Hung in there for dear life

A spider or a bat hanging upside down is merely a technique for survival. Whether they derive pleasure or fright is a matter of conjecture. Imagine a sixty-plus emulating this act, hanging feet down, from a maze of ropes and a parachute! What else it could be other than a foolhardy attempt to show off a misplaced valour? If this attempt is an invited upon adventure, then a more severe terminology has to be dug out from a bulky dictionary. 

Had I declined to go to the beach or simply dumped the encouragements on to the receding waves or weighed in my phobias before agreeing for this ghastly experiment, I could have avoided an hour of suspense, fear and uncertainty in the air and over an ominous looking sea.

For anyone who does not know swimming   or to act like a swimmer, hovering over the sea , even with all the safety gears and trained rescue team in place, it promised to  be a combo offer of thrill and nightmare waiting to be experienced and relived.

The short sand patch on the beach abruptly ended in the waters as if reluctant to get separated from the rolling waves. On this shore an expert strapped me with a flaming red jacket, which resembled more like a conjoined pillows stuffed with Styrofoam than a safety device. At this stage, there was no option but to trust this make-believe contraption or the driver who was standing by with an inflated rubber craft tethered to a wave rider. This brought to my mind the picture of a calf being attached to its mother.  It is my experience that whenever anxiety flexed its fingers, I turn to similes. 

A look at the craft and the name “Yamaha” on the wave rider froze my spine instantly. Literally I was dragged and unceremoniously made to sit on the rubber craft with a curt instruction to hold on to the hand-grip.

The driver vented out his impatience by accelerating the wave rider as he had to meet the mother boat standing at a distance, in the sea. The thoughts of contraband runners employing similar technique ran through my mind and that did not help to quell my fear of getting in to the open sea. Every wave that passed by chose to terrorise me further by wantonly amplifying each rise and fall of the rubber craft. After a minute or so my fingers were ready to poke through the palms and look at my rigid face.

In a feeble gesture, as if to divert my mind from building up further tension, the wave rider kept spewing a water jet majestically from its rear, unaware of the fact that I was also busy, doing the same thing, by counting the number of waves passed by to confirm a beach theory that said ‘every seventh one will be the biggest among the lot’ and assessing the probability of experiencing sea sickness before this ride came to an end. I lost on both the counts as the wave rider neared the waiting boat and stopped with a bang, almost throwing me overboard.

The mother boat had no gleaming deck to boast except for a winch mechanism and a long length of coiled manila rope. After meeting the people waiting and brave enough to go para-gliding, I understood why the driver of the rubber craft was in such a tearing hurry. He wanted to get the show going and I wanted it to end even before mine started. Though, there was no possibility of avoiding the prolonged stay in the boat, as I stood shaking at number four in the queue.

Mind in the grip of fear is a wonderful gadget to unleash frightful thoughts. Mine did exactly that with such clarity – its purpose was to make me experience the triple whammy of hydrophobia, agoraphobia and acrophobia. As a starter it let loose a shoal of sharks with the sole agenda to eat me alive. At this juncture a self doubt surfaced “Why so many at a time?” followed by a train of doubts: “How deep is the sea here and for how long I can hold my breath without taking in salt water? The very thought of salt water made me to retch a bit but somehow I managed to hide my discomfort from those brave hearts in the boat.

The show began when the first person was called up. One more life jacket, having a catch mechanism to attach it to the harness of the parachute, went over the first jacket. On signal from the trainer, the pilot of the boat revved up the engine to pick up speed. As I watched in fear induced silence, the cords slowly became taut and the parachute started to open like an umbrella. The gushing wind caused the parachute to fill and lift the person dangling from the harness.

Giving up its fight for freedom from the restraining ropes, the parachute slowly rose higher and higher, in to the sea breeze. The airborne figure and the parachute  started moving up and down buffeted by the wind. He resembled a flying kite and the rope attached to the winch on the boat looking like the tethering twine holding the kite from taking off on its own! A penny for my thought: "How the flier will react if the parachute takes off on its own?"

