Free Hanging Rappel
February 14, 2018
My rope is spinning me out of control. 300 feet below my legs, the rocky jungle floor is a circling blur of green, brown, and gray.
It's supposed to be able to stop the rope whizzing me down with my hands. One hand under me on the rope, one in front of me, holding the rope above the waist. That's what the leather gloves are for.
Friction. Momentum. Gravity. Emotion.
It's meant to be a slow (!), harness-seated, 360-degree immersive view of the vast B'omb'il P'ek cave floor outside of Coban, Guatemala.
B’omb’il P’ek is Q’eqchi for “painted cave”. It's a sinkhole, a collapsed giant cave, the entry, some say, to the Mayan underworld with hidden linkups to the vast Candelaria cave system that stretches continuously for 18 miles.
I can't stop the rope with my hands. Sensory input inundates my mind's eye in the first five seconds flashing by.
— that you volunteered to go first, that this is your first time rappelling, the first time in this jungle —
— The jagged cliff wall —
— just under the ledge —
— falls away —
— vast —
— open —
— s p a c e —
why
February 14, 2017
[Fragment of the new international teacher employee handbook I received via email after signing the contract to live and work the school year 2018–2019 at the American School of Guatemala in Guatemala City, a place I'd never been:]
I wasn't a family of four.
I was an American ex-pat in her 40's coming off of a two-year teaching stint in South Korea.
I was, now, exactly one year later, in the middle of a protracted long-distance breakup that took place over three continents and three years. The climax of the breakup — Kurt had flown in from Colorado — came on this trip, four days after this free-hanging rappel.
And it was my doing. I'm the one who left to teach overseas on two different continents.
We were a group of five on this journey, three of us educators at CAG.
Deidra: quietly bold, spontaneous yet mellow.
Gabriela: pragmatic, empathetic, witty, strong.
Romeo: humorous, welcoming, with a photographer's eye.
Gaby and Romeo knew their home country of Guatemala well. They had logged the adventures and travel know-how that allowed this trip to happen.
Kurt: intrepid, intelligent. "I let myself get relationship lazy" and "I thought you were the one" and "I'm done" were statements that rang in my mind from this time.
Me: good at the wrong things. I'll go first off a cliff but be the last to arrive at school.
This morning, on the walk through mountainous terrain, a cornfield, the tall, lush jungle, Kurt and I were uncomfortable with each other.
I didn't want us to be the last two people standing on the ledge, martyring about passive-aggressively.
It's one thing to volunteer to go first.
It's another thing to feel the coolly sinuous coils of fear slide down through intestines, wrapping around in the empty spaces, once the realization dawns that to go first means exactly that.
I had to turn my back to the drop below to start the descent, stepping backward slowly as I faced our group. I held onto the rope before me, listening to the guides' encouraging sounds (many in Q'eqchi, some in Spanish). They had done this drop many times were confident we all could.
The force of pushing away as the jagged cliff overhang gave way to nothing but the air around me, above me, below me, knocked me sideways. Elegance? Not here, my friend. Vertigo hath entered the chat.
I spun sideways.
"Stop. Stop." I sputtered, but in that nonexistent voice, we have in our nightmares.
The two guides below, far, far below, who I couldn't see but who had promised they would be holding the ropes to slow us in case we descended too fast, wouldn't have been able to hear me anyway. I didn't know if I could listen to them shouting up.
A few seconds later, arms muscles burning with the effort to slow myself, sweat pouring into my right eye at an odd angle, I managed to let out a strangled cry that echoed down the massive jungle sinkhole. And two seconds later, I felt a reassuring counter tug to my fall.
I don't know what velocity my lunch would have hit the ground from that height. But, I did know how fickle the illusion of control is, and the beads of sweat rolling in my eye became short tears rolling out.
And then I shakily finished the descent.
February 14, 2022
Suddenly overcome by vertigo today, as I type this, flooded again with memories, I push the laptop off my lap, curling up into a ball and closing my eyes on the red couch in the rented falling-down house on the street in the Houston Heights, near the long bayou that coolly, sinuously, winds its way into downtown.
Later today, I have an aerial class, a laborious, vertigo-inducing voluntary exercise I chose to accompany my new path this year as a Texas A&M University Performance Studies graduate student.
It's another identity-bending flip.
This time I'm learning how to climb UP the ropes.
