Throwing myself out of a plane in Spain, for fun apparently.
The only time I've willingly been tied to a Scotsman.
Bolts rattled violently in their housing, whilst deafening wind blasted every panel in the flying tin can we called our temporary home. My limbs were bound, tight braces covering every part of me from the waist up. This was far worse than being jacketed in any insane asylum I could feasibly imagine, and I’d chosen to be here - 14,000 feet up in the air.
It was only when the googly-eyed maniacs around me started staring at their wrist-bound altimeters that the terror started to set in. Crazed by the hunger for the jump, with adrenaline injected directly into their veins, they grinned like hyenas. Ear to bloody ear.
I looked on in horror. There was no turning back and only one way out.
Down.
I imagined all of the times I’d purposely put myself on the edge of the world. Peering into the abyss of the unknown, going beyond my comfort zone. A flawed attempt at calming my nervous system, but the only place my mind would let me wander.
Flashbacks of walking along castle walls in Malta as a child (to my Mum’s horror), jumping on glass panels in the Spinnaker tower to scare tourists, trampolining higher than any of my other classmates, right up to losing my footing as my horse dashed down the beach in Morocco. It’d be reasonable to think I was desensitised to heights and speed at this point.
However, you would lose that bet.
The altimeter checking became more frequent. The junkie equivalent of, “Are we there yet?” twitching on their faces. My goggles were sat in an uncomfortable position, pressing between my eyes, but my hands were shaking too much to adjust them. Hoyt tried to shout some words of encouragement in my direction, but they were lost in the static between my ears.
Everyone was getting itchy. Our hearts pounding in a single shared pulse, waiting for the ultimate release.
In one swift clunk, the rear door burst open. Air rushed in, and before I blinked, Hoyt was falling out of the plane. His four-legged silhouette sucked into a cloud immediately behind us.
Time ground to a halt as my jump approached. Our chimaera form waddling towards the “exit” as if I had any say in the matter.
I had only one thought as my feet left the ground, “I’m so glad I wrote a will before I left home.”
The calm before the storm.
Valiant drunken warriors were asleep all around the room, curled up precariously on small white sofas. Their nighttime debauchery being something I actively turned down 8 hours before. And with good reason.
I was jumping out of a plane today.
A bucket list item for sure. But, not the kind your hand wants to write out, instead throwing the pen across the room in an act of subconscious protest the moment ink touches the paper. You want to override your self-preservation programming to “fall with style” from thousands of feet up in the air? You’re insane.
Jake and Cale however, our resident adrenaline dealers, had hundreds of jumps between them and they wouldn’t suggest such an activity if they thought we’d be harmed in the process, right? RIGHT?!
My feeble heart was in a race to destroy itself before we even left our apartment that day. Lighting a cigarette, I stared into the morning sun just peeking over the top of the adjacent apartment blocks. Hoping to calm my mind just enough to prevent vomiting over the side of the balcony.
We three musketeers were due to ride in the back of Danny’s car that day. A kind gesture from an expat Brit who had somehow found himself living in Barcelona, collecting the obligatory sausage dog somewhere along the way, of course.
Cale, aka Young Lion, crawled into the middle seat of the car hungover and dehydrated. Head swinging loosely from side to side. One of the youngest in our motley crew (hence the nickname), and unlike myself, still willing to fuel his Illinois liver with copious amounts of international grape juice. Sometimes the youngest has to bear the consequences of youth though, as Jake and I crushed him like a car compactor on either side. Our knees testing the strength of any seat unfortunate enough to be within our reach.
With 150 brutal kilometres (approx. 93 freedom miles) to Empuriabrava, there was a lot of time to visualise the impending doom I was about to subject myself to.
I had the correct insurance, I had written a last will and testament, and told my parents where I would be. Everything was in its proper place. Should my assumptions be correct about the discontinuation of my lifespan, it would all be ok.
As you can imagine though, this did very little to calm my nerves.
Great Scott!
Arriving in Empuriabrava we unloaded like a clown car into the parking lot. Gangs of bodies unravelling onto the tarmac with each limb squeezing and popping back into place. The sky was clear, the wind was light, and the hum of a tiny prop plane in the distance echoed around the valley. In the last two hours, the panic had clearly spread like wildfire on our group’s faces. As bags were taken away and earrings removed, nervous laughter spread between us.
The preparation zone had less security than a gate at the airport, with skydivers attached to their instructors like koalas peppering the air above our heads. We were about to jump out of a plane, and there was no real concern for the possibility that anyone could sprint directly into the line of fire (the runway). The lack of formality and visible safety checks only cranked the leverage on my nerves even higher.
Flashbacks to high school gym class filled my vision as our group was picked up leisurely by each of their tandem instructors. Leaving me standing like a lemon coming in second to last.
“Is it getting cold out here or just me?” I winced into empty space.
As the feeling of being the unwanted puppy started to bubble up, a scraggly ginger man entered my periphery with a smile. Shorter than me with deep sun wrinkles, he politely chucked a harness in my direction.
A familiar accent found comfort in my eardrums.
He was Scottish - with a tan.
A combination so rare I might as well have been staring at a Tolkien-grade unicorn.
His name was Murray.
A man totally absorbed by skydiving after discovering it on a trip to Australia. His first jump leading to an adrenaline awakening so profound he hadn’t stopped for nearly 20 years. There was something so calming about knowing I’d be attached to a Scotsman. The shared identity, the same first language, and the soul-bound match of both trying to escape the UK by any means necessary.
