West of Jesus, page 14
I didn't have time to ask why he was speaking in triplicate. It took less than two minutes for him to strap me into a waist harness.
There was no diving board or fancy platform. I climbed over the guardrail and looked down. No reassuring water, no soft landing.
We were two hundred feet above a dry gravel bed. He told me he was going to count down from five and that I should jump on one.
"Five," he said.
It was then that I realized how little I knew about my employer.
He looked like a failed engineering student who now played in a Grateful Dead cover band and spent days off taking his Hacky Sack very seriously.
"Four."
I looked down. It was a long way down.
"Three, two, one."
Saying I jumped would be an exaggeration. Saying I managed to wobble my way off the edge of that platform would be closer to the truth. The worst feeling I had ever felt I felt during those first few seconds of free fall. For a long time, I would jolt awake in the middle of the night, sweating, panting, always endlessly falling off that bridge. In jumping, I had done something that my brain couldn't process. Research done by MIT's Matthew Wilson, among others, shows that dreams are the brain's way of filing short-term memories into long-term storage compartments. Normally, because our brains don't want us to store fear, we have an emotional eraser that separates the feeling of an experience from the memory of that experience. That way, we remember that needles are sharp, but we don't remember the pain felt the first time we got pinpricked. It's
our way of not recoiling in terror every time we see a syringe. But the jump had short-circuited the system. I was jolting awake at night because I couldn't file the experience in my long-term memory, because my long-term memory didn't want any part of it.
A few years after that, at a fairground on the outskirts of Toronto, I saw a bungee platform attached to the upper end of an enormous construction crane—in my memory three hundred feet tall, but, of course, that has to be wrong. It was the first time since that early morning plunge that I had seen anyone bungee jumping.
I remember walking into the fairground, seeing the crane and immediately beginning to shake.
In the years since, when someone asked me what I was afraid of, my answer was always bungee jumping. Never mind that in those years, I'd accumulated a long list of other idiotic experiences;
none haunted me like that bungee. For whatever reason, nothing came close. Long before I ever got to New Zealand, I had made up my mind about A. J. Hackett and all his friends—I wasn't jumping off anything.
"You should do the ledge," the Irishwoman said, pointing toward
the mountain behind the hotel.
I followed her finger and saw a cable car running up the side of a two-thousand-foot cliff. At the top of the cliff, a small platform teetered over a two-thousand-foot drop. She explained that the Nevis might be the highest, but the ledge is the hardest. "They built it to be the most psychologically difficult bungee jump in the world."
"Did you jump the ledge?"
"I'm sixty-four years old," she said. "Now why would I want
to something like that?"
33
That night I wandered down past the bars and the restaurants and the stores selling sweaters made from local wool and past the casino and the entrance to Eichardt's Private Hotel, which has been called "the best small hotel in the world" and "the most romantic hotel in the world," and where there are only five rooms, and each of those rooms comes with uninterrupted views and a fireplace and a mink comforter and a cost representative of such amenities. I walked by the hotel and kept going until I stood at the end of a long dock and felt the evening breeze whip off the water, and thought about the fact that somewhere very near here was the place where centuries earlier the Maori had hunted the very last flightless Moa out of existence. In that moment I wanted nothing as badly as I wanted to know if there was a word in any language for the sound of the last breath the last member of a species breathed before dying. I felt certain there had to be, but when nothing came to mind I decided it was time to start drinking.
I started drinking at a place called Bardeaux, where I learned that the gorgeous barmaid with the black hair and the glasses sadly no longer worked there. I left and walked over to the Red Rock Bar and Cafe, where I met a man who told me about how he cheated on his wife with prostitutes "but not with real women."
I've heard similar confessions in almost every city I've visited. In one of Douglas Adams's later books, possibly Dirk Gently's Holistic
Detective Agency, there is a character who spends the entire book caught in the rain. Everywhere he goes rain starts falling, and everywhere he goes he hates the rain that much more. He keeps hating rain until the moment he discovers that he is a rain god. This is exactly how I have come to feel about men confessing their transgressions to me in strange bars in strange countries, and I don't
think there's a word for that either.
