300 Reviews

You’ve heard of this. It’s where they put you in a vertical wind tunnel, a giant fan beneath you. You wear a nylon suit with lots of vents, a helmet, goggles, earplugs, your own soiled tennis shoes. When the fan starts it sounds like a hundred lawn mowers and makes your legs feel as if you’re balancing on a surfboard. You can hear the grinding through your helmet and your earplugs, but you can’t hear your instructor. Instead, he teaches you hand signals that mean “chin up,” “straighten your legs,” “bend your legs,” and “relax.” This last one is the one you see most often. He signals it by raising his fist with his thumb and pinky extended, like pantomiming a telephone. “Relax,” he signs over and over again as you dive onto the column of wind and ride it like a flying squirrel.

When you’re done, everyone will ask you if it felt like flying. You will have to tell them yes because you suppose it did. What you will not tell them is how it ruined the idea of flying totally and irreparably. It is nothing like those dreams you had when you were small, the ones where you just worked your mind a certain way and you could float through the air. In reality, inside your helmet, inside your flight suit, you could not be more aware of your own body. You could feel the massive effort it took to keep you in the air, the wind blowing your cheeks into tiny, wet parachutes. In fact, when you step back out onto the Las Vegas strip, teeming with people, it is an exercise in faith to believe that the earth you’re stepping on can even support you at all.

-Aubrey Hirsch

Tags: Aubrey Hirsch, dreams of flying, exercise in faith, flying, flying squirrel, giant fan, Indoor skydiving, Las Vegas