I’m plunging toward the river, and all of my oxygen is knotted up under my sternum. It’s a race now between whether I asphyxiate before or after I hit the water.

In the summer of 1994, I was living and working in Hanover, New Hampshire. I was working as a contractor for a ropes course construction company  before I moved to Texas to start my teaching career. By living in Hanover, New Hampshire, I mean living in a bed of pine-needles in a park outside Hanover. One highlight of that summer was the two nights I worked at an actual camp, because I got an indoor bed to sleep in. One low light of that summer was when the guy I was working for had sufficiently low cash flow, that he paid me in one hundred sixty feet of rope. 

Coincidentally, while Bill Church and I were in New Zealand earlier that year, we met a couple of Dartmouth College students who were taking a break to do some mountaineering.  I had their contact information in my journal, and it was nice to see “familiar” faces,  so I connected up with them for a drink and a meal one afternoon.

They decided to take me out to a swimming hole on the Connecticut River for part of the afternoon. It had an amazing rope swing that hung from a grand old pine tree that angled out over the water.  The swing was pretty exhilarating in it’s own right. However the branches of the pine tree were spaced just right so that you can basically walk up this tree like a ramp out over the deep water in the river, and generations of adventurous, and inebriated, locals and Dartmouth students had been jumping off this tree into the water, and these guys invited me to join them. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not sure now, how much of it was a testosterone challenge, and how much was just adventurous young men enjoying a summer day. 

I think most amateur rock climbers will tell you that they have a healthy fear of heights, and a healthy trust in their gear. I’m solidly in that group. I’m actually not much of a risk taker. I’m a calculated risk taker, and there’s a huge difference. Most of the time, anyway. Climbing up the tree was fine, and certainly no challenge for a guy who’d been working in trees for the past year, but the thing I didn’t find out until I was up there, is that there was a big branch you needed to clear, so not only do you have to really commit but you can’t see below you. When I was standing up there, amongst the branches, there was no ground. Just sky, and the jump.  I don’t know what fraction of my motivation was to not look like a fool in front of these guys, but that was some of it. One of them went first, and whooped and lived and yelled something. Now it was my turn…3…2…1… here I go…

Have you ever slipped and fallen down on your back and knocked the wind out of yourself? I hate that feeling. I think it’s one of the physically and emotionally worst feelings somebody can have. Despite knowing it’s not really serious, and that you will be fine in a moment, there’s just this kernel of doubt. A small part of you says “what if it lasts forever?” Now imagine having that feeling while accelerating towards the earth. 

The acceleration due to the gravity of the earth is 32 feet (or 9.81meters) per second, per second. In the first second you go from a speed of zero, to a speed of 32 feet/sec, so on average you are doing 16 feet per second for the first second, and so you fall 16 feet. That gets you past the first branch, and now you can look down to see the water coming up at you (in your reference frame. To a neutral observer, you are falling toward the stationary river, and the River observes that the tree has just shot at it with a large peachy, screaming pine-cone). The water is coming at you fast. In the 2nd second you’ll fall about 48 feet (we’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader), and I really don’t think this tree was 60 feet above the water, so the whole experience lasted less than two seconds, if you don’t count the infinity I spent coming up from the water, or the 26 years that loop has played in my psyche.