Peeled

It was obvious to me the guy was not going to make it. I even said so. I said:

He’s not going to make it.

The funny thing is, after saying that, my next thought wasn’t for the kid’s safety, or jumping in, swimming across. Nothing even remotely heroic was anywhere near my mind that day. In fact my thought process from that moment until the moment the kid, Travis, that’s his name, Fuckin’ Travis, hit the rocks was pretty simple. Just one brief idea displayed in sharp relief against a clear screen of THC-induced sleepiness. The idea was this:

That’s the dude who wanted to fight me.

***

The “Runner” is part of Taconic Park Watershed Area in Ithaca, New York. It’s got to be the only place in America to feature public land set aside for what the park guide calls “cliff diving.” To get to the Runner, you’ve got to drive a good mile or so into the park, and then hike another half-mile on a steady incline. You end up on a 20-foot boulder facing across a small body of water at the actual jump-wall. It looks smaller than you’d expect if it’s your first time, much bigger than you remember every time after that.

Once you’re facing the jump you’ve got to once again, hike a little ways. Specifically, you’ve got to walk down and to your left, and then under the dam that provides depth enough to make jumping off the wall safe. Or, at the very least, less death-defying. Once you’re on the other side you begin a long, steep descent to the cliff ledges. It takes a few minutes. At times you can reach out in front of you and touch the rock with a bent arm.

At the top things clear out. Here, thanks to the NYS Park and Rec, the underbrush is cleared and maintained smartly. Standing at end of the climb, you find yourself looking at a sheer drop only ten yards to your right. In order, to your right moving away from you are the three areas that mark off three separate heights and degrees of difficulty. The Runner is actually first to your right. Next is the Walker. Last comes Sixty Five. The last two require no skills and no great coordination. The ledges of the rock hang out over water that’s hundreds of feet deep. If somebody were to fall off either Walker or Sixty Five, the most they’d walk away with would be a bad belly-flop burn/bruise and embarrassment. The Runner, a good 20 feet higher than the others, allows no such comforts.

When you look at the spot where people are telling you to jump at first it seems like they’re either mistaken, or wish to see you come to great physical harm. The spot around the launch is always completely overgrown. If you look close in the bush you can see daylight gleaming through the bush like a tiny star burning the undergrowth. Not until you understand the topography can you attempt this, and the light-window in the bush is the first step. Framing out from the glow you find the most direct line to that light leads down a fifteen foot angled slope that’s covered with exposed roots and bramble. You’ll find yourself thinking about the rocks you saw when you were at ground-level . Eighty-eight feet straight down from where you’re jumping, you remember the rocks jutting out in a shelf. Then you begin to understand what’s required of you if you’re going to get this thing done and keep your legs.

First there’s the run. You understand now, just why they call it “The Runner.” To reach the small hole way out there, you are going to have to be hauling ass. Unfortunately, hauling ass isn’t really possible here. You’re jumping off the downward slope takes all balance and torque out of the equation. You actually have to rehearse the steps in order to understand what’s involved. One - two -three - four - five - six (on the rock not the root) seven - eight - nine (don’t stumble on the roots) - TEN (jump now dummy, now!)

***

So that’s where me and this dude first ran in to each-other. Him in a group with a few girls and a few other dudes. Me with a three person posse composed of my roommate and floor mate and a giant bag of expensive, and very potent, weed. Which we were smoking copiously.

We had been sitting at the Walker, legs dangling, and getting stoned. Passing around a two-paper spleef of the sticky and laughing. Most of my laughing was at the expense of this one dude standing over by the Runner. It was well deserved too, ‘cause this dude was funny. His friends were trying to show him what to do, and he kept fucking it up. A lot of the funny came from the fact that the guy kept saying the word “Freel”. As in:

“So make sure you jump hard cause if you don’t clear the rocks its over.”

“There’s rocks?? Freel?”

And

“Hey, I’ve got some weed”

“Weed, Freel?”

He said it in every sentence. Sometimes before and after. Every preparatory intake of breath on his part guaranteed yet another usage of the weird colloquial interrogative “For-real?”, squozen into the two-sylable, single-word syntactic abomination "Freel?". Fucking annoying! It was as if somebody was paying him to use that expression a million times in a day. That would have been enough, probably, cause I was laughing it up pretty good and calling him fat and shit…But it ended up he went the extra mile. After the lesson, the dude started marking off his steps while his friends left him, running back across to watch his impending jump. He was still practicing when they reached the big rock on the other side. Still doing it when they broke out food and beer and sat to eat and drink. Still doing it when we got up to leave. So, as we’re walking out, just as we’re moving past him (still trying to choreograph his steps mind ’ya) I said :

“Times up dicky, Sixty Five down that way.”

