Safe Suicide

Bungee

66 safe suicide Bungee She didn’t like to do things where the trick was not to die —Lorrie Moore Here I am. I’ve decided. Actually I decided before the ascent, before the free ticket, before the swaying, crowded cable car, before the tundra and alpine wind, the high camp resort, the skating rink, the open swimming pool, the bar and bloody mary, when, down below, I had only heard about the crazy bungee attraction on the edge of a cliff, and how wind or mishap, and you would do a Gloucester, five ship masts down, where thou wouldst shiverist like an egg. R I am at the Squaw Valley Writers’ Community. I am here for one week in August 1994, as the fifty-three-year-old founding editor of Ploughshares literary magazine. I have come all this way, 2500 miles from Boston via Denver to Reno, then a limo with congenial others past and through burning forest fires until we get to Tahoe City, and then to Olympic Village at Squaw. I am housed in a well-appointed sky lodge, steeply up an opposing hillside from Olympic Village, and just downhill from where the genius and organizer of the conference, novelist Oakley Hall, and his family live. My lodge mates are novelist Sandra Scofield, whom I published early in her career, and with whom I have had some correspondence; and Paul Mandelbaum, representing Story magazine. Sandra is a workshop leader. Paul and I are “outside readers,” asked to read for publication and to comment on a number of pre-selected manuscripts by conferees. The weather is clear. Mountain nights cold and crystalline with swarms of stars, dawns chill, days hot by noon. R I have enjoyed repeatedly John Frankenheimer’s film, To Live and Die in L.A., which opens with a treasury detective bungee jumping for recreation off of a bridge. The character’s jump, of course, becomes a metaphor. He is addicted 66 to risk. That is why he pursues a brilliant and vicious underworld Willam DeFoe, who is a counterfeiter. The detective survives his bungee jump, but he is killed later in the line of duty. This happens to driven people, we opine, people attracted by danger and risk. R “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce is probably another reference point. How could he have written this before bungees existed? R When, years and years ago, I trusted my older brother to catch me, as we sought to scare strangers with our act, I would simply fall forward, stiff, like a board, hands at my sides, and he would catch me, to others’ gasps and thrills, inches from the swimming club’s cement. I trusted him to catch me. R Forty-five dollars: that is the first dare, at least for Scottish/Irish me. If it were free, I tell myself, or if someone else sponsored me, but to sign away all liability on the one hand and to pay forty-five dollars for a thrill on the other, this causes pause. I sit with the conferees, two men, two women, witty, talented, sexy, young, with whom I have ridden in the cable car. We watch the jumping. A steady alpine gale blows in our faces and hair, not unpleasant. The surround is rocks and tundra. I think of Hemingway’s epigraph to “Snows of Kilimanjaro”: nobody could explain what a leopard was doing at this altitude. Here at some 8000 feet, over the valley base of 6000 feet, was a sports mall, a bar, a swimming pool, a skating rink, and as advertised, off one side, on a cliff edge, a girdered bungee scaffold (your basic erector-set, two verticals and a bridge, perhaps fifty feet high, a ladder up one side, with guy wires for stability). The resort managers called it “upper camp,” and during ski season, when all those time-share lodges were filled with vacationing and well-heeled skiers, no doubt it thrived. The whole Squaw Valley thrived. R To Eastern, marathoning me, in mid-summer, the upper camp seemed surreal, some capitalistic caprice worthy of Citizen Kane, with down at the base every Bungee 67 68 safe suicide day at noon, a Swiss costumed trio playing “edelweiss” in the courtyard, and the big cable cars, right out of some movie, say The Eiger Sanction with Clint Eastwood, starting up. The cable car building, an edifice, had...