This past weekend, I forced myself to face one of my biggest fears. No, not zombies…heights! I spent about 26 years of my life happily going about my business not realizing that I had a deep seeded fear of heights. Not the kind of heights where I’m afraid to fly in a plane or take elevators. I generally trust mechanical engineering enough to keep me from plummeting to my death (or at least know too little about it to really understand the danger I’m in). I’m more referring to the kind of heights where I’m the sole entity responsible for keeping myself up in the air.
The perfect example of this, and on a wholly related note, the first time I realized I had issues was at COT. Don’t get me wrong. COT was easy. Getting up early and being yelled at was annoying but there was nothing super hard about it. You just learned what you needed to do and got by without overtly falling asleep in the middle of seminars. Then the COT trainers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to run us through an obstacle course. The course itself was frustrating because whoever built it did NOT have anyone under 5’5″ in mind. Whatever, I mostly got through it. The next day we had to climb on a ropes course. The course itself is hard to describe so I’ll just illustrate:
So the ropes course doesn’t start out so bad. You just climb up a cargo net with two little ropes attached to your harness to hook into the cables for safety. The climb up the cargo net was only about ten feet up…but once you start on that platform you realize that a fall from ten feet could really actually be quite uncomfortable, and naturally the course only goes up from there… The course is divided up into different legs separated by ropes attached to telephone poles at different heights. Once you end each let at a platform you have to hook your ropes onto the cables on the other side of the pole and keep moving up from there till you reach the end and repel down.
It was awful. From the very first step off the first platform my legs and arms were shaking, they wouldn’t move immediately at my commands, and my stomach felt like it was constantly invading my throat. It was as if some part of my brain just said f**k it, you’re insane, go back to the ground where you belong. Shaking and cursing (not so silently) I got through it. I landed without incident back on mother earth and was so happy it was over…it wasn’t. I then had to face the toothpick. The name “toothpick” really doesn’t do this thing justice. It sounds inane and tedious. It was terrifying. The basic premise is to just scare the living bejesus out of anyone with height issues. You walk up a ton of stairs to the top of this tower, hook yourself into cables strung above and parallel to a telephone pole. This pole is also parallel to the ground…which was about 50ft below… The goal? Walk one foot in front of the other (because there wasn’t enough room to put them side by side and shuffle as I desperately wanted to do) and touch the telephone pole perpendicular to your walkway. This walk of shame was approximately 30ft.
As I started to hook myself in I thought I was getting dizzy as things seemed to be moving in an awkward way, but in actuality the poles were just swaying in the breeze. I’m still not sure which was worse. I got through the toothpick much like I got through the ropes course: trembling, cursing, and yelling at my flight mates to stop screaming encouragement because I just wanted silence so I could go to my happy place. I don’t know how this was supposed to make me a better officer. When I face job stressors I don’t typically shudder/curse/fight the urge to throw up…not usually anyway. Regardless, I made it past these events, buried the embarrassing fears deep in my subconscious, and haven’t revisited them since…until very recently.
When a friend of mine told me he was going the 007 Goldeneye bungy jump, I leapt at the opportunity (horrible pun intended). If you don’t remember the jump here’s a refresher:
1) This would allow me to again face my, and in my mind a very rational, fear of being in high places with nothing but myself and a flimsy piece of wood and some cord for support. 2) My friends were doing it and I’m a sucker for peer pressure. 3) I used to have a HUGE crush on Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. I think it had something to do with British accents seeming exotic/sexy to a country girl from TN. But then I watched Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace and Daniel Craig makes Brosnan look like a total pansy tool so I figure, if Brosnan can jump off a dam, so can I. This jump from a wooden platform attached to the dam is around 700ft high. It’s the tallest in Europe and the second tallest in the world, missing the mark by only around 10ft.
I was already nervous about the trip before we even arrived at the dam. I kept justifying my decision to go by thinking of all the people that do this every day at theme parks, beaches, carnivals, etc. Those places seem inherently unsafe to me, yet statistically speaking they, for the most part, survive unscathed. (side note: this also reminded me of the time my parents took me to Dollywood at 11 years of age and I begged to do the bungy jump there. They wisely told me “No”…or “Shut up and get in the car or you’re not getting any rock candy”…I don’t remember which). But we weren’t going to a carnival or theme park. We were headed to a famous jump in Switzerland! I’d put my stock in Swiss engineering over a southern fried carnival jump any day. The Swiss just make everything better: watches, clocks, chocolates. They probably make bungy jumps better too!
