Nine months ago I was in central California freefalling at 130 miles-per-hour to my impending death. At the very least, any person experiencing such a thing prior to the last century or so would have, without doubt, been completely squished upon impact. Yet there I was, staring over the early-evening, sun-blanketed Pacific Ocean, wondering where exactly I would land should my parachute fail to open.

I remember, just before jumping out of the airplane, thinking, “Why am I doing this?” Despite what both my mind and gut insisted that I don’t do – jump – I carefully clenched the grips along the straps of my parachute, pressed my head firmly against the chest of the instructor with whom I trusted my life, slowly placed each trembling leg onto the ledge of the aircraft, and for a split second stared down at the world from 15,000 feet in the sky.

Then something completely unexpected happened. As I listened to the instructor begin our previously-agreed-upon countdown to jumping, something inside of me took over.

“Ready?” he screamed.

“Yes!” I shouted, making sure to nod heavily knowing that he likely couldn’t hear a word coming out of my mouth. I wasn’t ready, but I wanted to be – so I decided that I was.

“Five!” he shouted.

“Four!”

“Three!”

And then I pushed as hard as I could with both of my legs to send us into a dizzying tumble into the open sky. We flipped several times, as evidenced by the rapid-fire progression of visual reference points: sun, then ground, then ocean…sun, then ground, then ocean…sun, ground, ocean…sun, ground, ocean…sun, ground, ocean… 

Then suddenly, there was only ground. We had stabilized into what felt like a violent, floating free-fall, with wind gushing past my ears, through my sinuses, and around each of my outstretched limbs. I remember my first thought, “It’s really cold up here,” followed quickly by, “holy crap, this is really happening!”

The free-fall lasted for about sixty-seconds. What was actually just a minute felt more like an hour. Most of the time, to my right, laid the Pacific Ocean. The perfectly-symmetrical, blinding-red sun hugged the distant western horizon, and a fiery dark hue blanketed the hills and cliffs to my left. Straight below me, the Pacific’s violent waves battered the mostly-barren coastline that eventually stretched into the endlessly green, rolling California hills to the east.

As earth quickly approached, each blink of my goggled-covered eyes reminded me of 7th grade science class. Just as a strand of hair would appear in greater depth and clarity with each swap of a lens under a microscope; cliffs, boulders, streets, and homes exposed one more previously-unnoticed detail each time my eyes reopened.

Soon, I began to notice people scattered throughout various parts of the greater Santa Cruz community below us. Fences marked where one person’s property ended and another’s began. Carefully mowed patches of grass revealed the landscaping skills of one neighbor versus the untouched, natural beauty of overgrown bushes, high grass, and flowers in the yard of another.

Suddenly, I felt three or four frantic taps on my shoulder. This was my tandem-jumper’s sign that we were approaching 5,000 feet in altitude and soon he would be deploying our main parachute. At that moment, I had the same thought everyone has in that situation – “here goes, it either opens or it doesn’t. This could be it.”

Seconds later, I felt intense rattling along the straps of my parachute. Soon, we went from laying in a position parallel with the earth below to being angled slightly upward. I could feel that we had slowed down just a bit, but we were still falling at a high speed.

“We gotta be at 4,000 feet or less!” I thought nervously.

Finally, I felt an incredible yank all throughout my body. We had gone from a chaotic, cold, surreal free-fall to a suddenly peaceful drift into the winds hugging the terrain below us. As it turns out, there was a small shoot deployed first to slow us down a bit, and the second shoot – the “main” shoot – is what’s used to slowly carry us to the ground below.

“This is exactly how I thought it’d feel!” I shouted, once we had finally stabilized.

And it was. That feeling that you get when you imagine what it probably feels like to be parachuting? That’s pretty accurate. It’s a sense of calmness, a sense of overcoming impending doom and slowly drifting back towards safety. Everything around you – colors, sounds, scents – all intensify in a way you’ve never quite experienced before. What was once a hectic free-fall and sense of doom gives way to peacefulness and a sharper, renewed perception of the world around you. What once existed as a mishmash of sensory overload and worry morphs into a calmer, manageable, gorgeous reality.

Then you land on both of your feet and your parachute falls beside you. You briefly notice each tree, each blade of grass, and each rock scattered about the dirt that gives way to the idling truck waiting to take you back home.

You look up and think of the tumbling you endured, the free fall into the unknown, and the serenity and peace that had overcome you once calmness and safety finally intervened, and ask yourself, “how did I survive it?”

Thank you, Lutheran Medical Center, Emergency Department staff, and Dr. Homi Kapadia, for being the parachute I needed when I found myself tumbling as I never had before.