Villa de Leyva, Colombia, March 13th, 2009
 
I rappelled down a raging waterfall. Right down the middle. In Colombia, they call it Torrentismo.

 

You could say that the equipment wasn’t state of the art. I paid a couple of Colombians to take me out into the hills (OK, it sounds like a bad idea already) and rappel with me down the waterfall. They do it all the time. Just before we went over the edge, I found that they also smoke a lot of marijuana. Disconcerting. Their English was bad, but I could understand them. One of them had long hair and his buddy had a buzz cut.

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"The rope is your life," the longhair said, holding the rope up while he involuntarily coughed, holding in a lungful of pot smoke.

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He was referring to the rope that you hold in your right hand when you rappel. I have been repelling before and know that the tension on that rope is what keeps you from falling down a cliff. Keep the tension and you can control how fast you go down the cliff. Let go and…

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Before we went down the waterfall, they fitted me out with a crash helmet. One of them tapped it pretty hard, then I did the same and we laughed. I raised a fist over my head and yelled out something like, “hahaa!” in an accent that I made sound vaguely foreign.

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They had the older version of rappelling equipment, without the automatic brake, so the line literally was my life, and I kept it taut. The first few steps were surprisingly easy; the guy went through the whole deal at the top. He told me in Spanish, and slowly, so at least the few words I didn’t understand were well articulated nonsense. 

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He asked me if I played soccer, futbol?

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I said "No, I played football, futbol americano."

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He looked disgusted, this messed up his analogy. He gave me the analogy of the soccer goalie on a penalty kick anyway. Stand like the soccer goalie on a penalty kick, he said (or at least I think he said), and he stood with feet further than shoulder width apart and rocked back and forth a little bit. I tried to picture a soccer goalie, but soccer sucks. He said to lean back, in Spanish, then in English he called it "Roll back", so my weight was leaning really far back, when we get into the waterfall itself, keep my head down so I can breathe, keep my weight back (keyword: “roll back”) because if I leaned forward the crush of the water would kick my feet out from under me and I would smash into the rocks. Then I would get a high speed shower while doing a head first bouncy dance off of the cliff face. OK. I got the idea, I was a soccer goalie, I was rolling back, head down with no water in the face, the rope always in the right hand. The rope was my life. I gave a thumbs up (with the left thumb, the rope is my life) and started over the edge, thinking to myself that the last time I was lowered over a waterfall was a much shorter distance, in a cave in Guatemala, and the fifteen foot drop had been intense. This was several stories tall. 

Just as I started to go the other guide, the one with the buzz cut who manned the ropes at the top, wanted to shake my hand. I grabbed the rope with my left hand, kept the line taut, and shook his with my right hand. It was a test. I failed. In Spanish he said something like "Don’t ever let go of the rope with your right hand for anything." Then he said in English, "The rope is your life."

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I remembered dive training at ECU. We had a section of the Scientific Diver Training where we had to go through an underwater course with our masks blacked out so that we navigated by feel. It was to prepare us for working in blackwater conditions. Our dive instructor, Steve Sellers, used to say "The line is life, don’t lose the line." In order to pass the test we had to follow a dive reel line from one end to another. To make it more challenging, sometimes they would hook clips to you so you would get stuck and have to feel around for where you were stuck and figure out how to get clear. At one place the line took you under chicken wire, at another you had to go through a fifty-five gallon drum with the ends cut off, it was suspended above the bottom of the pool. There was a part where they stuck you in a net. That was hard to get out of. After getting through all of the obstacles I really had a sense of accomplishment. Later, on the Roanoke River in muddy water, or out on the Queen Anne’s Revenge archaeological site when the sediment is so stirred up you can’t see a thing, I fell back on that training. Follow the line in, follow the line out. On the Roanoke I followed a line with other divers through submerged trees, across the river bottom where the current ripped so bad we had to use pieces of rebar to stab into the sediment so we wouldn’t get carried off. As long as I could hear my dive buddy breathing I knew they were there. And as long as I had a hold of the line reel that was tied to the bank or the anchor line, I knew how to get home. The line is life. Don’t lose the line.  

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In Colombia, as we started down, the guide shouted instructions over the roar of the water. Occasionally the he told me, in Spanish, to go left or right, I have trouble with left or right in English, but in Spanish to the left is "a la izquierda" or something like that. I kept shifting to the izquierda, and he yelled "Roll back!" every so often, so I leaned back. When we got into the waterfall it was, in a word, shithouse. The noise was far louder than I would have thought and the power of the water nearly knocked me off of my feet a few times, despite the fact that I moved izquierda and I was following his "Roll back" instructions. He almost didn’t stop yelling it once we got into the most powerful part. Everything became whitewater, the dark cliff face, and noise. Despite the challenge, it was ridiculously fun.

I was surprised at how cold the water felt, I have a hard time with anything chilly in the tropics because it seems like a rip-off somehow. Here I am somewhere that is supposed to be hot all of the time, and now I am chilly?

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At the bottom we climbed back up a steep trail through the trees. I had some fruit and crackers for lunch and then we hiked down the canyon, with a friend of theirs we met along the way. He was a slight man, in a Frank Sinatra style hat and waterproof boots, who played an Andean flute as we walked through the forest. We stopped at a new spot for torrentismo. Here the guide with the short hair tried a new route and rappelled down the face of another, more powerful, falls. He got his rope tangled in a tree caught by the torrent, suspended about fifty feet or more above the rocks. For a minute I thought it was going to be bad, but he got out of it, and when he was done, he shivered uncontrollably for ten minutes. 

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Done for the day, we hiked out of the canyon and the altitude got me a bit winded. Bogota is at over 8,000 feet altitude and we were at more than 7,000 in down Villa d Leyva, higher at the canyon by the falls. They had gotten a ride up with a colleague, and didn’t have their own vehicle, to get back into town we had to flag down a truck and ride in the back.

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The first part of that year was very busy for me. I taught two classes at East Carolina University, worked at an artifact laboratory, and took Mixed Martial Arts classes. I hardly had a spare minute, and took a Saturday off every two or three weeks. It was strange, but as I was about to go over the edge of the cliff, I realized that I really needed to go somewhere like Colombia and do something like rappel off a waterfall in order to really relax. I think the moment I stepped off the cliff was the calmest I was in 2009.