Flying Without Wings

Our visit to The Hurricane Factory

Last year for Thea’s birthday I gifted her an indoor skydiving experience - one of those where you go inside a massive chamber of wind and float/thrash around while a man holds onto your legs. The voucher was only valid for a year and somehow we had a scheduling conflict for eleven months, so the end of May involved frantically trying to find a time to go indoor skydiving in the same way you might try and squeeze a dentist appointment into a busy week.

So it was that one sunny Friday evening last month, we arrived at the corporate wasteland that is The Hurricane Factory - the deeply beautiful and evocative name of Germany’s largest wind tunnel, where we would be doing our ‘flight’. I should also now note the logistics of the experience: for two ‘flyers’ as we were thereafter referred to, the price was €100; drinks excluded, no photos or videos, with an hour of ‘flight training’ before. This was all in preparation of being in the wind tunnel for a total of 60 seconds. The Art of the Deal……

Upon entry to the building, the first thing your eye is drawn to, naturally, is the giant cylindrical wind chamber with people floating around in it. The actual space was weirdly small - think student union bar or TGI Fridays rather than an aircraft hangar, or dare I say, a factory. There was a set of wooden stairs facing the wind chamber where, during our session, the mother of one of our fellow flyers devotedly sat watching the whole thing, thus featuring in the background of every photo of the session.

If you cast your gaze a little further you’d see the ‘pre-flight’ area, where people awaited entry to the wind chamber. A man was sitting in a very still, meditative position, with his eyes closed and his hands on his thighs. Fair enough, I thought, he’s really getting himself in the zone. A couple of minutes later through the window, we saw an air ambulance helicopter descending upon the building, after which five paramedics rushed in and began checking his vital signs. The man at the desk explained casually that he’d smashed his head against the glass chamber and could no longer talk. He was promptly placed in a neck brace and taken away on a stretcher.

Getting the vibes back up after we’d all watched the man being airlifted away was a difficult task, but the training instructor gave it a good go. He went through each safety point for the group, then translated it for me and Thea afterwards. First came a long and elaborate point in German, complete with hand gestures, jokes, and follow-up questions from the other flyers, then he’d turn to us and say something like “So just try and be shaped like a banana”. We couldn’t help but feel we might be missing vital information.

As we started to suit up, the atmosphere of the group turned a little quiet— fizzing with jittery excitement and nerves. Other flyers included a giggly older woman and her tall, adult children, a tattooed young guy whose dad was filming him doing absolutely everything including sitting through the training, and a twelve year old boy who was the only one who’d ‘flown’ before, therefore becoming a sort of messiah/prodigy in the eyes of the group.

Thea and I clutched each other as we entered the ‘waiting chamber’, hysterically laughing at how deeply random it was that we were doing this. A list of our names flashed up on the screen in the order we would be flying, and the tattooed guy was first. Our hearts collectively thumped as he walked up to the doorway of the wind chamber and flung himself in.

We all screamed and whooped as he extended his arms and legs, the instructor grabbing him to turn and face his dad outside, who was furiously waving and thumbs-upping and filming from different angles. I felt myself welling up as I wrote the story of them in my head: single dad, just the two of them and things haven’t been easy lately, so dad googled something like ‘fun activities in Berlin’ and scrolled until he saw The Hurricane Factory. Maybe they’ll have a burger afterwards and he’ll do a Facebook post about the whole thing. I shouted all of this in Thea’s ear over the roar of the wind tunnel, and she leaned back and shouted into my ear “Are you about to get your period?”— Fair question.

A major theme of mine and Thea’s collaborative work is the idea of a person tentatively putting themselves out there, only to get too comfortable and somehow take it disastrously too far. We agreed indoor skydiving was ripe ground for this set up - psyching yourself up to do something a bit kooky and ‘out-there’, only to end up the first person to ever piss themselves inside the wind chamber or something like that. This was floating around in my head as I approached the doorway for my ‘flight’.

It all happened so fast (literally). My main memory is being consumed by laughter while maintaining extremely intense eye contact with the instructor as I tried to make my body rigid against the pummelling wind that was being blown at me from different angles. When the minute was over and I was delivered back into the waiting chamber, I emerged flushed and giddy, and my back kinda hurt to be honest.

Thea was next, and watching her spin around clumsily in the tunnel, I felt truly and deeply: who else would see the hilarity, the humanity, the BEAUTY of going to the Hurricane Factory on a Friday night in Berlin? The spirits be kindred……We went to check out our photos in which we both look 12 years old, and the giggly old lady looked about 25 in hers, and realised that the wind tunnel actually acts as a massive face lift.

We went to meet up with Matt after who had been at an experimental music gig, which reminded us that Friday night had indeed been happening across Berlin. I can safely say that there’s nowhere I would have rather been than at The Hurricane Factory with Thea, laughing, four feet in the air being battered by huge gusts of wind.

An unmistakably Lynchian composition: one woman suspended in ecstatic flight in the foreground, another seated in existential stillness in the background, both trapped inside a giant perspex cylinder.

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Thank you for reading my Sub Stack!!!!! April is behind us like a blouse that’s flown off the back of a boat, and June is already half done, and three weeks ago a crow landed on my head when I was cycling to work. What. Does. It. Mean….

The big news is me and Matt are moving in together ahhhhhh. Which means I am moving out of my precious but ultimately weird flat. Lots to unpack……………perhaps……….in my next substack post??? If I was a person on the internet I would do some sort of ‘moving into my Berlin flat series’, but unfortunately I am a person in the real world and have to accept I’m not capable of making content, although it is seemingly the only way to be able to do anything else you might want to do.

Here are some pics to prove I am alive

LOVE U ALLLLLLL XXXXx