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Falling to Fly

Ever since I was a kid I always wanted to fly. Throughout my childhood, I would climb to the top of tall trees and look out, wishing I could take wing and soar, higher and higher; to travel great distances, and see the world from afar; pristine, wild and beautiful.

As I grew, I was told repeatedly my dream wasn’t possible. Humans, as a species, are not made to fly. Sure, I could catch a plane if I wanted, but under no circumstances would I be allowed the kind of daily exhilaration and autonomy our feathered friends take for granted. Perhaps I should have accepted that ‘fact’, and gone about my business like a good little American consumer. But I couldn’t. I had to keep my dream alive.

Dreams are dangerous, however. They are both a gift and a curse. It is true our most incredible accomplishments are born of dreams, but so are our most destructive - often without anybody realizing which is which, until much later. Daydreams, night dreams, plans, plots and schemes become shelter, security, bridges, tunnels, weapons, wars, vehicles, television … you get the picture. For good or ill, it is our ability to turn dreams into reality that sets us apart from the rest of the animals that share our planet (or so I thought, but we’ll get to that later).

As I flew up into the silvery sky, I knew my dreams had led me there. I could have stayed in the States like my sister, had a family and settled on a regular nine to five. Instead, I was in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, beaten and bloody, and flying.

Time slowed as I rose. The air held me in a whispered embrace, and far below me, the unspoiled wilderness stretched into the distance; a dense canopy of rolling greens. Heavy rain had fallen throughout the night, making the lush foliage glisten. A slash of roiling whites and browns below caught my attention. The river at the bottom of the cliff beckoned, insistent, roaring its invitation to join the clatter of boulders being carried off downstream.

The two men responsible for my inaugural flight looked on impassively, their bare chests still heaving from the effort of hurling me over the cliff’s edge. I arced away from them, limbs flailing and clawing in slow motion. Split seconds passed like hours. But then gravity took over and I dropped like a stone. I had come seeking gold and adventure, and had found both. Not only that, I had also realized my lifelong ambition of flight. The downside was it looked as though it would cost me my life.

What happened next is hard to explain, or rather, it’s hard to believe. I hit the cliff face for the first time about twenty feet down, and bounced off in a spray of rocks and mud and blood. Like most cliffs in the ever-shifting landscape of the Amazon, this one wasn’t completely vertical. There were slight inclines gouged by erosion that ensured every inch of my body suffered a hefty blow as I spun, smacked and skidded down. Throughout the descent, I fought to stay conscious and alert. I knew the odds of surviving a hundred and fifty foot drop into raging rapids were minimal, but I had no intention of reducing them further by closing my eyes and giving up.

As I fell, I felt oddly calm - as if it wasn’t me plummeting to my death at all, but somebody else, someone separate from me. Instead of just focusing on the moment, my mind wandered and I found myself reliving the details of an earlier fall - from an eighty-foot Pecan tree - that I had survived as a child. I recalled the blur of wet leaves and lashing branches, and the way time had stretched (just as it was now) allowing me to see and catch the sturdier limbs that would slow and eventually break my fall. At the time I felt as if the branches were calling me, swaying to catch my attention from ten, twenty feet below.

Trees, like most plants, are spectacularly generous; they give food, shade and shelter freely and indiscriminately. I had climbed that particular tree at least half a hundred times, and looked upon it as an old friend. Afterwards, I thought maybe it had been looking out for me when I fell. Offering a helping hand to the small boy who had sought sanctuary in its dense branches so many times before. If you find that idea a little ridiculous, what happened as I hurtled down the cliff face will seem even more so. In fact, I wouldn’t believe it myself had I not lived through it. I am certain that without some kind of help, there is no way anyone could have survived that fall.

The cliff face was made up of slick crumbling earth and rock, with a liberal scattering of scratchy little trees and stunted bushes. Unfortunately, the foothold the tenacious twigs and shrubs had made on the cliff face was far too fragile to offer any help. I grabbed at them but my weight and the speed at which I was tumbling and falling were too much for their scrawny roots to bear. They ripped away in my hands like so many cobwebs.

The only other vegetation on the cliff face were tufts of coarse grass, and a sparse network of clinging vines that crept up from the thin strip of green lining the edge of the river below. After clutching at both the grasses and vines a couple of times, only to have them also fall away, I had written them off to be as useless to my plight as the shrubs. But then things changed. The vines beneath me started to move. I thought it a trick of the eye at first, and for all I know, at that stage, it could have been. Still, they appeared to gather and rise in clumps that snagged and buffeted me, first one way then the other, slowing my fall and moving me further and further to the left.

Beyond the clusters of vines, I noticed the near vertical cliff face I was careening down was about to disappear. As much as the vines had helped, the drop-off was still coming up too fast. Soon enough, I was airborne again. This fall was a big one - around sixty feet – and I knew the moment I hit solid earth again it would be game over.

Then something magical happened. A thick curl of vine whipped out from the ledge above and wound itself around my leg, yanking me back with an almighty crack. The pain in my hip joint was excruciating as I swung like a pendulum, across, and then down. About ten feet above the ground, the vine unraveled and released me. My body should have been pulp and shattered bones by now. As it was, it just hurt like hell.

This last impact knocked the wind out of me and set me bouncing and crashing down the final straight toward the river. I stole a glance at the seething rapids and was shocked to see a lone tree in my path. Thick and sturdy, it jutted at an incongruous angle six feet from the river’s edge, its lush foliage dark and streaming. I lunged toward it. My hands slapped against the smooth bark, but the rest of my body kept going. Gripping that tree took all the strength I had left, and for a moment I dangled, legs swinging above the churning water, my hands slipping and scrabbling, until, eventually, I hauled myself up onto the trunk.

I was dazed, battered and bruised. But I was alive. Not for the first time, Mother Nature seemed to have appointed herself my personal guardian angel, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. I had always loved the natural world, but as a gold prospector I’d done nothing but disturb and exploit the environments where I worked. True enough, my practices weren’t as destructive as most, but it wasn’t as if I were a good warden of the earth either.

Grateful, high on life and rushing on adrenaline, I bent and kissed the tree, then reached out and touched the nearest vine, wincing at the movement. Despite the pain, I laughed, realizing how fortunate, how blessed I was, and I vowed to somehow repay those magnificent plants for saving me.

I know that sounds crazy, but even now, years later, I feel the same way. Perhaps even more so after all I’ve discovered and achieved since then. At that moment however, I had to concentrate on getting out of the mess I was in. I may have survived the fall, but the river still roiled beneath me, and the cliff face loomed as sheer and insurmountable as a castle wall above.

In order to survive, human beings are capable of incredible feats. We have been known to lift immense weight, to hack off trapped limbs and endure the most severe hardships in order to draw breath for one more day. All I had to do was tap into that latent potential, ignore my injuries, and find a way out. Easier said than done, I know. But if I could do that, then I knew anything was possible - I might even be able to keep my unlikely promise to the plants.

However, before I tell you what happened next, I should really begin with how I came to be there in the first place….