Near Death Education
My dad once said he was surprised I lived to be twenty. Fortunately for him, he does not know half of the crazy things I did as a kid. The good side of all that dangerous experimentation was that I learned a lot of important lessons early in life.
When I was about fifteen, I decided to make a gondola between the cedar and the fir in our front yard. Each tree was around one hundred feet tall and took three kids to hug at the base. I strung a quarter-inch nylon rope about twenty feet up between the trees, which were about fifteen feet apart. I planned to use my mother’s clothesline stabilizer as the wheel and grip. Unfortunately, one of my brothers smashed it against the fir tree while I was stringing the rope between trees, so I only had half of the stabilizer to work with. The stabilizer fits over top and bottom lines of the clothesline from the side, which means that if you break the frame in half, any weight you hang from it will hang from the side, not the middle. That, of course, means that the wheel will tip—and that, as I found out when I attempted to ride from the cedar to the fir, meant a twenty-foot drop when the wheel twisted right off the rope.
I landed more or less like a cat and walked away uninjured, but wiser, too. I learned never to use broken equipment and to test any equipment closer to the ground. I have applied that lesson to other areas of life as well, because there are many way to fall. (275)