life, especially for adventurers, thrill seekers or adrenaline junkees. I already have another jump scheduled in June and I plan on getting certified to jump on my own. The fear you may have will pale in comparison to the rush.
