The Boogie Blues And Other Things I Learned About Skydiving
The last day of the boogie, after the tide came in and flights were grounded, we sat by the pool in near silence, nursing our beers.
“I feel blue,” I sighed to Gillian reclining next to me.
“Ah, that’s the boogie blues,” she replied with a knowing smirk.
Ten straight days of flooding our bodies with adrenaline and eating dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin after every landing left our brains feeling depleted. We had turned up. Now, we faced the comedown.
No one relished leaving new friends and boarding a plane headed home instead of the jump run. Most tedious of all was the prospect of reentering real life. What would we talk about with wuffos back home? Would they even understand? We were existentially bummed.
Jargon alert! A wuffo is a (teasingly?) derogatory term for a non-skydiver, especially one who does not understand the sport and asks pesky questions such as, “What for you jump out of them planes?” Therefore, wuffo. I spied the term on r/Skydiving, but did not learn its providence until I watched Cutaway last night.
In the post-boogie haze, I took a solitary moment to jot down a completely non-exhaustive list of things I learned at Skydive Diani:
1. Beer. Because this one is first.
2. The boogie blues are real. Enough said, because honestly, you don’t really say much. You just sit there contemplating the meaning of life.
3. Listen to your instructor! I don’t know how to adequately give this dictum its due. When you’re a student, your skydiving instructor is your god, your salvation, your sole source of truth and meaning in the cold cosmos, your alpha, and your omega. I’m not exaggerating. It’s not that the instructor is an actual immortal. It’s that when you are learning to jump from airplanes, the barrage of information and sensory input you face can be overwhelming, confusing, and counterintuitive. The job of the instructor is not only to keep you alive but to manage the flow of information so that you only absorb what you need to know for each jump. No more and no less. Throughout AFF and the jumps leading up to the A license, I listened to Ingvild like Anakin never listened to Obi-Wan. I was a babe, starry-eyed and new to the world. If Ingvild said, “Jump” I said, “How high, in what exit order, and in what body position?” When she admonished me for getting distracted by the funjumpers, I took it hard but thanked her for the sobering message: Ignore what everyone else is telling you. Don’t listen to other skydivers now, no matter how experienced and how many jumps they have. They may be right, but you don’t need to know this information now and it will only serve to confuse you or tempt you to try something you’re not ready for. Focus on my instructions. Let me manage your information. I am convinced that the only reason I had no repeat jumps and finished in 24 (+ initial tandem) is because I fixated on Ingvild’s words like they’re the gospel truth, because they were.
4. The instructor’s trust in you forces you to trust yourself. I found the brisk pace of AFF disconcerting at times. If you pass each level, the program progresses very rapidly and every jump teaches you a heap of new skills on top of the skills you just barely acquired on the jump before. You’re in a constant state of upleveling equilibrium. I remember the penultimate level of AFF as one where I was just beginning to feel normal in the sky. A lot of that had to do with having the instructor near me to help out or correct me in freefall. Surprise! Your next jump is your first solo. No instructor. It’s just you alone. Don’t fuck up! To top it off, they wanted me to be last to exit the plane. Oh hell no, right? But it’s ok, you’ve got this. Not to be punny, but the instructors just throw you right into it and expect you to keep up. You have untapped potential you never even knew existed. The instructors see this in you, or they wouldn’t let you jump. Every time I second-guessed Ingvild or told her I didn’t think I was ready, she wouldn’t hear of it. The instructors have observed many students, and they know who is ready to advance and who needs more practice. They have seen this many times. You have only seen it once. They know better than you do what you are capable of. Trust their confidence in you and let it feed your confidence in yourself. If they think you can do it, you probably can. People have phenomenal capacity:
5. Tandem instructors are heroes. When I did my tandem back in June, I had a flippant attitude towards the term instructor as regards tandem skydiving. What are they teaching me to do? My job is to sit there like a good girl and do as I’m told. What skills am I learning from this, exactly? I’m here for the lulz. Now that I’m on the other side of the sport, I can appreciate the risks these ninjas take when they strap a total stranger onto their body. Stability is a major contributing factor to safety in the sky. When you’re taking passengers, you have no idea how they will react to the bizarre sensation of a first-time freefall. They might go bananas, kicking and flailing, grabbing onto the arms the instructor needs to throw out the drogue or deploy the canopy. For every maneuver they make with their bewildered bodies, the tandem instructor has to compensate by outflying them to keep the tandem pair stable. That cute smalltalk they make at the dropzone as they gear you up? “Are you ready to be a skydiver, Janine?” “Is this going to be the best day ever, Stan?” They’re sizing you up, taking your temperature, and gauging your disposition to see if you’re going to behave up there. They take a massive risk to give you a 50-second rush and a beautiful five-minute flight through the sky. Thank them for it. And try not to kick.
