Anything can enter a state of free fall. A stone from a cliff, an apple from a tree, a human from an airplane. It simply requires that you let gravity do all the work.
Free Fall
When I arrived that morning at the tiny airport in Thomaston, Georgia, I saw them coming down, little black crescents in the sky, like slices of darkened citrus fruits, cradled by the air. I could not see where they’d come from, nor where they’d land.
Later, standing on the runway, I watched again as the jumpers left the airplane, barely visible and soaring across the still-cloudless blue, its sound a faint hum trailing long after it. This could have been mistaken for any other kind of plane, until quite suddenly, there they were: tumbling one after another, humans falling toward earth. They were nothing more than tiny white dots at first, pinpricks of light, until they’d fallen far enough for their parachutes to open up into arcs of color: yellow, pink, ochre, black, pale green. They floated down pinned into the air by its own sweet resistance, that silky and covert body we so easily forget exists.
Anything can enter a state of free fall. A stone from a cliff, an apple from a tree, a human from an airplane. It simply requires that you let gravity do all the work.
That was what I wanted: to do nothing but fall freely, to let gravity take over, succumbing to the laws of physics that I forget govern so much of my body, my existence. I wanted to be a tiny white dot in the blue sky and feel Earth pull me back to its surface.
Mass Wasting
The steepest angle that a slope can maintain before falling away is called its “angle of repose.” This angle changes according to the materials that compose the slope. For gravel, which is very rough, it’s 45 degrees, and for sand, which is more slippery, it’s 34. Ashes will sit peacefully up to 40 degrees, and earth itself, anywhere from 30 to 45. At which angle, I wondered, did my life start breaking up like distressed regolith, falling toward someplace else?
Mass wasting occurs when a slope fails, when its angle of repose is exceeded by stress and it starts to crumble away. This can happen very slowly, over the course of years, or it can happen quite suddenly. Any number of stressors can trigger slope failure: the gentle yet persistent burden of gravity and time, also rain, wind, volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes. The elimination of a root system can lead to collapse, as well as increased overloading from structures built into the bedrock.
A few years ago, I left my career, my city, my friends, my family, and New York, the state I’d called home for most of my life. I wanted a fresh start. My life felt like it had ground to a halt; nothing was working anymore. The move was perhaps impulsive, but I was single, unattached, with little but student loans tied to my name. I’d thought a change of surroundings might be exactly what I needed. The South, with all its sunshine and warmth, appealed to me, and the promise of better weather was starred by the fact that I had family in Georgia; I wouldn’t have to start over totally alone.
I didn’t have much money, much of a plan, nor any certainty whether my idea was a good one, but down I went. To make myself feel better about this rather blind descent, I imagined that my life was akin to that of a hillside, or a muddy cliff, perhaps the edge of a mountain that had never wanted a bridge built into it. I told myself I’d had no choice—that I was falling like stressed soil or rock would have. It wasn’t true of course, but helped me to let go, to leave.
What I’d failed to imagine was what happens to all the debris when it gets to the bottom. After I arrived in Atlanta, I spent every morning with my cup of coffee in the backyard of my first apartment, looking out at all of the kudzu as it grew ferociously over the trees and up the TV tower, wondering what the hell I was doing down there. I wondered how I’d chosen this place and arrived at all, how I’d given up teaching to wait tables, how I’d ever assemble a life that made any kind of sense to me.
By the bottom of every coffee, the summer heat would be searing, and my eyes wide with terror. What had I done?
Gravity
From my mid-20s to my early 30s, I performed this experiment: I’d sit in the bathtub, fill it up, and then immediately drain the water. I allowed myself to float for as long as I could and then took note of my weight against the porcelain as the liquid vanished. I would notice as my bones settled, as my skin sank back, as my lungs began to feel the weight of the body they were breathing against—how it required more effort, once the water was gone, to expand them fully. I felt my skull, my sacrum, the backs of shoulders hard and aching upon the solid surface, no longer suspended in warm liquid, no longer able to ignore gravity’s persistent drag. But after a few minutes, the Earth’s pull on my body would feel normal again, breathing became easy, and I’d forget what gravity does, what gravity is.
But by the time I found myself in Atlanta, the bathtub had become a tired experiment. I knew what would happen when I drained the water. I wanted something new, something bigger; I wanted to give myself over entirely to gravity, to feel the full extent of Earth’s hold upon my body. Feeling gravity on the ground is so commonplace we forget how strong it is, how fierce and constant that attraction.
