By Kyle Ratsch
It should be known that I’m afraid of heights.
The tropical humidity is a miasma so thick it seems to slow the pace of our walking and clings to us like sopping daylight. Ten minutes outside of any air conditioned sanctuary required your body to kick itself into the ridiculous self-preservation tactic of expelling water so you don’t die of heat. Doesn’t your body know you don’t want your clothes to stick to you, or for the darkened wet spots to announce to every passerby that you’re not acclimated to this climate? Doesn’t your body know that the sweaty sliding grit of quick-dry material makes rashes?
The tuk-tuks pull up to the curb and kick up a cloud of red, unfamiliar dust that settles onto our sweat-soaked clothing and slowly coalesces into a veneer of mud. The translator’s speech is babble to us, but beautiful articulations to the driver. He nods with comprehension and we load up. The wind of the vehicle puttering down a rocky red gravel road pushes the heat of the miasma away and we fill our lungs with dusty cold relief. We pass under a piercing technicolor of lush jungle greens all foreign to us. We could not name a single plant we passed by, just as we couldn’t express the sounds of the abugida alphabet zipping by on brightly painted signs. For now, we could only talk to one another.
An unfamiliar string of characters in bright pink and green told our driver that this was our turn, and so he turned. We’d heard that this was a popular spot for tourists to swim on vacation, and we were suddenly submerged into familiarity as the average skin tone of the crowd shifted from tea and bronze to pink and burlap, and the din of spoken words saturating the air sparked familiar associations in our brain—albeit in Australian accents.
The cavernous lake appears with little warning. It was a decommissioned strip mine filled with water in the middle of the jungle on relatively flat land, so any preconceptions we had about natural slopes or transitional hills to foreshadow the forty-meter drop-off were ignored. The land was flat and red and rocky, then red and rocky, then gone, open to a wide echoing space and we can see hundreds of meters farther than we’ve been able to for nearly a month.
The muscles on the backs of my legs tighten. Cold sweat intermingles with the pervasive survival instinct. My heartbeat increases and my breathe is shallow.
The guide directs us to the left side of the scar in the Earth, once a place of industry and capitalism to a place of relaxation and capitalism, where a gentle slope allowed us to walk down into the lake without taking an adrenal plunge. The guide also tells us that there were multiple places along the cliff-like walls that were designated as safe zones for jumping. One was twenty meters, one was forty, and one was sixty meters—though that one was closed due to a recent accident. The guide did not elaborate and my pulse quickened more, somehow.
Half of us took the hill. Half of us took the twenty-meter plunge.
The water was icy and the departure from the sweaty miasma deliriously refreshing. The edges of the water that rubbed up against the dirt wall peeled the mud away and mixed into a mahogany cloud, but each foot further from the cliff grew into a crystalline reflection of the sky, and then a sapphire mystery over the water whose depths we did not know. Ropes anchored into the walls striped the lake and gave us places to congregate and rest over the bottom whose location we did not know. We toy with the border of safety, working our muscles to propel ourselves over certain death with delightful little splashes and plunks, and as soon as our muscles being to give way—the precursor to sinking and eventual asphyxiation—we grab the rope, catch our breath, and laugh.
So who’s gonna jump? I’m not. We’re not. They are. They will. There’s no way. I’m afraid of heights, I’ll never jump. I’m afraid of heights, I’ll totally jump. Eight friends leave the safety of the rope and slice through the cold to grab a fibrous gritty rope embedded in mud and we crawl our way to—of course—the forty-meter jump. Our feet are caked in mud and scratchy. Some of us don’t want to jump. Some of us want to wash the mud off our feet and dance across the upper limits of drowning instead.
My practice should come in handy. I remember the abrasions from the hand-holds of rock walls, I remember the rush of air as I leap from trespassing spaces on brick buildings down to the pavement below, I remember the shaking ladder as I smear white paint on the walls of million dollar homes, I remember dangling myself on the edge of rocks looking out over the incomprehensible distances of mountain ranges. I’ve fought this.
My turn is last. The timing never seemed quite right, but several of the friends have jumped, climbed, and returned to the queue. To let them lap me would be cowardice. I run, something I’m quite adept at, to the cliff side. I plant my foot just as I’ve planted it for the long jump, just as I’ve squared up to jump and grab a basketball rim, I coil my legs as I’ve coiled it a hundred times before in weightlifting, soccer, and football. I prepare the athletic explosion to launch myself over an open space with a bottom unknown.
The ball of my foot sinks into the muddy precipice and my leg gives out.
My legs are stricken as if with rigor mortis and I careen. My incredible jump is comparable to a timid child pushed from the diving board—albeit with a track-runner’s speed. The instinctive lizard brain inside me spreads my arms and tries to stabilize on the rushing air under the presumption that the friction will slow me down to a safe speed. My palms were flat and parallel to the surface of the water, wavering from side to side from the fight with air particles. I imagine myself to be in the most unflattering of survival poses, toes pointed straight down to pierce the water.
The cold on my skin and the crush in my ears lets me know I’ve broken the surface and my rapid plummet grinds to a buoyant halt and I stay for a moment suspended in the black of my closed eyes. I do not know where the bottom is. A few kicks slowly bring me to the surface and I cross the barrier into breathable air and comprehensible noise.
Did you like it?
No.
But, I’ll do it again.
