Pushed to the Edge: Part Five, The Cliff Dive

Just before the divers at La Quebrada in Acapulco take the long fall from the cliff into the surf, they kneel at a little shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe and say their prayers. It's not hard to imagine what they ask her--I used to know the prayers they know--probably, something like, "Remember, O most gracious Virgin, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy intercession or sought thy mercy was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence. I fly to thee, O virgin of Virgins, my Mother. To thee I come. Before thee I stand. Sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Ward in carnate, despise not my petitions but in thy mercy hear and answer me. Let the water be deep enough, let the current be gentle, save me from garbage on the water, from the rocks, from blindness, from death, and may the turistas drop at least ten pesos apicce into the hat before they haul their fat white bodies back onto the buses."

I watched them dive half a dozen times one day. I sat on the terrace of the hotel that overlooks the cliff with tequila and beer in front of me, telling myself I was trying to decide whether or not I would do this thing. I knew that the power of prayer wouldn't get me into the air off that rock. I've dived from heights before, but never that high, never out over rocks like those, never into a slash of water as narrow as that. Still, the only reason I was down there in the good tropical sun was to dive or to come up with an eloquent string of reasons why I hadn't. As it was, every time a Mexican dived. I was adding a because to my list of why-nots.

One of them would walk out onto the rocks and look down at the surf 180 feet below him. Then he'd kneel at the shrine, cross himself and pray. When he got up, he'd wander out of sight for a moment behind the little statue of Mary, then come back and stand for another five minutes on the edge while the tourists crowded the railings of the hotel terrace and filled the vantage points on the rocks below. Then he'd put both arms straight out in front of him, drop them to his sides, cock his legs, roll forward, and then spring with what looked like all his strength into a perfect flying arch. Foam boils up where the divers go in and the sound when they hit the water is like an old cannon going off. Then, a few seconds later, he'd be up, waving one arm and treading water against the white surge that was trying to slap him up onto the rocks.

After a couple of divers and a couple of tequilas, I was telling myself I could live through it. I'd probably get hurt real bad, but it wouldn't kill me. I could get out past those rocks, all right, then it would just be a matter of going into the water as straight and skinny and strong as I could. I figured the worst I could get would be a broken back. Or else ... or else I could sit right there on that terrace, have another shot of Cuervo, maybe six, lay back on my laurels and review the risks already taken. The worst I could get would be a hangover.

All of these things are at their best in retrospect, anyway. Hanging on an ice cliff in a storm, worrying about death, is not fun. But thinking about it later--ah, that's wonderful. You run the memory again and again in your head, and every time, you think something new into it, make up meanings for it, draw lessons out of it, spin metaphors; and if you do it right, you can make yourself cold, make your heart pound all over again, no matter where you are.

Strangely, it's the timid moments that stand out when I think about it. I know now that if I jumped over the moon and made it, I'd probably get on myself afterward for not pointing my toes. In every case, I look back and tell myself I could have done more or done it with more grace. Not that it would have changed anything if I had. Not that I can't leave the cowardly parts out of the story when I tell it to my grandchildren. Still, it's strange how closely bound up your best and worst moments are. Nothing resembles a bump as much as a hole, and nothing resembles a moment of courage as much as a moment of cowardice. There were times during these assignments when I was sure the only reason I went ahead was that my fear of being thought a coward was bigger than my fear of jumping out of an airplane, or off a ski jump, or walking on a wing.

The question I heard most over the course of these adventures was, Why? And I heard it from myself as much as I did from other people. It's a damn good question, and it deserves not to be answered too quickly. For a while, I was telling people that the reason I was doing these things was that there was no reason for them; that everybody ought to have at least one totally unreasonable project going at all times, and I believe that. But that's more a smart crack than it is an answer. Just as Edmund Hillary's famous "Because it was there" is a smart crack. A great smart crack, though.

Certainly, money was part of the reason--a big part, yes. I'd finish one stunt, and even as I sat down to write about it, I knew that when I finished I was going to have to get down out of my head and up off my ass and go do another one; and if the rent hadn't come due, if the kids hadn't needed braces, if there hadn't been a pay check waiting at the other end, I wouldn't have gone on with it. But to say that I did it entirely for the money isn't right, either. After all, there are other stories to be written, other professions, if it came down to that.

In fact, the why of these things for me probably has something to do with the nature of writing for a living. You spend so damn much time in your head that finally the muscle between your ears is the only one with any tone to it, the only one that can take any punishment or do any tricks. You get so used to working everything out the way Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas did that when you are faced with raw physical terror, you might as well be a four-year-old kid on his first trip to the zoo. To stand there face to face with something truly monstrous and hairy, something with claws as big as your fingers can't help but teach you something about your place in the natural order that you weren't going to learn any other way.

I met the animal in me on that ice climb. When it got bad up there, when I thought I might die, my mind cowered, and whimpered, and then shattered. But the animal consciousness in my flesh and bones rolled out like the hell's angel he is and did what had to be done. Separation of body and soul like that is terrible and magnificent, something you can feel, as if the mind knows it can afford to give up and go on to what-ever's next, but not the body. The body knows that if it falls off any ice cliffs, there will be no tomorrow.

That's about as close as I came to any metaphysical revelations in the run of this goat dance. And I thought that one up after the fact, while I was sitting safely in my own garden, watching the jays eat what was left of my lunch. Out there, when you have the fear on you, thoughts, all thoughts, are like Muzak in a falling elevator.

