Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope

Jump

211 KIM EDWARDS The first time I was ever in an airplane, I jumped out. I was nineteen, skydiving with friends on a lark, on a dare, with a sense of immortality that must be the province of youth. The moment I remember most is standing in the open doorway of the plane at , feet. My friend had jumped seconds before, becoming a speck in the distance with remarkable speed, and I had watched his parachute blossom in the air. There was another jumper behind me, and the jumpmaster signaling me to go. So I did. I stepped out into the sky. And fell. Or briefly flew—in those few seconds before the static line pulled my parachute safely open, there was an exhilarating sense of freedom, and strangely, no fear. I write about this with a certain incredulity, looking back. I never jumped out of a plane again, and my sense of immortality has long since disappeared. I’m a mother now, and there’s no way I want my lovely children, each unique in the world and full of promise, jumping out of airplanes. It’s hard enough to let them cross the street. So where did it come from, this desire of mine as a young woman, to take such a risk? And what has it meant? In the days when I talked of sky-diving with my friends, I also lived at home, and I worked  hours a week in a grocery store to put myself through community college, where I was majoring in business. I dreamed of becoming a writer, but I had no idea how a person did that. It was such an unlikely dream, and I was probably the only person to take it seriously. Yet I never questioned this, myself. However unlikely or impractical, I understood writing to be my vocation, a calling in the true sense, something that was choosing me as much as I was choosing it. Perhaps my impulse to jump out of that plane was really a willingness to break free of the expected, a chance to announce different, and less predictable, possibilities for my life. Jump






















CH046.qxd 7/15/09 8:12 AM Page 211 212 KIM EDWARDS The first real story I ever wrote, for a college class I took with Fred Busch at Colgate University, (once I’d followed my heart to major in English, and transferred ) was a -page opus about sky-diving. It was short on character and long, very long indeed, on technical details and parachutes. Still, the story caught Fred’s eye, and when I went to his office to confess my unlikely dream, I suddenly had another person who took me seriously. Over the next several years, as I took more risks of various kinds, going to Iowa, moving to Malaysia and Japan, flying into Cambodia to spend a year when the Mekong was flooding and the country was still closed to Americans because, as one official put it, “of the weight of history,” I revised that story again and again. Eventually, it was published in The Threepenny Review and won a Pushcart Prize. It appears in my collection The Secrets of a Fire King as “The Way It Felt to be Falling.” I still think of this as the story on which I learned to write. I’m thinking now, as I write this, how the various risks I’ve taken in my life could be seen collectively as a metaphor for the creative life. Each story, each book, is its own new landscape, a place full of unknown delights and dangers, a journey one begins without any idea of how the narrative will unfold—except that it will be impossible, on this path, to hide from the truest voices of the self. CH046.qxd 7/15/09 8:12 AM Page 212 ...