I kept walking as I said it, and I had turned my back by the time he rushed me. I heard footsteps pounding in, and braced for a much greater impact than eventually came. I turned, and saw that the big guy had come running. I hadda hand it to him, ‘cause most of my shit talk, though obvious, and loudly targeted, goes un-countered. I guess most people just don’t give a shit, but this fat kid…he gave a shit. His friend was doing the simultaneous hold-back / talk-sense move favored by people who don’t enjoy throwing hands. Even after turning and seeing the state of guy, I couldn’t be bothered. There was no adrenaline charge, no “red curtain.” I even tried some humility:

“C’mon now, I didn’t mean nothing by it. I don’t really think you’re a fuckin pussy or whatever. Some people go their entire tenure here without jumping from this part. No shame…”

He considered this for a minute, and then started trying to push his friend in earnest. He wasn’t threatening or cursing. He was growling and panting though, and fighting people that fat and that into is never a good idea. His friend, wrestling and contorting with fat dude, said:

“Just get the fuck outta’ here asshole.”

And I did.

Walked down around under the dam. Walked up the rock, past the rest of the dude’s friends (you see our friend up there? Fat kid?) and finally into the park fields to play Frisbee. That was noon. Three hours later, and having forgotten, completely, about the fat kid, we headed back towards the cliffs to see if anybody was jumping. As we approached the big rock we saw, yes, the fat kid’s buddies. Two were sleeping and one was listening to a Walkman. I looked across the way, and there was somebody up there. I heard a voice “whoooooooo”… Saw a guy drop through the bushes atop the runner and hurtle into open space. He hit the water with a duck-fart splash and then surface with a triumphant fist. Fat kid, I guessed, had been played through. For the next hour I watched that same guy jump three times. All his friends too. We must’ve sat there for two hours just puffing and watching jumpers. When we checked the next time it was three o clock, and time to head back for booze. We all agreed and stood up. That’s when he did it.


Like I said before, he never had a chance. I timed it out later that night and the guy, his name it turned out was Travis Higgins, was up there for three and a half hours trying to get the eggs up to jump. Three and one half HOURS of trying to break through brick and cinderblock walls of self-preservation and discretion. In the end, he should have just jumped first and been done with it. His chances of survival, I’m convinced, would have skrocketed.

***

Up till then, I’d not seen somebody fall from the Runner, or from any eighty-eight foot cliff for that matter, onto hard rock. What’s more, I don’t think anybody, at all, ever laid eyes on anything even remotely similar to what the seven people at Taconic Park saw when Travis Higgins fell from the Runner.

You can’t really see any pre-jump activities at the Runner because the launch is obscured by brush. Even if your expecting a jumper and staring at the cliff in anticipation, the first thing you see of them is when they come rocketing out the bottom of the green undergrowth, plummeting toward deep, welcoming water. The thing that always gets me is the sheer duration of the jumps. It takes a long time to fall eighty-eight feet.

When Travis Higgins took his shot with the Runner, he didn’t come bursting through the brush. Instead he was stuck to the rock riding his own ass like a sled down the upper face of the Runner. That section doesn’t last long though. As a matter of fact, whole the reasoning behind the leaping and running is that one must clear this section of the wall, which juts out at least ten feet, in order to clear the rock shelf seventy feet below. Higgins slid until inertia flung him out over the rock. Gravity, as they say, took care of the rest.

I saw him fall, I saw him land, but as he was hitting the rocks, I was already in the air. My dive was long and shallow, and it hurt like hell. I surfaced almost halfway across and started pumping for the wall 20 yards away. Keeping my head below the surface, I was trying to swim for the spot where I thought he’d be. I heard, through the water and my own thrashing, loud, horrified screams and shouts from the shore I’d just left. Then my hands ran into the rock shelf and I reached up. With both hands on the sun-dried shelf, I pressed out of the water. I was closer then I’d expected. When I popped out Higgins couldn’t have been sitting more than a few yards away. I pulled my legs out of the drink and went to him.

***

I had a friend once who worked as an EMT. His job description, for the first few years anyhow, was basically to drive around after midnight scraping fresh-wrecked motorcyclists off the interstate. By the end of the first twelve months on the job, he estimated he’d seen about forty-five crashes involving at least one severed limb. Gunshots, stabbings, bludgeoning…all part of the job. All approached with a casual professional distance. All, that is, except the de-glovings.

