Learning to fall upwards, by Leah Scarth

An original contemporary memoir extract.

There is a moment, just before you run off a mountain, when every cell in your body files a formal complaint. Mine arrived at 10.42 on a Thursday morning in June, on a grassy launch slope above the valley of Saint-Aubin, with my wing laid out behind me like an enormous yellow tablecloth and a radio strapped to my chest.

I had done everything right. I had spent nine days on the nursery slope, running, stumbling, being dragged face-first through cowpats and learning to inflate the wing over my head until it rose obediently, like a kite on a lead. I had made six flights with my instructor’s voice in my ear. I had read the manual twice. None of that seemed to matter now. Below me, the valley dropped away for eight hundred metres. The landing field was a green postage stamp beside the river. The cows in it were the size of rice.

‘When you’re ready,’ said Marc over the radio, with the calm of a man who has watched a thousand beginners stand exactly where I was standing. I was not ready. I was never going to be ready. I leaned forward, pulled the risers, and ran.

The wing filled with a sound like a sail catching wind. For three strides I was a woman running down a hill with a large sheet attached to her. On the fourth stride, my feet pedalled at nothing. The ground simply let go.

I would like to say I whooped. In fact I made a noise that I have only ever heard before from my sister’s cat when it is put in the bath. My hands were locked so tightly on the brakes that my knuckles burned. My heart was not beating so much as hammering to be let out. I was sure, with perfect certainty, that the wing was about to fold and I would drop like a stone into the pine trees.

It did not fold. It held, steady and patient, and slowly, very slowly, I remembered to breathe.

And then I looked around.

I had seen the valley a hundred times from the road. I had never seen it like this. The river was a silver thread stitched through the fields. A hawk turned below me, below me, its back speckled brown, riding the same warm air that was lifting me. The only sounds were the wind hissing softly through the lines and, far away, a church bell marking the quarter-hour. I was not in the sky; I was part of it. I laughed out loud, and the sound vanished into all that space.

Marc’s voice crackled: ‘Good. Now a gentle turn left.’ I turned. The world tilted and swung beneath me, and I found I was grinning so widely that my cheeks ached. For eleven minutes I drifted down through the morning, terrified and delighted in equal measure, until the green postage stamp grew into a field, the rice grew into cows, and I came in over the hedge.

I landed on my bottom, of course. Everyone does. I lay on the grass with the wing collapsing softly around me and stared up at the slope I had just left, a tiny brown scar on the mountainside. My legs were shaking. I wanted, more than anything I have ever wanted, to go back up and do it again.

The writer’s first solo paraglider flight is described as both terrifying and exhilarating. How does the writer try to show this?

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