The Inciting Incident

Three years and seven days ago, I brought forth in this content a new notion, conceived liberally, and dedicated to the proposition that, ah, man! I get a sequel!

For you see, on August 20, 2009, I slipped off a mossy precipice and hurtled nearly 30 ft into a narrow chasm as images of my death flashed before me. And then I wet myself.

Although I had yet to finish my novel (a familiar story),¹ I finally had a tale to tell. And I needed a place to tell it. Thus, one week later (three years ago today) I started this blog.

And the rest, as they say,² is history.³

I know I've been slacking in my bloggerly duties these past couple months, but as summer wanes and cool autumn breezes carry inspiration my way, I can promise you that's not going to change one bit. My son's just too dang cute.⁴ Plus, if I don't finish my novel sometime soon, I suspect Joseph Selby may shift from positive motivation to all-out threats.

Okay, fine, I'll try to slack less. After all, I love to entertain.⁵

But three years. Wow. Time sure flies when you're doing a bunch of stuff.


¹ Not familiar: the novel, with its assassination plot involving invisible monkeys. (Unless that's a thing. If that's a thing, let me know post haste.) Familiar: to this day, the book remains unfinished. I'm nothing if not consistent.
² Who is they and why are they always saying such things? You'd think by now they'd have learned to listen once in a while so they didn't repeat themselves so damn often.
³ Then again, everything that's ever happened in all of creation is history, technically speaking, so that phrase is as worthless as this simile.
⁴ He learned to walk this past Tuesday, and he does this adorable thing where he slips into the other room without the noticeable pit-pat-pit-pat he had when he crawled, and goes straight for the cat food.
⁵ The only chance I've had to entertain over the past few weeks was that time I was up on stage and valiantly saved that poor bat from the malevolent horde of shrieking 6-year-old girls. True story.

And That's When I Wet Myself

Two years ago yesterday, I survived The Great Plummet.

Which is to say, on August 20, 2009, I fell 30 ft to my death but didn't die.

Which is to say, I was hiking with my ex-fiancée Denise¹ when I plunged 26 ft 8 in into a narrow chasm, but came out nearly unscathed.

Which is to say, I slipped off a mossy precipice about 100 ft upstream from Bingham Falls (pictured above) and into a gorge barely 5 ft wide, yet only suffered two minor scrapes and bruises. Nevertheless, my death (rather than my life) flashed before my eyes during my precipitous drop.

Which is to say, amidst my one and a half seconds of freefall I pictured myself dying in two and a half ways — cracking my head against the cavern wall opposite, breaking my neck as I landed, and shattering my legs and back to end up paralyzed.²

And that's when I wet myself.

Which is to say, I splashed down (much unlike a space shuttle) into water far deeper than I'd expected. I returned to the surface, but my poor, poor D took in too much water, and she drowned.

Which is to say, my Nikon D60 succumbed to the elements.³ I then swam 60 ft one-handed (my other hand heroically — and fruitlessly — trying to prolong the life of my camera) and climbed out of the gorge the only way possible: by hauling myself out, hand over hand, along the husk of a dead tree.

Which is to say, I climbed out of the gorge the only way possible: by hauling myself out, hand over hand, along the husk of a dead tree. After we celebrated my continued living at the nearby Ben & Jerry's factory, I knew I had to share the story of my amazing survival with the world.

Which is to say, one week later I started this blog.

And the rest is history.


¹ She prefers I call her "my wife," but where's the fun in that?
² No, I'm not trying to imply that losing the use of my legs is akin to dying. Yet, I would die a little inside, knowing I'd never again have the chance to run a marathon (never mind that I've never run more than 8 miles in one clip) or reign over the volleyball court as the "Lord O' Leaping" (never mind that I haven't played in over a year) or accidentally slip off a mossy precipice to my almost certain doom (never mind).
³ Or rather, it succumbed to one element. Then again, that one element is made up of two elements, so perhaps I was right right from the start.

Fallin' 2: Electric Boogaloo

One year ago today, I fell 30 feet to my death but didn't die. If you're unfamiliar with the details of The Great Plummet, go back and read about it in my inaugural blog post. It's okay, I'll wait.

All caught up now? Wonderful.

Earlier this week, I returned to the scene of the climb, and against Denise's wishes I went alone.¹ I planned to take photographs and more precise measurements of the spot. Yet, as I peered down into the gorge from the once-mossy precipice, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of vertigo. No, wait—not vertigo. What's the word... joy. I was overcome with an immense feeling of joy. As I pictured my rapid descent and miraculous survival in my mind's eye,² I openly wept.