De-gloving, if you don’t know, doesn’t describe a specific area of injury, but rather, a type of injury. Put simply, if the epidermis and dermis are forced to peel away from the muscles, bones, and organs they are designated to protect (either by friction or gravity) then that muscle group or appendage is said to have been “de-gloved” . Arms and legs - my buddy used to say - are almost a guaranteed de-glove if a motorcyclist crashes at 90 miles per hour or better. Unless you’re a surgeon, or an undertaker, it’s stuff you don’t really ever really see. In that regard, the phenomenon of de-gloving is priceless.

***

To understand what happened to Travis Higgins you must understand the position he was in when he smashed down on the flat rock. After ass-sledding down the 1st pitch, his body assumed a seated position in the air. His feet just forward of his body as if he were riding on a flying reclining chair. He hit butt-first, and remember, the dude was fat. Not chubby, or roly-poly or anything like that, FAT! Travis Higgins went about three hundo, standing no more than 5’ 9”. He was morbidly obese. When he hit, all that fat surrounding his bones kept going down. The weight of the fat moving at close to terminal velocity was too much for the tissues themselves and they gave way right where Higgin’s forehead became his face.

I closed distance and gawked from three feet away, and even then it took me a good five minutes to understand what had happened. I found myself looking at a circular pile about nine feet across. I remember thinking that it looked - from a few yards away - like a white leather jacket, laid on the ground and filled with raw steaks and sausage. As I approached, I could also make out some things I didn’t recognize. Directly in the middle of the wet pile, there was another, smaller pile. This one composed of what looked like intestine, and other organs. All of them mushed and soaking with stinky fluids and blood. Rising out of the smaller pile, Higgins.

His body had de-gloved at the forehead, exposing to the air his facial muscles, his eyes and nasal foramen, his upper-limb musculature. The top of his skull was still covered in hair, but his skin ended at his forehead, peeling down to his forearms, and what had been his waist a few minutes ago. His eye-balls blazed out of his red skull. As I looked on, suppressing dry heaves, the left one came loose, dropping into the pile of offal at his feet with a wet “thhk.” I heard something bubbling, and was amazed to see that the noise was actually Higgin’s heartbeat. His rib cage, intact apparently, wrapped around his heart and lungs and had done it’s job of protecting the vitals. There was motion and energy in there and I stood - transfixed - for a long time.

I was just about to turn back and yell for help when Travis Higgins said:

“What’s goin’ on?”

***

Higgins, regarding me with one pleading eye, seemed to want an answer to his question. I was still just staring into him when he said:

Am I just dreaming this? How many…

He coughed then, and then regurgitated what seemed like a gallon of black blood and fluids at my feet. The stench was overpowering. I had to concentrate to keep my lunch down. Higgins stared down into the pile of himself and did something unbelievable. He looked up at me and began to laugh. Slowly at first but then full-bore, head back, little flecks of stuff flying off his person. He was belly laughing.

Suddenly though, he wasn’t laughing anymore. At first I thought he was just choked up from laughing so hard, bur then he looked back at me. Making a noise nothing at all like laughing. He was choked up from something else. He began a low hum, almost like a growl. Then he threw his head back again, this time in confusion and pain. His growl became a banshee-wail and suddenly there was a dark liquid overflowing his mouth. Almost black at first, but then dark-yellowish brown streaming down his face, his neck and into the pile. His head pitched back and forth and I saw the other eye come free and fall behind him. Finally, the thing that had been lodged inside him escaped, flopping out of his mouth into the gut-pile. For a few moments, I found myself wondering how an eel got itself caught inside the guy, but looking closer I saw the truth. The serpentine escapee was no eel, it was Travis Higgins’s tongue.

***

Travis and I stared down at the mess for what seemed like centuries. Somewhere in there he died. The rest of us were - naturally - questioned until early am about the events of the day. I must’ve told the story 20 times. The next morning I enlisted in the Marine Corp. Within a year I was tearing through the desert of Iraq, on my way to kill a guy named Saddam. After that I would spend time in Afghanistan, Croatia, Sommolia, and Africa. I killed people on every stop, in disgusting and unholy ways too. But nothing will ever beat Travis and his tongue and the terrible 85 foot drop. Not a day goes by I don’t put myself back in that water, crawl stroking towards Travis, hoping for the best.