I Jumped Off A Cliff

And it wasn’t even a metaphorical cliff, well, I could squeeze some metaphors out of the experience if I really tried.

Anywho, on to the story: last Saturday marked two weeks since my longboarding accident. On Saturday I was feeling pretty good about my healing wounds. It had been a week since I could walk normally with weight on both legs and I was down to minimal bandaging. Saturday night my roommate Robin asked me if I wanted to go boating with her friends’ family the next day after church. I was hesitant because I knew I couldn’t do anything with my crippled knees and a slightly tweaked left hand, and I also didn’t want to be “that girl” that held everyone back. After some coaxing, Robin convinced me it’d be fine and before I knew it Sunday afternoon rolled around and I was in a Safeway bathroom out in the tiny town of Sweet Home changing into my bathing suit gearing up for an unknown adventure. I had my swim gear on, a towel in hand, and sunscreen lathered on my pasty white flesh, but I was still under the impression that I could get by with just sunbathing on the shore with only my toes dangling in the water. Before I had much of a chance to ponder getting my toes wet, we pulled up next to a bridge that ran over the Santiam River. One of the two guys in the car asked if we were going to jump off the bridge. I thought that guy was nuts for even toying with the idea. The other guy, and leader of the current adventure, said it was technically illegal, so we were going to jump off the rocks/cliff face next to the bridge instead. WHAT. At this point I realized I wasn’t traveling with your average river loungers, but rather I’d gotten tangled up with some thrill seekers. And the worst part was the guy wasn’t even kidding.

We parked the car, ditched our belongings, and approached a rock edge that looked down over the heavy flowing Santiam River. As the five of us stood gathered on what can only be described as a cliff in my mind, the tiny people floating & boating below looked up at us like “are those idiots really going to jump?” We became the spectacle of the river to the small handful of a crowd below. I so desperately wanted to be part of that crowd rather than my own elevated one. Somewhere during that thought process of taking in the ant-like people below, the first guy of our group leapt off the rock. We watched him sail into the water, swim to the other side, and emerge to say, “it’s a little colder than I thought,” as he held his shivering body. After that, the other guy/leader of the crazy pack took a running start to cannonball into the icy waters. Just us three girls were left on the cliff, but before I knew it my roommate Robin—despite claiming she could never take the leap and would have to find another way down the steep grade of the river walls—ran off the rock and plummeted into the river like a champ. I looked at the other girl left atop the cliff, then over the edge of a cliff higher than any high dive I’ve ever been on, then down at my bum knees, and said I didn’t think I could do it. There was no way I could go from two weeks of being couch-ridden and taking such ginger care of my knees to all of a sudden leaping off a cliff and swimming against the currents of a freezing river. But then it occurred to me that this was a real, true life experience. I can only use my knees as an excuse for so long before the scars fade and then I’m just a healthy wimp. So I went for it. I screamed from the moment my legs started running all the way down to the second before I plunked into the river. But you know what? It felt incredible. Even as I was screaming bloody murder (and flailing my legs uncontrollably, as I was later told by all others in my party) I thought I’d never felt so free. I fell for about five solid minutes, or so it seemed, and as I sunk into the depths of the biting water I beamed with joy. When I reemerged on the surface I wanted to belt at the top of my lungs “I’M ALIVE!” but I resisted because I thought the audience surrounding me might think I’d been in actual life-threatening danger at some point. As I backstroked my way to the shallow shore I realized I’d been bending my knee to swim—something I hadn’t done since my longboarding fall. When I got out of the water, my right knee was dripping blood because all the bending had caused the thin layer of skin masking as a scab to split open. But I didn’t care. I’d jumped off a cliff. Score. And I’d bent my knee. Double score.

All this crazy cliff jumping and knee bending made me realize I’m capable of more than I give myself credit for. There’s a chance I’ve been able to bend my knee all along, but I never would have known for sure unless I jumped off that cliff and had to swim. I shall apply this newfound knowledge to my unemployed life. I hereby declare to start putting myself out there more and to take a leap into the “real world” (hey, there’s that metaphor I said I’d squeeze in).