Then, I began the document process. As I've already hinted, the mossy precipice was no longer mossy. It was, however, even more precipitous than I remembered it being. Honestly, what was I thinking getting so close to the edge?³ Likewise, my escape route was much, much steeper than I recalled, and I have no idea how I made it out of the gorge without slipping back in once or twice.

I pulled out a ball of twine, and lowered a small weight into the gorge until it hit water. By measuring the string, I learned that I'd only plummeted 26 ft 8 in (not 30 ft, as previously estimated). Thus, I had only been in freefall for 1.3 seconds (not 1.4 s), and hit the water going 28 mph (not 30 mph). I also noticed that the gap I fell through is about 5 ft wide (not 3 ft). Clearly, these findings knock my survival down a notch in terms of miraculousness. But I'm not complaining.

Computer issues prevent me from sharing most of my photos until I return home from my vacation, but I'll leave you with one. Unlike last year, when my camera and lenses succumbed to a watery death before I reached the base of Bingham Falls, this year I was able to take some shots of the main attraction. I managed a few pics at varying shutter speeds before dozens of high schoolers in bathing suits descended upon the falls. This was only the first wave (click to embiggen):

A far, far better place to plummet than where I did.

Perched on a rocky ledge by the falls, I put my camera back in its bag and then, within seconds, I no longer had solid ground beneath my feet.

The water was cold, crisp, and invigorating. Submerged in that cold mountain stream, I felt an exhilaration I'd only experienced once before. This time, however, my camera was safely tucked away back on the ledge, and I had jumped, not fallen.

I was exactly where I wanted to be.


¹ After all, she's not the boss of me. Not for another couple weeks.
² My mind doesn't actually have an eye. It's an expression, people.
³ For the record, I believe it was: "Ooooh, waterfall. Preeeetty."

I've Had a Few

Regrets? Mine have always come with a silver lining. Yes, I wish I’d spent a semester studying abroad in college, but if I had, I’d never have taken the Advanced Drawing course that led to, among other things, my excruciatingly detailed life-size self portrait.¹ I rue the day I broke my hand, but by being forced to take the bus to D.C. rather than drive, I made a good friend out of the deal. Even my brief encounter with the mossy precipice back in August netted me a camera upgrade and this fancy new blog.

However, my latest regret, which I have been lamenting these past few months, will likely never have a moment of redemption. In mid-2007, my company’s stock price peaked at over $100. Then, with the company linked financially to every big-name firm that went belly-up during the 2008 crash, the stock dropped precipitously throughout the year, bottoming out below $3.50 on March 6, 2009. I had a chunk of money set aside that I planned to invest in something, and I knew I should jump at it, but I just couldn’t get myself to pull the trigger. I’d already talked myself out of buying at $29 and $19 and $9. What if it dropped further? What if the company imploded and I was left with nothing?

In retrospect I clearly should have taken the chance, but as they say, hindsight is always a show on CBS with Andy Rooney. Today, our stock sits back up at $29 and continues to inch higher. If I’d made the plunge back in March, I’d have already octupled my money. Octupled. I could kick myself for being so stupid. And it’s not just about the money. By hesitating on that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I’ve probably also ruined any chance of retiring when I had originally planned.²

Obviously, money isn’t everything. I’ve got great friends and family, a decent job, my health, and I haven’t nearly plummeted to my doom in over a month. Nevertheless, if I’m ever going to become a multi-bazillionaire, I suppose I’m really going to have to finish writing that novel. I’d be working on it right now, except…

Octupled?! Stupid, stupid, stupid!


¹ In it, I’m holding a rubber chicken.
² Next Tuesday.

The Camera is Dead. Long Live the Camera!

 

Nikon D60
December 6, 2008 – August 20, 2009

Here lies my departed D60.
I’d hoped the repair shop might fix thee.
It could have been nice
Had I known to use rice,
But I didn’t.

So, yeah, the camera’s toast.¹ Unlike yours truly, it did not survive The Great Plummet of ‘09. The repair place said that if I’d placed it into a box filled with white rice right away, that might have been able to draw the water out, but even then it would’ve been a dicey proposition. By the time the repair shop got hold of them, the body of the camera showed corrosion, and the lenses had extensive water damage. Which was pretty much what I’d been expecting.

