Sole to Soul

Wobbly as a newborn filly, I was standing in a rock climbing harness on a long steel cable suspended forty feet from the ground between two tall Maine pine trees. About ten feet over my head, another wire was suspended horizontally between the same two trees. Dangling down from it were six or so ropes spaced evenly along this wire. The idea was that you climbed the tree trunk, stood on a wooden platform, gradually stopped hugging the tree for dear life, and shimmied off the platform onto the cable like a tightrope walker, until you could grab the first dangling rope with your right hand. Then you used it to balance yourself as you slid along the wire to grab the next rope, balance, and so on until you crossed the whole seventy-five foot span to the opposite platform and climbed down. The problem was that the “next rope” was always just out of reach. To grab it with one hand, you had to let go of the rope in your other hand and reach, momentarily suspended in thin air, trusting yourself to find the next rope. I was on the high ropes course at The Hyde School in Bath, Maine, performing a physical challenge that was a metaphor for the parental challenge of “taking hold and letting go.”

When I first saw the wires from the ground, my goal was just to climb the tree to get to the platform. If I could do that, I’d be grateful. But much to my surprise, I did climb the tree fairly easily. It made me giddy. Then, I slithered along the wire to the first rope and snagged it. Sliding slowly and cautiously further out on the wire, I inched closer to the next rope, spreading my wing span as far as it had ever spread, and caught the next rope as well. People below me were cheering. I felt the wire beneath my feet start to wobble as my knees came unlocked momentarily. Lock-em-up, honey. We’re gonna do this. Creeping out, further and further from the big tree trunk, I slid toward the third rope, fingers almost feeling the braiding of it and ready to take that literal leap of faith, when I got distracted.

I thought that looking straight ahead would help me keep my balance, but what I saw was too startling. It was not a horizon, like I’m used to seeing from the ground, but the mid-sections of an enormous stand of giant Maine evergreens. A sea of ship masts. I had never seen pine trees from this vantage point before, up here in bird land. We had seen two bald eagles lazily circling the football field the day before. This must be their view, I thought. What a magnificent, very green, free view.

Then it struck me. What the heck happened in my life that I found myself on a high wire in a harness, 40 feet off the ground in Eagleville, Maine, myself spread eagle, hanging on for dear life? A giggle escaped, which shook the wire, which seemed unusually comical, like I was a Jell-o clown at the eagle circus, and I giggled again.

And then I lost it. Peals of laughter rang through the trees, flushing out screeching birds from the pines like they’d been blasted by an air horn. The people below looked up at me puzzled. Approaching hysterics, my knees turned liquid, and I briefly worried about losing bladder control way up there above the group, but that made me laugh even harder. As my knees slowly weakened and folded, I collapsed into a sitting position on the wire, still grabbing the vertical rope with both hands. I hadn’t laughed this way in years; gales, waves, a tsunami of laughter crashed through the ship masts.

I suddenly wanted to see my husband, Ignatius, who was belaying me, upside down. So, I hooked my knees onto the wire and leaned backwards, howling all the while. I could do this, I thought; after all, I was the jungle-gym queen in first grade. What difference did it make that I was 52. There he was, down below, holding very tight on my rope, upside down in my eyes, staring up at me confused, which made me laugh even more. My laughter calmed somewhat when they told me not to lean backward in the harness like that because I could slip right out.

It is very difficult to pull yourself up from a sitting position to a stand when your feet are on the same level as your butt and the only thing your feet have to push off from is the same half-inch wide steel cable that your butt is sitting on. That is especially true if, like me, you have no arm strength. But damn it, I was going to do it. I tried several times to get vertical again, and finally, with a Herculean effort that ripped at my arm and leg muscles, I slowly pulled myself up. The wire wobbled back and forth wildly because my leg muscles were so weak from the effort. The whoops and cheers from below were meant to urge me on, but viewing the scene on the instant-replay action-cam in my head, I bounced back onto the wire, sitting again, laughing uncontrollably.

“Bring me down!” I chortled through the now hick-uppy giggles. My stomach muscles were as sore as my arms and legs from all the laughing. I had failed the exercise miserably, but I’d had the best laugh I’d had in years, from the pure enjoyment of feeling like a tree-climbing tom-boy again. Maybe I hadn’t “failed miserably” after all. Some little chunk of the volcanic mass encasing my heart had cracked loose up there.

That wasn’t the point of the exercise though. I was supposed to be learning viscerally about “taking hold and letting go.” But the four-day retreat had just seemed so serious. I was tired of seriousness and striving. The laughter left me feeling renewed and light hearted.

Then it was my husband’s s turn on the high wire. As Ignatius stood on the ground looking up at the wire, we all concluded that the exercise would not be as physically challenging for him as it had been for the rest of us. At a lanky six-foot-two, he had the wing span to easily grab the ropes and was in good enough shape to sidle right along the wire. What would make it challenging enough to emphasize the point we were working on?

He volunteered to do the exercise blindfolded with me directing his moves. We snapped him into the harness and I tied on the blindfold. “Ok, everyone,” said the group leader, “Eleanor is the only person who is going to talk.” We moved over to the tree trunk as the two belayers started taking up the slack.

“Reach out for the tree trunk with your right hand at about shoulder height and feel for the hand hold there,” I commanded. “Now put your left hand about a foot higher on the left side of the trunk. Move your right foot up the trunk about a foot. No, over toward the center. There. Put your left foot on the foothold about a foot above the ground. Now move your right hand about a foot up and to the right. There.” On we went, up the tree to the platform. Everyone else was silent. My now serious voice echoed through the woods.

“Hold onto the tree trunk and with your right hand, reach straight out to your side. A little farther. There. Good! You’ve got the first rope. Now that’s your childhood. Slide out as far as you can, you’re almost to the second rope…reach a little farther, not forward. It’s right there behind your right hand. Good! That’s your first marriage. Now we’re going to the next rope: your marriage to me. That’s it. You’ve almost got it. No, the rope is in front of your hand. Good! Now hold tight to that one, because it’s our marriage. Now we’re going for the future.” I got him almost all the way across, but he lost his balance and bounced to a sitting position on the wire like I did.

What was special about the exercise to me was Ig’s vulnerability and dependence on me for a change. For so much of the last few years, we’d been on our own Olympic level ropes-course-of-life, which had consisted primarily of exercises in which he had propped me up, belayed me, held on and refused to let go for fear of the next challenge.