Warning: This is a retrospective travelogue, with all the self-indulgences such a genre typically entails.
When I was 18 I jumped off this:
After high school graduation, my parents let myself and a friend go to New Zealand and Australia. Bit crazy thinking back on it. At that point I’d never traveled anywhere by myself and going halfway around the world to the last inhabited piece of ground before Antarctica in hindsight seems a bit much. It was, of course, the Hobbit movies what did it. They’d been released recently and I was in love with the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the books and the movies. The fact that there existed a place, here, on the real earth, that could so easily pass for The Shire, or the Fields of Rohan, was enthralling. I had to go and see it myself. I had to go on my own little adventure to the volcanoes of Mordor (actually of White Island but, close enough). So, with a little cajoling I convinced a good friend of mine, Stephen, who had also never traveled anywhere, to tag along. Flights were booked and, a week after we were handed our diplomas, we stepped on a plane.
Fascinating trip. If you’ve never experienced it there does seem to be something qualitatively different about life on the Southern Hemisphere compared to life on the Northern one. Putting your finger on what exactly is not so easy, but nature just feels a little different there. I think maybe it’s because the southern hemisphere is almost totally ocean. Everything feels like you’re just on a big island. Most of the time, you are. In the Northern Hemisphere 40% of the surface area is land. In the Southern, it’s only 20%. That means that 8 out of every 10 acres is just ocean… and you can feel it. By the way, that 20% includes Antarctica, which is for all practical purposes uninhabitable. So, really, when you’re in the southern hemisphere almost everything is sea. The brief spats of land that rise up here an there out of the water feel isolated and weird. Almost as though they shouldn’t be there.
New Zealand certainly feels like that. The whole landmass has a sort of “out of place” feel to it. For one, there are no native mammals on the islands, only birds and reptiles. That immediately causes you to feel out of place as one such mammal yourself, walking around outside. It’s also pseudo-tropical, covered in parts by rain forest, but paradoxically often at the same time quite cold. Glaciers dot the landscape, giant mountains of ice right beside volcanoes, giant mountains of fire. When someone says the word “Kiwi” you never know if they’re talking about the bird, the people, or the fruit. So, yeah. It’s a mixed up place.
A sort of liminal zone maybe.
The edge of the world in a lot of ways.
They also have miniature blue penguins. So…
It was perhaps fitting then that New Zealand is where I learned to jump.
I’d never been bungee jumping before. I was afraid of heights. I’d never really traveled outside my comfort zone either. In many ways, my life had up to then been quite contained, sheltered in some respects. Getting on a plane and flying around the world was a major leap into the unknown for me. As it happens, the world is a big place. If you go far enough out into it, things start to get weird.
It was Stephen that pushed me to jump off the building.
“This trip is for conquering fears.” He said. “You shouldn’t come back home the same way you left.”
He was right.
Stephen was a simple guy. A son of blue-collar parents sort of fellow. A church on Sunday and hand-me-down clothes sort of guy. Baloney sandwiches for lunch. His simplicity however hid a kind of stereotypical country-bumpkin wisdom that ran fairly deep. He always had just the right aphorism in his back pocket to get you through a rough day. Last I checked on him, his simple life persists. He’s married with kids, one of the happiest people I’ve ever known. We could learn a lot from guys like Stephen and he was right about what we needed. Every young person needs someone like that when they’re coming of age. Someone to push you off a building. Someone to make sure you don’t come back home the way you left.
Not that he wasn’t scared too.
They put you in a shazam outfit for some reason. I looked it up recently and it looks like they’re still probably using the same coveralls that we were forced to wear 20 years ago. They look like this. Impossible to look cool in them. Such is life.
At the top of the tower there is a plank, like the sort you might walk off of to your death after a failed mutiny on a pirate ship. After you’re harnessed in to the cables, you walk out to the edge of this plank and there are two bars on either side for you to hold onto. You grab them, lean out over the edge…
And let go.
Doesn’t feel great.
