Roadtrip ’99 part 8: Skydiving
I am publishing the first draft of my world travels as I write it, starting at a solo road trip from Minnesota.It all begins here.
TW: I’m putting a trigger warning on this part of the story. I’m discussing the fears of being a woman traveling alone.
So, my brother had told me that meeting Weird Al was basically the coolest thing that I could ever do. I didn’t want to believe that. The day after I called my family I went to the little airport where “Skydive Idaho” was based out of, and scheduled a jump. It’s a pretty surreal experience to walk into an airplane hangar and ask about paying to jump out of an airplane but it also felt like making an appointment at a garage for an oil change.
Here I was, living on the hospitality of others, food cooked over a campfire, and then I dropped $200 to go sky diving. In 5 days I would go. That gave me time to work a bit more at Labor Ready and get the valves adjusted on my Bug. I found a neat little mechanic shop and the mechanic that had a love for Bugs seemed to be taken by my story. He went over my bug and took care of a couple extra things, replaced a head light, made a couple tweaks, as well as adjusted the valves. In the end I only paid $40. Then he invited me for a weekend camping trip.
In a garage, in a public area, camping sounds like a wonderful idea. I do have my tent, I do like the wilderness, I do think mechanics are cool people. I did want to be a person of faith and trusting that only good things would ever happen to me. He seemed like such a sweet genuine guy, maybe a bit of a hippie with his shaggy hair and round glasses.
But I had a concern about his “carnal man”. These manly urges that I had learned men apparently don’t have much control over. Here’s the thing, when I tell people that I traveled the world by myself, that I hitchhiked, that I slept outside in random places, I get two different reactions: 1. “You’re so BRAVE!” followed by shock and awe at my fierceness or 2. This look of shock and horror as they stammer to saying something polite and encouraging while their face looks like they just met the biggest idiot - who will soon be dead. At best, these people see me as horribly naive about the world.
So, I think this moment is a good time to share with you what went through this carefree (or would some say “careless”?) solo woman traveler’s head at all times.
I went out into the world believing that there is an instinct that lives within ALL men (sorry good men) that can cause them to randomly attack women. You read the stories all the time. Women randomly walking along and are just suddenly taken and murdered. What is a man’s life like that anyone of them could just snap at any moment and hurt another human so deeply? Are urges constant? Is it a virus that slowly brews and overtakes their mind and self-control? Does something just pop when the right opportunity arises? Are men aware that their women coworkers and friends are in danger by being around them unsupervised? I was morbidly curious to survey guys: “So, tell me, how many women have you had to resist raping and killing today?”
I spent my childhood imagining every scenario to prepare myself for the worst: What would I do in a plane crash? What if both my parents died in a car accident tomorrow? What would I do to take care of my brothers and keep us together? What would I do if the Nazis invade the US and I get separated by my parents before getting to the Place of Safety? So an obvious thing to think about was fighting off an attacker and all the different directions an attack could come from.
Maybe I could educate, maybe I could dress modestly enough, maybe I could appease or distract them from their onslaught of dark thoughts. The easiest thing would be to avoid men all together but now I was on this solo adventure. I had a life mission to walk with God and His love, “Love covers a multitude of sins,” I had this responsibility to show that love to everyone I came across. Even those that could harm me. My interpretation of “preach the gospel into all the world” is to live it as a living breathing example. My actions are my gospel.
As a child I remember listening to a sermon and the minister commend the fighting spirit of a woman that was hospitalized for attempting to fight off 3 attackers. She had proven herself a “good woman”. I assume it was a sermon on the importance of abstinence, the story is the only part I remember. I took the gruesome stories out into the world with me, along with verses about “Christian soldiers” and fighting for righteousness and the sacredness of virginity. I prayed for discernment, prevention, protection, but I was in this world to be either a sacrifice or an “overcomer” that wins an impossible battle with God’s miraculous assistance.
He seemed genuinely sad when I turned down his offer. Not the sadness of a murderer failing to isolate his victim, but the missed opportunity of two people getting the chance to get to know each other in a beautiful setting. I was sad too, that I lived in this world where I had to miss out on a friendship and adventure for “safety”, I didn’t feel like this was the appropriate moment to test God’s protection over me. We had a wonderful talk at the garage and geeked out about VW Bugs. He also taught me how to do my own valve adjustments. He demonstrated how the spacing between the valves should feel when measuring it with a spacing gauge, pinching the spacing gauge between his fingers to recreate the feeling.
