My Vernicle

Jumping out of an airplane 14,000 feet over East Troy, Wisconsin yesterday took me back 11 years, to another airplane, an Aer Lingus flight where I remained seated inside, flying from Dublin, Ireland to Brussels, Belgium.

And it did so because of one word, a word that I may be using incorrectly.

Welcome to my life.

Dano has been kicking around the idea of taking an advanced free fall class and doing a solo skydiving jump for the entire time I've known him, and maybe a couple of decades before that.  Last week, when I sent him a link for the new tethered balloon rides off of Navy Pier (to satisfy my hot air balloon item on the 101 in 1001 List) he shot back with an immediate and decisive "You're an idiot.  Tethered?  I'm not letting you count it unless it's an untethered balloon.  Replace the hot air balloon on the list with skydiving and go with me, you big sissy whiny baby fool."  (Again, remember, I'm going for tone and intentions, not word-for-word recreation of our conversation.)

I told him I'd consider a tandem jump, which is when you are strapped to a professional who makes all of the decisions and holds all of the responsibility for getting the parachute to open.  It might be the sissy way out, but I liken it to how I feel about riding the motorcycle - I want to enjoy the view without the pesky responsibility for living and dying.

So late yesterday afternoon, I put my life in the hands of a gorgeous man named Hoochie.  This is Hoochie.

We went to Skydive Milwaukee in East Troy.  Because we (Dano) suck at making plans ahead of time, we didn't make reservations far enough in advance for Dano to do his class and his jump but we decided to go anyway, possibly because he knew I'd chicken out if we stretched it out a few weeks.  I'm like that.  When I make the decision to do something stupid, it needs to happen immediately.

So we drove to East Troy.  We walked in, I filled out the mother of all liability waivers, watched a short video featuring the man who invented the tandem rigging, who I think might have been a member of ZZ Top judging by the beard, and then we sat and waited for them to have room for me.  It was during this wait that I said something about hitting the ground at 120 mph, a number that I pulled from the video, and Dano was kind enough to point out that 120 mph is the speed at which we'd be traveling when we first exited the airplane, and if the chute didn't open, we'd be going much faster than that by the time we hit the ground.

Helpful.

The wait was far shorter than I expected and in no time at all, I was meeting Hoochie and getting strapped into rigging that was even more complex than that outfit I wore to that one club we don't talk about anymore.

Dano took the airplane ride with me, an unexpected but cool turn of events.  The pilot had said that he would be back on the ground before I was, and it didn't work out that way, but it was totally worth it to me to have photos of the actual departure from the airplane instead of the arrival on the ground.

It was a teensy little plane with a propeller, the 2nd smallest aircraft I've ever been in (the smallest being a crop duster when I was a wee little kid, my first flight).  Hoochie sat behind me, I sat between his legs, my back to his chest.  It was a 14 minute trip from the ground to the height and location where we'd jump.  As we got closer, Hoochie was attaching things and tightening things.  And then retightening things.  And then retightening things again. 

I told Dano that if those belts were anything like being ratcheted down inside of a sprint car, then OMG I TOTALLY GET IT.  Because MY GOD, it was tight.

So we're sitting there, and Hoochie keeps reaching around me and adjusting and readjusting and tweaking and tightening things, and he says "So, where are you from?" and I answer Rockford.  And then he says "Do you have pierced nipples?" and for a minute I think "Dude.  Worst pickup line ever."  And then I answer no, and realize while he continues to explain, that the straps are going right across my chest, and if anything were to shift (AND IT WILL) and my nipples were pierced, it would be a pretty bad ordeal.

But ultimately, I think the real lesson is that upon learning that a girl is from Rockford, the most logical next question is "Are your nipples pierced?"  I'm totally using that in the bars from now on.

We were the last to exit the plane.

Dano was constantly firing the camera.  I have a series that is at least 10 shots long.

And then we were gone.

I like it this way.  He apologized later for not flipping to video, but seriously, I love this photo series more than anything.  Because I was there.  And now I'm not.