I left the Red Rock and moved on to the Boardwalk, where I met Kujata, a man whose name comes from Islamic cosmology, referring to a gargantuan mystical bull endowed with four thousand ears, eyes, nostrils, mouths and feet. Kujata introduced me to his wife, whose name was Sarina, which is close to the American Sarah and comes from the Hebrew word for "princess." They asked me what I was doing in New Zealand, and I told them I had come with one goal—track a legend to its point of origin—but had gotten nowhere. I had talked to forty or fifty people and learned little.
A quest was supposed to subsume other pursuits, not become one part of a common aggregation. I told them that I had begun to think of the Conductor as just another problem I was having, no different than job insecurities or a fight with a girlfriend.
My frustration was compounded by the fact that it'd been a few days since I'd been surfing. A couple of months back, I'd called Dr.
Michael Davis at Emory University, a neuroscientist who specializes in fear, to ask him about the notion of the adrenaline junky.
"Fear is an incredibly strong emotion," Davis told me. "If something scares us, the body immediately release endorphins, dopamine and norepinephrine. Endorphins mitigate pain; dopamine and nor-epinephrine are performance enhancers. There haven't yet been direct studies of so-called action sports, but the general scientific thinking is that the more fearful a certain sport makes you, the greater the release of these chemicals. The greater the release of these chemicals, the greater the addictionlike symptoms."
Maybe it was surf-withdrawal that was frustrating me. Maybe it was something else. After wondering why there was all this myth and magic in the Conductor's tale, I'd come to the conclusion that surfing was the bridge between such worlds, but perhaps I wasn't
looking deep enough. Perhaps it wasn't surfing that was at the root;
perhaps it was the neurochemical reaction triggered by all high-risk adventure. It seemed possible that the reason I hadn't figured this out was because I had yet to really scare myself.
Maybe what I really needed was a bungee jump.
34
On the island of Pentecost, in the Vanuatu archipelago, the locals practice the ritual of Naghol. Practicing the ritual involves a period of sexual abstinence, a period of fasting and a period of kava drinking—all preparations used to strengthen the participant's connection to both this world and the next. The reason one might want to strengthen such a connection is that the Naghol ritual also involves building sky-high treetop platforms, standing atop those platforms, tying a couple of vines around your ankles and leaping off. Historically, this whole scenario was something of a harvest rite, the general idea being the farther you fall, the higher the crops grow. The main crops on the island of Pentecost are yams, taro and kava. The first two are tubers, and the last is the root of a pepper plant. Curiously, all three grow underground, which makes one wonder why they were jumping at all.
In the 1970s, members of the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club—for those unfamiliar, they really mean it—replaced the vines with rubber bands and made a series of high-profile land dives of their own. Fifteen years later, those Oxford flights inspired a couple of Kiwis—Chris Sigglekow and A. J. Hackett—and before long, folks were bungee jumping in Queenstown, perhaps inspired by the "fear of falling comes from inexperience" tagline Hackett now uses to advertise his dizzy product.
About this tagline, Hackett is only partially correct. Fear spans the spectrum of physical experience and the spectrum of emotional experience. The word originated from the Old English faer, meaning "sudden danger," and referred to justified fright from real menace. When fear becomes unjustified, when it produces an intense irrational state, it becomes a phobia. The word phobia comes from the Greek phobos, meaning "flight and panic and terror" from the deity of that name. According to the psychologist Donald Goodwin, a phobia is "a constant, extreme, unreasonable fear of a particular object, activity, or circumstance that leads to avoidance of the fearful situation." Without our ability to feel such fears and to pass along this information to others, humans would have vanished from this planet a long time ago. So strong is this ability that evolution has hardwired certain useful fears into our brain. Reptiles and insects and loud noises are common examples; fear of falling is another. Our fear of falling is not, as Hackett supposes, inexperience. It's basic genetics.
