The Void

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
15 April 2002

Me in flight, descending from 345 feet above the Zambizi River just below the Victoria Falls cataract.

The crowd shouts, "Five...four...

THREE TWO ONE...

BUNGEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!"

I squatted down a little, leaning forward, my hands came lightly away from the railings at my side and as I canted forward, the green canyon walls rose to fill my vision, and the brown river, flecked with white rapids, became a vertical wall in front of me. I leapt.

Somehow the human brain, through evolution, knows to block out sensations too alien or frightening to us, like circuit breakers. I never seem to remember the first second of any plummet I take, the sensory overload being too much for my conscious mind to grasp. And jumping off a bridge 111 meters above the Zambezi River certainly qualifies (to most) as incomprehensible and insane.

Somewhere in the distance I registered screaming (hopefully not me) and cheering as my truck mates watched me, the first of our group off the bridge, which spans the Zambezi River just below the monsterous Victoria Falls and crosses between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The gyrating river and canyon walls gave me the only sensation of falling for the first moment. Then, I remembered my pre-jump thoughts and consciously tried to surrender to my inevitable death; not today but someday. For throwing oneself off a bridge can really only be considered as ritual suicide.

For a moment, my life and the world and everything I know, knew, or will know vanished. I felt free of all earthly encumbrance (excepting gravity) and plunged into a metaphysical void. In that passing moment, I sensed a timelessness and placelessness that can only be described as a rapture or grace. Like the Zen master said to the NY hot dog vendor, "make me one with everything."

Yet through that void, something tugged at me, some tether to the world of form and substance that we occupy beckoned to me. Time slowed, and sensation and conscious thought reappeared in a flash; the river ceased its mad rush at me and I decellerated to a stop, scant meters above the rushing deep. Slowly, the heavens sucked me back from my leap. I soared towards the sky (and the bridge - which I thought I might hit) and I noticed my friends taking pictures and waving, but why were they upside-down?. I waved back as I bounced yo-yo-like beneath the steel girders.