the grandest project

Today, I noticed that the first flight we booked leaves in a couple of weeks.

Heh.

Hilarious that we ever thought we'd be on it. Heck, I don't believe we ever truly did.

I.

Today is the day I start a travelogue.

I should have begun it in the airport lounge, as I sat restlessly in the pregnant pause just before we piled into the good ol' jumbo jet. Or in Frankfurt, wired and tired and rubbing at my underdressed arms. Or upon arrival in Kommetjie, from my perch at a wide-plank table, watching the ocean breeze poke at the enormous chandelier overhead.

Or ten years ago. 

Or, perhaps, right now.

In any case, right now is what I have...so here we go.

II.

We've been flying every day, several times a day, at several sites a day, for twelve days. As thrilled as I am at the tremendous growth this has afforded me as a pilot, I'm understandably exhausted...so when we woke this morning to the sounds of a petulant sea and the gunshot retort of rain on the metal roof, I melted back into bed with a rumbling sigh of gratitude.

In the quiet that fills these earthbound hours, I think about my beloved mobility -- of my religious devotion to moving around the spheroid temple of the world, and of touching a match to the candle of everyone I meet out here. I think about how much more me I am when I'm on the move; how sensual; how stimulated. How the yoga of travel cracks me open and fills me with a buoyant sense of peace.

Tomorrow, the skies will clear, and the Good Hope wind will shuffle teasing fingers through my summer-light hair as it unfurls my wing before me. Until then, it's coffee and music and quiet conversations beside the fire.

rough seas

I fought the battle of Sedgefield, and Sedgefield won.

Punchy, capricious conditions make me hopelessly awkward on launch; it takes me six or seven tries to get the glider over my head and, when I do, it feels so miraculous that I'm dumbstruck for the first few moments of flight.

As soon as I begin to slide along the forested ridge, I'm cutting through thermals so sharp they feel like air-gun blasts aimed haphazardly from the ground below. My heart in my throat, I keep pressure on the glider, doggedly willing my head back into the customary position. It fights me, creeping up between the risers.

Moment by moment, I struggle to relax as my twitching glider rings me like a bell in the harness. I hear small collapses crinkle the sides of the wing, waiting sickly for the moment until there's a crisp snap as the airfoil reinflates. Albatross tandems swoop across my path. Occasional gusts shove me too close for comfort to the toothy line of trees that runs across the top of the ridge. Struggling to keep my head, I talk to myself. Hum. Sing a little bit: African Sky Blue. Take It Easy. Across the Universe. Breathe loudly through the nose, focusing on the texture of the air as it traces a long curve over the back of my throat.

No dice. The conditions are unrelenting, and my heart has worked its way up from my throat to my mouth.

Defeated, I point my glider out from the ridge. A series of explosive thermals keeps me up longer than I anticipated, but it gives me ample time to choose a landing area from the options on offer. Cruising in on final, ground effect cruelly pops me up again five or six times before finally allowing me to settle to the ground.

As I start to gather my lines, I see that my hands are shaking.

On the ride back, I ponder the validity of my sense of defeat. I think about how difficult it was to launch in those conditions (when the immense disquietude of the air had already been explained to me) and to be dragged around the topside at least once -- in front of a crowd -- with a biffed launch.

Hm.

There's only one way forward: do the hardest thing, over and over, with a smile -- and soon, the smile will be real.

I'm back.

The sensation is so raw that it makes my blood sting the hollows of my veins.

I'm watching my face reflected in the enormous panel of glass that separates this living room from the coastal forest spread out below. The early-morning sea throws handfuls of foam at the shore. My paraglider is waiting expectantly for the day to begin.

The last time I was on this continent, I never budged from overdrive. Everything was new; everything was at once terrifying and bones-on-fire sweet. I found a new life here without even looking for it, and every moment burned another bridge to the life I'd had before.

It's different now.

It's better.

I knew it would be; there was no replicating that first few months in the bower of southern Africa. That moment was pinned to the change it engendered, and that change was so complete and universal that it seems now to be someone else's story.

