Skydive!

Introducing guest blogger, my daughter, Amy Mills:

When I was in about 4^th or 5^th grade I remember watching a really awesome video in Ms. Urmston’s class room. It was just my Mom, Ms. Urmston and I sitting in front of the TV watching a video of Ms. Urmston going skydiving; from that day on I always knew I wanted to go skydiving. I fulfilled my dream of going skydiving on May 28 2008, my 21^st birthday. Most people want to go out and drink and party it up on their 21^st, but I had no desire to do so. I rounded up 8 crazy people, including myself, to jump 15,000 feet out of an airplane (California’s highest tandem jump). In order to achieve such a big accomplishment one needs to have the right mind state and do these 5 simple steps.

Step 1: Sign your life away. By this, I mean, when we got to the airport we had to fill out a whole bunch of paper work, initial about 20 different things, and handwrite: “I understand that the parachute may not open, and I can be seriously injured, and I’m putting my life in risk of death,” or something along those lines.

Step 2: Pair up with your tandem instructor. When I met Mike, my “jumpmaster”, I knew I was in for it. He kept on making dying jokes, and playing around. I asked him how many times he had been skydiving and he said 9 times, I knew he was joking by the way he was saying it, then I asked him again and he said over 9,000 times. I then felt safe. He put my harness on and that was it; no instructions, and no letting me know what to do if something were to go wrong.

Step 3: Getting onto the airplane. Since it was my birthday I got to decide when I wanted to go. I chose to go first because I didn’t want to watch somebody else fall out of an airplane. As we were climbing in altitude I realized what I was getting myself into. It all happened so fast, after about 5 minutes we reached 15,000 feet and the door opened.

Step 4: Jumping out of a perfect good airplane. My camera person got out of the airplane and held onto the side of it. I walked to the edge, with my right hand on my left shoulder and my left hand on my right shoulder. The noise was so loud from the wind. At this point I don’t really feel like I’m doing anything, kind of like out of the body sort of thing. Mike holds the edges of the door, I’m pretty much out of the airplane and he pushes off. He does a turn and I see the airplane fly away. I’m plummeting toward the ground at 120 m.p.h and I don’t feel like I’m moving at all, and the earth doesn’t look like it’s getting any closer. I’m smiling and taking in the scenery of Monterey Bay. After a 70 second free fall (it didn’t feel like 70 seconds), the parachute opens, and we glide down to the ground. The entire experience, from takeoff to reaching earth again, took total of about 10 minutes.

Step 5: Celebrate with a few bottles of champagne. When we all reached the ground we felt so relaxed (believe it or not). We were all thankful for the experience and wanted to do it again right away. As Leonardo da Vinci once said, “…and once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you long to return.” Our experience will always live on and I’m proud to say that I have been skydiving.

~Amy Mills