Feeling entirely justified I hopped out of the car with a modicum of confidence. This immediately faded when we heard this horrific male shriek echoing through the valley from someone that had just jumped. It could have been a cry of exhilaration…but it could have just as easily been a cry of terror and immediate regret. It was hard to tell but I was definitely picturing the latter. It also didn’t help that as we rounded the corner to head to the dam we saw this:
My stomach felt like it was making its way slowly up into my throat. The only thing that kept me walking was the fact that Kim had a very similar expression on her face and she kept moving so there was no way I was backing out now. The three of us walked up to the trailer where we paid to plummet and then proceeded to wait in line. The line was taking a little longer than normal since there was a BBC reporter who was ironically doing some piece on the thin line between pleasure and terror/pain. He stood on the platform for a good bit as a helicopter was flying around getting different shots. The roving helo was definitely making me nauseous and I was getting really irritated at this guy’s inability to take a decent shot so we could be on our merry way. Finally he left and the line started moving again. The three of us, being the raging narcissists we are, made a plan to switch out cameras. While one person jumped, the other two would take continuous photo and video and we would switch out duties as we all too turns jumping. While this was a great idea, I realized very early into our wait in queue that I needed to go first. Standing around and waiting while we watched other people disappear over the edge and more often than not hear them shriek on their way down was bad enough. I realized that if I had to film one of my friends jump and watch them go all the way down I would probably lose my nerve so I asked to go first while Kim and Drew took pictures and filmed. Standing in line was becoming nerve-wracking and too soon it came time for me to hop on the chair and get a quick tutorial for how things were going to work on the platform and very shortly after when I stopped bouncing (theoretically).
The physics of this whole scenario is pretty simple. You wear a harness with a rope attached to both my ankle and the waist of the harness. The bungy cord attaches to your ankle (at least it was in the ankle area…I never looked closely enough because I was at the point where I refused to look anywhere but either straight ahead or up) and when you jump you’re supposed to dive such that you fall head first until the cord contracts, bounce for a little while upside down, then when you’re done bouncing reel in the cord between your waist and ankle such that you are in sort of a sitting position rather than upside down. Once you’re in the sitting position they lower a crane that you hook into your harness and they pull you back up on the platform. While everything was incredibly straight forward it didn’t make me any less nervous and I was suddenly hoping BBC guy would show up and delay us a bit more… About two minutes after my tutorial, standing in my padded ankle shackles with the harness firmly set, it was suddenly my turn. I walked up the steps slowly like I was headed to the gallows. I gripped the hand rail like the whole apparatus was about to tumble into the abyss and I desperately tried to regulate my breathing. I was actually much calmer than I thought I would be. I held onto the railing (I don’t think it served any purpose but to make me feel better) while the platform leader hooked me in and told me how it was going to work. Basically I would walk to the edge of the platform with my toes hanging off and wait for him to count down from 3 to 1. On 1 I would jump. If I didn’t jump, they’d give me three minutes to make up my mind then pull me off the platform. Thank you Swiss efficiency! Much like my friend Julia who jumped months ago, I knew two things. 1) I couldn’t look down so platform guy would have to tell me when my toes were hanging over and 2) if I didn’t jump when he said 1 I wasn’t going to do it. So finally it was my turn. Platform guy graciously held onto my harness and guided me to the edge. Despite only looking up, I was very much so aware of the nothing that surrounded me. My mind did a kind of retreat where it started digging through my subconscious trying to find something interesting to think about other than the fact I was about to fall 700ft. All I could come up with was something along the lines of “did I unplug my crockpot before I left this morning?” I did chance a glance down to the dam where Kim and Drew were yelling encouragement and poised ready to document my awesomeness. I also noticed them chatting with BBC guy who had made his return and was filming me. The only encouragement he gave was “Give us a good scream!” Well I was on TV with my peers filming as well so there was absolutely no way I could back out now. Again, peer pressure is a wonderful thing. I raised up my arms to prep for the swan dive and was still thinking about my crock pot when I heard the dulcet tones of platform guy from behind me:
3
Oh s**t.
2
OMG I HAVE TO JUMP REALLY REALLY SOON! OMG!
1
I would like to think that it was through some conscious effort that I decided to jump but in reality I have to thank whatever synapses decided to fire at the right moment such that my legs thrust me off the platform because I don’t really recall doing it on my own. 700ft is a really long way down so I had a lot of time to think. My thought process went a little something like: “Oh wow I just jumped!….OMG I’m falling, Oh hell I see the ground……Oh wow I’m still falling. Oh god!….OMG I’m STILL falling…ahhh there it is.” I felt the tension in the cord and it was not as jerky/sudden as I expected. I bounced for a surprisingly long time and just stared at the ground and swinging for a while. I was getting dizzy with all the blood rushing to my head before I realized I had forgotten to reel myself into the sitting position. Oops. I looked up and finally realized how far I’d fallen. Everyone looking over the dam looked like little dots on the horizon. It made me feel incredibly small. They lowered the crane to me and pulled me up pretty quickly. The ride up, much like the fall down, was kind of a blur. The platform guy and assistant hoisted me up and helped unhook me. Once I took the gear off and left the platform I felt both liberated and still a little shaky. Whatever. I conquered my fear and had a relatively good time. I didn’t pee myself. I didn’t throw up. I didn’t die. It was an excellent Saturday afternoon. Here’s the video to prove it…as an aside, I may be depicted shrieking like a five year old girl on the BBC.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=748&id=100000078041783#!/profile.php?id=513240671
Next up….skydiving? Let me know.