The other things I learned weren't much of a surprise: that I'll probably die saying something like "Oh, shit," that adrenaline is the most powerful drug in the entire pharmacy, that I always underestimate my limits and that all of these stunts are pale metaphor for the things in this life that are truly dangerous: Just before I did the wing walk, I married my girlfriend. The editors, how-ever, refused to count it as number four in the series.

I told them before I went down to Mexico that there was a good chance I'd walk away from this one. They said they understood, but I don't think they did. Four times they'd sent me out and four times I'd come back with the ugly beast "fear" more or less strapped to the fender, and I think I was making it look too easy.

"The thing about this dive is," I told them, "once you get off that rock, it's aerodynamics. You're a missile...."

They looked at me as if to say, "Is this the kid who climbed the ice? Who jumped the ski jump? Who pitched himself 2500 feet out of an airplane? The kid who walked the wing?"

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, I told myself.

"Oh, hell, I'll try it," is what I told them. In a way, they seemed pleased. I think maybe they were getting tired of all this thrill-of-victory stuff and wanted to see what I could do with a little agony-of-defeat writing.

Before I left, while I was packing my suitcase, I tried to promise myself that I wasn't going to dive, no matter what, wouldn't even consider it, wouldn't agonize over it, either. Four big-fright gravity games in 12 months is enough. You make no apologies after a run like that, and you don't sit around and torture yourself about the one that beat you completely. But then ... there I was, watching the Mexicans do it, telling myself I could probably live through it to write the story. Something in me wanted to do it. Wouldn't this one make their eyes bug out and their blood run cold? I thought.

One of the divers came around to collect 50 cents. I gave him a dollar and when he said that was too much, I told him no, it wasn't. His name was Fidel and he had a broad face and a paunch that hung out over his tight red trunks. He looked about 40 years old. I asked him what kind of injuries the clavadistas got when they didn't hit the water right. Broken bones, he told me, when the arms sometimes collapse into the head on impact. And the eyes, he said, if you break the water eyes first instead of with the top of your head, you go blind. But they have an association, he said, and the 26 divers in it have a fund, so that if one of them is hurt or killed, his family is taken care of. I didn't ask him if there was a fund for half-wit gringos with a history of foolish moments and a little too much sauce in them. There are no funds for people like that, people like me. Just simple services when the time comes.

Fidel moved off through the crowd, looking for more peso notes, and pretty (concluded on page 190)Cliff Dive (continued from page 174) much left me thinking there was no way in hell I was going to make that dive. The idea that I'd probably survive the plunge didn't mean nearly as much after he told me about the arms snapping over the head on entry. Somehow, I could hear that one. Even from 40 or 45 feet, which is the highest I've ever dived, you hit the water hard enough to make a moron out of yourself if you do it wrong. It hurts even when you do it right.

Finally, that afternoon, I figured out exactly what that cliff was to me. It wasn't a test of guts, or coordination, or strength, or Zen oneness with this imaginary existence. It was an intelligence test, the most fundamental kind of intelligence test: If you're intelligent, you don't take the test. Still, to sit there and think it through was one thing. I knew I had to let the animal make the final decision; take the meat up there onto that rock and let it look down the throat of this thing, let it feel the edge. There'd be no more maybes after that.

You actually have to climb down the rocks from the hotel to the spot from which they dive. On my way, I kept waiting for someone to stop me, tell me it was divers only out there, but no one did and there were no warning signs. I jumped a low stone wall and crept down some rock steps overhung with trees that made it feel like a tunnel out the end of which I could see the backside of the little shrine. It was cement, painted silver, and behind it, stacked like cord-wood--as if to say that even among religious people liquor takes up where prayer leaves off--were two dozen empty tequila bottles. Two steps beyond that and I was out from under the green overhead and on the small flat pad from which they do it, and the scene opened before me: to my left, the hotel. I could see people tapping each other and pointing at me, as if to say, "Here goes another one, Edith." To my right, the flat blue Pacific stretched out to a sharp tropical horizon, and then turned into sky. I stepped up and hung my toes over the edge, and then looked down at the rocks below me, then at the rocks on the other side, then at the skinny finger of water between them, rising and falling, foaming in and out. There were Styrofoam cups on the tide, pieces of cardboard and other trash I couldn't make out. I remembered my mother, who was a champion swimmer in the Thirties, telling me about a woman high diver who'd gone off a 100-foot tower in Atlantic City and hit an orange peel on the water. She lived, but the image of their hauling her limp from the water has stayed with me, and it was never more vivid than at that moment at La Quebrada. Looking down from that cliff, your perspective is so hopelessly distorted it seems that, to miss the rocks on your side of the channel, you'd have to throw yourself onto the rocks on the other side. I tried to imagine myself through it. Get steady, feet together, arms down, roll, push, arch ... but I couldn't take the fantasy any further than that. "No," I said out loud. "Just turn around and say goodbye to the Lady, Craig."

A couple of hours later, I'd found some of that blond reefer they're so proud of in Acapulco, and the defeat of the thing didn't seem very profound at all. If I'd kept drinking tequila, I just might have gone screaming off that cliff. Tequila, after all, talks to the animal in you and he thinks he can do anything when he's drunk. But marijuana, sweet marijuana, gets you in touch with the vegetable you are--and what does a head of lettuce care about victory?

And, Jesus, you gotta stop somewhere.

"I stepped up and hung my toes over the edge, and then looked down at the rocks below me."