[SCI 8x2] High Wire Act
Hello again! Believe it or not, this week's topic affords me the chance to share yet another story from my Navy days! "Were you a pirate, cause modern ships don't have rigging?" I hear ya say. And guess what, you're right! About the rigging, smartass, not the pirate bit. I do love plunderin' booty, but that's beside the point! So, how does a squid get tangled up with high wire dealings?
Well, here's the thing. The Naval Academy is kinda dual purpose. They train to to become a Naval officer, OR a Marine Corp officer. Since they assume you don't know shit about either when you get there, everyone gets to spend blocks of their summer trying out every respective occupation to see what they're about. Flying planes in Pensacola. Doing a couple days on a submarine out of Kings Bay. Going all over the world on cruisers, aircraft carriers, destroyers, you name it. And, joy of joys, humping in the mud in Quantico Virginia with some of the toughest bastards on the planet.
So no shit there I was. Lover of comfort and cleanliness, crawling through the mud, picking off ticks, shooting guns and running through the woods, all that stuff that goes along with being a Marine, and nothing that goes along with being me. The absolute height (you'll get the pun in a second) of disparity was what they call the Confidence Course. It's supposed to give you confidence cause you'll do things you didn't think you could do. Guess what? They ALL involve climbing around on very high things. That you're not attached to. Another fun fact: Yours truly has a fairly crippling fear of heights! If you think it can't really be that bad, let's see what's on the buffet of terror the USMC served up that day.
The biggest and most visible obstacle is your standard ladder. If it were made out of logs. And about 50 feet high. With the log "rungs" about half your height apart. I should also mention that you're not attached in any way, so a slip means you're playing Icarus at the end of the story. As visually dominant as this obstacle is, it's probably the easiest.
The second one is a lot like the first, except you bend it 90 degrees in the middle and push it over until the top and bottom are both in the ground in an A shape. Seems like it'd be easier, until they explain how it works. You go over the first rung, then UNDER the second rung, over the third, UNDER the fourth, etc. You can't touch the ground, though after the first two rungs you couldn't if you wanted to. For half of your time, you're hanging underneath trying to swing under and get an arm up over the next log. Fun.
So you keep doing death defying stunts on one torture device after another, until you get to the grand finale, the "Slide of Life". You get to a platform WAY up in the air, with what looks like a zip line leaving the platform and a good downward angle, until it finally reaches a spot near the lovely, blessed ground. It's not a zip line though. If it were you would get a harness, or a hooked handle, or SOMETHING to go with the wire. Nuh uh, it's just you and the wire. We're shown that there's two ways to get down that wire.
The first way (the "safe" way) is to hook both legs over the wire, hang from your hands, and work your way hand over hand down the wire. It takes a while to get down, so you need some strength to keep it up and get down without falling into the net way below. The other way, much faster, is insane. You start off straddling the wire, and bend forward until your chest is on the wire. Then, you hook your right foot up over the wire behind you. Your left leg stays straight down to your left. Now, you push off and slide head first down the wire with your arms out to the side like a balancing pole, flying down until eventually friction slows you to a stop near the end and you pull yourself the rest of the way.
There was no way I was gonna do that right? Well, that's what I thought. After a while though, watching everyone doing it the slow way falling to their death into the net and everyone doing the fast way happily getting to the ground, I gave into peer pressure and flew screaming head first no hands down that wire and got the hell on the ground. Finished with this set of trials, I looked back and realized they were right. The Confidence Course did help me build confidence.
I was confident that I hated heights! Put me back on the ship, I'm done with dirt.