Member-only story
Summer in New Zealand
Winter for most of the rest of you.
When your ankles are tied together, you don’t so much walk as shuffle. So when the man told me to walk forward, I shuffled to the edge of the precipice and looked out onto nothing — precisely 43 meters (over 140 feet) of nothing that ended with a turquoise river cutting its way through a rocky canyon.
“Let go of the railing,” the man instructed.
But I couldn’t make my hand release. I didn’t want to lose my balance and fall, especially since my ankles were bound together.
“I’ve got ahold of you,” he encouraged. “I won’t let you fall.”
That was an incongruous statement. After all, I was standing on the edge of Kawarau Bridge, the original birthplace of bungee jumping. I had come here specifically to jump off the bridge. And yet, I was afraid of falling off by accident.
Standing with my toes dangling on the edge of the platform, I took a breath and released my grip on the railing. I did not fall.
The instructor counted down, “3, 2, 1. Make it happen!”
I made it happen. I leaped off the edge into nothing. And I plummeted, in the…