This time, I still take enormous pleasure in sitting silently in a restaurant, reveling in the earthy sensuousness of Afrikaans' earthy rasps and trilling r's. I still check the gas gauge before driving through townships. I still find myself marveling at the salty practicality of the wheat-haired descendants of the first pioneers, their offhand economy of expression a Rubik's cube in my hands. And I will never, never tire of the expanse of mama Africa under my feet, always tempting me onward with the promise of another heartstring plucked.

drift

My leaden skis carve laboriously through the mess of wet powder lashing the slope before me. Each new track wrestles me down into the orbit of a conflicting trajectory, and my muscles shiver with the effort of staying upright.

The heavens are murky with a roiling morass, dragging a grey crayon sideways across the valley landscape, shading the gaps a dull flannel, daubing out the sun. Through my sleet-spackled goggles, the trees and snow have lost all color. Gravity lasciviously sucking my skis, I lurch into an Ansel Adams landscape.

I become black-and-white.

-

I remember pieces of that day. I recall twisting her flaxen hair though two fingers, feeling the warmth at the scalp fade into the winter-cold of the cabin with each stroke. For weeks, she had been a plaything -- a curvy, porcelain creature with a rapier wit and a smile I haven't thought to question, easily returned to the dollhouse when I wished it. At that moment, the snow was deep outside and the crown of her head was tucked under my collarbone, ear pressed to my heart.

I remember hoping she wasn't listening too closely.

-

I see the space between the trees just as I'm about to shoot past and, a cursory over-shoulder glance confirming my isolation, I cut hard to the left and dive in. This path was fraught with logs and boulders the last time I noticed it; now, a crushing press of snow has elbowed down through the evergreen canopy to submerge the roots in a thick, white marsh.

But for the heavy flakes beating a swift stacatto on my goggles, the silence is oppressive. My tracks are soundless beneath me, and my breath is subsumed in snowfall. Each bucking bump feels as though it's wrenching me from the greedy earth, a quagmire of cold that wants desperately to gather me in.

-

I remember pieces of that night. I remember his arm under mine, deftly negotiating us both over the sheet of ice glassing over a wide Cambridge street. I remember whiskey on my lips, then reckless words on my lips, then skin on my lips. I remember standing at a window afterwards, unable to sleep, watching flurries of snow chase each other across the river, twisting an engagement ring aimlessly on a finger.

I remember seeing flaxen hair spread across a pillow, and he's there, and the snow is deep outside, and it's his dollhouse now.

I remember numbness.

-

I break from the trees at full throttle and see the clotted, hulking snowdrift half a moment too late to dodge it completely. One tip daggers into a protuberance as the opposite pole catches my falling body in an awkward half-twist. I hear fleshy sounds echo through my ribcage from my shoulder.

Stunned, I slide silently onto my back and let the hungry snowfall slide flurried fingers under my clothes.

I never saw it coming.

ancient art

We've spent the past couple of hours making our way up the channels etched in these ancient cliff faces, wedging arms and legs and backs in the long striations chiseled by centuries of desert rainfall. The reward of the challenging climb is a perch that's eye-to-eye with the thousand stone spirits of the Moab mesas, all standing silent and tall against the blanched blue sky, all watching us with ageless umber faces.

Now, we're assembled on a tiny sandstone bridge. The formation we're on approximates a pommel horse, wedged between a cliff and a caddywompus spire of blood-red rock. It's several hundred feet from our position to the sun-baked valley below.

There isn't enough room for the three of us, so I'm perched on a ledge a few feet down with my hands clamped around a chain that's bolted into the rock. If I don't engage my calves, I slide by millimeters towards the several-hundred-foot drop behind me -- so I switch from one to the other, an interminable slow-dance with a giant rock in the baking sun.

You're wrapped around the rock, clinging with everything you've got.

The soft curve of your back matches the curve of the well-eroded sandstone so perfectly, it seems as though you've been fit to it. I hear you whimper, but I can't see your face, hidden by a fringe of black hair that glints like obsidian in the flinty midday sun. I want to put a reassuring hand on your shoulder, but I worry that my touch would spook you even more. I can't think of anything to say, either to you or to the man beside you, calmly feeding a rope to Brett as he gingerly navigates the most technical part of the climb. Under the thick mantle of silence, I listen to your ragged breath. Our equipment rattles emptily with each tiny adjustment.