At this point I closed my eyes to imagine myself at that position. Dramatic scenes, in 3D, of soldiers being air dropped over enemy territory amidst whizzing bullets followed by pilots ejecting from flaming fighter planes premiered in my mind. On the sidelines of these heroic acts, some gruesome scenes where the parachutes fail to open and the jumpers die crashing to the ground, peeked in exclusively to scare the hell out of me. If fear is the key to the doors of nightmare I was tightly holding a bunch of them on that day. Even the cackle of sea birds circling above the water sounded like the creaking doors to the museum of nightmares.

This forgettable reverie was broken by the not so gentle shaking of my shoulders. The trainer was standing in front of me to get his job done. Little did I realise that in real life a queue could move up so fast or time runs out at supersonic speed when you are lost in the forest of fear. The boat was gently bobbing up and down,mirroring the movement of the waves while the co-passengers were excitedly pointing out to the far away mountains or at birds circling overhead. Speaking casually in a local dialect, the trainer finished harnessing my unwilling persona  for the adventure. I felt like a patient being readied for surgery, having no choice to lodge a protest.

The pilot slowly picked up speed and the boat started to buck like a horse in a rodeo show. I felt a gentle tug at the harness and began to ski backwards, scraping my feet, over the deck surface. As my feet were airborne, I felt like a steer hanging down from a meat hook, courtesy, once again, from movie scenes. The parachute started talking to me with cracking sound, which I initially mistook for gun shots, from overhead. The lone, mean looking bird began to circle around my airborne frame. My frightened mind surprised me by throwing up these teasers: if I am the meat hanging from the hook, then will this bird be the buyer? Whether the purchase is for the whole family or for its own meal?

At this stage, my heart felt like a ball of cotton and started to pump ‘frightened’ fear along with the blood from toes to head. Unable to bear the burden, it suddenly took a fancy for the fresh saltish air and started inching towards my mouth. We are made for each other and are agoraphobic. This fear for heights and my gridlocked teeth effectively prevented it from happily walking out on me.

Slowly, ever slowly the parachute rose up in air and through the slit of an eye I saw the whole sea shore, building structures and people receding from my view to become indistinct details. Bursting at the seam, the surging fear managed to open my sealed lips to let out a plaintive cry. Then I began to talk to myself, in a loud monotone, expelling few vehement shouts, at the waves.

By this time, my dangling arms and legs got busy in punching the air and the relative, riding in the boat , especially to photograph this event, kept himself busy shooting this comic scene frame after frame. Poor soul, he might have misunderstood the flailing legs and punching arms as a mark of my exemplary courage.

The humming of the diesel engine started to sound weak and the parachute began to steadily lose altitude, giving a false hope that my ordeal would end soon. Before I could realise it, my feet landed on the surface of water pulling me down up to hip level. The boatman’s intention was to give me the feel of getting a ‘dip’ in the sea while curly waves tried to lift and lower me like an abandoned piece of drift wood.

A sharp burning sensation, on the left leg just below the kneecap, now joined the list of my miseries. An accidental scraping against a boulder had left a deep cut and now that was protesting the salt water bath it was getting. Who knows, the gash might have opened up and bleeding? Another imaginary worry crept in : If it is true that sharks could smell a drop of blood from a mile , have I not just sent it an invitation for a bite?

The interminable waiting, for the shark to bite and the game of ‘dip , lift and dip’ being played on my nerves by the boatman using me as the lure for the shark, mercifully ended when he decided to land me on the deck.

Thinking that the sea of emotions I exhibited, during the entire exercise, would look ‘telling’ in the family album, tight close up pictures were continuously being shot by one of the conspirators. Obviously he wanted to impress the other one, his wife, waiting for us on the beach.

Fresh from this agony, I resolved not to give in to any temptation for walking that extra nautical mile even to visit a sea shore - in future!