Numb
Three.
Two.
One.
And then the bottom drops out of everything.
I absolutely love that phrase. The sensuality it lends to moments of sharp mental or emotional anguish is irresistible. The flavour of helplessness built into the saying lends a delicious seasoning to any tale of loss, or heartbreak…or any dish on the long menu of personal catastrophes.
Well, I found a place where you can physically experience that. A place where the bottom literally drops out of everything.
Twenty minutes (at least how I drive) east of Ottawa is a colourful, themed water park. It’s a haven for families, budding teenagers eager to see each other half-naked, young couples in love, the morbidly obese…whatever. It’s meant as a getaway, an escape, a day’s respite from life.
It is a most unlikely place to find the physical incarnation of my favourite literary device.
Tucked into a corner of this magical place, are two tubes entwined like a pair of crazed snakes. You step into the cylindrical head – a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare – before embarking on a 70 degree drop, followed by an angled loop and then a sharp turn before emerging from the snake’s tail – trembling and terrified.
“Isabelle,” I say to my water park companion. “We have to do it!”
She thinks I’m looking for a thrill. She doesn’t realize my aim is much more sinister: a masochistic desire to put my body through the same anguish that occasionally wracks my heart, soul, mind et al.
In the line for the ride/life experience, we meet a pair of, I assume, high school girls; a cute redhead with a charming spattering of adorable freckles and a toothy, easy grin…and a lithe brunette with ice cold blue eyes and a smirk that’s likely already broken a few hearts.
Oddly enough, they initiate the conversation.
“Have you guys done this already?” asks the redhead.
“No,” answers Isabelle. I’m still considering how many 16-year-old boys the brunette has destroyed or emotionally maimed for the next decade.
I settle on four. It seems a reasonable number.
“The scariest part,” says the redhead, grinning widely. “Is the countdown.”
“Yeah,” adds the brunette. “It goes ‘three, two, one’…then the bottom drops out of everything.”
“Ah ha,” I sigh.
I stop short of saying what I’m thinking.
Consider yourself fortunate, princess, that you’ve been afforded a count down at all. Fate does not spoil you with the warning “on the 17th day of the 3rd month, I will blindside you with the worst day of your life before I tear your world asunder and leave you sobbing and calling for your mother from the darkest of dark corners.”
“Sounds awesome!” It sounds like my voice but I scarcely believe my own words.
“Yeah!” They both exclaim, bouncing around with glee.
Good lord.
A few minutes later, I’m stepping into the cylinder. I’ve crossed my feet and folded my hands across my chest as instructed by the teenaged lifeguard. He’s giving me the thumbs up and grinning like an idiot. I painfully return the gesture, he nods, slaps the side of the cylinder and takes a few steps back.
“Three.” says the voice from the GPS unit that guided me here.
“Two.”
A deep sigh. I glance at my feet. I have to see this.
“One.”
A pneumatic thump. The bottom actually folds out…and now I’m freefalling down this translucent blue tube. I struggle to keep my eyes open. It isn’t enough that my stomach is somewhere between my ears, that I can’t breathe, that my eyelids feel like they’re writhing in the wind like a pair of torn parachutes…but I need to see this happening.
A rush of wind and I’m on my back, sliding forward, rushing around a turn…I feel my body being pulled to the left. It occurs to me that I’m looping…yet my senses are under such an assault that my brain computes it as sharp turn. Amazing.
I hear a gurgling sound. My legs are torn apart and my testicles seem to be crushed by a tidal wave of water. At some point, I’ve closed my eyes. When I open them again, I’m lying in a tube of salt water, sputtering and blinking furiously.
I’ve lost a contact lens. A blurry Isabelle is speaking to me.
“We’re never doing that again!”
“Okay,” I mumble. I don’t have the heart to tell her that the entire experience was oddly therapeutic…and very alarming.
As I stumble to my feet, I realize the whole experience may have lasted less than six seconds. It slowly dawns on me that the slowest part of the ride was the freefall. I felt numb as I plummeted into oblivion. I sadly realize why.
I’d been there before. Countless times.
I’m no stranger to fear. In nearly ten years and a pedestrian 500 hours in an airplane, I’ve had several students try to kill me attempting aerobatic manoeuvres. In fact, one tried today. I hardly batted an eyelid.
In the better part of five years as a television reporter, I covered fires, shootings, brutal murders…and funerals for 8 year olds who drowned in swimming pools during birthday parties. Each time, something inside me rusted, rotted, broke, died. But I swore I wouldn’t lose compassion or grace.
I promised myself I wouldn’t grow numb.
The trouble is life doesn’t give you a countdown…and when the bottom drops out, the horror doesn’t last seconds.
