Faith on The End of a Rope
Rope, clip, harness, 70 feet above the ground. In the moment after the jump my body relaxes, opens, and one arm flings back in flight. Finally. The Earth is to my back, the sky is a huge blue audience. Then the moon gravity of the cliff pulls me in. When my feet contact the rock, everything spins and the sky is up once more.
When I catch my breath I watch myself plummet to the ground. Line, griri, carabiner, harness. A chain of single-point failures. The fall loops over and over in my head, each time slightly different.
A run this time. Sideways canting up the rock until the line gently drags me back through the middle and out the other side. Higher at the second end, then higher still, a gathering pendulum. At the tail of the arc there is a split second of perfect weightlessness, and I launch myself into it. In flight the cliff is liquid and I glide fifty feet to the far shore.
I will not pray.
The rope is statically rated to 6000 pounds. The hardware is over-designed by factors of ten. No one falls from gear failure. No plane has ever crashed because aerodynamics took a holiday. To say that physics is faith is an insult to reason, and yet you’ll look for the meaning if I die.
You’ll say, it was just his time. You’ll say, it was meant to be. You will have a ritual by the cliff base to mark my end, a ceremony with candles because fire and light are the only things we can all believe in. You’ll make yourself feel better. Some will speak of the great cliff wall in the sky. Eventually you will talk of the things that bloomed from the pain of loss.
But when the breath is back in my throat I turn, reach and fall to find that I’m cartwheeling through free space. Everything spins again but my body knows what to do. My leading leg touches rock and I land lightly. The video will show my first ever perfect jetée. I thought nothing of it.
Will I come down just before or just after we discover that the belay device has a one-in-a-million manufacturing defect?
Or, the rock could shear off around the anchor. Fate could always kill me, if I allow our ignorance a name.
We have done our engineering, we have double triple checked. I know that no one has ever died from this, and I know that some day there will be a first. Everything I can do I have done, and now there is only the risk of living. But I will not hope for karma. I will not smile at the Gods. If I die from a random failure, please do not see meaning in it. The meaning is already here.
As I step into the air again.
The truth is, we all do whatever we have to do to get up here. It doesn’t matter what we call it.
