Whatcha gonna do, mister?
I once swam in the Olympic pool in Montreal. Cynde and I were vacationing in Canada. We thought that taking a dip in the official pool of the 1976 Olympics would be pretty swell. This was a long time ago. We were maybe twenty-four years old.
As pools go, this one was quite nice. I’m not really an aficionado of swimming as a sport, but the Montreal pool seemed to have everything one would need to host a world-class swim meet. It was filled with water. It was long. It had those floating strings to separate the lanes and keep you from veering off and bumping into the ladies doing their water aerobics. It had a clock on the wall that kept time to the fraction of a second. There were even bleachers where people could sit and watch, strategically set back so the folks in the front row wouldn’t get splashed.
No, really, the Olympic pool in Montreal is quite impressive. One of the things that catches your eye from the moment you enter the enormous facility is the diving platform that stands tall and imposing on the far end of the pool. After swimming a few laps (well, maybe one lap for me), we were floating around in the shallow end of the pool and looking over at the diving platform. There were some kids jumping off the middle level, five meters. They seemed to be having a blast. I remember saying something like, “Gee, I wonder what it would feel like to jump off that thing.” Cynde replied with some gentle coaxing. “Why don’t you go find out.”
I have always had a pretty serious fear of heights. It was a joke for Cynde to even suggest that I go jump off a five meter platform. Five meters isn’t that tall. When you have a fear of heights, it’s not so much the height, but the very idea of falling. Have you ever woken up from a dream in a breathless panic, clutching at your bed, at the moment your brain has tricked you into believing that you are about to fall off a cliff? I have those dreams all the time. There is never any feel of distance, just that I am about to take the fall.
I decided that I would at least walk over to the diving well and check it out. No harm in that, right? Standing next to the platform, I watched a couple of kids jump off and splash into the water. They hooted and hollered as they flew through the air. Then they pulled themselves out of the water, smiling and clamoring back up the steps for more. The idea of jumping off the platform suddenly didn’t seem so scary to me. I decided to climb the stairs for myself and have a look. I could just check it out and walk back down if I wanted.
I got a little lightheaded just walking up the stairs. Again, not from the height, just the idea that I might do it, that I might actually jump off this thing. I reached the platform and walked out to the edge. What I remember most is the rigidity of the slab beneath my feet. It is solid and supportive right up to the very knife edge where it gives way to freefall. I walked out to that edge and dangled my toes over the side. I looked all around the pool but avoided looking straight down. I caught Cynde’s eyes in the water across the pool. She was waving me in. Then I looked down. Nope. Not going to do it.
It was a good try, progress for me to even have gotten that far. I turned to walk back down the steps. There was a little boy blocking my egress. He couldn’t have been more than about seven or eight. Skinny and shivering, he had been patiently waiting his turn while I stood on the edge undecided. He saw that I had turned to go back down, but he didn’t budge. He looked at me quizzically. It was a look that said, “Whatcha gonna do, mister?”
What was I going to do? Walk past this little boy and live with the humiliation for the rest of my life? There was no way I could do that. I was trapped. I made a decision that would change my course in life. I turned, and without thinking about it for another second, jumped. I don’t remember much about the actual fall – whether I yelled, whether I was scared, whether I flapped my arms like a chicken. It was over in about three seconds. All I know is that I did it.
Since that time, I have gone on to face much bigger and scarier height challenges. In my lengthy geology career, I have walked on pencil thin glacial moraines, where one wrong step could send me falling to serious injury or death hundreds of feet below. I have flown in helicopters over bottomless glacial crevasses and active volcanic craters. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t gotten over my fear of heights. I have just learned to manage it. I still get scared when I strap myself into a thin-skinned Bell helicopter. I still get short of breath walking along the edge of the plunging cliffs formed by the eruptive ejecta of Haleakala volcano on Maui. But I do it. I am no longer a prisoner to my fear.
The thing is, each and every time I am put in a potentially dangerous situation involving heights I think about that little boy at the Olympic pool in Montreal. I can’t help it. He just appears in my head. And I hear those words: Whatcha gonna do, mister?
9:42:21 AM  Stories
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