Here’s the last thing I want to say about this, at least for now. Your choices and actions have a ripple effect into the world, that you can’t comprehend, that will change the way people interact with each other. It’s not a “20 minute lack of judgement”. Because a few men did some terrible things to women, I chose to judge a kind man differently. I was taught, all women have been taught, that we are always in danger and because of that fear, women have made different choices and miss out on adventure because they have to choose self preservation and safety over being social. Many of my friends, most women I know, would not travel the way I chose to because they see the risk of attack as too great. All I’m saying is, I still regret that I turned down a weekend camping trip in the woods with this strange guy. With the lack of information I had about him, it was the right choice but that still pisses me off.
I had one last Labor Ready day working on a construction project. A house was being built and they just needed help picking up the area. This time I drove another worker so I got paid a bit more for the transportation, but we also got lost. I met another laborer there, he was a strange dude but sweet enough. Was he still in high school? I feel like everyone I met on this trip was younger than me. I spent the night at his house where he lived with his mom. He tried to kiss me, and then he told me that I was a messenger from a dream and asked me what message I had for him. I was pretty speechless and disappointed in myself. I did not have a divine message that I was aware of. I probably said something preachy about love God and love others. Bible quotes. Life pro tip: Quote the Bible if you want to sound profound or be left alone.
We went out to eat with his Mom and her girlfriend. When I was at the Arts High School it provided a wonderful education on LGBTQ lifestyle for this sheltered country Christian girl. I realize now, that angsty teenagers are not the best representation of an entire community but it was my starting point. The Church had even advised me against going to the Arts High School and living on campus because of the “Immorals of artists.” I had not realized that being an artist was a fall into being immoral. Perpich Center for Arts Education did a great job in having workshops about sexual orientation, a significant number of the students were not straight or were exploring their sexual orientation and I did my best to understand the concept. But still, whenever I would talk to non-straight friends the word “abomination” would flash in my head, like a Bible thumping tic. Have you ever heard such a terrible word and then to direct it at a person? It felt terrible. Here’s the thing about old Testament that people kind of gloss over: according to Old Testament there are LOTS and lots of reasons to get stoned, like not keeping Sabbath, kids that don’t obey their parents, adultery, premarital sex, so…I don’t understand why there’s an ongoing protest for only one of these groups of people.
The best I can say, for now, is that I was too busy judging myself to worry about judging others. Unconditional love, forgiveness, and not judging were the main tasks that I was focused on and they alone are a handful. The disturbing verses I tucked away for review later, like men laying together being an abomination, or that it’s only rape if there’s no one around to hear, and if a woman is raped and isn’t already betrothed then the rapist has to pay her dad and marry her for life, or the couple times that it was matter-of-factly recorded about women being offered up to appease mobs with no emotional words such as “abomination” appearing anywhere in that context.
I was uncomfortable with this couple. Mom’s girlfriend was only a year older than her son and they sat in the booth of the little restaurant and macked on each other throughout the meal, while I sat next to her son. I felt too awkward to try and have a conversation with him while his mom made out in front of us with a girl that was actually a classmate a grade ahead of him. But it was a good time for me to reflect on my hypocrisies. Am I cringing because they are gay or am I uncomfortable because I can see tongues probing at each other over my plate of food in a public setting or is this a really cringy family arrangement?
Skydiving
Finally, Sept 1, 1999. There actually is not much to describe about skydiving. I think you know the gist of it. I was given a flight suit to wear, a leather helmet, got harnessed up, a guy named Brian showed me the mechanism of pulling the chord and reading the dial thing. I was tandem jumping. I was putting my hands in the life of a professional. We rehearsed how to step out under the wing of the plane and that’s sort of when I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into. I’ve always wanted to skydive. I had a thing. I wanted to stretch and push and terrify myself — in a safe way. I believed this would build my character.
The thing that was special about this jump is we jumped out of a tiny little airplane that was really only designed for 2 people. We had 4 people with the pilot. There was me, my tandem guy, and a guy with a camera on his helmet to film this whole thing. This would be documented. I needed to have proof that I had done this. I still wasn’t quite believing this was actually happening. They had removed a seat and we sat on the floor cross-legged behind the pilot. I didn’t have a view as we climbed. I was focused on the song that I would play over the video. I didn’t ask many questions. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to be one of those people getting their fingers pried off of the door frame as they are thrown out of the plane.