6. You know nothing, Jon Skydiver. It was amusing when I got home and friends asked me if I could take them on a tandem. Boy-o, can I ever not. Due to the aforementioned, a tandem instructor hopeful needs a minimum of 500 jumps, a D license, and three years in the sport. There is a lot to learn, and it’s all very hard and requires a great deal of skill and many years of dedicated practice. I remember walking into the wind tunnel for the first time over the summer, before AFF. The Red Bull Air Force was there making sit-fly look cool, so I asked the coach if I could start with that.
HA! Watch me nay-nay all around the tube barely able to stay on my belly. Also before AFF, I remember asking a friend if I could wingsuit soon after getting licensed. He laughed at me and told me I needed 200 jumps before anyone even let me get close to a Squirrel. Deployment is different, body position is different, everything is different, and all of it could go very wrong very quickly unless I logged almost four hours of freefall time (for reference, each jump is about 60 seconds of freefall) and was completely confident flying my body. I think it’s probably best to keep approaching the sport as if I know nothing about it. Assuming nothing keeps you humble, keeps you checking your gear and reviewing your emergency procedures, and keeps you from complacency.
7. Skydiving IS a safe and repeatable sport. According to the United States Parachute Association:
There are an estimated 3 million jumps per year, and the fatality count is only 21 (for 2010). That’s a 0.0007% chance of dying from a skydive, compared to a 0.0167% chance of dying in a car accident (based on driving 10,000 miles). In layman’s terms, you are about 24 times more likely to die in a car accident than in a skydiving one.
There are probably two reasons people see skydiving as insane but think nothing of getting into a car. The first is that, because skydiving deaths are so rare, the news tends to report each with alarm. By contrast, automotive accidents are commonplace, so there’s little noteworthy to report when someone dies driving. The second is that driving is commonplace while skydiving is niche. People tend to associate the unfamiliar with the extreme. Most of us don’t know any skydivers. But most of us drive cars and know thousands of other people who do. Humans have always feared the unknown. Paradoxically, that’s probably what draws some of us to skydiving. We want to greet the unknown and neutralize our irrational fears.
8. The equipment is very good. Have confidence in it. I think this is something they teach in ground school to keep students from freaking out about malfunctions, but it’s true. The odds of a main malfunction that necessitates cutting away and using the reserve parachute are about one in 750. And you should trust your reserve. That baby is packed only by certified packers and must be repacked every six months. It will work, so don’t waste your focus on what could go wrong. It probably won’t. Keep the brain RAM for your dive plan so you pass the jump and save a few hundred dollars in redos.
9. Have a whisky budget. You’re supposed to buy your reserve packer a nice bottle of it if you end up cutting away and the reserve saves your life. You don’t have to buy whisky if it doesn’t, though.
10. The door fear will go away. Ignore the door. Just keep jumping. Around jump nine, you’ll start craving the exit. It is your magical portal to the great outdoors two and a half miles above the Earth. It is your friend.
11. Skydiving is hard, but it is also easy. Before I started AFF, I thought — as many probably do — that approaching and exiting the door would be the hardest part. I spent many hours contemplating my likelihood of hesitating or backing out for fear of The Door. Forget the fucking door. Once you’re out, immediately once you’re out, it’s awesome. Just get out! Never let yourself overthink the door. Diving into the sky is easy. HOWEVER! Once you’re out, that’s where the hard work begins. Which brings me to…
12. Falling is easy, flying is not. Avoiding canopy malfunctions and perilous collisions with other skydivers depends in large part on flying well. Learning to arch properly so that you remain stable will take you several jumps. Most students have trouble with this. My instructors put a 13-pound weight belt on me to help me remember to arch from my hips instead of my chest. If learning to arch is this challenging for most people, imagine the technique and hours of practice it takes to learn how to fly on your back, how to fly with your head down, how to fly like you’re walking upright, and how to look like a dancer up there. It’s a lot harder than it looks. Then there’s the canopy piloting. Lots of skill there if you want to be confident landing in varying wind conditions, trying fancy things like swooping, or even just standing upright on landing! Focus on the correct hard parts. The door is easy.
