You Don’t Have to Jump

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I had a friend I grew up with. We were friends for a long time before high school.

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We liked the same kinds of things—chess, science fiction, the kind of ideas that feel enormous when you’re twelve and haven’t yet learned how small you are. We walked everywhere. This was back in the last millennium, when kids were turned loose early and wandered until it was dinner time, or too dark to notice anything that mattered. Helmets were optional. So was supervision.

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We tried all the things young boys and young men try.

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When I was about seventeen, he invited me to go swimming with a group of friends. We went to Lake Sammamish, I think. It was a beautiful day. The kind that convinces you that physics is taking the afternoon off.

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We swam across the lake to some rocks on the other side. I was a good swimmer. No problem there. But when people started jumping off the rocks into the water, something in me locked up.

I climbed up onto the rock and froze.

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I don’t know where it came from. Panic, maybe. Or imagination doing what imagination does best: presenting a full-color slideshow of everything that could go wrong, complete with sound effects. I just couldn’t jump. I stood there for what felt like days—working up the courage, losing it, working it up again, losing it again.

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Finally, my friend said, very calmly,

“You don’t have to do it.”

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It hit me like a revelation from heaven. Possibly with a small choir.

So I climbed down.

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I suppose I could have jumped. But I also might still be standing on that rock today, explaining to strangers that I was “almost ready.”

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Years earlier—maybe when we were twelve or thirteen—his father took us hiking up Mount Si. A wonderful, haystack-shaped mountain east of where I grew up. We climbed fast. It was fun. At the top, we went around the back of the haystack, where there was still snow.

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We were cutting steps into it with our boots. At one point, I kicked the snow and it crumbled. I slipped and started sliding. I hit my friend, and suddenly we were both sliding together, bobsledding straight toward a cliff we were certain meant death. Youth is very confident about these things.

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He ended up in front of me, my legs on either side of him. As we got closer to the edge, I wrapped my legs around him and grabbed two branches on either side. He grabbed one. We swung out over the ledge and back.

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We were very relieved to still be alive.

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We were also much more careful after that, which is a lesson that tends to arrive after it would have been most useful.

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There’s a coda to this story.

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We drifted apart over the years. Much later, we ended up living near each other again and reconnected. At some point, his kids came up, and he told me they had heard the story.

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Apparently, they’d been told how I had almost killed their dad.

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Except—in the version he told them—I had saved his life.

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Funny how one story can have two versions and both be true. Especially when everyone survives to argue about it.