Over the Edge

     When I was twelve years old I was a boy scout. This didn't last very long, but for a while it was a source of adventures for me that I would not otherwise have had as a boy. Like camping out in sub-zero temperatures in a homemade shelter and waking up to find my leather gloves frozen into hand-shaped rocks, useless to my freezing fingers, while my friends and I yelled at each other about how we were going to survive until our mothers could come and pick us up. Or getting stuck in a bog of something like quicksand while portaging a canoe during a wilderness trip, watching my khaki green-clad comrades pass me by on the dryer part of the trail, considering themselves lucky I'd found the wrong path first.
     One of these adventures I still remember was my first and only experience rappelling. I'd seen this feat of daring do on television and thought it looked easy enough. In true Boy Scouts fashion, we were told it could be a useful skill in case we ever needed to rescue one of our clumsy compatriots who'd fallen over a rocky ledge. (The Boy Scouts are very much into being prepared for the most unlikely of scenarios.) To us, honestly, it just sounded fun. So on the designated day, we met our leaders at the top of a 60-foot bluff to learn the language of climbing harnesses, D-bars, carabiners, diaper slings, and double-figure-8 fisherman's knots. Then we wrapped nylon ropes around our asses and prepared to go skipping down the side of a cliff.
     Turns out, it's harder than it looks. And scarier. The thing about rappeling is that it looks one way when you're down at the bottom and have a full view of the exercise. It looks totally different from the top. You can't see anything. You can't see the side of the cliff you hope to meet feet-first. You can't even see the ground you plan to reach, preferably in very gradual fashion. You simply have to walk up to the edge of the cliff, strap yourself in, turn around backward, then sit yourself way out into space with nothing but blue sky and clouds behind you, and then push off. Once you're away, the face of the cliff will appear before you. And if you aren't truly sitting in the air when you leave the ledge, trusting yourself to what you cannot see at the beginning, it's not going to be a smooth ride.
     I may be unusual in this regard, but I was born with a full allotment of self-preservation instinct, and as I stood with my back to the edge of that sixty-foot rocky drop, I felt keenly that I was about to do one of the stupidest things I'd ever done. "Just sit out over the edge," they said. "You'll see the face once you've pushed away from the edge," they encouraged. But I couldn't make myself do something so obviously ill-advised. So I didn't. I just jumped. I pushed my instincts aside for just long enough to leap over the edge of a cliff standing straight up in the air.
     And it was only in that instant that I understood why I should have been sitting. For once my backward momentum reached its limit, I saw the face of that cliff swinging toward me fast and I had nothing but my face and torso to stop me. I suppose there's something to be said for learning the hard way. "Whack!" I hit the rock wall with enough force that I nearly lost hold of my ropes. And it hurt. I hung there in the air, stunned at my stupidity, and then, I lowered myself into the proper sitting position and rappeled down the side of the bluff. I got to the bottom safe and sound, mostly, with little more than a few cuts and scrapes and a bruised ego to mark my mistake. But in the end, I had done it. Against my better judgment, I had gone over the edge and made it to the ground below.
     It would be nice to say that that was the beginning of a life-long love for rappelling. But that would not be true. The fact is, I never did it again. I did go back to the top of the bluff and prepared for another try. But I didn't do it. Facing the blank and empty air again, I decided that once was enough for me. I've never changed my mind about that.