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“12,000 feet, everybody out!” As the metal doors slide open, the pilot of the small Cessna aircraft yells for the 5 skydivers including myself to jump, jump out of a two thousand pound machine flying thousands of feet above where you spend every minute of your life walking, driving, sleeping and eating. Thousands of feet above a planet where billions of people live everyday the same as the next, never doing anything new or relieving themselves from the war-filled, disease-stricken civilization we live in. That is why I skydive. It is the reason almost every human in the small skydive community does it, to get away, to feel the sense of true freedom, not the freedom the government reassures us everyday we should be so thankful for, but a real freedom.
My experiences are very limited with this new, adrenaline powered sport, although my closest family member, my cousin Cecil, is an avid skydiver with over 1,000 jumps at the young age of 20. With his wise knowledge and love, along with my envy of it, I’ve come to learn a lot about it. On the morning of my first jump, the drive to the drop zone was the most nerve-wrecking feeling I’ve ever felt. With the sun just rising on the horizon and the thin layer of fog like sheets over the Snohomish plains, I started to feel the excitement. The day was filled with a lot of preparation, practice, packing, and crying, but the time finally came to get in the air. The flight to the right altitude and location seemed to take an eternity, but it finally came. Everything that had been building up to this moment had now been erased from my memory and the time to jump was here.
Many people believe that Skydivers are crazy, careless people who throw a backpack on with a parachute in it, get in a plane, and recklessly jump out thousands of feet up. They believe they are the sorts of people that take life for granted and if something were to go wrong, then who cares? Most people I’ve spoken to emphasize on the careless...