Well, first off I must say that it was very disconcerting to be driving Jeff home late one night and realizing that I was going to be picking him up to go skydiving in an hour.  After less than an hour's sleep and getting lost in Airdrie we got to Beiseker, pulled into the luxuriant parking lot and proceeded to break my deck going over the potholes.  We got out of the semi-warm car into a barage of freezing rain/snow and heavy winds.  Being the top-notch establishment that it is there were no signs at the skydive ranch directing us as to where we needed to go, so we ran through the rain from building to building, which were either locked or were dark empty hangars, neither of these being terribly conducive to learning to skydive. 

 

After a good ten minutes freezing our asses off outside we found the office and got registered, paid up, and confused by the waiver.  I'm reasonbly certain that I legally certified that I was pregnant while signing those papers.  Also, I was very mislead by the part about if you had chronic shoulder dislocations that you should have had surgery on it.  They didn't say whether that surgery had to be succesful or not.  Anyway, we spent the morning sitting through long talks and videos on not dying and how to best not die.  

 

The real highlight of the classroom portion of the day was lunch, which itself was served on the patio (it was still snowing and around 0°C at this point), not very good, and over-priced.  But at least in that time I met my hero, well one of them.  This guy was from the U of A in Edmonton and he was enjoying some tasty fries, and by enjoying I mean he would take a fry, take a packet of ketchup, pour the entire packet on the fry then eat it.  It was a thing of beauty, you really had to be there.  When he was finished his meal he had a plate piled high with empty ketchup packets and a satisfied grin on his face.  "You know, if you heat it up, ketchup makes a dandy meal." mused my new found mentor.  Needless to say, I shook his hand and bowed my head in respect.

 

After lunch we learned more about no dying, then proceeded to the hangars.  Jeff and I were familiar with this area as we had already wandered into it a few times at this point.  There we got to stand in a big circle and go through the steps involved in falling out of a plane.  The instructor really stressed looking into the camera and saying something witty like, "Hi Mom!" or, "The baby's yours Sid."  I guess if you're saying something clever you're more likely to buy the video of you saying that clever thing, then proving your cleverness by letting go of a plane 3000 feet above the prairie.  After these gruelling exercises we moved into the next hangar where they had a mock-up of a real plane.  we got to practice thing like sitting in the plane and climbing into the plane.  Then we reviewed our exercises from 10 minutes ago by practicing climbing out on to the wing strut and smiling into the camera. 

 

After these exercises our training was pretty much done, other than watching a cheesy video from their lawyer explaining that we gave away our right to sue, look at hard-core pornography (I saw a single tear roll down Jeff's cheek at this), and question the math used in explaining how unlikely it would be for both your parachutes (you carry a main chute and a reserve chute, just in case) not too open, especially if you were a pregnant male unsure as to whether or not you had a shoulder problem.  It was time to sit and wait for the weather to clear, and clear it did not too long after.  Of course it was still freezing, but at least the rain and snow had stopped. 

 

As the weather continued to clear we headed outside for our final test, getting strung up in a harness and going through the steps whopping 4 steps that we had spent the day learning.  These are: looking at the camera, tilting your head back and looking for a dot on the wing above you, arching your body with your arms and legs back, then making sure your parachute was open.  I'm really not sure how it took all day to learn this, especially since the first step is totally irrelevant to the situation at hand, the second step really doesn't matter.  Arching is however a good idea, to make sure that you're in a good position when the parachute opens.  And checking the parachute?  Well if you can make it all the way to the ground before you notice that you don't have a parachute above, and your reserve chute doesn't open, I'm pretty sure you that you had you survived, you would have died the next week in a tragic nose-hair trimming mishap.  The final simulation was basically the same as every other exercise we'd done so far, except now my nuts were being crushed and the instructor was yelling in my face.  I sure hoped that the real skydiving wouldn't be like this.

