Weekend Trip

Yesterday I went zip-lining. 

My husband and I had met up with good friends over the weekend to celebrate a milestone birthday. The friends had a day planned at a wilderness park that featured activities like rope climbing and Walking on Rickety Bridges and Dropping 100 Feet from a Tower. Doesn’t that sound like fun? said the friends. 

Not really, was what I was thinking. But what I said was, Yes! Let’s do it! The park was in its off season and we had the place mostly to ourselves, which was good, because each activity took a lot of gearing up—physically, with actual gear that had to be put on and looped and belted and tightened, and mentally, with internal pep-talks and mindful breathing and additional pep-talks, where I literally had to talk myself off a ledge. 

The ledge. Picture a very slim platform twenty feet in the air. The thinnest of thin wires shooting across. A wall of mesh on one side. On the other side: the air, the forest, an earnest park worker named Frank, who is looking up at me and telling me I can do it. “It” is walk across the wire. But how, Frank? I call down. I study the wire. It’s impossible. I know this with every fiber of my being. Meanwhile, the rest of the group is bunching up behind me on the platform. We’re all clamped in on the same rope, so if I chicken out, everyone has to turn back. 

I examine the wire again. I imagine myself swinging one leg around and setting a foot on it. I imagine myself falling and crushing Frank. You’re not going to fall, Frank says, reading my mind. You can do it, my husband says. But I can’t, I tell him. And then I don’t know what comes over me, but I do it. I inch across the wire. I make it to the other side, adrenaline surging through me so hard that I complete the remainder of the course in record time, the swingy bridges, the floating steps, some kind of vertical mesh thing? Until I’m on the ground, heart banging, breathless, laughing, laughing louder when Frank tells me that this was the easy course. Good Lord, Frank, what is the difficult course? 

And then it was on to zip-lining, which, let me tell you, was an absolute piece of cake after the insane wire walking. Before each activity Frank or one of the other earnest darling safety conscious workers takes us through the checklist, the harness tightening, the clamping of clamps, a reminder to tilt your head to the side when you reach the brake at the end of the zip-line. I nod along obediently, but then, the last time on the zip-line, flying, yoo-hoo-ing, enjoying the blur of the trees, the sky, and BAM 

my helmet hits the rope, but there’s Frank pulling me in, telling me I did great, despite the helmet-rim-sized indentation on my forehead. (Ah ha, so this is why you’re supposed to tilt your head.)

Confession: I hadn’t wanted to go on this trip. I don’t know why. Something to do with my usual anxiety, the dread before any trip, and new worries (what if the airplane flips over?), the packing and rearranging of schedules, the securing of the dog sitter. Add to that my general despair over the world, a dose of guilt about my good fortune—that I can go on a trip like this, that I can step away for a minute from the craziness. Maybe there’s a part of me too that feels I don’t deserve a break, that it’s wrong somehow to have joy, fun. Love. Friendship. 

But this can’t be true. Can this be true?  

We spend the entire day at the park, culminating in all of us watching the friend with the milestone birthday climb the 100-foot tower. We watch him step off. We cheer as he flies.