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by Mike HillYou had been climbing before, you’ve gone every summer with your dad. It was no big deal to take a short cut when your buddies went on a hike. But now you are at the top of a sheer fifty foot cliff standing on a platform the size of plastic food tray. The last ten feet are at a slight angle but unfortunately it has no hand or foot holds and it’s just steep enough that you can’t shimmy up. Well this is great. You are definitely stuck. You peek over the edge and it’s starting to set in. You instantly get a light headed feeling. The warm sun on your back becomes a burning sensation that seems unbearable, sweat beads slowly roll down your brow. Just breath.
Your Friends all stuck to the trail and finally caught up to you. They are pissed and all instantly sober. Your best friends Conlyn, Gregg, and Derrick get there first. They lean over the edge and can barely see you. They want to know what the hell you were thinking. But you know that thinking has nothing to do with it. You can’t get hurt. This kind of thing is just what you do.
Anyway, after a considerable amount of time spent arguing and demanding to them that for you to try and go back down without ropes would be suicide you hatch a plan. Derrick, the lightest, will hold on to Conlyn’s belt with one hand and Matt’s hand with the other. Then Matt will be held onto by Eric and Eric, Gregg then Conlyn. They lean Derrick over the edge, you can see the whites of his eyes grow three fold when he looks over the edge. You tell him to focus and he makes eye contact, the look that you two give each other gives you both a shiver down your spine. If he slips or looses grip you are dead and if this crazy idea actually works he just saved your life. You grab the end of the belt. Your heart is racing, you can feel it pulsing in your throat. You pull yourself halfway up the ledge, instinctively you move your arm forward to pull yourself the rest of the way up. But the guys don’t pull the slack out and you are starting to slowly slide down. You scream “PULL!” and flatten your body to the rock hopping it will stop you. They react in a tenth of a second but by way too much, the belt rips out of your hand and you slide down the rock. Your focal point shrinks, everything around you is black and all you can see is the waving tip of the black belt. Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes, in fact nothing does really. You see an image of red rocks around you. You can smell dry dirt and your mouth is dry…
You are all in a rental van towing the Jet Ski to the camp site. It’s a long drive from California to Utah. Of course you are driving, like always, after all driving is what you do. It’s fun though, Derrick just mooned a tour bus full of retired people vacationing in warmer climates so their joints don’t hurt. Then you slowed down so they could pass you again just to embarrass the hell out of him. It worked. We finally got to the docks early the next morning. Unloading the van and trailer took what felt like forever. We eventually got all the food, beer, supplies, clothes and beer onto the boat and into some kind of storage system. Eric topped off the tanks and set sail. As soon as you got out onto the lake you cut the motors and jumped right in. Everyone was having a great time. Your girlfriend looked fantastic in the new swimsuit you got her for the trip and you could hardly wait to help her take it off. It is starting to get late and the girls went inside to start dinner. Everyone had already agreed that the boys would cook breakfast and the girls dinner, for lunch you were all on your own. Pasta tonight, a delicious creamy alfredo with grilled chicken and salad. You could smell the cooking, the gas from the grill, the garlic and the onion make your mouth water. After dinner the rest of the guys help with the dishes while the girls go upstairs to sunbath and set up the bedrooms. You get around to driving the boat in search of a decent place to anchor down for.
The rest of the days go by in a blur. The sun wakes everyone up at around 5:30 or 6:00 every morning but nobody minds. There is plenty of time to catch up on sleep later. Besides it’s very refreshing to watch the sun rise; helps with hangovers. One of these days happens to be Derrick’s 18 Birthday and he starts drinking with his Captain friend Morgan at 8 in the morning. He’s passed out by noon. There is no cell signal so you haven’t even bothered to check in with anyone in the outside world for a few days at least. It is the most free and relaxing feeling you have ever had. Most of the daytime is spent swimming or drinking, or swimming and drinking, or wakeboarding, fishing, tubing, hiking, and relaxing, whatever you want to do really. The same for the nights, playing drinking games with your friends and disappearing for hours at a time with your girlfriend. It really is the life. There is a constant smell of fresh clean air, sunscreen and cold beer. Fourth of July roles around and you set off bottle rockets. One falls over and comes right at you, blows up 5 feet from you and you go def for about half an hour but the expression you had on your face was a joke for the next few days.
Eventually it gets to be the last day of the trip. You can’t believe it went by so fast, but you are all packed up and ready to turn the ship back in tomorrow. After dinner the girls go have their last bonding time and you and the boys decide to take one last hike. You take a few beers and some cigars you brought just for this occasion with you hoping to get to the top of the red rock canyons and see the sunset one more time. Halfway up the hike you notice a perfect little crack in the side of the canyon that you can climb. It looks like it goes all the way up and would be a great shortcut to beat the guys up there. You’re a pretty good climber you can easily handle it…
This is the exact moment when you realize you should not have taken that stupid shortcut. You are slowly sliding down the last few feet of the top of the cliff and can feel your body loosing contact with the red rock. You spread your arms and try to get even lower but all you can feel is the rock scraping off the top layers of your flesh. Then you are weightless, you let out the loudest yell you can and make eye contact with your best friends up on the cliff. They are white and frozen. You lose sight of them as you fall a little more. Then you close your eyes and it all goes black.
You aren’t sure what has happened. You don’t feel weightless but you don’t feel grounded either. You’re not in pain that’s for sure. Out of nowhere you feel the red food tray under your feet again and decide to open your eyes. That’s when you see the cliff right in front of you. You landed back on the tiny platform. You stand there paralyzed and then realize what just happened. You can’t help but start laughing hysterically. You feel the sun and the wind again, you can feel the sting of the scrapes you just got and it hurts but it’s fantastic. You can taste dirt and it isn’t good but you love it. The guys all look over and you can tell they are stunned. They can’t believe their eyes. You can tell that Gregg was crying. He thought he killed his best friend. You still can’t stop laughing and you need to do the whole thing over again to try and get out but you don’t care. This is the best feeling you have ever had in your life. Better than the best gift you ever got or the fastest speed you ever reached. It is even better than the incredible amount of sex you had with your girlfriend over the last week. Then they tell you to shut up because they still have to do that once more and make it work this time or they will all have to get your name tattooed on their ass for killing you. You laugh more and agree that you should all get going. This time you tie the belt around your hand and they slowly pull you up. Once they pull you twenty feet away from the cliff, A bit much but they don’t want to take any more chances, you all just sit in silence. After a while Derrick says something about no more Cliff Hanger stunts and we decide to go back to the boat without finishing the hike.
You tell the story to the girls. Sure enough they get all mad at us for being so stupid. Oh well, it was worth it. on the drive back everyone is taking things a little different. Your not going back to California with the rest of them, they are dropping you off at the Las Vegas Airport. You have to catch a flight to New York and meet up with the new race team. It is a long goodbye to everyone. Your girlfriend can’t stop crying and you don’t know how to say goodbye to your best friends who just saved your life a day ago. Eventually you get it all out and watch them drive off. Then you go sit in a terminal somewhere and you watch all the people going places and doing things. Then you start thinking about how every boring second keeps going by and you can’t stop them or get them back. And you realize that the greatest fear you have is wasting one of those seconds, because you can never get them back.