Break on Through (or Hope You Don't) 2
Continued from last week.
I was suspended, by the wind rushing up from the floor below, about four feet from the netting, below. And, since I had entered a state in which I was neither on the ground nor shortly returning to it, I feel compelled to note that I was also about twenty feet from the ceiling. This is a rough guesstimate, and there is a reason why my wife won't let me do home repairs (or hang pictures) around the house without a laser guided tape measure and some double checking by at least two more qualified people. Regardless, I was flying.
My first thought was something along the lines of "Tee hee! I'm flying!" I didn't exactly compose that thought, as you can probably tell. I don't think I'd ever like posterity to remember me as having a "tee hee" thought. But there you have it. It's not like it lasted long, because that thought was quickly replaced by the one that we, as a race, have keenly developed over time. And that thought was to wave to the people watching me being buffeted by winds of (again, research fails me here) three thousand miles an hour.
The non-flying portion of my family was positioned on the other side of the glass wall from which I entered the chamber, one with a camera, the other crying the way eighteen month old sons do when they see that their father has done something that is going to likely limit their playtime over the next eighteen years or so, seeing as he's about to be sucked up into the giant exhaust fan overhead and shot clear down to Florida.
In an effort to console him as best as I could on the other side of a wall of plexiglas, four feet or so off the ground, I looked down to him and tried to smile. Now, I didn't think of the ramifications of such a move, which where: me smiling while having air thrust up past my face at an incredible rate likely made my face look the farthest it has ever come from comforting for the poor boy. The little splash of drool I'm nearly certain escaped my gaping mouth and traveled somewhere up my face didn't help matters. Also, by attempting to look down at D----, I committed a cardinal sin in personal air travel, which is, don't look down. Not even slightly.
This isn't a rule to help you fight vertigo or a fear of falling. After all, if you look straight down, you see a net, and a fan, sort of. More than anything, if you look straight down, your eyes immediately dry out, and you can't see much of anything, you just blink a lot, trying to get some moisture back into your battered eyes. No, the real danger comes from your aerodynamics, as they relate to flight, mean that you are going to go, pretty fast, in the direction your head is pointing. And the danger of doing this, in a wind tunnel, is that you are going to go quickly into that glass wall directly in front of you, no matter which direction you're facing.
So I flew straight into the glass wall. Now, this isn't terrible, as you generally have to fly with your arms out, so they hit the wall first. The downside is that your natural reaction (though I don't know how this is a genetic reflex, as I can't imagine too many of our ancestors getting themselves in this sort of situation) is to thrust your arms against the oncoming obstacle. If you do this, which is explained to you in the initial fifteen minute class, you will very quickly go from flying to becoming a human pinball on a very small and crowded pinball field. Until you hit the ground. Luckily, as I was looking low down enough to send messages of comfort to an eighteen month old, I hit the wall quite low down, so my pinballing resulted in me hitting the net flooring very soon after hitting the wall for the first time.
The takeaway from that lesson was that basically you are not to have fun in the wind tunnel. You are to remain as still as possible, once you find yourself held aloft by the wind, and you are to restrict all movement and sudden changes in any surface on your body that the wind might catch hold of to the absolute necessities. Thankfully, two minutes isn't a long time to hold your breath.
Just kidding. While there's an element of that, you can't help grinning like an idiot, and slurping at what you imagine is all the saliva in your mouth slipping out over your lips and into the jetstream rushing past your face. And you do try to swim. And when the instructor gives you a signal, or you think he does, because you see a flash of... something, just below your field of vision, you look down, which causes you to hit the wall, and ping pong around for a little bit, when all the instructor was trying to tell you was to not look down. And then, two minutes later, you get pulled in the direction of the door on the opposite side you came in on, and you land like Superman in the movies if he'd been holding desperately on to a foam-padded doorway like it was his first time taking steps.
The second time through, after watching your fellow jumpers, and smiling like a fool on the bench inside the chamber, you feel a little more at ease, you slip into the tunnel like you'd slip into a warm bath (granted, one you'd have installed at a very funny angle).
And for those next two minutes you mostly fly overhead everyone else in the room, the bulk of them disappearing from view when the flying aide pushes you up out of the glass walled portion of the tunnel and into the segment above: metal and wind combining to make you feel as if you were escaping via the ventilation shafts, and it'd be so easy to just creep out over top of the tunnel and soar off over Nashua, heading... south, or maybe east, heading for the coast, flying above it all, and man is it going to be such a bummer to get back into a car after this, even one that can time travel, rooted to the ground like a monument to gravity and putting back on your own shoes, ones which have never been off the ground for two minutes at a stretch...
And not having to risk certain death by doing this all without a net below you to catch you, should you take one last furtive glance down at wife and child to give them a grin, and you come less than gracefully barreling through that door separating you from the non-flyers. From the bench outside the tunnel you give those two, the ones who keep you grounded, a goofy grin, like "Man, am I ever going to have a lot to tell you about this place I've been."
disclaimer:
For those of you who also would like to try flying in a claustrophobia-inducing little glass tube and have spit drip up your face, you should get on up to SkyVenture, in Nashua, NH. It is totally, 100%, 1,000% worth it. This is not a paid advertisement.
These are just the words of a man who has flown. (And also, lazily, the words of a man who wrote them last week and simply copied and pasted them into this week's issue.)
Also, you'll note, if you are the sort to note these kinds of things, that Further Fenway Fiction now has a publish date, and is appearing on both Amazon.com and Sane Magazine's very own bookshop (hosted on Amazon). the 25th of July, 2007. Mark it on your calendars, get a forehead tattoo, buy a stamp with the date imprinted on it -- just remember that date. Because your beloved Sane Magazine founder has another story in it, this time with a guy named Bellyitcher in it. Which, in and of itself, should be enough to get you to buy it.
For those of you who are not fans of the Red Sox, well, I suppose we'll just have to start working on another, non-Red Sox book. Watch this space.
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