13. You’ll come home with mysterious bruises and pains. It’s a sport. You’re going to get a little bit hurt, especially when you are learning. I had bruises on my legs from kneeling on the metal floor of the plane, from the butts, feet, and rigs of over skydivers, from the leg straps that held me attached to my parachute…I could go on. My tailbone and knee were hurting from a hard landing. My neck was stiff from deployment shock, because I hadn’t yet developed the musculature to absorb the abrupt arrest of terminal velocity as the canopy inflates. This is normal, or don’t do sports.
14. There are two jars. Pyro mused to me between jumps that we have a jar of luck and a jar of skill. You start with an empty jar of skill and a full jar of luck. You’re always taking from your jar of luck and putting into your jar of skill. But eventually the jar of luck runs out. Your mission is to fill your jar of skill before you run out of your jar of luck.
15. It helps to have hobbies other than skydiving. Especially for the boogie blues, but even in general, a weekend of skydiving will make it hard to come back to Earth. All I wanted to do as soon as I got home to Rwanda was fly back to Diani and jump. I fantasized about the plane door. I visualized it. I dreamt about it. I wanted it so badly I was almost depressed. Have something you love to do back home. I box, play tennis, and do acro yoga on a fairly regular basis. These things give me something to look forward to other than skydiving. It’s very helpful and I’m grateful to be able to stay occupied.
16. Skydiving has a steep but demonstrable learning curve you can see and feel with every jump. AFF is a rapid succession of victories. Every jump you survive, you achieve. You achieve the first time you land. You achieve the first time you land upright. You achieve the first time you arch properly. You achieve the first time you track, dock, barrel roll. I’ve never been part of something that expects as much from me as skydiving does. I’ve also never been part of something that allows me to give it so much of myself every time I do it. You learn a lot and, because the stakes are so high, you learn fast. This is exhilarating. It can also go to your head. If you ever feel like you know too much, go back to #5: you know nothing, Jon Skydiver.
17. It’s as much about the people as it is about the sport. I’d be lying if I said that jumping out of airplanes was the only reason I wanted to skydive. It was the initial attraction, but what drew me in was the atmosphere of the dropzone. The people in this sport have large hearts and wide smiles. They’re happy to be doing the best thing in the world and grateful to be alive. They radiate joy. I wrote this in a prior post:
Everyone asked how my solo went and smiled along with me. It’s this wonderful thing about this whole week: everyone is rooting for you. The people are incredible. You see it in their faces when they check your gear, sometimes without you even noticing it. You’re walking to the bus and someone you haven’t even met yet is checking your pin or tucking in your risers or telling you to stop because your leg straps look uneven. Everyone is looking out for each other. Everyone is game-on in the plane. You laugh, you chat, but you don’t fuck around. You’re not alone. Not ever. Not really. Whether you’re talking to someone with 20, 200, or 2,000 jumps, it’s open arms and, “Welcome to the sport!” It’s such an encouraging community, and people have a genuine interest in seeing you succeed. Not least because they don’t want you to be a hazard in the sky!
18. Develop a dive plan mantra. I created a helpful system for remembering what to do on each jump. On the way up, I would recite a particular set of objectives in my head on repeat. This mantra changed with each AFF level, as the objectives changed. I would keep repeating this mantra all the way up to about 2,500 feet. Then I would nap/chill/close my eyes and let it simmer. Then I would perk back up around 7,000 feet when everyone else started to stir. I would ask myself: Do I still remember the mantra? Yes I do. Ok, good. Let’s run through it one more time. I’d stop talking to myself at the two-minute notice and focus on gear check. Then, I would repeat the mantra immediately after exit while watching the altimeter and waiting to stabilize. This way, I (mostly) never forgot what to do. Visualizing every step and having something tangible for my brain to fixate on prevented me from blanking out and forgetting everything. If I wasn’t sure what maneuver to execute next, I just repeated the mantra from the beginning until I got to the part I was forgetting: Oh, right. Now the backloop. Cool. I also didn’t let myself think about the landing until I was under canopy, at which point I would immediately begin planning my approach. Information management helped me focus on one objective at a time, so that I did not get lost in the myriad factors that go into keeping me alive.
19. It’s hard to talk about skydiving with other people. So try not to, unless there’s genuine interest. Change the subject if you can.
20. This seat reserved for future learnings. ___________________________
