Walk On Air

There is this thing between me and heights. It's called Fear. I am known to fear tight narrow spaces, I'm claustrophobic. I'm also known to fear great heights, and not-so-great heights. This fact made today went really interesting.

So apparently some people decided to hook some wires and planks around some trees in a forest in Kumeu. Apparently they've been there for five years, and by a staff's own admission, not many people know them anyway. I went today fully expecting them to make me piss my pants. They didn't quite get there but they sure didn't disappoint.

Here's how it works. You go up a ladder, you grab on a wire, and walk along some cleverly-placed planks, rope, logs, wires, or combinations of them attached to various trees around the place, all the while always secured by not one but two locks to a thick wire to ensure gravity doesn't kill you. Repeat at different heights. That's about it. It's clever, simple, and a sure magnet for adrenaline junkies.

I'll be honest with you. Within the first two minutes I started thinking, what the heck am I doing here. The first course was probably two-three meters above the ground and I was scared out of my head. But of course, I wanted this to happen to begin with, that's why I was there in the first place, so I pushed ahead. At about the fifth obstacle I was still scared. In fact the fear never actually left me. But at that point, I no longer thought of quitting. I was there, up in the air, standing between two trees with a wire under my feet and another piece of wire I held on to at about chest level. My old breathing techniques came in handy as I forced myself to keep looking forward and not down. But that's kinda hard to do most times, when you're walking on planks set some width apart, they force you to look down to watch where you're stepping. Clever, as I said. By the second course I was finding my footing. I got used to breathing fast and gritting my teeth. I no longer hurried my steps. By the third course, my breathing techniques failed me, and I resorted to swearing black and blue into thin air. My "ssshhh...." were not attempts to calm myself down, I was swearing in acronym.

After the fourth course we took a break. This was a mistake. Then we got in there again for the second half of the thing, kinda like "the real thing". In the first thirty seconds of that I found the same quitting thoughts in my head again. I thought, I've done this before, only in slightly lower altitude, so there's no reason to stop now. I actually realized that they were recycling obstacle ideas at about course three, that all they've done is set up the same course slightly higher at every repetition. This had an amazing effect: the first time you go through something, you go through it really slow because you're really scared. The second time around, though it's higher, you don't take as much time because you're not that scared anymore, as long as the altitude increase is not huge. I think they lift things up about half a meter or a meter everytime. There's a lesson in there. The first time around you face a certain demon in your life, everything goes crazy. The next time you face it again, even if the stakes are higher, maybe it still scares you, but you've got the hang of it at that stage. It's no longer as paralysing as the first time.

When we were having a break, we noticed that most people that go through this go through them really fast. Most of them don't even hold on to anything. That's not recklessness either, it's perfectly safe. Life is so much easier once you believe that your fall, if you do fall, wouldn't be fatal. To me, I know the safety mechanisms are strong, I wouldn't break a leg or anything if I fall, I wouldn't even go down half a metre if I step off the platform as the chains will hold me. But still, being up there looking down with none of what I am used to have as "safety" scared me. It's a pseudo-fear. It's fear of something that isn't really there anymore. Much of my life has been lived that way. When you don't fear the falling down because you know it's not gonna happen, but you fear the height anyway, you know something in you needs to change. I understand that now. This year has been leading me up to this point, pounding this lesson into me over and over again in different ways until I really get it.

On the sixth course I got two kids going right behind me. They were really tailing me, right on my back. They were about 10 years old. Due to security measures and rules, there was a lot of waiting to avoid overcrowding on the wires and platforms. I was the last in our group to go, that's why I had these kids tailing me. They've been tailing us pretty much the whole day. As I stood on the platform, waiting for Lucko and Wulan to clear the next wire, I started talking to the kid. "Bro, you've done this before?" I asked, because he was so fast in clearing these obstacles. He said no, it's my first time. Later on I figured that he probably meant it was his first time on course six, he might've done the others before. I said "Sorry we're so slow ey bro, this is our first time, and I'm really scared." To my surprise, he politely said, "That's okay, I'm scared too". Somewhere along the line I was on this moving-log thing that I was so afraid of. Lo and behold, the kid was right there behind me, on the same log. I was scared enough when the logs were stable, let alone with a kid breathing down my neck hurrying me up without saying anything. I asked him, "Bro, are your parents near here somewhere?" He said no. I said, "That's good. Sorry about my mouth ey bro". Again, the ever-so-polite kid giggled a little and said, "That's okay". And I continued to swear black and blue into the air.

Much to my surprise, however, he started talking to me after that. "Woah that was freaky", he said after one obstacle, "now I don't know if I really wanna do course seven and eight after this." At one point he even asked me to help him move his safety lock from one wire to another because he wasn't tall enough to unlock them easily. That struck me rather deeply. This was a chance encounter. I didn't get the kid's name, and never will, as I quit at the end of course six because my arms wouldn't lift much more and grip was as good as gone. I was getting blurry and my mind wasn't there anymore at about halfway through course six, so I wasn't really there anymore by the end of it. But there it was, instant communication. Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was the altitude, maybe it's just easy to get people going when you're ten-twelve meters off the ground with just a cable wire under your feet, I don't know. But it's there. Maybe communication is hard to maintain, as was the case with this kid. But it sure is easy to initiate. And everything starts with a beginning.

This whole thing reminds me of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Do you remember what Indy got after he stepped [in faith?] off a cliff to a bridge that he couldn't see? The Cup of The Covenant.