To feel alive

notes from an encounter with a local cryptid (teen boy playing hooky)

My father is dying both slowly and swiftly. Each passing week is a little worse, but the deterioration comes in painstaking increments. Yesterday my mom called me crying: He can’t get comfortable, he keeps rolling over, he reopened his wounds, there’s blood all over the sheets, he won’t sleep, he’s speaking gibberish, the morphine isn’t working, I can’t do this anymore. I talked her down, told her to call the hospice nurse and reminded her she wouldn’t have to do it much longer. I know we are nearing the end, advancing on it like hounds on a fox.

After the call I went running. Five miles up and down a dirt fire road connecting one half of town to the other. It’s downhill out, uphill on the return, and winds past waxy, evil looking clumps of poison oak and a sheer rock face we called the firing range even though there’s a bullet-hole riddled sign tacked up to it that read absolutely no shooting. At the end of the downhill stretch a bridge crosses Whiskey Creek. The water surges on one side but opens up into an ice cold swimming hole on the other. On empty days in my twenties I’d strip my sweaty running clothes into a pile and take a quick naked dip, but when the weather’s nice there are usually a few families camped out on the sandbank, or else a wandering tweaker or two, grinding their teeth.

we love fire roads here because most of my running options are narrow horrible shoulders hugging blind curves with speeding traffic.

This time, there was a figure on the bridge, curved like a question mark. As I neared I squinted, uncertain if it was an illusion or not. It wavered in the sun and so did I, convincing myself it was just a weirdly humanoid wooden post until–suddenly–it dropped. Right off the side of the bridge, and into the water below. Unmistakable with its long legs and sunburnt shoulders.

I was too numb to do anything but keep running. I imagined telling my wife when I returned, I saw someone suicide themself, and tried to invent the proper intonation for such a story, one that would convey sympathy and compassion, hard emotions to express when you are in a constant state of nervous system shutdown. But when I made it to the bridge, the figure was swimming. He surfaced, shook his hair out. A teenage boy, maybe fourteen years old. I stopped.

“It’s deep enough to jump?” I shouted, popping an earbud out.

“Yeah,” he said. And then, without missing a beat, “You should do it.”

“Maybe later,” I told him, and it felt like a lie. “When I finish my run.”

I started back up again, finishing out the remaining curl of the fire road before turning around to chug my way uphill. It took me ten minutes to make it down, and an agonzing sixteen to crawl my way back up. Gnats hovered around me, landed on my face to drink my sweat. The muddy puddles pockmarking the road were ringed in tiny, periwinkle butterflies that erupted into dizzy flight as I jogged past them. I wiped my burning face with the tail of my shirt and instead of thinking about my dying father, as I did on most of my runs these days, I thought about jumping from that bridge.

It seemed insane. Reckless. Dangerous. Stupid. Surely my feet would hit the bottom, and I’d break both my legs and wouldn’t be able to run anymore. I knew I wouldn’t die, but considered I might hurt myself, which didn’t seem worth it. But still, part of me wanted to do this thing I now knew could be done. I’d seen it–he’d plunged, and resurfaced.

I told myself that when I made my way back downhill, if he was still there, I’d do it. If not, I wouldn’t. I’d swim, cool off, but I wouldn’t fling myself fifteen feet from a bridge and into a roiling, rocky creek people drowned in every year.

But when the bridge appeared again his bike was still there, akimbo on the weedy dirt and shuddering like a mirage. I undressed and waded in, the water so bracing it stole my breath. Mika flecked sand swallowed my ankles, and I tottered in my underwear and bra, looking up. The boy was clinging to the outside of the bridge, and as he saw me, he grinned and leapt again. The splash was spectacular, a jade-green fountain around his cannonball. He popped up a foot away from me, carried by the fierce current. “You gonna do it?” he asked conversationally.

“I don’t think so,” I told him, eyeing the bridge. It looked way higher from this vantage point. “I’m too scared,” I admitted, because I have made it a point to never be afraid to say I am afraid.

He slogged out in sopping chinos and climbed a tree in that way all local kids do: easy, like a squirrel. “Nah, you just gotta go up there and sit on the edge for a little while. Don’t overthink it,” he said, dappled sunlight falling on his face in patches, chest dotted in hormonal acne. “Then–” He made a hand motion with an accompanying whoosh sound, to demonstrate a body knifing into the water. “It makes you feel alive.”

I swam for awhile, made excuses, and he he talked me down like I talked my mom down. I learned his name was Hunter, but not much else because he mumbled so thoroughly I missed every other word. He held eye contact though, and never glanced down at my drenched granny panties, which I found surprising and generous. “Follow me up,” he said. “We can just sit there.”

I did. The sun baked my shoulders as I dripped on the sandy concrete. “Want to go first, or want me to go first?”

the view from the bridge, which imo is significantly less scary as a photo than in real life

Still not committed, I stood locked up in skepticism, staring down at the roaring creek. Then I scrambled over the metal railing and clung to the outside with my arms behind me, body jackknifed and dangling over the edge. The water was moving swiftly below in a deep, rich green swirls, loud but not loud enough to drown out my pounding heart. I have what I consider to be a minor, but healthy fear of heights. “Where should I do it?” I asked, voice shaking.

“Anywhere,” he said with a shrug.

“There’s rocks over there,” I observed, jutting my chin to the right.

