Back in elementary school, my friends and I all thought it tremendous fun to pick the winter sidewalks clear of ice for about a half a block, leaving the rest icy so we could dig out our old-school fixed-gear bikes and strap on our hockey helmets, then ride full bore down the clean sidewalks straight onto the end patches of blue ice — at which point we would jump on our brakes, recklessly sending our bodies wherever the bike happened to slide. And stopping wherever, and in whatever manner, they happened to stop.
Even then, I think we realized how slightly crazy and very stupid we were. Yet we were not the least bit frightened. Flecks of blood frozen into the ice only served to remind us how alive we were.
Blood was just part of the culture of youth. My younger brother once threw an instamatic camera at me, cutting open my forehead and ruining my white turtleneck. I took the blood-spattered shirt to school the next day for Show-and-Tell.
Back then, as ever, fear had more to do with the unknown than the known. Cemeteries were scary, haunted houses were not. Being stranded alone in the woods at night was scary, being stranded alone in the woods in the day was not. Losing teeth playing hockey was not scary, older girls were.
But then.
One summer during high school I traveled through the Rockies with my family. The day after we touched down in Denver, I went off hiking by myself near a family friend's place in Summit County. I climbed a mountain and came upon a series of waterfalls. I was able to maneuver behind one and take pictures out through the curtain of water. It was a beautiful place and a spiritual moment. And then in the time it took to blink, I took one bad step.
I fell and I slid. I turned on my side, dug hard into the wet rock, and still I slid, quickly approaching the next waterfall. The edge fell away sharply to more rock, and water. The fall was substantial and would take more than a second. I could feel the thud and crumple of such a landing. Time slowed down. I grabbed backward and looked forward, and my life did not flash before my eyes; rather, in that moment before certain crushing pain and possible death, I saw with supreme clarity the most probable outcome of the fall.
It was grim and filled with pain, traction, long hospital stays, and a wheelchair with a blow tube. It scared my 16-year-old brain possibly even more than death.
Instinctively, I dug sharply and continued to, until I found a hold the depth of a tack.
My legs dangled over the edge of the drop, and to this day I believe that God entered my fingertips for some fifteen seconds, until I had held and pulled myself to safety.
An hour or two later and altitudes lower, and when the blood was washed away, I sat and studied my fingertips. They were raw to the bone and the nails were completely gone. I cried for the first time in years, and for a full hour.
::::::::
I told this waterfall story in a college acting class during a "private moment" exercise designed to let us bear our souls — or, in a word, cry in front of our peers.
I learned that year that acting boils down to two things: truth and courage.
To be nakedly truthful; that is, to allow an audience to see the parts of your soul and yourself about which you are not proud. About which you are uncomfortable. When necessary, to give yourself over completely and allow yourself to dangle precipitously.
I got worked up, but I was not able to touch the memory closely enough, nor open up enough, to cry in that acting class. I was not that good of an actor. But the memory haunts me even now. And I write about it — as I have periodically — as a form of therapy, as a form of further discerning what happened and how it affects me still. I write as a form of truth-telling.
That day in Colorado, as I washed away the blood, and as I poured hydrogen peroxide over the left side of my body, I cried not because of the pain — which I understood — but because I knew for certain that no matter how I explained the incident to those I love, there would be no way they could understand precisely what I had gone through. They had not been there, and I did not have the capacity to make sense of what had happened nor allow myself to share it properly. And so no one could know exactly how close I had come.
Despite the solitary nature of this event, I also believe that had anyone been there, their screams would have broken my concentration for the slightest blink, and god would not have entered my fingertips, and I would have missed my hold and gone over the edge.
It mattered then, because high school was a difficult time for me, and I had felt a need for recklessness and rebellion as a way of dealing with teen angst and depression. And my near fall began a change in my thinking. It introduced reality and powerlessness into the life equation in a way far different from the fantastic teen glorification of suicide and the like. It made me realize too that there was much to the world that was much greater than I.
It matters now because I feel the need as a husband and a father to remember with unflagging precision how desperately I wanted to live at that moment — and how much more I still want to live.
Comments