When we were waiting, I was wandering around the office looking at photos and noticing that some of the tandem jumpers were wearing the suits and some were not, and I made the decision that if given a choice, I didn't want to wear the suit.  I don't know what my logic on this was, I guess that I wanted it to be as raw as possible, my skin exposed.

Leaving the airplane, I was thinking about doing what I was told to do, crossing my arms across my chest and then spreading them wide and arching my back.  But once in the free fall, I was thinking about the air against my skin and I was so glad I'd chosen not to wear the suit.  It was frigid and sharp, like the worst cold night on the motorcycle with no jacket but times 1,000, but it was so goddamn amazing.

It was right around that time that I realized I wasn't breathing.

I'm pretty good at breathing.  Years of biofeedback therapy have given me an enviable control of my breathing, my heart rate, and my body's response to stress.  That's the whole point of biofeedback, to learn to control those responses that are typically out of our control.  And here I was, not breathing.

It was a combination of the tightness of the straps, the g-force of the fall, and you know, probably a wee bit of knowledge that the ground was rushing towards me.  As soon as I recognized that I wasn't breathing, I figured out how to breathe again, not the deep but infrequent breaths I was looking for, but shallow breaths that were just enough to get oxygen inside of me.

Maybe this isn't how an adrenaline rush is supposed to work, perhaps I was supposed to let my body panic a little more than I did, but I couldn't.  I might not be any good at being a daredevil, but you know what?  I'm really really fucking good at enjoying the ride.

During all of the talk and waiting, I wasn't scared or nervous about dying.  I wasn't thinking about what could go wrong and how badly I could be hurt.  I was thinking about whether or not I had the balls to do it, I was scared that I would be the person who lands in the airplane because I just couldn't get myself to the door.  I know it makes no sense, because if I'm not thinking about dying, then why would I chicken out?  I don't know.  It's just what I do.

So during the freefall, when it kinda hit me upside the head that WHOA DUDE, people probably do die during this sort of thing, I processed several things pretty much instantly.  One, that I won't regret dying this way.  Two, that I think I might be crying or maybe my eyes are just watering.  Three, that I'm ready.

I'm ready to die?  Where did that thought come from?  This is all happening so fast, in fact the entire jump was probably over in less time than you've taken to read so far, but this is how I remember it, so bear with me.  But yes, that's the thought in my head.  I'm ready to die.

Not in a suicidal way.  Not in an unhappy way.  I swear to god, I was plummeting towards the earth thinking "Yeah, I've done enough with this life.  I've done enough.  I've seen enough.  I've been enough.  Life and me, we're cool."  I suspect at least part of this is due to Sunday's post and the nonstop emails and phone calls and personal conversations that I've had with basically every single important friend or foe, online or off, invisible or visible, that I've ever had.  So many wrongs righted in such a short period of time.

(This isn't me.  But this is what I looked like.)

So I'm falling towards the earth and thinking about death and purposefully suppressing my body's response to the adrenaline, and Hoochie pops the parachute open and it's like we've slammed into something and all motion stops and it's quiet.  He reaches around me and adjusts a few things with the straps until I'm in more of a sitting position than a hanging position.  We float and float and float.  He asks how my stomach is doing, if it's okay to spin a little, and I say I'm okay and yes, and we do.  I giggle the same giggle that Dano teases me about every time we see the top side of 100 mph in the M. 

Because this question has already been asked, the song in my head (there is ALWAYS a song in my head) was "Silver Lining" by Rilo Kiley.  My only explanation is that I was scanning the sky, trying to see if there were clouds anywhere, looking for Milwaukee, looking for Chicago, seeing clouds but moreso just the horizon and the curvature of the earth, and there was Rilo Kiley. 

I was your silver lining and now I'm gold.

We had a smooth, flawless landing (to the best of my knowledge) and it only took a minute to get out of the harness and be on my way.  Dano and the plane landed at almost the exact same time I did, so he never got to see me under canopy, which he kind of regrets, but I don't.  I think it calmed me down a lot that he was on the plane, and I really do like the plane pictures enough that I don't miss having pictures of myself falling.

