Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Waterfall

On the way home from safari, we stopped at a waterfall for lunch and swimming. It’s this little tourist trap place with a restaurant and a beautiful waterfall that you have to climb up to. Sarah and I went with the Kennell girls/Mark, the Reeves clan, and the Miller clan to the swimming hole at the base of the fall. As Mark told me on the way up, it’s the most perfect place ever to reenact the Lost episode where Kate and Sawyer find the case of guns. He was right, but I’m not sure I would have gotten in the water if I thought there were dead bodies at the bottom of the pool.



So, here we are, in this lovely little cove, swimming in the brilliantly blue water, enjoying the wonderful coolness. I swam across toward the waterfall with Maddie, following Aidan and Matt to a little bunch of rocks that they started to climb up. Matt jumped off of the little rock ledge, then it was Aidan’s turn. He was a little hesitant, and I was worried he would jump weirdly and hit a rock, so I climbed up to where he was to point to where he should land and to give him a little encouragement. Aidan soon let go of the tree and leaped off of the ledge, so I climbed back down. Maddie and I worked our way closer to the waterfall, then swam back to the other side where all of the non-swimmers were sitting.

Once I got there, Andrea asked me why I hadn’t jumped. I told her that it takes me an incredibly long time to get the nerve up to take my feet off of solid ground to leap off of high things. The story of the time at Paige’s lakehouse, right after high school graduation came up: I sat at the top of her diving platform for an hour until the sun had gone down and my friends had gone in for supper. I wasn’t going to climb down, because I needed to jump off. I wasn’t going to jump off because I couldn’t convince my body that I needed to. So, I sat there. After that hour and sometime before I went to bed that night, I jumped. “Why didn’t I jump, Andrea? I didn’t want to lose the respect of everyone on the team!”

In response to her (and in my mind, my) question, I swam back to the rock, and climbed up to the ledge. Yeah, I don’t really know why either. I hate jumping off of things. But, it was a challenge I presented to myself. So, I climbed up and looked off of this super tall, massive, huge 8 foot cliff. Dave kept saying, “You have to jump, I’m blocking your way down.” Becky convinced me it had spiritual application and once I jumped, I would officially be an adult. Little 6 year old Gabe encouraged me with, “Come on Miss Jacque! You can do it! Yaaayy!!” Andrea had her camera poised and ready to snap. Sarah had her camera recording. Everyone on the shore was cheering for me, just like they had for Aidan.

So there I stood. And stood. And stood. Sarah’s camera, full of pictures from Europe and safari only had about three and a half minutes of video space- she took three videos, and missed the actual jump because it was unexpected when it finally happened, and her camera was full again! Andrea caught the moment on her camera, though, because she persevered through the fifteen minutes of false alarms.


I climbed back on a ledge that was half submerged (no more heights for me), dove in, and swam across the pool back to where everyone else was. Aidan informed me that until I jumped, my position as his favorite teacher was very threatened. Which is totally legit.

After I (finally) jumped, Gabe climbed up on the ledge after me and leaped off. It took him at least 30 seconds to decide to jump.

No comments:

Post a Comment