Well ten+ days=one humongous blog post

I certainly have been a little blog-lax lately, but it will have to be excused on the grounds of us using up all of Camp Cedar Glen’s internet (apparently they only get a certain number of MB/month and we utilized them all), and then we had to get settled back into Sacramento.
And then I went skydiving.
So, yeah, busy time. The last days at Cedar Glen were nice. We got to name our trail the Ian Chicken trail, and we even finished building it a day early, earning ourselves a “day off” (or day of rest, due to lack of available work).
So, I want to remember howL
I’m going to do a Sam-ritual recap, really just so I remember stuff. Feel free to tag along.
-I always have to attach my watch to something when I sleep. I don’t like to sleep with it on, but I don’t like to leave it anywhere it could easily move. Preferably I wrap it around a bedpost near my head, so I can easily hear the alarm. Or I Velcro it around my nalgene (also always near when I sleep, being thirsty at night with no water nearby is one of the most base discomforts of my life)
-My bunk became an island besieged by stuff. All the stuff was very purposefully placed, and I always knew where anything was to within 1-2 layers, but with backpacks, charging electronics (I made sure to claim both the biggest bunk AND an outlet) and personal cookware, and waterbottles, and dirty clothes that did not merit a washing but sure as hell weren’t going back with the clean clothes, there was a good 2 foot barrier around my bed
-The cascade of alarms starting at 6:35. Every morning the routine was the same:
6:40-Zach’s alarm, he hits snooze
6:45-Jason’s alarm, he gets up
6:50-Zach’s alarm #2, snoozed
6:53-My alarm, I get up, and across the room from me Matt glares at me and gets up
6:55-No alarm, everyone is up with the noise. Vlad jumps down from his bunk, Steve rolls out, Pat gets up (already dressed), and Zach gets up
7:00-We gather with the girls in the adjoiner room for PT. Total silence, and once everyone is there, we file out with our hands in our pockets
-Running the trails that we built and searching the ground for mountain lion tracks. During “go for a run” PT days, I like to trail run, but no one else does. I spend the entire way up the quad-burning hill estimating my chances of meeting a human-aggressive mountain lion, and gauging adrenaline’s ability to help me fight it off. The entire run.
-Waking up half-lucid in the middle of the night scratching my poison oak like I could scrape it off my skin. The back of my leg finally scabbed over two days ago. It always took me a good 30 seconds before I realized what I was doing, and another 5 seconds before I could bring myself to stop. And of course, it was always 30 minutes before my body stopped burning with itch enough to fall back asleep.
-Getting electrocuted in the shower
-Getting electrocuted by the sink so often that I never ran water without shoes on
-Making midnight leftover-bacon runs down to the dining hall and its glorious walk-in fridges on the weekends
-Coming back to Sacramento and remembering that I had a box of thin mints still in my mini-freezer from my family’s fantastic packages

And that was Cedar Glen. It was a fun place, and it was an intro to what we are doing next (pulaskiing the crap out of hill sides for 3 months). I am sure I will miss the food.

