Before Christmas I got my law firm together for a celebration. This year, my law partner and I took everyone tunnel jumping. It’s like skydiving, but you’re indoors and jump into a wind tunnel blowing 160 miles per hour. They say it simulates a free fall from 18,000 feet, but to me, it feels like sticking your whole body outside the window of an Indy car as it races down one of the straight-aways.
Tunnel jumping is a lot like jumping out of a real plane, which I’ve done a couple times. The first time was in college. There was a place down by the boarder of Mexico, and for $40, you could throw yourself out of an old Cessna on a Saturday. The training consisted of jumping off a pile of boxes – twice. That was it. “Fold into the ground” our twenty-year-old instructor who was wearing a tie-dye shirt, sandals, and a ponytail said to us with confidence. I figured there was a good chance that was exactly what would end up happening to us, because without any other training, a half hour later we jumped from a plane using what’s called a “static line.” It’s a piece of rope that is tied to the plane, and it pulls the ripcord on your parachute for you.
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I don’t think they still use static lines with novice skydivers. Probably because too many people ended up folding into the ground when it didn’t work. When I jumped that first time, I knew I was betting my life on a piece of rope, and because of that, I remember experiencing that terrible falling feeling as soon as I left the plane.
The second time I went skydiving was just last year. This time, I did a free-fall from 10,000 feet with my sons and another buddy. I assumed some lawyers had been involved since my first jump years earlier, because this time, rather than using static lines to pull the ripcord, now they strap a guy to your back. I asked him if he knew what he was doing, and he told me he’d done this thousands of times, and he wasn’t scared. It wasn’t just what he said but the way that he said it that gave me confidence as they connected us together using lots of straps.
