Edges
Standing here next to death. Inches away from another existence. What if I...? How fast would it be?
STOP! What is that morbid slice of psyche inside me posing these questions? Does everyone have these thoughts or am I the dark dreamer? I remember taking a shortcut with my father, walking the train tracks all the way to downtown to pick up our car from the dealership. Imagine, dealerships in a downtown area, no shopping malls yet. The strip mall is a big draw at this time, but the downtown was in tact and people went there to run errands. We were a one-car family, so that meant walking home after dropping the car and walking back to pick it up. We played a game called ‘What if’. My father used natural disasters, I thought of what would happen if I were struck by a train. The oldest memory I have is standing on a curb, holding Mom’s hand, imagining what would happen if I stepped off in front of some large vehicle.
Skip forward 15-20 years and I am holding safety next to an undercut rock (George’s) on Wilson Creek. I felt a rush of mortality thinking what lay next to me. If a paddler came out of their boat here and didn’t grab my rescue line, they would be trapped beneath the rock in a pocket of churning aquatic demise.
Another occasion for ‘What if’ came when I was switching out gear on pitch three at Stone Mountain near Wilkes. I looked down between my legs at the wall of friction climbing below. Hundreds of feet of air terminated with a backdrop of the flat fan of forest reaching out from the hidden base of this mammoth monolith. The trees blending together like coffee swirling with creamer. Seeing what birds see. I know they don’t think this way. These thoughts are easily pushed aside though. Up here they are highly counterproductive.
Nowadays, I look at an oncoming tractor-trailer and discard these musings. Good thing self-preservation is such a strong draw. Why doesn’t my mind go to more pleasant suppositions? I will retrain myself to redirect them, send that boggart away with the ravings of the ridiculous. Today when that oversize truck carrying a modular housing unit approached, I turned my car into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang instead. I was flying over the high school drop-off line and into the back of the parking lot before all was said and done. Today I redefined ‘what if’.