I’m used to such now and could probably do it today no problem. Since that day, I’ve bungee jumped several times, climbed rocks, sky dived, and flown planes. My fear of heights is largely put to bed, although I still have a healthy distrust of ladders. At the time though, the first time, every single thing in my body was screaming, for the LOVE OF GOD DO NOT LET GO.
You know, intellectually, in your head, that it’s okay. Dozens of people jump off this tower every day. It’s the main tourist attraction in the city. There’s never been an incident (that I’m aware of) and you saw them clip the cables onto your harness with your own eyes. Short of a multiple exceedingly rare and catastrophic equipment failures all happening at the same time, there is no way you will get hurt. You know this.
And yet you don’t believe it.
That’s not what your eyes see.
Your eyes see a ledge. A ledge with no solid ground beneath it and no net to catch you. Your eyes see that you are a hundred stories in the air and that letting go will mean death. So, you don’t let go. You hang on. You stall and you stagnate.
Stephen was wise. In his own words part of the reason for his journey was to overcome fear. And yet his body didn’t agree overmuch with his head. He walked the ledge first and I stood behind him, trying to encourage him to let go. I can still see him, in my mind, leaned out over the plank with both hands white knuckled around the handrails.
“Just let go! It’s fine!”
“Okay! Okay! I’m gonna do it!”
“Alright! Let go on three! Okay!?”
“Okay!”
“Alright. One! Two! Three!”
“YAAAAAAAAA!!!!!”
…
Stephen was still there.
He’d screamed as if he were going to jump. He’d wanted to jump. But his body wouldn’t listen. The commands from his brain were overwritten by the automatic nervous system response from his spine.
Let go. The brain said to the hands.
Go screw yourself. Said the fight or flight reflexes down his spinal cord.
Eventually he did let go. About ten minutes later. The remaining time was filled with various repeats of the above conversation. I must’ve counted down for him to jump a half dozen times or more before he actually did it. When it was my turn I went with a little less fanfare, but I think that’s because I had had the visual confirmation of my friend doing it first and him being okay.
I met Stephen at the bottom on a giant crash pad. We laughed. We went and got sandwiches and watched the sails of the boats float like clouds upon a sea of glass.
I’m convinced life is like that.
People spend their whole lives waiting for everything to feel safe enough to act. To do the thing they know they’re supposed to do. What they were made for. To carry out their own little individual mission from God. It never does seem safe though. I don’t think doing what you’re supposed to ever will. A little hemming and hawing is to be expected, and is maybe necessary… but at some point you just have to jump. At some point you just have to go for it.
It might not work out. That’s true. But listen man, you’re what… how old now? How long can you afford to keep waiting? If the perfect time hasn’t come yet, will it ever?
If not now.
When?
At some point you just have to go for it. You just have to jump.
We did a lot more jumping on that trip. For the time we were there we morphed into adrenaline junkies. We jumped off canyons and off of boats into shark infested waters. We hitchhiked through the back country in the freezing cold at three in the morning hoping to catch a train by dawn. We didn’t even have cell phones back then. At the time, making such work internationally was insanely expensive. No communication with anyone we knew, half a world away, outside of a pay phone and a collect call. We were, in some sense, extremely alone. Reliant on God and the kindness of strangers. In Richmond an old woman took us in for the night and gave us breakfast. You know, like in the song.
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me breakfast
And she said:… Do you come from a land down under
Men at Work
Not Australia but close enough.
This world is one of infinite possibilities.
The only reason you are trapped is because you’re too scared to jump.
(Note from the Author:
Hello! Thank you for being here. I’m experimenting with new ways to show my appreciation for paid subscribers! With this in mind, this coming Friday I’m going to have a Q&A post that only paid subscriptions can comment on. I promise I will answer all your comments on that post (you know, within reason, I don’t promise they will be immediate responses) and afterwards I will repost our discussions as a separate article so that everybody can benefit from the insight and wisdom of the community. Many of my readers are very intelligent and I think we will all benefit from this. Thank you all again, so very much.)