Rappelling

 

            G’s roommate sounded like the voice of my conscience, harping away in the back of my head. “You want to borrow my climbing harness? What the hell for? It’s almost four in the morning. What the hell are you doing this time of night?”

            “We’re gonna go rappel off a building.”

            “What? You serious?”

            “hell yeah.”

            “Man, that’s a crazy thing to do! You shouldn’t DO that! you can get CAUGHT for that, you’d be in so much trouble...”

            Right there i decided the roommate was not an adventurous soul, even if he did have this rather nice rock-climbing harness sitting around. A harness which would soon be supporting my entire body against the pressures of gravity and the ravages of concrete ground eighty feet below.

            So with the gear in hand we retreated into G’s room and left the roommate to his bedtime ablutions which he was engaged in when we barged in. But the roommate followed us. “You could get in SERIOUS TROUBLE, guys....”

            “I don't think there’s much chance we’ll get caught,” i said, “it’s hard to get caught, actually. It hardly ever happens to me. You shouldn’t let your fears limit you like that.”

            “Ok. Ok.” This from the roommate. “Ok, the chances of getting caught are small. but there’s a possibility of really BIG trouble if you do get caught, that’s the thing, see?”

            “Trespassing ticket,” i said dismissively. “That’s all. Criminal trespassing at the absolute most, that’s normally like a $150 fine.” I didn’t know what i was talking about, but i felt the need to project suave expertise or else be undermined by this all-too-reasonable voice of pessimism.

            G started going through the tangle of climbing gear on his floor, digging out his own harness.

            Then the roommate saw the bong out on G’s desk and suddenly drew himself up suspiciously. “Are you guys... High?”

            G and i looked at each other. The last time we had smoked had been a few hours ago, before we went out drinking, but we’d been planning on hitting it again before we headed out to conquer the skies.

            “You guys have been SMOKING?” the roommate said, aghast. “And you’re going to go RAPPELLING!?

 

            For this there was no defense. Ropework while fucked up is one of those things that’s just silly. I think G tried to assuage his roommate’s fears for another minute or two, but i just gave up-- there was nothing i could say-- I mean, i know that putting yourself in danger after blunting your ability to deal with it makes about as much sense as anything else in life, which is to say not much at all. When the roommate was gone we fired up the bong and passed it back and forth.

            Then we checked the gear. We decided to put the harnesses on under our pants, so they would be less conspicuous. But since i was high, I couldn’t figure out quite how to get the harness on. The leg loops kept on wrapping themselves around the waistbelt or something. I think G was getting a little worried watching me, my pants around my ankles, and all these puzzling straps and shit wrapped octopus-like around my waist.

            “You’ve rappelled before, right?” he asked me.

            “Oh yeah,” i told him, trying to make the tangled harness look intentional. “I, uh, I'm just trying to do it without actually taking my pants off completely. That’s why I'm having so much trouble.”

           

            Our plan was to climb out of a window and onto the top of an enclosed walkway between two big buildings, a sort of bridge eight stories up, and rappel down from there. The bridge was built within a sort of cage of steel beams, and we could loop the rope around one of these girders and then slide down the doubled strands. But it occurred to us as we headed over to the location that our rope was only 160 feet long.

            “Which means,” i concluded, “that when we double it to loop over the beam, it’ll only be 80 feet of rope.”

            “Well, how high is the bridge? Each floor is about ten feet, right?”

            “Yeah. But just ten feet, or a little OVER ten feet? And besides, isn’t that bottom floor especially high?”

            “We’ll have to test it. We can just go to one of the rooms up there and hang it from a window before we climb out on the bridge.”

           

            The building was locked up tight but that hardly slowed us down; G has some tricks up his sleeve. No, I'm not going to tell you how he did it.

            Upstairs we dug the rope out of a backpack and untangled it. I looped the middle around my waist to make sure the whole thing didn’t fall out the window, and G tossed the coils of rope out, his body sticking so far out into the night it looked like he’d unbalance and fall after them.

            I felt the tightness of my harness around my legs, and the first bits of real adrenaline pumping underneath the buzz of weed, and i felt tensed up but still pretty mellow, like a new guitar string. But was the rope long enough? I could see it stretching taut from my waist to the window, but i had no idea if it was hitting the ground. Finally i couldn’t stand it any longer.               “Hey, what’s up? does it reach all the way down?”

            pause. then:

            “...it’s tangled. We gotta bring it up and redo it.”

            Shit.

            When you’re feeling paranoid, every little setback seems terrifying. Lower it down again? What if security saw it stretched down the side of the building?

           

            G hauled up the rope. Then when it was all nicely rolled up again I offered it to him:

            “Here, G, work your magic. Say a prayer and throw that baby out there.”

            “You can toss it. Here, I’ll hold onto the middle. Just make sure and throw it hard. It got stuck before because i didn’t toss i out far enough from the building.”

            I tossed it, and stuck my head out, leaning way down to see. The rope ends seemed to be bobbing, like curls of hair.

            “You see it?”

            “I think so. I can’t tell if it’s touching.”

