My prize? A 'first jump and training course' at a local skydiving company. I’d long wanted to try my hand at parachuting, but being a student of limited means, had never had the opportunity. Until then. My enthusiasm for danger quickly turned into a longing for security as the reality of what lay ahead set in. One question kept recurring over and over in my mind. Why the heck would anyone want to jump out of an airplane with perfectly functional landing gear? I'll tell you why:

Last Saturday, with my horoscope checked and biorhythms at a peak, I took the gift certificate to a seemingly abandoned airfield just east of Vancouver and found a quiet hanger with name "Pacific Skydivers" above it. The certificate said courses start at 9:30 am, every Saturday and Sunday. And sure enough, at 9:30 sharp, the people whose hands I was putting my life into arrived.

After signing a stack of waivers (it seems the instructor/owner of the company is a lawyer on weekdays), the 6 hour training course began. I didn’t know what to expect from the course - how many times can they tell you to count to ten and pull the cord, right? Well it turns out there’s a bit more to skydiving than that. The course was quite interesting - part of the stuff was the kind of info that one should really know before jumping out of an airplane, the rest of the info was probably there to qualm anxiety.

We spent the morning learning exactly how the release mechanism of a parachute works, how to ride in a little Cessna airplane, how to get out of the plane, how to fall (this was the important part - arch, arch, arch - more later), how to land in case of a fast landing, etc.... Then we spent much of the afternoon going over emergency procedures - how to recognize a 'bad' parachute, how to fix a tangled one while falling, when to release the parachute and go to the backup chute, and so on.

But all day long, the fundamental concept that was stressed was that of how to fall. After letting go of the plane, the idea is to stretch your arms and legs to full length while arching your back as much as possible and screaming the count, "ARCH THOUSAND, TWO THOUSAND, THREE THOUSAND, FOUR THOUSAND, FIVE THOUSAND, CHECK THOUSAND", at which point you're supposed to look up and check your chute to see if it looks healthy or not. The parachute comes out automatically on your first jump. So all day, pretty much every second thing we did was the instructor yelling "GO!" and us jumping into our arch position and screaming the count. We did this over and over and over so as to develop it into a reflex action.

I wasn't all that bad at this arch thing. He kept correcting other people on their positioning, but he always said mine looked pretty good. So I thought I'd have no problem when it came time for the real thing. I was sure I was going to be a natural at falling.

Finally the moment came and I surprised myself by not being terrified. I felt fine getting into the airplane (a tiny little Cessna), felt fine flying up, felt fine when the door opened (I was to be the first out), felt fine climbing out under the wing (strong winds!), felt fine when the instructor yelled "GO!" and tapped me on the shoulder, and even let go of the plane without much hesitation.

As soon as I had let go however, I was deathly terrified. I was convinced that I was going to die. It's mostly a blur in my mind - I don't remember much of what happened - but I thought I was in my arch, and I can remember hearing myself screaming the count - thinking "God I hope this works!" I remember not having any idea of which direction my body was pointing, just falling, and suddenly starting to twist in the air very quickly. At this point, I was sure I was going into a tumble that I'd never get out of and the game would be over. I realize now that this spin was brought on by the parachute catching the air, which rapidly twisted me into an upright position.

I finished my count, and looked up. There it was! My parachute, nice and rectangular: the way it was supposed to be! I'm certain that I’ve never been so happy in my life. I screamed with joy, and I continued to scream the whole way down! It was a tremendous feeling floating down with my parachute, looking down and seeing nothing between my feet and the patches of earth far below. I used the steering handles to look around, following instructions via a radio hookup from a controller on the ground. He told me to spin left, and so I pulled the left-turn chord and held it, my body went out almost horizontal to the ground with the earth on my left, spinning round and round... Wow. What an amazing feeling. What a rush of emotions that went through me as I saw my home, the Earth, from a totally new perspective.

After about three minutes of slow descent, I landed quite softly in the designated landing area - not with one leg on either side of a tree branch, or on power lines, as I had feared I might. Back on my beloved Earth.

Once the instructor got back on the ground, he led me back to the hangar to debrief me on my jump technique. I expected a short anticlimactic summary. "So, how do you think your jump went?", he asked when we had sat down in the hangar.

"Not bad, I guess. I think I was arching, but I don't remember much actually." I replied.

"Do you know what you really did?"

"Errrr... not really.... just what did I do???"

"Well, as soon as you let go of the plane, you looked down at the ground, looked up, then started running in the air, as if you were trying to get back to the plane!" Apparently my legs were just pumping as I tried to sprint in the air, back to safety. Its humiliating to think that as my life was flashing before my eyes, I looked like Wile E. Coyote just after running off the edge of a cliff. I have absolutely no recollection of this though. So much for the reflex action of arching - I folded.