I'm not ashamed for you in the least; I'm amazed you made it this far. I'm proud of you.

Later, I try to tell you I understand how you're feeling -- like being pushed down a waterslide, drawn by an inexorable gravity of expectations, caught in a purgatory between things you know you want, things you think you might want, things you wish you wanted and things you find repellent. I know what it means to constantly balance fear with an ever-changing, endlessly contradictory amalgam of facts. I know what it feels like to have suddenly called into question everything you've ever believed about yourself. I know what it's like to face what feels like a daily tribunal.

I want to tell you that these people don't -- and won't -- understand the powerful and nuanced creature you are. You're on a different wavelength entirely. It's clear that your path is just as grand, and perhaps you're here because you're understandably nervous to begin such an epic undertaking. One fact is clear: your path doesn't start here.

Let go.

You're more protected than you think, and you'll be shocked at how short the fall.

the valley of fire

We've driven hours to arrive here -- a barren nocturnal wilderness formed from time-worn heaps of jagged rock and the occasional struggling shrub. As we emerge from the car, the night air is startlingly warm. The moon is ripe and full, sketching unnerving shadows between the boulders and clefts.

From the approaching road, the tower appeared as a pinprick-thick line drawn from the earth to the north star with a massive ruler. It's actually a triangular cage with a ladder set against the vertex of its equilateral legs. My feet at the first rung, I look up. Inside the cage, there is no sky.

My two companions begin their ascent -- the first steps of a reverent pilgrimage back to the ground.

I tighten my harness.

I climb.

The blush of dawn has begun to pour through the lattice. The breeze carries no sound but the sussurus of the generator far below, throbbing as evenly as the breath of a sleeping giant.

At just shy of nine hundred feet, I choose a perch and flip to the narrow space on the other side of the ladder. I grab the chin strap of your helmet to pull your kiss through the bars. I watch the oranges and golds of the desert-morning sun bury themselves in your green eyes and wonder, as I always do, if this will be the last time I see them.

You and the other jumper rattle further up the ladder, sending quivers through the steel. Soon, you're too far to see clearly. Soon after that, you can't hear when I call for you.

I start singing to myself instead and, while I wait for the familiar battle cries from the jumpers above, I play.

I sit in lotus between two legs of the triangle.

I hang loosely back into the center of the tower from my harness, arms loose, palming the ebb and flow of air as it moves through the steel and over my skin.

I straddle the void, balancing, one foot propped on each side.

I clamber out to hang on to the outside of the structure, sending resounding clangs up and down the length of the spire as I explore new points to affix myself, watching far above for signs of an exit.

I run my fingers over the inscriptions impressed on the quickdraw clipped in front of me. In one succinct, sentence-like diagram, the carabiner explains the math behind cross-loading. I'd never stared at one long enough to notice the engraving, so I take the moment to ponder the little miracle of engineering that holds me here. I scratch the multiple embroidery that holds the central web together. I think about microcracks.

The carabiner shivers under my fingers as the boys move into position four hundred feet above. As I move my hand back to the ladder, I brush a small fabric tag attached to the web. In tiny letters: "CLIMBING IS DANGEROUS." I see the words framed by the sacred grey geometry of the tower beneath me, its vanishing point sliding into darkness.

It's time.

The crack from the first jumper's canopy splits the silence. The gunshot retort is soon followed by a whoop of victory, and I watch him settle to the ground with the ease of a dandelion seed.

I drop my head through the lattice to crane my neck upward, squinting my eyes at the stark blue canvas behind what I can see of the zenith. Soon, you emerge. Arms and legs long and even, you spring into the void as smoothly as a launching albatross. When your canopy blossoms from your back directly in front of me, I throw a cry of triumph across the space between us. You cleave a path down, down, down to a dirt road and I see your nanoscale figure touch lightly to the earth.

I breathe, watching the pink slowly return to my whitened knuckles.

Time to go down.