 

So now we were done, Jeff and I were in the first plane load of 6 jumpers and we got our jumpsuits helmets and parachutes on as we watched a group of expert jumpers go up and test the conditions for us.  I must say it was nice to see that these people would literally hurl themselves from a plane just for us.  After the plane landed and the testers gave the ok we loaded into the plane.  This is not the most enjoyable of situations.  The plane is a smaller model, typically used by those who feel threatened by the thought of going to flight school and interacting with society, so they stick to radio controlled models.  Six people and the instructor pile in in order of weight (heaviest jump first) and kneel on the floor in two rows packed in very, very tightly.  The ride is noisy, cramped and cold, by the time it's your turn your just happy to be getting out of the plane, regardless of how high you might be.  Jeff, naturally being the heaviest, was the first to jump, he seemed to have no problem climbing out and letting go, in fact he almost made it look easy.

 

Now it was my turn.  I crawled towards the door while our notably surly british instructor yelled things at me, not that I could hear him, I think he just liked yelling.  I handed him my tether, which connected my parachute to the plane so I wouldn't have to pull the ripcords myself.  As he clipped me in I went over everything I had to do in my head.  This didn't take long at all because the only thing I had to remember was, "Don't die."  The Brit yelled some more and began gesturing angrily out the door, I took this to mean it was time to go.  Despite what is often shown on TV and in movies, when you're a beginner skydiver (and really, why would anyone willingly progress past that stage?) you don't just jump out the door and hope for the best.  You have to climb out of the plane so that you end up dangling from the strut under the plane's wing.  I suppose that this is to speed things up.  If you just had to jump from the door a lot of people would likely spend all day sitting at the edge trying to muster the courage to jump.  Forcing people on to the strut does two things: first, once you're out there the instructor pretty much won't let you back in, no matter how nicely you might ask.  Secondly, when you're hanging from the wing of a plane with winds over 100 km/h in your face and the temperature right around the zero mark, you're not thinking about how high you are, or what the jump master's yelling, you're thinking about how lovely it would be just to let go and make it all stop.  And let go I did, after, of course, looking into the camera and shouting something (I don't quite remember what, but I think it was along the lines of, "I'm not buying your damn video and photo package no matter how attractive that frame was!"), then looking at the dot on the wing above me.  This was where things went not quite so well as one would hope.

 

I let go of the wing and immediately was hit with a wave of blinding pain.  I quickly realized that while I may or may not be pregnant, I did indeed have a shoulder condition.  As soon as I let go the winds pushed my arms and legs back behind me, into the arch position that I'm told is to important, and as my arms went back I dislocated my right shoulder and that hurt.  Not long after realizing that I had dislocated my shoulder it occured to me that I was about 2500 feet above the ground and that I should probably make sure that I had a parachute above me before I was at zero feet.  Looking up I gasped a sigh of relief as I saw a perfectly inflated parachute above me.  Then I gasped a grunt of pain as I remembered my shoulder.  I tried wriggling around a bit to get it back in but, alas, to no avail.  I decided that I should worry about that later, right now i should probably concentrate on flying the parachute, particularly the not dying aspect of flying it.  I reached up (with great difficulty) and grabbed one steering toggle with each hand.  The toggles are attached to some of the lines on the parachute, and as you pull them they pull down the rear of the parachute one side or the other.  This creates more drag, and if there's more drag on one side the parachute will turn towards that side, this is how you turn.  If you pull on both the toggles at once you will slow down horizontally, but you will lose altitude faster because the parachute is in a less efficient shape.  For most people they would want to keep the toggles at their highest position in order to maximise their flight time.  I kept my toggles about halfway down for two reasons, at this point I really wasn't to concerned with maximising my flight, in fact, I really wanted to get down faster, and halfway down was about as high as I could raise my right hand. 

