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Oh Christ.

"So like I said, don't look down, look over there at the horizon, and jump as hard as you can away from the platform, okay.? Count of 1. 5-4-3-2-1"

I jumped, and the bottom fell out of the world. Wile E. Coyote would have hovered for a moment in mid-air, but I dropped instantly, like a rock. The memory is all out of focus, just a heart stutter, and a sickening rise in my stomach during the acceleration down. I have a vague memory of trying to hold myself up, backstroking, against the air. It was a physical sensation, far from a thought, because my brain was spinning out from overload, registering red-alert, but little else. In some ways it feels like the first seconds of an earthquake, your body sending spastic signals to your brain that something is horrendously wrong, but your mind lagging a few slow-motion beats behind in deciphering the code.

I felt a split second of jolting rubbery impact at the point when the bungy cord hit full extension, and shot me back into the air for the first gigantic bounce. Booiiiiiing. My mind re-established communication with my body, and I realized with a glorious whoop of feeling that I hadn't died, and that I was swinging back up. Laughing now, high on adrenalin and relief, I bounced way back up, almost two-thirds of the distance to the bridge, and this time I did hover, spinning in the air, before heading down again. I swung for a while by the heels, in gradually decreasing pendulum arcs under the bridge. It was over in a matter of minutes, and in the end, I hung upside down over the river until a guy in a raft on the bank held out a long pole for me to grab, and pulled me in. For days after the jump, I'd find myself grinning in memory at how unbelievably fun it had been, reliving that wonderful bounce back up.

I can't say that I feel different, except that I no longer think of bungy jumping as, in the words of a friend, "just so DUMB." Bungy is not a sport, and requires no particular physical effort, and just a split second of courage. It's weird, an odd-ball touristic phenomenon. And I would do it again in a flash. After all, it's the bounce and the swing up I remember, not the fall.

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