Brushes With Death (or at least, serious injury), Part Deux

Perhaps some of you will remember that in June, I posted a "humorous" story about almost dying. If you want a recap, click on me, and I shall whisk you magically away to the past and you can catch up.

Now, I shall regale you all with a story much closer to our present time period. The original was ten years ago. This happened last August. Right after I got married. And this time, the onus of blame was squarely on my shoulders. Savor the flavor, kiddies, because I don't often announce my own complete idiocy to the world. But in this case, there's no escaping the fact that I was a complete effin' moron.

Jessie and I had decided to go on a catamaran cruse out to a cove. It was called either Pirates Cove or Cave. But basically, it was a place for pirates to hide back in the golden age of piracy. They'd anchor the catamaran and you could swim up to the cove, or you could go up to the little establishment on the top of the cliff, pay a buck, and jump in to the water.

See where this is going? No, you don't. Let me finish.

Jessie and I decided to just swim to the cave to check it out. This is where I had a very crucial lapse in judgment. If I did die, I wouldn't have blamed anybody for a scathing epithet of "He picked the wrong time to have a colossally large 'duh' moment." In hindsight, of course, it was crystal clear to me. But at the time, not so much. I wasn't even trying to be macho, I simply screwed the pooch.

I thought I could swim to and from the cove. I even turned down an offered life jacket. Why? What was the colossal "duh" moment that made me think I could do this? I thought that the water would shallow as we approached the cave. Can anybody tell me why this was such a stupid idea? I'll tell you. The cave was used by pirates to hide, right? Which means that the water leading up to it, and inside of it, had to be deep enough for a ships keel. Duh.

I get about halfway there, when I realize that if I don't turn back, I'll be in deep doo doo. I get halfway back to the catamaran when I realize I probably went about 10 feet too far towards the cave before turning back. My legs have become as useful as wet noodles, and I'm forced to rely on my arms to stay afloat, and to propel me towards the boat. I'm also starting to hyper ventilate from exertion, so I can't call out to the boat for assistance.

At this point, I don't remember much. I think I went in to "instinct mode," I hazily remember focusing in on the ladder rungs on the back of the catamaran, and willing myself towards them. Twenty feet became fifteen, which became ten. Right about here I remember much more, because at five feet...I was done. The tank was empty. I wasn't even taking in oxygen due to the severity of the hyper ventilation. I made what is best described as a last ditch flail towards the catamaran, and by sheer dumb ass luck, my hand caught the rung.

I managed to pull myself up, right at the same point a concerned sailor came to my aid. Had he not been looking at the back of the boat at that exact time, and my hand didn't catch the rung...well, I don't want to think about that. I caught my breath sitting on the ladder, and then sheepishly crawled to where Jessie and I had been sitting on the way over to figure out what went wrong. Wasn't very long before I realized that I went wrong.

I've done some stupid things in my time, but I'm pretty sure my complete lack of common sense in this situation is the top ranking incident of my life.

Brushes With Death (or at least, serious injury)

Edit: An old friend fleshed out the story a bit more...

There have been a few times in my life, when looking back, I breathe a sigh of relief with a "phew, that was close." Allow me to weave you one of those tales...

It was the very early winter, November of 1997 (imagine those wiggly flashback lines now). I was a strapping young lad of 20, in fact, only recently had my birthday a week or so before. I was Master Flyman for "The Music Man." I didn't corral house flies. I was in charge of the curtains and flying scenery...anything that was rigged in to the fly system. This show was designed as fairly fly intensive, so I had an assistant. That probably saved my life (or prevented serious injury).

It was tech week, as we called it at this theatre. The week before a show opened when you finally got actors on stage with sets and props and the other intricacies of tech. The show opened that Friday night. I honestly do not recall if this was a tech rehearsal or a dress rehearsal (only real difference is that you're supposed to soldier on in a dress. Tech is to "work out the kinks" so to speak), though I do know it wasn't a "dry tech," because that means no actors. There were definitely actors there, because what happened could have hurt or killed one of them.

During the middle of this run, I had a cue. Of course, I had cues at pretty much every scene change, like I said, this was very fly intensive. Part of the change over was to pull a scrim out. A scrim is a relatively light weight fabric curtain on which you can project light for neat effects. From the back you get shadow type effects, from the front you can make it colored for sky stuff. I'm sure you've all seen them in action, especially as a shadow effect, but never knew what they were called. Now you do. Scrim. Most curtains are weighted at the bottom by chain or pipe. Doubly so for something like a scrim which is light and without that weight could easily billow around from the wind created by actors walking. Now that I've set the scene, allow me to go in to the heart of the matter.

I released the safety lock, and began to fly the scrim out. After about 20 feet I felt a wrench on the rope, and vaguely remember hearing a ripping sound, followed closely by a loud crash. At that point, it became survival instincts as that rope started to move WAY TOO FAST in an upward direction. But not my survival instincts...

See, a fly system works on a system of counter weights. In the fly gallery there are weighted counters on a pulley system to help counter the curtain weight, and make the curtains almost effortless when moving them up and down.

All the weight was now on the counter side...so the counters were going down, and the pipe (what the curtain hangs on), was going up to the grid (the metal griding above most stages). Here's the thing: Both things would have been ultra bad. If I simply let go of the rope, the counter weights would crash downward with such force they may bounce up and out of their carriage. The counter weights carriage rest position was approximately 2 feet forward and 20 feet higher than my current position. Also, if the counter weights jumped their carriage, that would create an imbalance in the opposite direction, causing the pipe to crash from the grid, 100 feet up, to the deck (stage).

In the heat of the moment, I did the only thing I could think to do in this emergency situation, which is usually only talked about in hypotheticals. I grabbed the rope, and dug my heels in to the rail so I wouldn't go flying up. This hurt like hell, and wasn't really working very well. But like I said, I had an assistant, and he made it over about a second before I was either going to go up with the rope myself, or simply let go and dive out of the way and hope for the best.

With my assistant's help, though, our particular catastrophe was averted. We slowly let the carriage get to its home position, and then offloaded the counterweight so we could bring the pipe back down. The scrim had dry rotted. When I first made the up move, the force of its own weight resistance caused the entire scrim to rip off the pipe. In a case of dumb luck, nobody had been underneath the scrim making any scenery moves when it crashed to the deck (though Katy, an old friend(in the group photo she's directly above me) who was there, had this to say in a comment she left: "I had a brush with death at almost the same exact second as the pole from the bottom of the scrim came barrelling down a few feet from where I was standing and left a two inch gash in whichever set was directly next to me (the mayor's house I think? I have no idea, I'm old). " So my memory was faulty and there WERE people moving scenery right below, but it was dumb luck that the pipe hit no-one). Somewhere out there, there exists pictures of the crew tying a new scrim on to the pipe with this cool haze swirling around them. The haze, unfortunately, was the dust from the fallen scrim that was still kicked up.

I'd like to say that was the only problem we had with that show, fly wise, but that'd be a lie. This was the only scary one, though.

Here are some pictures of that time. One of them is of me alone, waving down from my perch in the fly gallery. The other is of most of the crew. I'm center low, grinning like a maniac. Oh, and ten years younger. :)