The Real Insomnia Culprit

It’s funny: people think I’m crazy for these stunts we’ve planned (now 20 days away). “Oh, I couldn’t do that. You have fun. Hope you live to tell us how it went.” [That’s not a direct quote, just the conglomeration of repeated sentiments.] Stupid, no. It’s calculated risk. Like a Brett Favre throw: if he threads the defenders, it’s gutsy skill; if it’s picked off and taken to the house, he’s a careless gunslinger. So, if the mechanisms that guide our adventures—the bungy, the parachute, the personal flotation devices—work as they have been designed and tested and repeatedly used, then my brother and I look like eternal youths, daring men. If the inspectors missed something or a failsafe ungrasps, then we are hapless child crusaders or at best lost boys.
That, is my greatest fear: that I will have led my brother to injury or worse, that the ledge will leave us before we’re hooked. I cannot control a torn shoot, a frayed wire, a paddle-less raft. Fate does. Chance does. God does.
And that’s what makes me gasp at 12:10am and start not-thinking about our trip: the elements outside of our control. It’s why I can ride a coaster that follows an adrenaline-filled, heart-speeding circuit but sweat through napkins during airplane turbulence. It’s control. The multi-car machine will go where it’s told and follow the natural laws of the universe. A plane . . . well, too many movies about that.
So, oddly enough, I’m more afraid of the ledge than the jump, more wary of the opening in the cable car than the bungy. I get freaked out most by the idea of falling off the insured precipice trying to record the moment on video or digital picture.
That’s one of the main reasons I’ve purchased the helmet mounted cameras. If I’m wearing the camera, Timmy is safe behind the yellow line. If he’s recording without hands, I can sit in the safe zone.
People, especially my wife, ask why it’s so important for me to capture the stunts on “film.” If it’s about conquering fears and bonding with Timmy, why record? If it’s about the experience, why not just experience the moment and walk away with inner satisfaction.
Well, one, it’s always good to have evidence. We can’t chicken out of an activity for which family and friends are expecting pictures. Two, it allows our future viewers (if edited correctly in post production), to experience vicariously a little of the lot we’ll be feeling. Even if the video quality is poor, the audio track should be priceless.
Mostly, though, it’s for a memorial. I’m visually stimulated. Crystal could tell you I have a terrible—TERRIBLE—memory. But I can jump back in time to smells and sounds and temperature with just a picture. I don’t mean this sacrilegiously, but it’s like stacking Jordan rocks into altars to remember the good things I’ve known. I take a lot of pictures—almost 7000 in the past year, still over 5,000 even if you subtract those from shooting my friends’ weddings. I can’t tell you how many times this year, I’ve blown a lunch hour just flipping through the digital images on my Mac. Photographs are my memory, often times as much as they trigger my memory.
Five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I can still benefit from the adrenaline, the conquering, the brotherhood. These DVD clips and coffee table iPhoto books will help this trip of a lifetime last a lifetime. I have never forgotten the 70’s-colored pictures of my dad in his black helmet and the distant shots Mom took of his round, white parachute against the blue. He had instant legend status from his small son, bragging on him at grade school. And I’ve never forgotten that bold adventurous facet of my dad, even as he grows into cardigans.
Someday, my nieces and nephews will flip through pictures of their dad and/or uncle jumping out of a canyon cable car and see us in a new light. Or our Sunday school class or youth group. Or the people in our nursing home. We’ll be the ones recognized for having guzzled life ’til it slurped; we’ll be the ones with fewer I never got the chance to‘s and more stories to tell. Not just because of 10 days in the Southern Hemisphere but by the kind of lives that consider falling blue-faced and heart-paused a great vacation.
So, I’ll take these weeks of insomniac midnights now to avoid the nights of shoulda, woulda, coulda later. I’ll conquer my ledge-cut fears, so that people who know me will know someone who did.