Fear
Everything about skydiving frightened me. As an adult I’ve developed an irrational fear of flying, I very much dislike small planes, I don’t care for heights, and I am terrified of death. But I wanted to look at all of those things and say, So what? I wanted to feel all of that fear and then leap right into it.
I remember that morning with intense clarity—driving the hour from Atlanta down to Thomaston, to jump from a plane. I passed through forests of towering loblolly pines, through pecan orchards filled with light that was sharply angled and golden, dappled and loose in its hold on Earth. I drove alone; no one knew what I was about to do. I hadn’t wanted anyone to worry needlessly, and I wanted no encouragement.
My morning at the airport was spent sitting at a picnic table adjacent to the runway, with Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, watching people fly up and float down, fly up and float down. I’d purposely arrived early so I could watch everyone scheduled before me jump without dying. I chatted with an older couple who had decided, suddenly, they really wanted to try skydiving. I met two teenaged girls planning to jump, and their parents, who stayed on the ground and signed the consent forms for their daughters. Everybody but me seemed filled with eager anticipation. I read the same poem six times without understanding a word before I slammed the book shut. My name appeared on a television screen next to the name Bobby. And then Bobby was strapping me in, pardoning his reach, walking me onto the plane, selecting the seat farthest from the door.
As I sat in that plane, strapped into Bobby, I was still thinking about how I managed to find myself soaring noisily into the clouds over central Georgia. I mean, what the hell was I doing, really, in an airplane I was supposed to jump out of? It surely wouldn’t be as romantic as I’d imagined. And what the hell was I doing down South? Waitressing again, and barely able to pay my bills? I mean, at 33, shouldn’t I have a better handle on my life? Some kind of visible, palpable goal I was headed toward? A recognizable shape I could fit into?
Somehow, though, falling out of the sky seemed like necessary movement toward whatever was next. So, there I was, sitting, waiting until we were high enough, until Georgia became a distant patchwork of green and gold. Until the air was thinner and brighter, and we were well above the clouds. I was so afraid that I felt certain I’d either collapse or explode, or both. I could not imagine a reality in which I would willingly leave that airplane at 14,000 feet, and yet, this was indeed the plan.
General Relativity
Sir Isaac Newton proposed that gravity was the result of the masses of objects and the amount of space between them—the more massive the object, the more pull it exerts, and the more distant an object, the weaker its attraction. Newton’s theory explained gravitational behavior with a few exceptions: across extremely short distances (such as between Mercury and the Sun), and near extremely strong gravitational fields (something very, very dense, a black hole, for example).
Albert Einstein refined Newton’s laws of gravitation and proposed something radically different: that gravity was not a force, but a result of the curvature of spacetime. How are space and time curved? By massive objects. Imagine you have a thick piece of foam and you throw a bowling ball onto it. What does the foam do? It curves around the shape of the ball. According to Einstein’s theory, this is what objects with mass do to the fabric of space. Earth does not revolve around the sun because the sun pulls on us, but because we’re falling into space curved by the sun’s mass. The Moon falls around the Earth, as do man-made satellites and spaceships in orbit. We fall down the curve in the fabric too, with each footstep—each limb lifted and lowered a tiny tumble into warped space, our mass a tether that ties us to our planet. A leap from an airplane, I reasoned, was just a bigger tumble, was stretching that tether as far as I possibly could.
Love
I remember when they called my name and along came Bobby with a Styrofoam cup full of soda and a free hand that led me toward a room where all the gear was kept. The tandem harness was complicated and there were lots of straps, so he did most of the work, while I stood there mutely failing to recall what all these straps and buckles were for. I remember as I stepped into the harness, as he fit it to my body, his hands at the small of my back, or tightening the loops of nylon around my upper thighs, pulling down alongside my shoulders, cinching straps across my chest. Pardon my reach, he would say every time his hands neared my breasts. I remember wondering: Am I really doing this because I want to fall? Or did I merely want to be touched, held, wrenched into another human, glued, in midair, to a stranger I’d chosen to trust? I think I wanted both. To be willing to fall. To actually fall. And to be held, to be deeply connected, to be someone’s priority.
