Travelogues

Big Fear At Low Altitude: Zip-lining in Caldas Novas, Goias, Brazil

This post is Track 16 of Travelogue Soundtrack.

The harness operator had lost patience. “Ou voce pula ou voce se caga” ("you either jump or you shit yourself"). Failing to take the hint, failing to launch and failing to escape my terror, I remain perched, ridiculously immobile, at the top of the zipline.

I first discovered my fear of heights as a seven year old child when on a school trip to the Isle of Man’s Laxey Wheel. My classmates scampered happily upwards to enjoy views from the top of the biggest waterwheel in the British Isles. Yet I remained welded eye-level to the axle, transfixed with terror. The rotation of the bright red 11m long spokes hypnotically churned my stomach. I only surrendered my iron grip on the guide-rail when I rejoined my class as it snaked its way to the safety of firm ground.

26 years later, I was in Hot Park - Brazil’s largest water park in Caldas Novas, Goais - and was again similarly frozen. I was unable to jump.

Such irrational fears are said to be “all in our head” or more specifically to reside in the amygdala, the tiny fear and anger centre of our brain. But for me, vertigo is a terror of the body not the mind - a rebellion of my physical form against my conscious self. When approaching a precipice, all the cells in my body tighten. Calm whispers of my rational being are overwhelmed by the strident choruses of body molecules screaming “STOP! DON’T! YOU CAN’T! YOU’LL HAVE A HEART ATTACK!!!”

At Presidente Figueiro in Amazonas, my body again froze on the cusp of leaping into the murky brown waters near the foot of the beautiful Santuario Falls. It wasn’t enough for my mind to issue re-assuring thoughts that the piranhas, caimans and other local hazards were safely located a few kilometres away. My body needed proofs of sense rather than of thought. But my eyes could not see beneath the surface.

My mind and my body simply did not trust each other. Apparently my body possessed a greater appetite for self-preservation than my mind. The decision to quit my job in Ireland and move to Latin America was a much more consequential leap into the unknown than that at Presidente Figueiro. I had many fears about doing so - am I wrecking my career?, am I being irresponsible?, will my relationships suffer? is this exactly the wrong thing to do with my life? Yet, I neither hesitated about making the decision, nor equivocated about it once it was made. By contrast jumping from even relatively modest heights produced paralysis.

Of course fear is not a purely negative sensation - it has the excellent side effect of keeping us alive. Although we diminish as people as our fear increases, such self-shrinkage is a reasonable strategy when surrounded by danger. However, life as a small target is a kind of blasphemy - a failure to experience and celebrate the full extent of ourselves. Thus, the paradoxical expansions and contractions of hope and fear create the heartbeat of our lives - supplying the impulses with which we venture into uncertainty.

The week that was ending with absurd paralysis at Hot Park had started more promisingly in Rio De Janeiro. On midnight on New Year’s Eve, I had joined 2 million Cariocas on Copacabana beach. Nearly all of us dressed in white as we arrived at the edge of the Atlantic. We were here to greet Iemanjá, the Goddess of the Water, and to ask her to bless our New Year. Such a peaceful and optimistic mass communal exercise represents humanity at its best - embracing the unknown in hope, rather than retreating from it in fear. Spectacular fireworks announced we had made it safely into the new territory of 2008.

Perhaps I absorbed some of the hope and optimism of Rio’s Reveillon festival at a cellular level. My body relaxed and I jumped. I jumped on the zipline in Hot Park, into the murky Amazonian waters in Presidente Figueiro and the river rapids in Brotas. In mid-air, suspended between fear and hope, my mind and body made their peace with each other. Both only felt complete when leaping into the unknown.