Looking back, I suppose I was hoping to be converted.
I went skydiving recently. I’m not really the sort of person who goes skydiving. I had decided to do it at the end of the summer, when I was bored and feeling like the screws that keep my life together were getting loose. I thought that going skydiving would give me something—my own agency, a new outlook on life. Perhaps, I thought of it as simply an experience I hadn’t had yet, and I had concluded, in the pits of my boredom, that new experiences are the point of life. In any case, I had agreed to do it, and three weeks later, I wasn’t going to back out simply because I was scared.
I go with my professor. His name is James “Jimmy” Hatch. He’s awesome. He took a circuitous path to being a lecturer and so he’s the sort of person who takes his students skydiving. We’re with Sophia, who I met in Jimmy’s class last semester, and Luke, who I’ve never met before, but just knows Jimmy from around. Sophia could be the heroine of one of those late 2010s romcoms where the headstrong girl gets the really hot guy.
The drive is two hours long. For most of it, I ask Luke questions. He tells us about how he wants to be a missionary, as well as all the other interesting and unique ideas he has about the world. He says that the reason he finally agreed to go skydiving was because, two Thanksgivings ago, he went to Big Sur to hang out with some monks, and one of them told Luke that he went skydiving for his 70th birthday. The monk said it was revelatory. Luke was convinced.
We are going to “Skydive the Ranch” in Gardiner, New York. It’s just a field with a ranch-style building, a worn tarmac with two planes, and a small hangar with another two. They are small, sturdy, beautiful planes, like the ones you might imagine people using in a post-apocalyptic world.
When we arrive, a few people are already waiting: a girl around my age, her boyfriend, a woman who I think is her mother, and a baby. I don’t know to whom the baby belongs.
The boyfriend is wearing black jeans and a black long-sleeve shirt under a t-shirt with a picture of Charlie Kirk against an American flag. “A True Patriot” is written at the top. His shirts are tucked into his belt.
There’s a goth teenage girl here, too—so goth it feels like a bit. She has pink-dyed hair, heavy eyeliner, and a big septum piercing. She’s wearing all black. Her t-shirt says something in silver vampire font.
We wait around. The owner comes up to us, gets us to sign documents, asks us how do you spell that. As our turn approaches, I get quieter and quieter, slowly losing my ability to socialize. I think the people around me think I’m really nervous. I am, but I’m not going to break. I’m just steeling myself.
A plane passes overhead. It’s a clear-blue day, with puffs of cloud. There’s a slight chill in the air, and the light is becoming crisper and weaker. People, dark colored dots, start to appear against the blue.
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I looked up the likelihood of being paralyzed during the jump. Google AI overview said extremely low, with the highest chance of hurting yourself at landing. This didn’t make me feel any better. Sophia made her dad and friends agree that if she ended up in a coma, they would pull the plug. I haven’t told my parents I’m going skydiving, and won’t until a week from now.
The baby family cheers when their people land. We watch from the sidelines. The skydivers get up and unstrap. They seem fine. No one is hurt.
The goth girl is somehow related to the other family. I know this because the older woman, the mom, takes a video of her after she lands. “I’m nineteen and I just went skydiving,” she says to the camera, her eyes and face bright. She is exhilarated.
We chit-chat with a man named John, who just solo jumped. He is not a member of the goth family; he is simply one of those people who has jumped so many times he considers himself a skydiver. He is wearing a purple and yellow jumpsuit with matching purple and yellow Air Force Ones. He tells us that after the first time he ever tried skydiving, he quickly realized he needed to find a job that allowed him to have the time and money to jump again. He used to be a New York steelworker, a union man. He asks us if we’re smart. We shrug, smiling. He laughs and tells us it’s good, that we need more smart people going out into the world with everything happening.
It’s our turn now. We strap up. The instructors, the owners, John, Jimmy—all the people who have jumped before keep saying that once we jump, our lives will be changed forever. We’ll become addicted, always returning to the altar.
That’s how they frame it. They are skydiving missionaries.
I am going tandem skydiving, which means I am strapped to an expert. My guide falls right at the intersection of ski bum and surfer. He has blonde curly hair, verging on dreads, that loll out of the top of his yellow headband. He has a gruffy mass of a beard.
I am strapped to him on the ground, which means that for the first 15 minutes on the plane, I have to be seated between his thighs. It would be worse if I wasn’t so nervous. As we rise into the sky, I look out the window, watching the earth recede until I am 13,000 feet above it.
My guide wants to make this an event. He keeps sticking a camera in my face. I don’t care if this experience is recorded, even though I did pay for the video. I find his constant intrusions annoying. It is his job, I guess, but I hope he will be silent when we are up in the air.
One by one, everyone else—Jimmy, Sophia, Luke, professional jumpers— are all sucked out into the blue. We are the last ones to jump.
My guide pushes off, and I close my eyes. The wind rushes against my face. I attempt to open them, but I can’t. I remind myself to breathe. Eventually—and I do not know how long it takes—I open my eyes. I don’t feel like I’m falling. It’s beautiful. The ground alternates between rough, textured, dark green forest and smooth, bright green grass. It’s geometric.
Suddenly, I am yanked back. The parachute is out and I am sitting in the air now. My ears are clogged; my guide is talking, but I can’t really hear what he is saying. I am staring out at the horizon. Beams of light cut through the clouds.
We wind our way over the Wallkill River. It meanders through the ground. The water looks like mercury—silvery, a reflection of the sun and the sky. There are more forest sections, rural neighborhoods. I see the pattern of the trailers in the trailer parks and the conspicuous construction of blue rectangular pools. I feel that awe that comes from seeing big, grand things, like huge crowds of people, or the beach with dunes extending outwards and the sky upwards.
People build up skydiving to be this thing, adrenaline seeking and bucket list-y. And yes, when describing it, it is a thing—you jump out of an airplane at 13,000 feet. But once I was in the air, it wasn’t that. I realized that if this didn’t exist, no one would believe it could. But it does. Being up there, and seeing everything so small, it seems, was so nice, because I got to come back down and think everything was big again.
He asks me if I want to spin. I sort of nod. He pulls on the left side of the parachute, spinning us around. I do not like that. I want to just keep staring out at the earth. We wind our way over the ranch, until finally, he tells me to pull my legs up and we skid into the grass.