At 7,000 feet, Bobby asked me to climb up onto his lap so he could clip us together. At this altitude, a small sliver of my earthly perversion was still intact, and I was amused at the obviously sexual nature of such a position. I chuckled to myself, imagining regaling this story to friends on the ground. Seconds later, though, as he was still buckling our hips together, it quickly dawned on me why I was sitting on his lap. He finished clasping our shoulders together and yanked down. I felt myself become swallowed by his shape, his breathing full and rhythmic against my back. He tapped with his fingers all four points of attachment, over and over, and named them out loud for me, as if knowing where we were connected would make me feel better.
“Try to get away from me,” he said. So, I did. I leaned forward, and I felt his body follow mine.
“You see? You’re not going anywhere without me. Anywhere you go, I go, too.” God, I thought to myself, those words.
I was thinking, suddenly, strapped to Bobby, about the kind of love I’ve allowed myself to receive. It was the kind of love that always said:
I love you, but.
The kind of love that always said:
Here’s what I have left over. Don’t ask for anything else.
It said:
I’m going wherever I want, and maybe, if I feel like it, I’ll let you come with me.
And then I thought about the kind of love I have always given. It’s the kind of love that says:
Here’s everything I have. But if it’s not enough, I will figure out how to give you more.
So, I supposed it was no surprise I was in that airplane, this stranger’s thighs snug around my hips, his chest wrapped around my back, waiting to fall.
Before me floated a magnificent haze of fear, so dense it was unimaginable that I’d ever get out of that plane, into the air.
Gravitas
I have always wanted to feel the pain of existence. I mean, it is a slightly tragic thing to be born, to be here, to be alive. Think about it: We fall in love with the world and then we are forced to leave.
So, you could also say I’ve erred on the side of melodramatic. But I do want to live with the knowledge that this is all temporal, fleeting, not mine to keep. Such knowledge forces attention, inspection, admiration. In some branches of Tibetan Buddhism, this awareness of transience is called the “genuine heart of sadness.” It is the mark of a completely exposed heart, a required precondition to fearlessness—the kind of fearlessness where first you must experience fear, intimately. And I suppose this was my goal. To make a small move toward being fearless by basking in fear’s presence, by diving straight into it.
This felt like a noble and alluring idea on the ground, made me tremble with delightful anticipation. But I can assure you it did not feel that way in a tiny airplane, buckled into Bobby, zooming up and over the clouds. Before me floated a magnificent haze of fear, so dense it was unimaginable that I’d ever get out of that plane, into the air. Yet there was no time for stalling, and I had not forked over money I didn’t have just for a 15-minute plane ride. I would have to go through with it. That pain I claim to want to know? Here was a small slice for the taking.
Even now, when I am feeling afraid, I pause. I close my eyes and recall that doorway: the blinding blue, the rush of cold air, the unbelievable noise of the wind and the engines, the memory of nothing below me.
Leap
There are mathematical laws that dictate how things fall. My behavior upon leaving the plane could be predicted, calculated almost exactly—but those last moments before I left the plane? Incalculable. I could not even contemplate them as they were happening.
I started to seriously consider the possibility that, no, I could not actually leap from a plane. But I wouldn’t let myself complete the thought; I was afraid I’d follow it if I did. The numinous clouds below us held steady to their form and place—their white shocking from above, their stillness disturbing as the plane bobbed and rolled each time somebody else leapt out of it. I looked around me at everyone, grins smeared across their faces, bodies leaning forward, anticipatory, each teeming with excitement. I was not excited. I was not grinning. I thought that perhaps confessing my fears to my tandem instructor might help.
“Bobby,” I started, “Are there ever people who are more afraid than excited to do this?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Are there many of them, or are most people just excited? Do the people who are more afraid still do it?” I could hear how small I sounded; like a shy ten-year-old, nervous about asking a potentially embarrassing question.
He paused, lowering his voice so that I could still hear him over the engines, but others could not.
“Yes, a lot of people are afraid. And you know you do not have to do this. But you might regret it if you don’t.”
I nodded in agreement and declared loudly, “Well, I’m not excited at all. I’m terrified!”
“Terrified!” Bobby shouted back. We continued shouting back and forth, each of my declarations an escalation of the previous, until the plane was nearly empty, all the other jumpers falling through the air somewhere behind and below us.
“MOTHER-FUCKING TERRIFIED!” he sang, repeating my final words as he scooted us forward along the bench toward the door. He hoisted us up to crouch in line behind the tandem pair in front of us. We would be the last to leave the plane.