            G pushed up to the window, the rope still held around his waist, and shoved his torso out next to mine. His shoulder was muscular, warm and firm as it pressed against my arm. I remember thinking it was nice to feel something that solid and human. When I'm high, on adrenaline, weed, or anything else, i sometimes get the feeling that I'm made of nothing but spider-webs and misty thoughts, that float tenuously on the breeze. You know that supremely relaxed feeling you get sometimes, when you’re way up high looking down at the antlike people below, the night wind blowing into you like a guru’s magic, when you feel like maybe you really could fly?

            Well, anyway, that’s a bad feeling to have when you’re about to go rappelling. It’s too relaxing. You forget about gravity, and become absentminded. Feeling G’s shoulder against mine just pulled me back hard and steady into reality.

            But reality, here, was that the rope was just barely touching the ground.    

            “Holy shit,” i said finally. “It think it’s down.”

            “Yeah, but just barely. Only the last couple inches are on the ground.”

            “I guess that’s plenty, right? we don’t need much slack, do we?”

            “We need to have some slack. It’s a dynamic rope, so when there’s weight on it, it stretches and gets real tight... you need to have enough rope so that when you stand on the ground, you can still pull a handful of slack above your harness. Otherwise it stays so tight you can’t unclip.”

            We stared down at it for a few moments longer. Quite a while, actually. It occurred to me that we were in the process of chickening out. You gotta watch out for that sort of thing. It creeps up on you, and seems so sensible at the time, and it’s not until you’re safe back at home with a beer that you realize you really should have pushed a little harder, gone a little further, taken that one last step out into the great empty vastness.

            “Just barely, G, but it’ll work. Are we going to do this thing?”

            “Yep. Let’s do it.”

            We sat a minute longer, though, staring down, before G said:

            “Yo, Kev, we should get this rope up before some guard walks by and sees it.”

           

            I went out the window in a desperate clamber, across the space to the bridge with nothing below my feet, hands holding onto a windowsill and one foot scrabbling convulsively at the wall as the other, blind and slow, wormed its way sideways to the round steel beam that i knew was there... then the sideways tensioning of the body, levering myself against the weight of all that long drop, and i caught onto a bolt on the top of the bridge and eased over until my center of gravity was above the relative steadiness of the sheet-metal. I realized my hands were sweating.

            G tossed the rope and then came over himself. I lit a cigarette as we untangled the rope, and felt myself opening out to the night sky like a shy flower. I felt great. The beer foamed in my blood, the weed floated me up.... i felt i could follow the thin wisps of cigarette smoke up to the bright, half-full moon.

            We set the rope. No knot, just looping it around a beam and letting both ends drop down. The ends seemed to be hanging a few inches off the ground.

            “You all set, Kev? You checked your harness, all the straps double-backed?”

            I undid my belt and the top few buttons of my jeans to make sure. I couldn’t really remember if i had actually buckled my harness earlier. I hadn’t. I buckled it up, slipped the big carabiner through both loops, and fastened my jeans again, the ‘biner sticking out through my fly.

            “Sure. All set.” 

            G went first. He clipped in, his cold fingers slow on the rope. Both strands through the ATC, attached to the ‘biner which was, in turn, sticking out of his fly. He yanked the rope to test it and grinned at me. I realized i was trembling.

            “See you on the bottom.”

            I contemplated his tensed face as he went over the edge. Then i could only see the top of his head, and then just the vibrating rope. Ten, twenty, twenty-five seconds... the rope twitched as he unclipped himself, and then went slack. He was down.

            Was this really what we had gone to so much trouble for? A half-minute carnival ride? It seemed awfully silly. But I still felt damn good, even though i was still trembling, the taste of anticipation in my mouth...

            I grabbed the rope and clipped in. Fumbling, in a hurry, hands cold and still sweating. I know G coming down had been awfully conspicuous, and I wanted to get down before security had a chance to come over and investigate the hanging rope.

            I made sure the rope was centered, both strands clipped in, all set. I walked over to the edge, one look down and....

            ...I couldn’t do it.

            It’s just going over the edge that gets to me. That step where you go from having your feet under you to placing all your faith and all your life in that fragile rope, no thicker than your finger, that could right now be parting under some sharp little wedge of rust....

            This edge was even worse than normal. Because of where the rope was looped, i had to let myself slide off the edge of the beam and fall a foot or two until my waist was below the attachment point before the rope would support me.

            Deep breath. With my right hand i held the rope tight against my side, keeping the friction high so that i wouldn’t slide too fast. My left hand clutched spasmodically at the steel beam as i went over, and my thumb got pinched hard between the beam and the rope. Embarrassing, a beginner’s mistake. No reason, except unreasoned fear, to have my hand there.

            And then suddenly i realized my legs were swinging free and i was OVER! The harness bit into my legs and there i was, sliding slow as honey and all the world laid out beneath me....

            A little ways down, i stopped to enjoy the moment. Suspended, everything frozen; out of reach of the police here, and gravity, too.

            ...then down the rest of the way like lightning, fast as I could go, so fast i burned my hand on the rope before slamming on the brakes a bit above the ground. My ATC was so hot from friction that I almost burned my fingers again as i unclipped.

            I pulled the rope, hand over hand until it wriggled down out of the sky under its own weight, and grinned maniacally at G. Hell yeah.

            “Sweet, man, we made it.”

            “Indeed, brother, indeed we did.”

            And we left the scene of the crime. Quickly.