HUMOR

Every Time A Kid Doesn’t Die

He gets to try again

by author

The summer I aged out of my parents’ health insurance was the summer my friends and I discovered cliff jumping.

On the Saco River in Buxton, Maine, there’s a section called Salmon Falls where steep banks and cliffs line the river, and the trees are dressed in so many rope swings (such pretty tassels) they look like a gathering of cowboy pimps.

We went as often as we could, using the ropes, slopes, and cliffs to fly.

One time, I lifted weights hard before going to the falls and found out I’d used up all my upper body strength and had none left over for rope swinging.

I discovered this in the middle of swinging on a rope.

I grabbed the rope, swung out, my arms immediately betrayed me, snapping straight, then my hands let go, and I had no choice but to fall.

So, I fell.

I barely cleared the cliff. My path to the river achieved a slight angle, thankfully, the exact angle of that particular cliff, making my path a path only a few inches away from the rocks all the way down, so close and tight to the cliff that if I was an outfit the cliff was wearing, I’d be leaving nothing to the imagination.

My head missed ten to fifteen death opportunities by mere inches, each one making my mother feel a goose walk over her womb.

I hit the water, which was moving. How rivers work. And it was cold down deep. How water works. Down in the moving deep and cold, I thought, I wonder how close I just got to death.

When I surfaced, I found out. My friends on the cliff top shouted, “Hey, Dan!”

“What?”

“You should be dead!”

“I should?”

“Yes!” they said, laughing.

We all laughed. Of course we did. Death is the punchline of youth’s greatest joke.

Yes, our merriment was based on death, but it was also rooted in my lack of insurance. Irony: I was the most ironic lead character in our comedy. After all, I’d started taking the biggest risks of my life the moment I couldn’t afford to, as if I’d been saving up big risks, waiting and…