But do not despair, for when I learned of my camera’s fate a week and a half ago, I began seeking out a suitable successor. The D60 was nice, but this time I decided to up the ante. I stuck with Nikon, moving up to the D90, and getting one standard zoom lens (16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-S DX ED VR), one tele-zoom lens (70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S VR), and a fixed lens for low-light shots (50mm f/1.8D AF). I realize that unless you’re a photography buff much of that last sentence is pure gibberish to you, so I’ll clarify: mm stands for millimeters.

Basically, what it means is I splurged and got myself some quality product. Not pro level stuff — I’m not made of money — but the body and two lenses are at the high end on the amateur side. I ordered through Amazon, and everything except the camera body was delivered within two days. Therefore, come Monday, barring a bloody coup, the D90 should arrive at my doorstep to begin its reign.

In the meantime, let us take a moment remember my old, washed-up D60. Eventually I’ll get around to posting photos on Flickr, but for now, I leave you with a few sample shots taken during the previous regime:

¹ Not literally. But you already knew that. This footnote is really nothing but a waste of your time.

A Tough Act to Follow

As proud as I am of my initial post — particularly that part about how I didn’t die — it begs the question: What do I do for an encore? After all, I did set the bar a bit high.

Short of finding that second gunman on the grassy knoll, or perhaps wrastlin’ a bear to death with one hand tied behind my back, there’s no way I can match the emotional impact of that first entry. And now that I have a new lease on life,¹ I’m not about to go throw myself off another cliff just to produce an exciting follow-up for your reading pleasure. I have no interest in tempting fate a second time, and even less interest in subjecting myself — or any of you — to a horribly contrived sequel.²

So, back to that original question… what do I do for an encore? The answer is deceptively simple:

I lower your expectations.

If you don’t expect me to run with the bulls in Pamplona, you’ll be amused, rather than disappointed, when I prance with the kittens in Verona. Not that I’m going to do this, per se, but I definitely would, if given the opportunity. Wouldn’t you? (People with cat allergies are exempted from answering this question.)

So far, I only have a vague idea of what I’ll be writing about in this blog, but I don’t foresee many more posts about death by moss or hurtling into the abyss. All I know is that no matter what topic I choose to prattle on about, I shall do so with my own twisted sense of humor on full display.³ Hopefully, that’ll be enough to keep you entertained.

And if it isn’t, at least you can take solace in the fact that it’s enough to keep me entertained. And when it comes right down to it, isn’t that really all that matters? <sup>4


1</sup> No money down, $295/mo. for 36 months.
² Almost Died II: Electric Boogaloo
³ Also, footnotes.
⁴ Yes. Yes it is.

The Day I Almost Died

The water was clear, crisp, and invigorating. Submerged in that cold mountain stream, I felt an exhilaration far beyond anything I'd experienced before. However, had you asked me five seconds earlier, I’d have told you that stream was the last place on earth I wanted to be.

The date was August 20, 2009. That’s right: last Thursday. Denise and I were in Vermont for the week, and our first four days had been so unbearably humid that each one had registered higher than 10.2 on the swelterometer.¹ When Thursday came and brought us our first taste of pleasant weather for the week, we decided to celebrate with a short hike followed by a stop at the Ben & Jerry’s factory. Our only requirements for the hike were that it be picturesque and not too strenuous. We settled on Bingham Falls, near Stowe, as our destination.

Partway along the trail to the main falls, there is a clearing of flat rock that overlooks an upper portion of the falls. While Denise busied herself taking pictures of the rock formations upstream, I was perhaps ten feet away, trying to get a good shot of a six-foot-high section of the falls cascading into the gorge below. Not satisfied with the angle of my previous attempt, I thought I’d inch even closer. About a foot to my right, maybe six inches from the edge of the overhang, was a spot that looked to me as though it had been stepped on before. I cautiously tested the spot without incident, but when I shifted a little more of my weight to that leg, what had appeared to be solid rock with a thin layer of moss turned out to be nothing but a thick layer of moss. The moss slipped swiftly downward, followed by my boot, followed by me. I thrust my hand out, searching for a handhold in the rock, but there were none to be found. And down I went.

