Man’s cleverness outwitted by nature. Wile E. Coyote’s failures summed up by the diminishing figure falling downward into a puff of smoke.
That was what I was thinking, watching a YouTube video of two women reluctantly hurtling down a zipline in Boracay. They were screaming when the guy harnessed them in, screaming when he pulled them back like a slingshot and released them, and screaming all the way down the steel wire as it disappeared over the tree cover into an ever-diminishing scream punctuated by (I imagined) a tiny mushroom cloud.
Come to think of it, Roadrunner cartoons always struck me as a wry take on those scientists who built the first atomic bomb out in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The cartoons were always set in the desert, surrounded by scrubby nuclear wasteland, where the chase took place: Wile E Coyote always had this state-of-the-art arsenal contracted by the mysterious weapons maker Acme — never a match somehow for the smirking face of speed and nature, the Roadrunner. Then there was that guitar-driven theme song: probably my first experience of rock ‘n’ roll in all its reckless exuberance.
But it was the image of the coyote plummeting that always got to me: the plume of smoke, after the pregnant pause, signifying decimation, man’s undoing at the hands of physics. The feet pedaling uselessly in space before realization kicks in. The distant sound of land erupting, when a body meets it.
All that went through my mind, too, when my wife and I stepped up to the platform near Fairways & Bluewater Resort in Boracay. Hard to believe, but we’d never tried ziplining before. Hard to believe — after watching the YouTube, and noticing that nobody was riding on the Zipline Boracay shuttle with us — that we were going through with it.
But some things you have to try once to see for yourself how stupid they are. We’d heard great things about the zipline in Cagayon de Oro, seen pictures of people lying spread-eagled, soaring like Superman. Looked good. Why not?
We took a shuttle to Fairways & Bluewater, up the winding back hills of Bora’s Station 1, then a second shuttle from there, going higher, until we begin to doubt our resolve. Same as with any spirit-crushing roller-coaster line: the higher you climb, the longer the snaking line seems before you actually reach your seats, the more you start looking for “EXIT” signs.
But then we were there, forking over pesos and signing a form — not even a liability waiver, as we did at the Kai Spa the night before, absolving themselves from any injury caused by deep-tissue massage. No, this was more like “notify next of kin” paperwork.
So we got harnessed and strapped in, leaving us enough time to contemplate the deep descent over a canopy of leaves and trees that seemed to end up at the beach down below, in front of a large rock face.
Wait a minute. “Large rock face”? That’s where we stop?
I was having second thoughts.
But the dude who strapped us in was used to this hedging. He had us sit down on the edge of the wooden platform. Directly below us was about 80 feet of greenery down to the ground. I imagined he was going to give each of us a sharp kick to the back to send us on our way. Instead, the dude muttered: “On the count of three, go.”
Like a good Nazi, I went on “three.” Just following orders. My wife Therese, meanwhile, stayed put on the platform. I knew this was all wrong as I started to descend. Maybe she chickened out. Oh, well, it’s only 30 seconds or so. What I didn’t bank on was the difficulty of gripping two black canvas straps supporting my weight all the way down. This was literally all that was preventing me from dangling upside down and backwards. There was about a second or two of exhilaration as I dropped down suddenly on the stretched line, then bounced back up: enough time to study the forest passing beneath my legs, which I labored to tuck underneath me as instructed. I also leaned back as we were told.
But I was painfully aware of my wrists wrapped around these straps; they were digging into my tightly clenched fingers, and I kept thinking how bad it would be if I let go at that point.
The problem with this zipline was it didn’t really feel safe. It felt low-tech. There should be straps, I kept thinking to myself, the kind in subways cars, the kind that are comfortable when you’re jerked around. This was scary, I realized, but not the “good” kind of scary. All I could think about was if I let go of the straps, I’d dangle like a trapeze artist awaiting a catch, and my head and arms would become intimately and painfully acquainted with a long reception line of tree branches. It would suck. I hung on.
This concern was soon replaced by a more pertinent matter: the rock wall at the bottom was approaching. It then occurred to me: How do we stop? Where are the brakes on this thing? As I got closer to bottom, I finally saw it: a rubber bumper. I was going to bounce off this thing, like Wile E. Coyote bouncing off a canyon floor, in a puff of smoke and a gently exploding “poof!”
No, instead, there was a rude jerking sensation as the metal bar above my head (the one the instructor wisely told me not to hang onto, otherwise my fingers would be mashed to pulp on impact) slammed into the rubber bumper. I bounced off, and found myself hurtling backward. There were other safety lines, which the guides down below were using to slowly reel us back in. I stopped in less than a second and was left dangling like the spent end of a broken elastic band.
Then I turned my head to see Therese hurtling down after me. I could see she was smiling as she glided down — this must have been before it dawned on her that she, too, was about to French kiss the rubber bumper.
Therese later likened the landing experience to being a crash test dummy. She said if she’d worn false teeth, they would have flown out of her face. I considered what would happen to people wearing prosthetic limbs: these would probably end up in the surf, too. I made a mental note that a warning sign (“Note: Please don’t wear false limbs, teeth or toupees on this ride”) would not be out of order.
The Zipline dudes guided our spent bodies onto a platform to unharness us and there I noticed something else: a few leaves were wedged between the two biggest toes of my left foot. I must have picked up a little flora on the way down. That’s about as close to nature as I plan to get for some time. And another Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.