This weekend was our “spring break,” meaning that we got both a Monday and a Friday off. Four whole days!
I mentioned a couple entries back that I wanted to try and get my skydiving certification over spring break. Namely, seven ground school course, seven jumps, and the ability to jump solo at any USPA (United States Parachuting Association) certified drop zone. Well, I did go skydiving! HAHA IT WAS GREAT
I went down to a dropzone about 1.3 hrs east of San Fran on Thursday night, taking a greyhound from Sac to Stockton, and then a Cab ride to the Byron Airfield. On the way, I learned that greyhound baggage checking has a max weight of 50 lbs, and I now carry a 60lbs backpack with ease. I also reaffirmed my belief that most people are good people who want to help, and my bag got on the bus.
At the Greyhound in Stockton, I grabbed some McDonalds (which seemed way more expensive than the last time I had it), and then hung out with the security guard at the bus stop. He said as long as I didn’t mind listening to Jesus, I could wait for my cab in his office. There was another a 20-something year old guy already in the small “bus driver’s lounge.” He was waiting for his dad to come pick him up from San Diego, and the security guard was reading to him from the book of John.
I was lucky, in that the cab driver I got was without a doubt the cheapest around. For a 30ish mile drive, he only charged me $2 a mile. We talked about all the times people had tried to rob him and pulled a gun, about skydiving, and when we got to the hangar I was going to be bumming it at, he checked to make sure I knew that no one was going to be there at 10 o’clock at night.
But again, I was lucky. Bay Area Skydiving is a classy enough place that they have pavilions, and I spread out my space-blanket ground tarp, brushed my teeth, and crawled into my bivy-sacked sleeping bag. Fifteen minutes I listened to the wind and tried to pull the corners of my Ameri-issued sleeping bag down farther, when a furry creature stepped on my sleeping bag and headbutted me in the face.
The next day, I found out that it was the skydiving cat, and two days later I figured out why its name tag read “Beer Light.” But, seeing as his collar did read Beer Light, I assumed that he was a runaway the owners (the givers of the name) were not intently searching for. Then I did something I regretted for the next two nights. I scootched over a bit, and made a spot for Beer Light to tunnel in next to me. Thus I sealed my position as the midnight warmth giver, forever woken up by Beer Light trying to poke his head into my sleeping bag.
In the morning I packed up camp, to give Bay Area Skydiving the credit of not appearing to house hobos. The instructor, an elderly brit named Gareth, arrived on a motorcycle, having crashed his car into a hillside about a week ago. Regardless of that, I would say Gareth was overqualified as a skydiving instructor; his job in his youth had apparently been testing out parachutes. The reason you know your parachute has a high chance of opening properly? Because crazy Gareths all over the world jumped out at 12,000’ with a prototype strapped to their back.
Ground school, which I did with another guy named Mark, was mostly going over the parts of the parachute, identifying what a good and bad chute looked like upon deployment, and the body position that gave the most control in freefall (a knees-at-90-degrees, “hands-up” arch). And, of course, the method for cutting away your main chute and deploying your reserve. All the parachutes I used were rectangular ram-air chutes, picture a parasail. They can be steered by pulling on two cords (the brakes), which pull down on one rear corner or another. You do a diving swoop and turn in the desired direction. Along that line, the easiest way to die under canopy (with chute deployed) is to turn too close to the ground. The swoop that swings you out and around just swings you out and slams you into the ground.
I didn’t get to jump at all on the first day, even though we finished the ground school around 1:30. The cloud cover was too low (it’s a federal offense to jump through cloud, you can’t visually tell how close to the ground you are, or avoid airborne obstacles). But Saturday dawned clear and cool, and even though it was something around -7 Fahrenheit at 13,000, I got to make four jumps.
I have always dreamed of freefall, and since parachutes are actually pretty safe if you handle them well, my logical brain figured that jumping out of a plane=no sweat. I overlooked a pretty key detail about the skydive certification process: while you are plummeting to earth at 120mph, you have two instructors hanging onto you, who you must perform a series of skills for well enough to pass onto the next level and jump. Performance anxiety, while the air rushing by is being forced into your lungs, and your body position makes you look like a P.O.W., is a killer.
With five jumps under my belt, I can safely say that I have learned how to relax a bit while diving and enjoy the sensation. But the knots in my stomach do not loosen until I hit terminal velocity. Jumping out of a plane is the most final, irrevocable thing I can think of doing; you are completely committing yourself to trusting the bundle of cloth and string strapped to your back. When jumpers leave, they rocket backwards and down in a rush of air and noise, and the plane shakes a little as the weight rebalances. To jump as a student, you stand outside the plane in the wind and cling, waiting for your instructors to give the OK. You have to give a count with body motions, so that your instructors leave at the same time you do. And then, with two skydivers holding onto each side, you let go, turn into the jetstream, and arch with everything you’ve got.
There are hand signals that your instructors give you while in freefall, to adjust your body position and pass messages along. Possibly the most important is the extension of the pointer finger, which plainly means “PULL.” When I made my first jump, the only reason I could run through the list of practice touches to your pull cord and checking my altimeter every 5 seconds was because I had practiced the motions for hours on the ground. But when I looked to check in with my instructor, and he pointed his finger, I did something of a double take. When he reconfirmed the hand signal by shaking it in my face, I assumed I had done something drastically wrong. In my haze of adrenaline and robotic action I had not been reading the altimeter as closely as necessary, and maybe I had missed the pull height. Kind of like hitting a pedestrian in a driving test, I had completely failed. Thus, I panicked, and fumbled for my ripcord.
All I could think as I floated down was that I had totally failed the easiest level. 3000’ up is a great place to vent, because there really is absolutely nothing you can do about anything for another five minutes or so.
But, as it turned out, we had just been farther from the dropzone than desirable, and my instructors wanted me to pull early so that we wouldn’t have to walk a mile back to the hangar. I passed, with instructions not to panic, and every jump after that was better than the last. As I learned the basics of relaxing in freefall, and was finally let go of on jump #3, I got to enjoy the view, spin myself around. Pretty much everything I had been looking forwards too. And so, on my fifth jump, when I solo exited their smaller plane and tumbled out of control for a couple thousand feet, everything was cool. I have no memory of where the horizon was while I tumbled, but I did figure that if I just arched like I was sposed to, everything would be fine. And it was.
Later on Sunday the clouds came back, and even though I went up for my sixth jump, I came down with the plane. I got a ride back to Sacramento with one of the instructors (an ex-MMA Kyrgyzstani with two daughters), but with luck I will complete my certification process (jumps six and seven) later this year.