Always Have a Backup Plan

With Mike starting to lose it, while sixty feet up, it was time for that backup plan.  So I called for Ryan to hurry up and finish rappelling down, and I had Rocky come over to relieve me on the belay once he had finished unclipping Garrett.  I was putting a helmet on and taking my gloves off as I crossed the bridge, and was ready to go by the time Ryan hit the ground.  I unclipped the carabineer directly from him to me, and went through the regular commands with Joy quite rapidly.  I must have set a new speed record for the combined Leap-MVP element, taking whatever route seemed quickest.  I had to slow down a few times, to give Joy a chance to take in the slack, but she did a great job of trying to keep up with me.  I figure the entire process took about one minute, and when I reached Mike, he hadn’t moved an inch.  I was right up there on the platform with him and he was sort of crying, but hadn’t totally lost his composure.  I talked to him pretty much constantly, and after a few minutes was able to get him to stand up and turn around.  I was right there behind him, as we inched towards the edge of the platform.  Things were beginning to look good until he got about six inches from the edge.

At that point he regressed to the frantic point at which I had reached him.  At any time from this point forward, I could easily have given him a little ‘boost’ and it all would have been over immediately, but I didn’t want to totally traumatize the kid for life.  No, I was just trying to traumatize him a little bit for the week.  He was half-way crying, and mumbling about freak accidents and how the belay rope was going to break.  It was at this point that I had him sit down on the end of the platform.  For some reason I was thinking at the time that this would help in some way.  I don’t recall exactly what my thought process was, but it definitely didn’t work out the way I was anticipating.  Quick tip of the day: Never ever let someone sit down on the Leap of Faith, ever.  You will have great difficulty getting them to move again.  He had his feet over the edge and everything, but had a death grip on the platform with his fists at his sides.  At this point the tension from the weight of eighty feet of belay rope leading down to Rocky was beginning to pull pretty strongly on the kid, which was freaking him out even more.  So I grabbed his belay rope with my right hand, to give him some slack and reached behind me to grab the platform to keep from being pulled off myself.  I had to hold this position until we finally got him off, and I would estimate there was about fifty pounds of tension on the rope.  That would have been enough to pull Mike over the edge if I had let go, but not enough to make sure he cleared the platform totally if he was resisting.

It was right about then that Mouth returned from getting the pickup truck, and had brought Hong along to help load up the ropes course gear.  We had been up there for about ten minutes by that point, so we weren’t setting any records, but things weren’t exactly going smoothly.  Mouth and Hong both talked to him for awhile.  Hong had been the one to help Mike two days earlier on the Ladder jump, and helped him on the paintball field as well, so he was a familiar face.  They had a nice little chat, and over the course of the discussion, our creative adventure on the Ladder jump was revealed to Mouth in a rather humorous way.

It was right about then that Indy and Buffalo showed up.  Now I was beginning to feel a little bad for occupying one of the MVP belay lines for my little adventure, as well as both of their belayers.  My campers below were beginning to get worried about the fact that Canteen closed at 5pm, which was probably rapidly approaching.  Buffalo was generous enough to actually hike up the hill to collect my kids’ candy for them, so they wouldn’t totally miss out on that.  While all that was being sorted out, we were still trying to calm Mike down and get him to voluntarily go for it.  I made a few subtle attempts to get Rocky to tighten the belay line, so that we could sling shot him off if I let go.  My attempts at silent communication were futile, and it was not like I was going to yell down to him, “Give it a nice hard yank to rip him off the platform!”  All trust would be lost, plus I still had in mind that I could turn this into a positive experience for the kid if I ended it in the right context.

Brandon actually managed to behave himself reasonably well throughout this process, with only a minimal level of morbid comments about impending death.  The rest of my cabin was kept fully entertained be the events progressing at the top of the tree.  At some point Mouth yelled up, “Hey Mike!”

We both looked down and simultaneously replied, “Yeah?”  Only one of my rather attentive campers picked up on that.  Nathan was the only one to discover my real name before I revealed it at the end of the week.

So we continued to talk with Mike and move the situation forward.  Eventually Buffalo returned with my kids’ snacks, and I was beginning to stress over how late it seemed.  Dinner was supposed to be at 5:30, and here I was holding up half the staff in this little adventure, after having deliberately gambled on requiring their assistance in this endeavor if it went south, which it clearly had.  I could have ended it at any moment, but I wanted to find a way to bring about a positive outcome for Mike, since that was the whole point, but every time we discussed anything about jumping or falling, he started to freak out again. 

Then out of the blue, Canary appeared below me with her cabin in tow, headed over the Swing-to for a little low ropes action.  I was a bit confused, but then quite relieved once I thought about it, since that meant that it was not nearly as late as I had previously thought.  That lowered my stress level quite a bit, and allowed me to relax about how long this was taking.  After a few more minutes of ‘negotiating’ we got Mike to accept the idea of coming down, regardless of how much he didn’t like it.  Mouth and Hong counted down from five, Rocky applied a lot more tension to the rope, and I gave him a little shove, and there he went.  We had a nice ear piercing “AHHHH!” to break the serene forest noise as he swung back and forth while Rocky slowly lowered him to the ground.  I immediately scrambled back over to the center of the MVP, and rappelled down, almost beating Mike to the ground, courtesy of a good bit of help from Joy on the belay.  Mike was clearly shaken up, and at this point I wasn’t sure how I felt about the entire situation.  It had been a gamble from the beginning, but had I won or lost, and at what cost?  As it turned out, it not even 5pm by the time we were back on the ground, so Buffalo and Indy still had time to go up the MVP, my kids had gotten their Canteen snacks, and no one had gotten hurt or anything.  So I had lost nothing, but what effect had it all had on Mike?  He was very emotionally shaken up when he reached the ground, but within ten minutes or fifteen minutes, he seemed to have recovered.  By the end of the day he was ready to try it again, but that was obviously not to be, based on the schedule, and that I only have so much freedom at camp to manipulate the system and plan.