The Dad Who Fell to Earth

Story by Paul Willis

“Okay, we go!”

We are nearly two and a half miles up in the air on a glorious Fall day. Igor – my skydiving instructor – is shouting over the engine noise as we straddle a narrow bench running parallel with the fuselage of the twin prop aircraft.

Several yards ahead of me, through the plane’s open door, I see a line of blue sky, and below it, the burnt ochre-colored canopy of Fall trees stretching away to the horizon. My torso harnessed tight against him, Igor—a tall, slender Russian man who began his skydiving career jumping onto the Siberian tundra during the days of the Soviet Union—urges me forward along the bench.

I move forward almost despite myself. The open door is now just a couple of yards away. Just a moment earlier, three jumpers dived out of it. Gripping each other’s arms, they wheeled recklessly out of the narrow opening. Through the door, I see a snapshot of them, banded together in a tight circle, plunging to Earth. Just as quickly, they are gone from view.

At 13,000 feet, the air in the fuselage is cold and blustery, but I can’t feel it. All of my focus, all of my attention, is on that narrow square of open sky just ahead of me that I will soon be disappearing into.

Beside me on a second bench that runs alongside the one I am on, two other tandem jumpers are standing up and shifting slowly towards the exit. The instructor and his student strapped tight to one another, waddle awkwardly forward. The student – a young woman – looks pale and scared but lets herself be guided the last yard or two, like a victim going to the gallows.

They crouch before the narrow opening. The whole thing feels surreal, and I wonder why I am not more scared. Afterward, I think about the Louis MacNeice poem “Snow,” in which he describes looking out of a window on a snowy day, trying to articulate the strangeness of a world where his warm, cozy living room is separated from snowfall by only a thin pane of glass.

How can it be that this couple is standing in the narrow confines of the plane’s fuselage? How can it be that all that separates them from the sudden terror of plunging 120 mph earthward is a single step? They jump. We are next. Okay, now I’m scared. At Igor’s insistence, I rise on wobbly legs.

“The drunkenness of things being various.” That’s the line from the MacNeice poem that has always stayed with me.

We shuffle towards the door and I try to remember the instructions for the moment of freefall. Hold tight to the harness, and keep your neck arched back as we jump. The Hudson Valley, so far below, looks exquisite, bathed in the soft, golden light of Fall. All the beauty and the terror of the world right here in front of me. Just a step away.

I crouch and wait for the 1, 2, 3 countdown that will precede the jump. I could die. I know. But it is in search of death’s opposite that I have come here. We only get one life (at least in this incarnation) and I refuse to live it in the shadow of my own fears. Whatever is about to happen, it will surely be something I will never forget. And if the chute doesn’t open and we plunge hopelessly to…

“Don’t look down,” Igor shouts in my ear. “It’s just Google Maps.”

A second later, we’re gone.

…

Rewind fifteen minutes to find me standing with my ten-year-old daughter, Alice, looking out on the drop zone, a plush green field on the edge of Gardiner. I had just been fitted with my harness and Igor had delivered his final instructions for the dive. Alice was sitting on a picnic bench nursing an ice cream I bought her as consolation for the time she would have to wait.

When I found out I was going skydiving, my first thought was to bring her. But now that we were together, it was hard to know what to say. Should I reassure her? Before I had time to say anything, she asked me if I was scared.

“No,” I said. “Are you?”

“No,” she said.

I thought about her all the way up in the airplane. It was largely because of her that I was here, doing this crazy thing. She had ridden a roller coaster for the first time this summer on her birthday during a trip to Coney Island, and the experience had inspired me.

She had been utterly terrified in the line for the ride, and by the time we were strapped in, her fear had gotten the better of her and she had asked to get off. I asked the guy working there to help, but by the time he responded, it was too late and the ride was already moving.

As we climbed the tracks that led to a fully vertical drop-off, she was in a state of near panic. I held her hand and told her to keep all her focus on my face. “Just look at me!’ I said. ‘You’re gonna be fine. Don’t look away.”

…

At the moment we leaped from the plane, Igor told me to keep my eyes on the wrist camera that he was pointing back at us as we fell.

What is it like, that first moment of freefall?

The truth is, it’s exactly as you’d imagine it. Sheer terror overtakes every part of you; your stomach is in your mouth and the breath catches in your lungs. You’re both completely present and fully dissociated. It’s as if it’s happening to you and to someone else, all at the same time. That probably makes no sense. But maybe an experience like that isn’t meant to make sense.

It was like the roller coaster ride with Alice. It made no sense, but the moment the roller coaster tipped over the drop, I knew instantly that this was going to be one of the best moments of her young life. After we had looped the loop and negotiated a few more stomach-churning drops, the ride came to an end. I remember my relief when I turned to see a look of complete exhilaration light up her face. She couldn’t stop talking about it for days.

The exact same thing happened to me during the freefall. After a few seconds, the experience was completely transformed. A state of blissful joy filled my entire body. Below me and around me, the Earth filled my view; bigger, brighter, and “suddener” (to borrow a phrase from MacNeice) than I had ever known it. I felt free—the kind of freedom that only comes at the release of a moment of extreme tension.

We fell for a full minute and while the thought was certainly lurking in the back of my mind, ‘What if the chute doesn’t open?’ For most of the freefall, I was blissfully set free from anything other than the enormity of the moment.

The chute did open, of course, and after the sudden jolt of feeling the freefall cut short, we floated gently, calmly earthward.

When I was back on the ground, I went straight away to Alice. She was filming me with my camera as I talked excitedly, rapid-fire about the amazing thing I had just gone through—a perfect mirror of the end of the Coney Island roller coaster experience. She called my wife on the video chat. “He says it’s the most amazing thing he’s ever done,” I heard her saying.

They say that love is the opposite of fear. Real love, that is. Not the love that requires conditions and compromises and a fair wind to always blow. Rather, the love that shows up even in the face of loss, in the face of struggle and difficulty, the love that consoles us when times are hard.

“He says it’s the most amazing thing he’s ever done.” In states of excitement, you get carried away with your words and you go too far. Because, in truth, the most amazing thing I’ve ever done is not skydiving; it’s becoming a dad to Alice.

Is it love I’m talking about, or is it faith?

All our lives are, in essence, a kind of freefall. But unlike skydiving, we will never know if the chute opened until it is all over.

In the meantime, we have the choice in each moment to surrender ourselves to freefall, to trust ourselves, to trust those who fall alongside us, and to breathe in the beauty and magnitude of this Earth we have the privilege to call our home briefly.

As Rumi once wrote:

“The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.”

Or, as Igor put it: “Okay, we go!”

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Contributing writer Paul Willis had his first skydiving experience at Skydive the Ranch in Gardiner, New York. For more information on jumping with them, call 845-255-4033 or visit their website.

Photos courtesy of Skydive the Ranch