Down To Earth

 Standing up in a pine tree, hugging the trunk and not fully trusting all the belts and cables put there to keep bipeds like me from plummeting to the earth, I thought of the chore I did shortly before taking this trip. I was up in a plum tree, shaking fruit until it fell to the earth. By the time I was done, I had joined the plums. On the earth.

But now I was on vacation, and following my wife's whim, we were on an adventure that involved zip lines. And trees. And a strict adherence to the rules that would keep us from suffering the same fate I had experienced in my own front yard. Under the watchful eye of our twenty-seomthing guide, we learned the ways of carbiners and hooking on and unhooking and moving from one precarious perch to another, always with the anticipatoin of shoving off from the platform, picking up speed as the pulley system attached to our belts carried us back to terra firma. 

It was a ritual, of sorts, an avoidance of both age and gravity. Cheating on both ends. I felt my comort zone being tugged at from a number of different corners. Was I going to let my wife go and have all the fun? Would I just sit and watch while she and our friends went off on this grand adventure? Was I going to play the common sense card and hang back at the gift shop?

In a word, no. In a bunch more words, I thought about it and wondered if there was a statute of limitations to peer pressure. What did I really have to prove, after I had the fees for four of us rung up on my credit card, would it make any sense to just stay on the ground?

In a word, no. In a bunch of words, I wanted to see if all those years of climibing trees in the hills of Colorado and rock climbing with my older brother would pay off in some way or another. I viewed it as a kind of test. It wasn't pass or fail. It was climb or not. 

I climbed. And I felt physics and my age at work. I was pleased each time I completed on of the challenges, and thanked my youth in the trees and my older brother for all the time I spent putting faith in that one caribiner attached to the nylong web diaper. And when it was all said and done, I finished the red level and let my wife go ahead and test herself on the ultimate test: black. I watched and took pictures. I encouraged and exhorted. And I waited for that pang, the one that comes from missing out. 

It never came. 

I was tired, happy, and relieved to be joined back on earth by my high-flying wife. No plummeting required.