Nine months and over fifteen thousand miles since selling my house and hitting the road for reasons not entirely clear, I was standing on the edge of a cliff in the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York nearly forty feet above the water. Naked.
July 8, 2018
I’d found the swimming hole the day before and gamely jumped off some reasonable looking ledges that were at most ten feet above the water, proud of myself for my relative bravery in light of a long history of risk aversion. The pool, which looked to have been pulled from a postcard, had formed a few years earlier with the help of Hurricane Irene who tumbled several giant boulders into the South Boquet river to slow and gather the water here before letting it continue on its way. High above the pool’s surface, high enough to have initially escaped my notice as a viable jumping spot, loomed a dangerous looking ledge, one from where, I assumed, people far more daring and adventurous than I was probably leapt.
The same day I discovered the pool, a small group of adults and children showed up, among them a man who looked to be in his mid-to-late forties and in phenomenal physical shape, tan and shaved head to toe, his chest broad, his abdominal muscles neatly encased and defined within equally striated obliques. He had the pronounced veins in his calves, as I do, that belie thinning middle-age skin stretched over middle-age muscle. He carried himself with a studied stoic confidence and as soon as he arrived he immediately climbed up to that menacing cliff above the pool and without breaking stride jumped in with the same enthusiasm he might have had for brushing his teeth or tying his shoes. I was fascinated by him and watched him from my perch on a boulder at the side of the pool wondering what his story was. He appeared to be single, and interacted with both the adults and the kids he’d arrived with like someone who was on his own despite being surrounded by people he knew and was probably related to.
I was projecting, of course.
I saw in him a possible near-future version of myself in which I am later middle-age, physically fit, and alone. The muscles were the tell. The muscles smacked of the kind a person builds and maintains at that age and to that level of aesthetic perfection because the rest of the package isn’t enough without them, to hold on to the fading illusion of youth just a little longer, and ‘what else are you going to do with your time?’ It’s not like you’re married or in a relationship. In that imagined regard, he was a kindred spirit. I’d lifted weights myself most of my life for vanity, to deter bullies and aging, and because I didn’t know what else to do after work or school. I rarely exercised for my health first. The sense of camaraderie ended, though, when it came to jumping off of cliffs. By that casual bravery I was condemned. I could never be so cooly daring. If I made the attempt, I knew, I’d end up petrified at the edge before finally admitting defeat and retreating down the back of the cliff while the audience in the pool below bore witness to my weakness.
I left the river about thirty minutes after the group arrived, but the fact that the idea of jumping off a cliff from a certain height into the water elicited such stubborn fear in me despite my future doppelgänger and then a trio of teenagers having done it, and with such nonchalance at that, and even though by all accounts it appeared the endeavor would be safe enough, rankled me the rest of the evening. It burrowed into my mind as a fear I needed to face and soon symbolized something larger than itself. Somehow my self-respect, or something like it, was on the line. I had to prove myself. I wanted to be the kind of person who blithely jumped off of cliffs and into lakes. I wanted to be the kind of person who could be with her.
At camp later that evening, I went back and forth in my mind about how I didn’t actually need to prove anything, to myself or anyone else, and, well, if I didn’t then why not do it then? At the very least it would be a learning experience, right? Fine. I would go in the morning. Even though my heart kicked when I imagined going through with it in any detail, it was settled. I knew I wouldn’t retreat from the cliff. Now that I’d made such a to-do about it in my head, not jumping was unconscionable. The stakes were too high. Backing down at this point would mean something, possibly final, about me.
The next morning I hiked over to the swimming hole and up to the cliff. From the ledge I peered down at the water which sparkled back at me from below. I laughed. This wasn’t that bad! I could totally do this! I laughed at how worked up I’d gotten about it the day before and the unnecessary eternal significance I’d assigned to it. I decided my display of manly courage needed an exclamation point so, with no one else there to see, I took off my swim trunks and set them to the side. Then with my feet positioned to push out far enough to avoid an outcropping of rocks below, I jumped.
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There’s a choice point in situations like these, that moment where something in your mind shifts and you commit to stepping over the edge. It’s an act of will, a final decision that in an instant puts you on a trajectory to an inevitable destination. If courage exists in the endeavor, it will be in that flash of a moment. Once airborne, gravity does the lion’s share of the work for you. Sure, there are things you can do mid-fall to keep yourself safe, like straighten your body and, if you’re naked, cup your nether-do-wells with your hands, but once you’ve jumped you’re mostly along for the ride and there’s no going back. If you struggle and worry about it too much— as one kid did the day before— your form goes to hell and you come away with red skin and bruised limbs on those parts of your body you forgot to keep lined up or protected on the way down.
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I shot into the water. It was bracing, but not unbearably cold. My feet touched the sandy bottom and I pushed off towards the surface where I laughed again. It had been so easy! So inconsequential! The soles of my feet were a little sore from taking the brunt of the entry, but that was nothing. I climbed back up to the ledge and jumped again before putting my swim trunks on and sitting by the ledge to listen to the river and dry out in the sun. I was proud of myself and relieved, but not triumphant. I didn’t feel changed in any way by this modest act of physical pluck.
A few minutes later, two women appeared from the trees on the far side of the pool and picked their way along the boulders to the water for a morning swim. I waved hello to them from the ledge and then jumped a third time, mostly to convince myself it hadn’t been a fluke, but also to show off my newly acquired derring-do and to have an excuse to swim over and meet them. One of the women congratulated me on the jump and we got to talking. She was a fashion designer working in the wedding dress industry and had recently moved from New Orleans to New York where she hoped to gain experience working with larger design firms before returning home to open her own boutique. She had ambition and a plan. When I asked her if she was considering jumping off the ledge herself, she replied that no, she was content where she was, but happy to watch others jump if that’s what they wanted to do. I envied her answer. We chatted for a few more minutes before I said goodbye and returned to camp to spend the rest of the day and much of the next reading a book, which was really what I’d wanted to do in the first place.