Tinkering with the GoPro that would ultimately record every frame of my screaming demise, Murray gestured to follow him out onto the runway.
I don’t tend to get nervous in high-stakes situations like this.
Playing in bands in my teens, performing in drama class, and working client video calls for years had prepared me to handle stage fright like it was second nature. Making everything until my first step onto the runway a delightful daydream. The second my feet touched the grass however, every inch felt like dragging bags of concrete uphill on a rainy day. An involuntary rejection of every decision I had made to get here. The gremlins in my mind running rampant trying to anchor my body in the final moments before launch.
Each instructor must have seen the face I was projecting thousands of times before.
The polite grin through chattering teeth as the plane comes into land and you climb up the rickety metal staircase. Ducking into the tube of barren metal and flesh. Everything had been stripped out from inside the plane except one bench with just enough depth to balance yourself on. No individual seat tray, entertainment system, or comfy headrest.
This machine had one job and didn’t expect to return full of cargo.
No way out.
As the door whipped shut, control became a distant memory. Light pierced through tiny windows above our heads, rippling between the clouds as we rolled down the runway, picking up speed for takeoff.
I was putting my fate in the hands of a Scotsman with a generational overdose of sunshine. For what? A quick thrill? Anything could happen with that level of Vitamin D in his veins. There was a reason the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall after all.
The rattling intensified the moment we left the ground. Each panel on the plane vibrating inside a thin veil of nuts and bolts. With every foot we climbed our pilot was punching the gas even harder. Not a moment could be spared in our ascent to the heavens. Around 12 of us, tandem and solo, were barrelling towards the sun. And without my own personal altimeter, all I could do was sit and wait.
In a flash, the door cracked wide open.
Cheers burst from the solo skydivers to my right, their fix about to be delivered, as I stared into the canvas of blue on my left. If these were to be my final moments, I was glad to be attached to someone from my own island. At least we could reminisce about the delightful crunch of Yorkshire Puddings or grim overcast weather before the Great Splat.
With no time to overthink though, we went straight into freefall.
I don’t even remember Murray wrangling us together, or interlocking our harnesses. Just an expanse of blue filling my vision and breathlessness taking over my entire body as we fell from the plane.
For the first 20 seconds I felt like I was going to die.
My legs and arms felt entirely detached from my body. My soul stretched 2 feet above my head racing to catch up, with my conscious mind quietly preparing a list of terminating functions required for a rapid detachment from this physical plane of existence.
I’ve had this exact nightmare hundreds of times in my life.
Freefalling from a building or plane, the ground meeting your body at the speed of light, waking up just before the crash. Except this time, I was not about to wake up (a little sweaty) in my own bed.
Then the mountains came into view.
Rolling into crystal clear ocean water.
The explosion of adrenaline turned into euphoria just as the rip cord was pulled, yanking my body 90 degrees upright. The crushing sensation around my groin reminding me that my spirit and body were still very heavily intertwined.
Murray was laughing, I was laughing. The release of terror turning into pure ecstasy. He just seemed glad I wasn’t vomiting, gagging, or crying. So, for some reason, he decided to give me the reins because I was (of course) now utterly fearless.
No genetic history could have prepared my tiny monkey brain for an event like this.
Adrenaline was now my default state.
Pulling the left handle as hard as I could, we spiralled down, accelerating into a nose-dive. I finally felt alive. Relief flooded my body.
The barrage of the wind tunnel was now a pleasant breeze. My breathing slowed, focusing in on the target at hand. Locked in on the ground, my head was clear for the first time in over a year. Some of our group were already waving upward as Murray and I glided down towards the runway. Gracefully slowing, riding each ripple of air, I lifted my legs into a seated position (as instructed).
“Feet down in 3, 2, 1…” Murray yelled over my left shoulder.
Dropping my legs from seated to standing, I expected them to keep running underneath me. Instead, they immediately dug in like anchors. Throwing us both off balance, skidding across the wet grass, and tumbling onto our knees. A less than beautiful, but still hilarious landing.
Hugging Murray, I sprinted out of the gate. My knees buckling from the adrenaline like a newborn deer experiencing the weight of real gravity for the first time.
Fighting demons.
CJ, our resident Utah mountain boy (who by all accounts had no business being in the sky), and I had landed at almost the exact same time. Sharing identical shark eyes, we shadowboxed instinctively around each other. I could have punched through brick walls in that moment or sprinted to the ocean and back. Our souls had been refreshed and we were all high as kites.
The clarity and sharpness was incredible. I could move in 4D, passing between planes of existence freely. Greeting the machine elves in one moment, teleporting to the moon and back in the next. I couldn’t stop smiling, and even at dinner an hour later, my body was still buzzing head-to-toe.
Only when we rolled back into our claustrophobic, but circus-ready, clown car did my body start to unwind. Digesting all the adrenaline into a nauseous concoction reminiscent of Cale’s earlier queasiness. If I shut my eyes, the expanse of the open sky returned to my vision, the bumps and turns in the road mimicking pockets of air blasting past my hands in freefall.
We were blessed with a beautiful sunset drive that night, and although my knees were glued to the back of the passenger seat, my heart was full of gratitude. Not just for surviving a splat on the concrete, but for taking a leap of faith and following through despite every instinct screaming otherwise.
Because I’ve decided you can’t ruminate on the trajectory of your life when you’re hurtling towards the Earth strapped to a Scotsman and a perfectly engineered piece of nylon.
Until next time.
Connor x
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