It was too loud for conversation. We went by short loud words. The word finally came to get out. They opened the little door and I had to go first, with the guy strapped behind me. There was a step on the wing, a brace to hold onto, and then just like that, I was like one of those stuntmen in the 1920s that would rid on airplanes. I’m under this wing, looking over to my left at the cabin of an airplane. I am thousands of feet in the air but not in a cockpit. Why? Why have I chosen to do this? The scenery was small and totally unrealistic. Little farms, little highways, it was the same scenery I had seen on other flights, nothing exciting but now I was outside the plane with the wind racing. It was not as loud and noisy under the wing as I expected. I was not getting blown away.
One of the hardest things that I’ve done in my life was that moment when I felt the double tap on my arms. That was the signal from my instructor behind me to let go. There are a few moments in your life when everything changes. When you make a choice and you can never go back to the way things were before you took that action. Where everything is different from then on. In this moment I was still “on” a plane. Even if I was flying out on a wing. But I had made a choice to sky dive and that meant that I had to let go. I had to look at my fingers, gripping onto the metal wing brace and I had to tell my fingers to let go. My poor fingers were doing an excellent job in ensuring my survival. I told them to let go and I watched my hands open and then the brace of the airplane was no longer in reach. Nothing was in reach. I followed through on the training and arched my back as far as I could while I crossed my arms. We were falling. But it was a new experience. I watched the plane that I was just in get smaller. It felt like I was in a wind tunnel once we were in the classic bellyflop/sky dive position. It was windy. It was loud. There was nothing but blue sky all around. There was not much around to gauge speed or distance. The land was still too far away to seem real. There was a guy below me, Kevin, with the camera on his head making faces at me and giving me the thumbs up. Everything was good. I was not alone. I was with these 2 crazy guys, falling through the sky together. Bonus, they were pretty good looking. Kevin had even been to an Everclear concert.
When the parachute pulled that was another new experience. It felt a bit like a fair ride as our fall slowed down and then we were suspended. Mom and her dad had gone on a hot air balloon ride when I was little and I wondered if this is what they felt like, floating. Brian, the instructor asked if we could do some spins and that was fun too.
The landing was beautiful. I don’t even think I fell on my butt which they warned might happen. #1 Sky dive tip: Don’t try to stand up as you land! You are meeting the ground faster than you think. It was all a piece of cake. We got all unhooked. Took a few more photos, and went back in the office at the hangar. I don’t remember the details of that I just remember editing the video. I felt a bit guilty because the song I chose had swears in it. Oh, well, it was too perfect: Amphetamine by Everclear.
I packaged up my treasures that I had collected over the week, the signed Weird Al shirt, the video, some random thing I had found left in a hotel room from a convention at Shiloh Inn. Maybe I wrote a letter, maybe I didn’t but I did not make any mention of what the video was about and I just HOPED that it would shock my family. That was the real incentive for this whole endeavor, shock and awe.
I had to wait about a week to hear about the reaction and how the package was received. Mom retold me the whole story, crying at the exciting parts — that’s what Mom and I do- I’m crying while I rewrite this.
So she got the package, realized it was from me, admired the different things, was curious about this unlabeled VHS tape so she put it in the VCR while she did some vacuuming. She wasn’t really paying attention while the video started by showing backpacks laid out on a table and people standing around in coveralls, but then one of those people looked like me. So now she’s confused, and I’m putting on a very serious harness and we’re walking out and Mom starts talking to the TV. “Wait, what’s happening?” We walk up to a little airplane, “…No.” And then we’re in the plane and taking off “No!” and the jump out of the plane and Mom is still going “No! No! No!” laughing and crying. She was the one that got to gather the family for the video when everyone got home at the end of the day.
She came out west
To find the sun
She lost her name
But found a new one
Amy goes to school all day
But at night in the neighborhood
They call her
Amphetamine
Next. Part 9: Car trouble leads to a detour to Salt Lake City and hanging out with acid heads. (keep reading)
Rachael Shores is posting her travel story to encourage those that don’t fit in, to explore the world and their inner desires. Your path can be different than the standard options layed out for us. Follow current travel,art, and life on Instagram @sparrowshand.
Do you know 2 people who could use a spark of adventure? Please share.