I believe I can fly, but I'm less than certain I can touch the sky and I certainly don't dream about it every night and day. That being said, I recently found a way to fly that didn't involve a high possibility of death, scaring my mother or puking at 35,000 feet. Around the country there are indoor skydiving locations. They are set up partly just for fun and partly to help train real skydivers to do what they do best... give the finger to God by challenging gravity to a game of chicken.
On my last day in San Francisco, Jeff and I headed over to Union City where they have an indoor skydiving area set up, complete with professional trainers and whatnot. We started with a short training - mostly to learn the hand signals required for when we were in the tube. There are ways to go up, down, left and right while you're flying, but for the beginners, they basically just teach you how to stay in the air.
Suited up and ready to flail wildly.
There were people of all ages there doing it for the first time. Most impressively were a woman and her mother, both of whom where first time flyers. I didn't find out how old the woman was, but she told us that her mother was 80 years old and doing this for the first time ever. I was deeply impressed by how adventurous she was. She wasn't scared at all. It made my nervousness seem, well, silly.
To be fair, I wasn't as nervous as I thought I'd be once we got there. It seemed quite safe from the look of the wind tunnel. There was a man in the group before us who asked what happened if you hit the bottom of the cage. The person working behind the counter explained that it was like a trampoline and that he wouldn't get hurt. The said, "but, you know, it is metal so you don't want to, like, slam into it or anything." That sounded like solid advice.
Turns out the key was to relax and just let the wind flow past you. The more tense people are, they more likely they are to spend the whole time correcting their body position and the more likely they are to fly out of control. That has to be a metaphor for something. As for me, I managed to relax 99% of my body. I couldn't, for the life of me, get my fingers to uncurl. Its like, I could just about let go and relax, but not quite.
Invisible handrail!
The thing about indoor skydiving is that it was one of the first times that the "fantasy" was very different from the reality. Close your eyes and think about flying. For me, when I did that, it was sunny and bright and there was a light wind in my face. There was not the skin-flap-creating, hard-to-breathe-in, drool-inducing gusting that actually existed in the tunnel. The reality of flying is that most of what you focus on is holding your body right and how the wind feels whipping across your face.
It was still worth it. The couple of moments I had in the chamber of realizing that I wasn't standing and nothing was under me were amazing. I mean, I really grasped, for just a few minutes, what it was like to be off of solid ground. It wasn't a heart-skipping-a-beat thing, like I thought it would be. Instead, it took focus and concentration, like most things in life. In retrospect, I think I like that better. I don't know why, but if I figure it out, I'll post about it. In the mean time... I think I'm just going to let this one go.
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