Samantha Gay | Introduction

I live in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of everywhere. My house is situated next to two baseball fields, one is owned by the city and the other is owned by the high school, and is at the end of a dead end. There is a wall and a whole field between us and our next-door neighbors, though we do have regular football practices right next door in late summer. I used to wake up in the morning to manly grunts and shouting coaches, then peek out my window and giggle at the heavily armored high school boys doing ballet-type exercises.

My house is a little brick house, with vines growing all over it. The house sits on about a half acre of land, which meant a huge yard and the perfect play land for us children growing up. Besides the many other trees surrounding the house, the land has an orchard and a little grove of trees that sits next to an old milking barn. It rests on the opposite end of the property from the house; the closest landmarks are the sand box and the swing set. (This swing set, it is important to mention, is not like the wimpy, small, plastic-y ones that are prominent in backyards now a days. This swing set was like the big metal ones that you can still sometimes find on old playgrounds. The swing sets with long, metal chains and a heavy plastic seat; where you could swing up really high and feel like you were touching the clouds with your toes. But back to the old milking barn…) The barn has always been old and has always been falling apart. We would play inside occasionally, but we mostly avoided it because of its dim spidery depths. It was a dark, dismal place really; with rusty old junk and full of filth. There was a random door in the attic that opened up into the outside, above the entrance to the front door. It would have been perfect for a balcony, but no balcony existed. It was probably used to pile hay in to feed the cows. Whatever the door’s original purpose was, it is with this door that my story truly begins.
My Dad got the idea one day to create a zip-line, starting from the barn to the swing set; just enough for a short, but fun ride. He attached a thick heavy cable just above the barn’s attic door, a good 20 feet above the ground and strung it down to the swing set. For handles, we used some old bike handle bars and a pulley. The door that had had no purpose before was now where we would push off and ride down the line till we hit the ground with our running feet, laughing. It worked really well, and I have many a found memory of the zip-line.

One day however, I was standing in the attic doorway, clutching the handle bars, I decided that I would push off extra hard and go down the fastest that I had ever gone. I gave an extra hard kick off the door frame and swung into space… and that is where things went seriously wrong. I didn’t even feel the pulley and the handle bars stop dead. The next thing I knew was staring up at the sky, flat on my back, immobilized with shock and pain. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. My lungs refused to expand, my chest felt tight, as if a block of heavy concrete was pressing down on me. I heard my brothers and sisters yelling and screaming, looking down at me with anxious faces. It was only a few seconds before I could move, but it seemed like forever. I was in agony. Finally, I waved my siblings away angrily, embarrassed and dizzy, struggling to sit up. I somehow managed to stand and then limp my way to the house, still fighting to breathe.
I finally reached the house and collapsed on the couch in the front room, managing at last to take painful gulps of air. I don’t really remember much after that, it’s all hazy. I began to fell weird, like I was on sleeping drugs. I got up and walked towards the bathroom. Then I just stood there, feeling dizzy. It was like when you stand up too fast, and black spots cloud your vision, but these black spots wouldn’t go away. They kept getting bigger and bigger. My mom was standing in front of me, trying to get me to talk, but I couldn’t respond. She caught me as I slumped forward and laid me on the ground, screaming for someone to call 911. But I could talk again, and my vision was clearing slowly and thankfully, the paramedics did not have to come. She took me to the hospital anyway, just to make sure that I was really ok, and it turned out I was.

I made myself go on that zip-line a few days after my fall. I was terrified, but I knew I had to do it again. I successfully zipped down it without falling… though I didn’t push off extra hard, and I must admit that I was quite happy when my feet touched the ground running.