As we were walking out, Dano asked me to talk about it, and I gave him the look that says "Get me the fuck out of here before I totally lose my shit in front of strangers."  And we were off, in the car.  We headed to Starbucks, the same one where we stopped on the way to the airport just a couple of hours earlier.

Between the airport and the Starbucks, Dano and I talked about the list, my list, and the crossing off of an item that technically wasn't there in the first place.  From the time that I started strapping into the tandem gear, Dano had control of Louise, my Blackberry, and he was sending updates and photos to my Twitter and Facebook account.  Once in the car, I sent my first update (this one) from the ground.  Between the photos he'd sent earlier, which made it clear that I wasn't joking about jumping out of an airplane, and the update I sent saying it was over, I was getting a ton of Facebook comments and emails and text messages from friends, so many so that I couldn't respond to much of anything because Lou was struggling with the volume of incoming messages while I was trying to compose responses.

These problems I have, y'all.  You just don't understand.

My favorite message of the entire day was to my friend DSM, to whom I said "I'm alive" and to which she responded "Okay, but how does your hair look?"  She gets me, you guys.  She really gets me.

One of the comments that I got on Facebook was an old friend (well, technically, my ex-step-mother-in-law but she's really cool so let's call her an old friend) saying that skydiving was on her Bucket List, which sent Dano and I into a conversation about Bucket Lists and the phrase itself and then lists in general, my list, whether it was better to have things written out, to have goals, or to just take every opportunity as it arises.  We came to no conclusions, we just discussed.  But I am loving my list, I'm glad I have my list, and I feel like if I didn't have my list, I'd get to the end of 2009 and look back and wonder what I did with an entire year.  But I won't, because there is this this out there with so many things crossed off, and there is a basket in my house filled with receipts and ticket stubs and programs.  And Flickr, oh boy, is Flickr familiar with my attempts to get shit done this year.

At Starbucks, I paid for my drink and as I was opening my wallet, the credit card receipt from Sky Knights fluttered out and landed on the counter in front of me, and I picked it up and looked at it for a bit, thought about how it would go home with me, likely to end up in the aforementioned pile of receipts, all of those little scraps of paper.  Proof that I'd been there.

It's this point in the story where my brain gets sucked eleven years into the past, to an airplane above Europe, where I'm sitting and reading a book called Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty, a novel about a woman writing a symphony which she titles Vernicle after the term for a religious badge that recognizes achievement of a personal pilgrimage of faith.

The word appealed to her - it had a good ring to it. Proof that you'd been there. In a land of devastation. At the bottom of the world. And come through it - just. She'd brought back evidence in the shape of music. Vernicle. A feather in her cap - for full orchestra. From the shrine of desolation.

This wasn't the first time I'd read the word vernicle.  (See: high school obsession with Chaucer, or those 3 semesters I thought I was a C++ programming major but I was actually a British Lit major.)  But it was the first time it directly connected to my life in a tangible way, because before I'd even picked up that book in a bookstore in Wexford, I had been collecting patches from each city I visited, each tourist location, each monument.  I was taking all of those patches home to be sewn onto a quilt that my Grandma Wanda was in the process of making for me while I was flitting around Europe that summer.

So while I took my first sip of iced tea, all of these various thoughts floating around the silver, now gold, lining of my subconscious formed together fully and rose up in this big giant wave of the shit I suspected I was about to lose earlier, and I demanded that we leave Starbucks immediately, and we went to Dano's house and I tried to distract myself by uploading photos to Flickr but it caught me anyway, and I broke down sobbing.  I dropped my basket.

I may never be able to explain why to other people, but here's my best attempt:

Somewhere between missing the life I used to have and the person I used to be and planning for the life I want to have and who I want to be, somewhere in the midst of making that big list and crossing things off of it, somehow through all of the collecting of vernicles and disposing of baggage, somewhere in there . . . I got there.  The cliche about life being what happens when you're making other plans came true, except that I wasn't making other plans, I was making this plan.  I was looking at the arrow on the map that pointed to where I was going, and suddenly, that arrow said "You are here".

For some reason, that arrow was pointing at a point on the ground that could only be reached from 14,000 feet in the air.