My toes were on that ledge, very suddenly, beyond which there was nothing but open air, the Earth’s surface far below us. The seconds that passed as we perched there felt both like an eternity and like nothing. I remember wanting to scream, to make any kind of noise or motion, but I’d been rendered both speechless and frozen. He counted one, two, and we were out.
Equations for a Falling Body
It takes about 12 seconds to achieve terminal velocity, the fastest speed at which we could fall before the friction of the air restrained us from accelerating any further. In 12 seconds, Bobby and I fell approximately 1,500 feet. If our terminal velocity was somewhere around 120 miles per hour, that also means we fell 176 feet per second. Say the words out loud: One Mississippi. In that time, we fell 176 feet. Our weight did nothing but yank us down. We were like a heavy stone through water: sinking into nothing, dropping without pause toward the bottom.
We dove as we left the plane, heads down, piercing the air as narrowly as we could. There were flashes of sunlight as we pitched forward, as we rolled onto our bellies. I remember near total disorientation for a few seconds. I remember I could not breathe for a few seconds. I remember the sensation of everything in my body being caught in my throat. But panic bled into relief as we began to stabilize, falling steadily belly down. Bobby had instructed me on the ground that the best way to fall required keeping one’s body open and relaxed, but I’d of course forgotten at 14,000 feet. He uncurled my tight fists and spread my arms wide, looped his feet around my ankles and pulled my legs long. Down we went, our soft bellies first, the air howling as we fell through it.
I was never sure where to look: out at the clouds or down at the Earth? If I ever skydive again, I’ll watch the clouds, but this time, I looked down at the Earth as we plummeted toward its surface. I watched as the landscape revealed itself, as it unfolded into farmland, forests, backyards, pools, open fields, and narrow, winding roads.
Math is used to calculate how things fall, to describe or predict downward acceleration due to gravity. These equations calculate the velocity at which a body falls over a particular distance on a planet with mass, and they must consider whether a body has just started falling, or has been falling for some time.
But what is the speed of a life? What is the distance one travels and how much time does one get? Where does it come from? And where does it go?
Air
It still amazes me that air can act as a restraining force, that it can stop me or anyone or anything at all. I wanted to know air like that. I wanted to feel it as a form and not an invisible substance I take for granted. I wanted to feel it open and close around me. More than anything, I wanted to feel the air sustain me, to hold me in its body—the parachute a medium between forces that don’t ordinarily coalesce. A human floating, a human in midair, legs hanging, looking down at the sunny tops of clouds.
Up that high, it was so cold—it wasn’t the warm and heavy Southern air I was accustomed to—but the air is what I remember most distinctly. Air is invisible, and yet it roared and rippled as we fell through it, the friction between our bodies and the air loud and palpable. I could feel its skin on every part of me: flattening beneath my belly as I collided with it, and rushing like tight, curling sea waves to close the space behind us.
Parachutes
Before I jumped, I researched parachutes and skydiving extensively. I watched dozens of YouTube videos, scrutinized safety statistics, Googled various instructors, and plumbed the depths of parachuting history. There was one human I was completely smitten by, whose photo I looked at every morning in the month approaching my own leap: Georgia Ann “Tiny” Broadwick, the first woman to ever parachute from an airplane.
In 1914, while demonstrating parachutes for the U.S. Army, her static line became entangled with part of the aircraft as she exited the plane. During her next jump, to avoid having the same problem, she cut the static line completely, opting to deploy her parachute manually. This made her the first human to jump free fall. By the time she retired from parachuting in 1922, she had made somewhere around 1,100 jumps. In my favorite photograph of Broadwick, she hangs below the aircraft’s wing atop something that resembles a playground swing. The image caption reads: Ready to drop.
Parachutes are released from their backpack tightly compressed, no larger than a folded beach towel, their cords neatly arranged so that they can open without tangling. They bloom rapidly, catching whatever air they can in order to expand. The event feels rather violent, to be yanked by nylon and air from 120 miles per hour to a mere 17. The event feels instantaneous, like you travel no distance while the parachute is busy unfolding itself into a wide and fluttering arc above you. But most parachutes actually require anywhere from 600 to 1,200 feet to fully deploy, to hold their jumpers safely in the air.
Bobby and I had fallen around 9,000 feet in just under a minute and had required perhaps 900 feet for the parachute to open, giving us about 4,000 feet to float, to fall gently. Those final seven minutes were my favorite—we were stitched into the air itself, as if the parachute were a needle with a long thread, the sky pulled down and twisted into a cord. There was a golden haze suspended just below the clouds; sun beams caught and then scattered all of that thick Southern air. Beams of light: impossible without atmosphere. Atmosphere: impossible without gravity.