People often say that in near-death experiences your life flashes before your eyes, but the visions that stuck in my head were of my impending death. After all, I had seen how close the opposite wall of the gorge sloped towards me. And I’d seen how horribly shallow the water was just upstream. Images flashed in my mind of me slamming into the rock and caroming into the shallow pool below. I saw my back broken, my skull cracked open, my legs shattered, my life ebbing away before anyone could reach me. As I fell, I was certain that those final fleeting moments would be my last ones on this earth... or, at the very least, they’d be my last moments without me being horribly mangled. I braced for impact, knowing my life would never be the same. There was no way I would come out of this unscathed.

Only, I did.

After approximately 1.4 seconds of freefall,² my boots struck water. And as luck would have it, they kept going, down to a depth of about eight feet. By my estimation, I had fallen close to 30 feet (greater than the entire 25' height of the final falls), and had landed right about here:

Seriously. Right there.

As best I can figure, that gap between the walls of the gorge is no more than three feet wide at its narrowest point. And no, I have no idea how I survived, either.

For fun, here’s a recap of my thought process during my descent:

• (as my foot slides over the edge) Oh shit, I’m falling!
• (as the rock slips from my grasp) Oh shit, I’m dead!
• (during freefall) Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!
• (fully submerged underwater) Holy shit, I’m alive!
• (a split second later) Oh shit, my camera!

Once I returned to the surface, I lifted my Nikon D60 above my head in an attempt to minimize the damage,³ and kept myself afloat by paddling with my other hand. My camera bag, containing my zoom lens, batteries, cables, etc., remained draped over my shoulder. All were completely and utterly soaked. My sunglasses? Gone.

It's even deeper than it looks

Of course, by now Denise was frantic. Later, I learned that she’d heard me say something (presumably "Oh shit!"), followed by a very loud splash, and when she’d turned around I was gone. She anxiously called out my name a few times, but it was ten long seconds before she heard me yell back that I was okay. It was another seven or eight seconds before she looked over the right ledge and her head came into view above me.

All of the walls of the gorge were either too steep or too slippery for me to be able to climb out, or, for that matter, to even hold onto. I put my camera back into its bag and did my best to keep it aloft as I paddled one-handed. I swam through two more pools of nearly identical size before I came to a spot that, although it was still quite steep, afforded me an exit thanks to a fallen tree that extended down to the water’s edge. I heaved myself up the slope by way of the dead tree’s meager branches, then climbed further up along a winding trail until Denise had me enveloped tightly in her arms.

My escape route

My camera and lenses were probably toast, my cell phone was iffy, and my sunglasses were lost to the current, but physically, my only injuries were one scraped and bruised elbow, and one bruised and scraped wrist. I won’t call it a miracle, since I don’t want to get pope-slapped,⁴ but damn was I lucky.

"I thought I'd lost you," she said.
"So did I," I replied. We remained locked in our embrace for another twenty seconds.

Then we went and took a tour of the Ben & Jerry’s factory.



Okay, I know this is already a pretty long post – I’m new to blogging, that’s my excuse this time around – but I do have a couple more things to share.

• Not one person at the falls offered to help. No one there even asked if I was okay. As I was treading water there in that gorge, shortly after my initial plummet, two people up above the third pool just sat and watched me placidly from a distance, acting no differently than if they had been watching a movie. Similarly, some hikers heard Denise frantically calling for me; others saw us as we embraced after finally reaching each other; still others passed us on the trail without a second glance in my direction, even though both my camera and I were soaked from head to toe. In fact, only two people had any reaction at all, and that was because they were sitting nearby when we returned to photograph the spot where it happened with Denise's camera. I said to Denise, "See that spot where there's no moss? That's where I fell." At that point, even though they were sitting a good six feet from the edge, they shifted further away.
  
  
• The week since my almost death has been a very surreal one. I continue to be in awe of how close I came to not being here any more. (I've also had to resist saying, "I almost didn’t come back" when co-workers have asked, "How was your vacation?") Since that day, I have been more thankful for everything and everyone in my life. I've been filled with a renewed strength and vigor even in boring day-to-day activities. I guess it really is like that old saying: "What doesn’t kill you, may well destroy your camera."

Thanks for taking the time to read this all the way through. Unless you didn't, in which case, here's the Cliff's Notes version: I fell 30' to my death but didn't die. True story.

And remember, stay off of mossy precipices.



¹ Not an actual ometer.
² It’s physics, byatch.
³ It didn’t work.
⁴ pope-slap, v. to bestow the traditional Catholic repercussion for exaggerated religious claims. For example, if you were to go around boasting that the Broncos' last-second touchdown was a miracle, Benedict XVI would come to your house and pope-slap you.