A small almond-shaped sliver of the brain called the amygdala generates fear. It resides in the anterior portion of the temporal lobe, deep within the limbic system. The limbic system produces our emotions, with the amygdala specializing in fear and rage.
When the amygdala detects a threat, it sends out signals which trigger reflexive responses of the run-don't-walk variety. Almost immediately, the adrenal glands flood the body with adrenaline and cortisol, preparing us for swift adventure by converting glycogen into energy-rich glucose. Hearts beat faster, pupils widen, throats parch, breathing speeds up and the blood vessels close to the skin begin to contract so more blood is available for our muscles to use.
The hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for storing and retrieving memories, is also part of the limbic system. This is because it helps to know what you were scared of yesterday in assessing threats today. If I had no experience whatsoever with falling, a cliff might make me feel fear, but it wouldn't make my palms sweat, my heart pound and my insides quiver when standing on flat land and thinking about the fact that I was planning to bungee jump off the edge of a two-thousand-foot cliff. It was not, I should mention, fear of dying that was my main concern. I had a decent understanding of the technology and safety standards and knew that the chances of a fatal mishap were exceptionally small.
People who are worried about dying are worried about their landing; I was just worried about the fall.
Not only was I getting set to jump what was psychologically designed to be the most frightening bungee jump ever, but I had also decided to do so at night, because the women at the A. J.
Hackett counter had told me that jumping at night makes the most psychologically difficult bungee jump in the world even more psychologically difficult. I guess I wanted it this way because what I really wanted was the jump to produce some real magic. What exactly qualified as real magic was hard to say.
The movie Confessions of a Dangerous Mind opens with Chuck Barris's character, played by Sam Rockwell, saying: "When you're
young, your potential is infinite. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age when what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren't Einstein. You weren't
anything. That's a bad moment." It had been a long time since I'd
seen that movie, but when I ran out off that ledge and leaped into darkness, the only thing I remember was hearing Rockwell's voice in my head. "That's a bad moment" was what he said.
As it turned out, I did not have a transformative moment jumping the ledge. Nor did I have one jumping off the Harbor City Bridge in Auckland, which I did a few days later. I did have a conversation with a number of folks who worked for A. J. Hackett, who all told me people had profoundly spiritual experiences bungee jumping all the time. When I asked what qualifies as a profoundly spiritual experience, one of the operators said, "For most people bungee jumping is the hardest thing they've ever done.
When you're done doing the hardest thing you've ever done, you feel like you can do absolutely anything afterward—if that's not a spiritual experience, I don't know what is."
The day after I jumped the Harbor City Bridge was my last in New Zealand. There was rumor of some swell in the water, so I teamed up with a surfer I'd met in Auckland and drove to the northern coast to check out Piha. When we got there, the waves were double-overhead walls, as hostile looking as any I had ever seen. My friend told me that sometime last year Pearl Jam's lead singer, Eddie Vedder, was surfing Piha on a day like this when he got caught in a riptide and had to be rescued. He thought via helicopter but wasn't certain. Vedder's reputed to be a pretty good surfer, but my friend glanced at the break and shook his head against it. "Got to be something wrong with you, surfing out there on a day like this."
We drove across the island to a beach called Te Arai. The break has something of a reputation for friendliness, but we caught it in a seriously bad mood. While the waves weren't quite snapping closed and weren't quite double overhead, they were starting to push in those general directions. Normally I'd give serious thought to paddling out at a strange break on a day this big, but I'd just jumped off the ledge and just didn't seem to mind. The paddle out took forever. I counted twenty-nine duck dives before I decided to stop counting. Much of the time I was gasping for air, my arms straining, lactic acid burning my muscles, but it didn't seem to matter. I felt like I was in a trance, beyond fear, beyond exhausting. I had one goal: I was going to get out there and catch a wave.