 

After getting settled in I decided to see if I could get my shoulder back into it's socket.  Before my surgery I could do this by sort of jiggling and twisting my arm inwards, but as it turns out, all my surgery and subsequent six months of recovering, going to physiotherapy, and gaining weight accomplished was to make it impossible for me to get my shoulder back in on my own.  Thanks Dr. Hollinshead.  After giving up on getting my shoulder back in in the air I just accepted that I would have to ignore the pain for the next four or five minutes and concentrate on what I'd spent the whole day learning how to do, not dying.  I put the toggles back into my hands and started listening to the radio strapped to my chest.  Everyone is on the same frequency and the spotter on the ground calls you according to your position in the plane.  Jeff, being first out was 'Jumper one', I was 'Jumper two', etc..  I guess everyone being on the same channel makes it convenient for the spotter, but it does make it a little more dangerous.  Since everyone in the air can hear the intructions going to everyon else, the spotter will never tell you if you have a defective parachute and need to cut away and pull your reserve chute.  This is because if the spotter started screaming, "Jumper 3! Jumper 3! You need to pull your reserve!"  and Jumper 1 wasn't quite paying attention and thought that the instructions were for him, he might cut away his perfectly good parachute 50 feet above the ground and find out that he doesn't have time to get the reserve chute out. 

 

I heard someone saying something about jumper 2, but it was really hard to concentrate on what he was saying, I think he was telling me to do some turns or maybe a 360, but I really didn't care, I just kept on doing my thing and figured if he had a problem with it we could talk it over like gentlemen on the ground, after I'd seen a doctor.  After that I just worked on no throwing up from the pain and landing in the right field.  Occasionaly I would manage to hear something on the radio like, "Jumper 2, turn left."  but for the most part I just sort of circled down until I got close to the ground.  By the time that I was getting near to the ground I had probably been in the air for about four minutes, and all that time I had not only had a dislocated shoulder, but had had to hold it up above me to hold on to the steering toggle.  From this I found out that when you're shoulder is not in its socket and all the muscles around it are being stretched out in ways that they really ought not to be stretched, it causes intense pain to try to use those muscles to hold your arm over your head.  As I neared the ground the pain started getting to me more and more and I went from feeling very, very nauseous to struggling just to maintain conciousness.  As I was coming in to land I felt incredibly relieved that this ordeal was almost over, but at the same time my vision was sort fading in and out and I could hardly concentrate on what I was doing.  As the ground neared I did the 'flair' (pull both steering toggles as hard as possible to bring the parachute to a stop and deposit me neatly on the ground) as best as I could, but for some reason the strength in my right arm was somewhat lacking.  As a result of this, and my overall state, I touched down and just crumpled to the ground.  I lay there for a minute or so, just catching my breath, being filled with bliss because it was over.  As I stood up my shoulder decided that it had been out long enough and slipped sickeningly back into its proper place.  The feeling of a part of your body sliding around in ways that it wasn's meant to is somewhat hard to describe, but basically you can feel that things are moving in ways they shouldn't and it just doesn't feel right.

 

After my shoulder was back in most of my pain subsided and I gathered up my parachute and trudged back to the hangar.  There I dropped everything, was helped out of my jumpsuit and went to watch the videos. 

 

We watched Jeff first, his arch was somewhat lacking, mostly in the legs I believe.  Next up was my video.  I saw myself looking at the camera, saying something that was carried off by the wind, then it showed a rear view from the plane as I let go. 

"Great arch."  The video guy was saying.

"Thanks." I replied that's really what I was thinking about up there, whether I was arching properly.  About a second after I let go you can see the look in my face as I fell my shoulder dislocating.  It's somewhat amusing.  After watching the videos (I don't even know why we did) we went back out to the reception, argued with the lady there over whether or not we got the extra altitude we paid for (luckily for me we didn't) and after getting our $20 back we drove back home.

 

I'd have to say, after such an awesome experience, and especially with the top notch facility and the friendly, curteous staff, I'd recomend skydiving to everyone.  And if you can't afford it, just stick a fork in the toaster, you'll get pretty much the same effect.