We were above the clouds and then level with the clouds and then below them.
From the Earth, our bodies made no noise tumbling through the air. For the spectators below, we were silent as we dropped, as we sank, and as we expanded, as we opened up into color: fluorescent yellow with a red stripe. Parachute number 13.
Quietly, we fell out of the blue.
Terminal Velocity
When I was little, I would watch ants fall off tables or stairs and marvel at the fact that they were okay—that they could fall quite a distance and then just amble on, unfazed. But that was before I understood that for some small animals, gravity is not an issue. No matter how far they fall, they will never reach a terminal velocity that is fatal to them. As humans, though, gravity poses a sincere threat.
I have spent much of life worrying that things will get so bad I won’t be able to cope: perhaps the death of a loved one, or a terrible accident, a terminal disease. But now I think about terminal velocity, how we can fall and fall and fall and accumulate more speed the farther we fall, until. Until the friction of the air meets our velocity, our gravity, face to face, until we are held snugly within a balance between opposing forces. We keep falling, but we do not accelerate further. We cannot. Is it the same in life? Is there an invisible restraining force that holds us as we fall?
I think about Tiny Broadwick hanging from a plane, ready to drop. Are we, every day, ready to drop? Ready to let go? Do we trust life, the Earth, the air, the people we love, ourselves: to hold us?
Eventually
Bobby and I made a few slow, wide circles as the runway came into focus, people and their crumpled parachutes visible on the ground. I looked out and watched as the land rose to meet us, our view narrowing and taking on a third dimension. I did not want that minute to end. I wanted to float up there forever. But Bobby instructed me to pull my legs up in front of me as high as I could, and then he looped his ankles under mine, pulling them up even higher. It became obvious, as we approached the ground, that our floating was more akin to falling at a somewhat controllable speed. As we skidded down the lawn on our bottoms, a wind gust blew through the runway and sent us spiraling toward our left, erupting into laughter as the air that had just carried us so gently now dragged us backwards across the grass.
Sitting between his legs, I waited until he unhooked our harnesses. Then we stood, and I gave him a quick hug, said thank you. He bundled up the mess of parachute and strings and walked me back to the airplane hangar, handing the heap of fluorescent nylon to a technician to be untangled and re-folded for another jump.
All day I felt joyous. All day, I replayed the terror, the blue, the roaring air, the yank of the parachute opening, the quiet breeze as we floated down. I walked to a wooded park near my apartment and lay on a bench, stared at the sky between the trees and thought about how I’d been up there, that I’d fallen through all that air. I felt joyous, but I did not feel changed. Had I really expected it to be that easy? I’d hoped to leap into epiphany, but I landed the same person I was when I left the plane. Only one difference was noticeable, and it was small: my circumstances, however precarious, felt less like an accident, and more like a choice.
Bobby had done most of the work, but I had made my choices. I chose to drive to that tiny airport in Thomaston in the first place. I chose to board the plane, to let Bobby take over when my faculties vanished. And I chose to leave my life up North. I chose to start over in Atlanta without knowing if it was indeed a good idea, if things would work out for me in this sunny new city. I wasn’t merely a stray piece of dirt or gravel, helplessly tumbling down when everything else around me started to fall apart. I chose to go, just as I choose now, every day, to rebuild slowly, approaching piece-by-piece that angle at which I can still hold everything upright and intact despite gravity’s insistence.
And I have a tool I did not have before; one act of total surrender, imprinted on my memory. I call upon it whenever I feel frightened, the blue sky above becoming a constant reminder that I can relax and let go, that fear need not be a stopper. Perhaps what I learned from falling was that it is not the fall itself that matters terribly, but what you make of the landing—how quickly you stand, orient, navigate places you do not recognize. It matters not how afraid you are, but what you do with that fear, or despite it. What matters is how your body moves toward that edge, how much you resist, hold on, or delay the inevitable. Because I want to be like Tiny Broadwick: ready to drop. Every day, an act of falling.
Katie Duane is a writer, mixed-media artist, and educator. She currently resides in Buffalo, New York and teaches visual arts in the Buffalo Public Schools. Her writing has appeared in Permafrost Magazine, Sheepshead Review, and elsewhere.
Header photo by Eleonora Grunge, courtesy Shutterstock.