In the end I caught more than one. We surfed all morning and on through the afternoon. When I finally got out of the water, I was so tired it was hard to carry my board up the beach. My shoulders ached for weeks afterward; I could have cared less. I'd flown halfway around the world to fail to find the Conductor, but got to splash about without a trace of fear instead. I'd ridden the waves I'd come to ride. The playwright Edward Albee wrote in The Zoo Story, "Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of their way to come back a short distance correctly." I knew exactly what he meant.
Part Five
You have a lot going on, all of it weird.
—William Gibson
35
Sometime in the midnineties I ended up at a party in San Francisco with my friend Michael and his friend David and a couple of off-duty undercover narcotics agents. How the off-duty undercover narcotics agents ended up with us at this party is a long story, and not nearly as interesting as one would suspect. What is possibly more interesting is that we were all very, very stoned. We were probably too stoned to do much besides lean against a wall in the stairway of someone's two-story Victorian and stare at the steady stream of partygoers that had been trekking past, though one of the advantages of being too stoned to move is that you can get plenty of exercise simply leaning against a wall, staring at strangers.
We were leaning against the wall when somebody wondered where the dance floor was, and somebody thought outside, and somebody else thought upstairs, and some unseen obstruction caused the line to come to a sudden halt, leaving a very beautiful woman stopped directly in front of Michael. She never looked at him, never even saw him, but it was a hot night and she was wearing a tank top and her bare shoulder was a few inches from his face.
Tattooed on that shoulder, in simple bold type, were three words. I put it to you that the impact of these words was perhaps augmented by what was clearly some very high-quality Humboldt County marijuana, but that does not change the fact that those three words read: MICHAEL WAKE UP!
In a very short moment an incredibly long time passed, then the line started moving again and the woman disappeared. Before anyone could say anything, Michael pushed off the wall and dashed away and caught the woman at the edge of the dance floor, which was upstairs after all. "I'm Michael," he said. "What if I'm just fine?
What if I don't want to wake up?"
She didn't say anything for a minute, and then she said he didn't understand. She said she had a friend named Michael who had gone into a coma, the result of a bad motorcycle accident. The doctors were not hopeful. The family was not hopeful. Twelve friends got together and got MICHAEL WAKE UP! tattooed on their shoulders. "And then," she said, "he did."
Carl Jung came to believe that traditional notions of causality were incapable of explaining some of the more improbable forms of coincidence. In places where no clear linkage could be demonstrated between two events, but where a meaningful relationship still existed, he suspected a different principle was likely at work.
Jung called this principle synchronicity. At his most succinct he defined his term as "meaningful coincidence" or "acausal parallelism,"
the slightly more intricate "an acausal connecting principle" or the excessively intricate "the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state"—whatever the hell that means. But mostly he felt his was a principle best defined by example.
If I was trying to give an example of synchronicity, I could bring up the Michael Wake Up story. I might just as easily mention that the first time I heard the Conductor's story was in Indonesia, where it was told by an Australian with whom I had only the most casual of acquaintance; and that the second time I heard the tale I was in Mexico, where it was told by an American with whom I had only the most casual of acquaintance. It would be important to point out that I had ended up surfing with both of these men through roundabout happenstance. It would be just as important to note that on both occasions I had made a bad decision and taken a bad fall and gotten a bad beating. Afterward, in both cases, I paddled over to a small dinghy anchored outside the break to recover, and, in both cases, something in the whole deal had inspired my acquaintances to paddle over to tell me the Conductor's tale. If I was a stickler for such things, I might point out that the dinghy was anchored some distance away and that paddling over required a conscious act of will, or I might contact a mathematician who could work out the statistical probability of such overall improbability, but none of that would be necessary. Even without the help of the numbers I am a little dubious about the synchronic significance, albeit not for the obvious reasons.
