Yesterday, my husband and I loaded the Smokin' Pirate and the Princess into the car and headed to an outdoor high ropes course. This might be the absolute last place that you would expect to find my husband given his overwhelming fear of heights, but my husband has never been someone who runs away from his fears. Instead, he charges forward and confronts them. In fact, I'm sort of surprised that he still feels apprehension about anything.
I still vividly remember being seven months pregnant with the Pirate and listening to a surreal conversation unfold between my husband and our life insurance agent. The agent went through a battery of questions designed to suss out people who would be a poor risk for the insurance company because of their propensity to engage in irrational, dangerous acts. Needless to say, I was not particularly comforted when my spouse, the man with whom I soon would be raising a child, started rattling off affirmative answers to all of these questions. Cliff jumping? Done that. Sky diving? You betcha. As my husband marched further and further into the territory of the uninsurable, the agent stopped him, looked him in the eye, and said: "You need to promise me that now that you are having a child, you are not going to do these things anymore. No more sky diving." For the past ten years, my husband has kept his word and avoided all high risk activities . . . until yesterday.
After piling out of our car, we headed to a little log cabin and squeezed into harnesses and hard hats. Somehow the staff at the facility did not look nearly as uncool as we did in all this inelegant safety paraphernalia. Accepting the fact that I was going to look like a frumpy miner for the next couple of hours, I ambled out onto the course with my family.
We started our adventure by scrambling up a net to a wooden platform high above the ground that was swaying in the wind. After attaching our harnesses to the thick metal wires that were strung between the wooden platforms, we transversed a half-built suspension bridge and arrived at another platform. Our instructor hooked the kids up to 450 foot dual zip lines and told them to just step off into the air. The kids made it look incredibly easy. Of course, in the blissfully sheltered lives of the Pirate and the Princess, bad things do not ordinarily happen; they have not lived long enough to be inundated with stories of unfortunate accidents and negligent mistakes. After the Pirate and Princess were safely on the ground, it was time for my husband and I to huddle at the edge of the platform and then step off into thin air. We hesitated just long enough for our minds to race through several unsettling possibilities and then . . . we did it. We stepped off and zipped down the wires with neutrino-like speed. Suddenly, a wave of pure exhilaration swept over me and I was hooked. I came to a grinding halt in the gravel at the bottom of the line, searching for the instructor and the next challenge.
Over the course of the next two hours, we climbed telephone polls, stood at the top, and leaped into the air. We were pulled high above the ground by a system of pulleys and were left dangling by our harnesses until we pulled a cord and became a giant human pendulum, swinging rapidly through the forest. We wobbled across wires working as a team to keep everyone off the pine-needled floor. We skittered up rock-climbing walls and balanced on logs that were suspended twenty feet above the ground. We were awash in the pleasure of trying something new and facing down our fears. My husband and I were flooded with parental pride as we watched our daughter calm herself down and jump from the top of a telephone pole. We were revitalized as we watched our son fly through the air screaming and laughing.
At the end of the day, we hobbled back to our house and collapsed. While we were exhausted from our repeated displays of courage, we were also invigorated by our bravery. We were left wondering what our next challenge will be. Sky diving? Probably not. But these four newly minted adrenaline junkies may just hunt down another zip line adventure next weekend.