“Ok, not there.”

I took a deep breath, and realized I was still wearing my hat. I shook it off, afraid to let go of the sun-warmed metal. “Want me to count down from twenty, or ten?” Hunter asked, straddling the railing. It was a standard crash guard, rusted and graffitied, about three feet high. He swung the leg he had hanging off my side.

“Ten,” I said. Twenty was too long. I’d psych myself out.

“Ok.” He cupped his hands over his mouth and used a booming voice, no longer mumbling. “Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven, six.”

I didn’t think about my father, or broken legs. I watched the water roil and buck, felt the cold wind coming off it in misty waves. It looked deep enough. It was deep enough. I’d seen that it was deep enough. It would make me feel alive and I wanted–I wanted to feel alive. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

I jumped. Out, rather than down. Used my heels to propel myself, arms pinwheeling and air whistling past me as I plummeted. Halfway through the plunge I remembered that I hate the feeling of losing my stomach. I have nightmares about it, my brain replicating the exact, nauseating sensation of freefall until I wrench awake, sweating. I grit my teeth against it as the water rushed up at me, and then I hit it with a smack. I forgot to plug my nose. Water ice-picked into my sinuses and ears as my feet scraped slimy rocks. The impact didn’t hurt–the water was too cold.

Breathless, I surfaced, my body launched out into the swimming hole by the current. “I didn’t think you would actually do it!” Hunter crowed from where he was still perched on the bridge. “It took me way longer the first time.”

“I wouldn’t have without you counting,” I shouted back, though speaking was difficult. My mouth and throat didn’t want to work, paralyzed by cold and adrenaline. My heart was still racing, even though I’d already survived. I stumbled out to the beach as he jumped a final time, popping up and shaking like a dog behind me.

“Do you like to tan?” he asked, laying down, sand clinging to his arms as he folded them behind his head. He was not golden-skinned, but redneck vermillion, so I questioned his definition of tanning.

“It messes up my tattoos,” I explained apologetically. “But I love the sun.” ‘

He nodded sagely. “Also makes you feel alive.”

We chatted. He asked me about my runs, I told him, he was impressed. I found out he was fifteen and he didn’t believe I was thirty four.

“I would have never guessed,” he kept saying, and I kept thanking him, even though I’m not sure I was flattered. Eventually I put my clothes back on, basketball shorts over underwear, tee-shirt over my bra. He shook my hand solemnly, recommended a few other spots in town to cliff dive from, then he pedaled off. I looked down–my foot was bleeding, a ribbon of red crisscrossing my metatarsals.

___

I ran back, clothes soaked through. The air smelled like lupin and blooming ceanothus, which smells like semen, which is a smell I hate. My foot ached, sock adhering to the wound with blood, but I finished out my five miles, breathing resolutely through my mouth so I didn’t have to choke on the seed of spring.

Not everything I write right now has a lesson. Not everything I write has to have a lesson. I’m not sure there’s a lesson in jumping from a bridge with a stranger in my underwear into a freezing cold creek, but I will say one thing: it did make me feel alive.

—

Several days ago I spooned my dad’s frail bone body through three blankets as he nonsensically blathered on about how his nurse, who has 40 years experience, doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and how he is not actually dying. Then, after a pause, he said, “I don’t want to die. There’s so much…so much.”

I think he meant “so much left I want to do.” It’s certainly what I would say, if I was dying, and I jump from bridges with strangers in my underwear into freezing cold creeks even if I am afraid.

My dad was a pathologically risk-averse homebody. A Tauran’s Taurus. He led a life of constant anxiety, needless penny pinching, and tyrannical control of his daughter in pursuit of an unattainable standard of safety. He never called out of work, and the few times we went on vacation during my childhood (thrice in my memory) he always started an enormous screaming match towards the end, terrorizing me and my mom into spending the remaining time in the hotel room lest we “waste” any more of his obsessively hoarded wealth. His idea of a good time was drinking, at home, in his favorite chair with his beloved Raiders on. Every time I left the house, he said “be careful.”

I am not trying to speak ill of my father, who I love tremendously and have forgiven in spite of our complicated history. I guess I am just trying to shed light on why I do things that are reckless, dangerous, and stupid. And why it feels worth it to do things that are reckless, dangerous, and stupid. Especially if you know they won’t kill you, and probably won’t break both your legs. I firmly believe it’s better to regret having done something than to regret not doing at all. I think it’s better to have a bloody gash on your foot than to lie on your deathbed thinking there’s so much…so much you didn’t do, so many times you didn’t jump, so many times you lived, but didn’t feel alive.

Thinking so much about death has actually served as a gateway to thinking more about life. How I want to live it–not just the person I want to be, but the sort of things I want to do. We have so little time, and all of us, eventually, die at the end of our story. Death is an equalizer, she is neutral, she does not discriminate. No matter how wealthy or kind or industrious or hardworking you are, nothing will save you from the fact that life is terminal. My father did not think about death. He was terrified of her, he ran from her, he lived like he had all the time in the world and refused to look her in the eye. He believed if he worked very hard and amassed resources that eventually, he would be able to use them at the end of his life.

But we don’t get to decide when the end of our life is. I know it sounds insanely cliche–”live every day like it’s your last,” but take it from me, someone who is watching a man full of regret approach the end of his days: jump.