Jumpers

Bungee jumping, I've always felt, is one of those sports that only a deeply secularized culture could ever really enjoy. For only in the absence of religion could your craving for a spiritual world be so profound that you'd almost be suicidally willing to die for it. Indeed, the top ten bungee jumping locations are in the US, Canada, the UK, or Switzerland -- or else they are in eco-tourist locations like Zimbabwe, Nepal, or Costa Rica, run by secularists in those locations for the sheer value of the vertical drop the location affords them: you can be sure they don't get many locals doing the jump.

We currently reside in the Canton of Ticino, home of the "world's greatest" bungee jump location, whose claim to fame is not merely the 722-foot drop off the side of the Valle Verzasca dam, but is also the jump that James Bond made in the film Goldeneye. The Franklin College Adventure Club, to which I am the academic advisor, decided to take the jump, and I, having seven very good reasons to live, agreed merely to drive them and write letters of solace to their parents in the event of their actual discovery of the spiritual world.

As luck had it, they all survived to tell the predictable tale: the rush wears off after 7.5 seconds of free-falling. What Walker Percy (in Lost In The Cosmos) calls "re-entry problems of the orbiting self" get somewhat metastastized here, because bungee jumping instills such an adrenaline rush that you immediately want to do it again, which is good for business, since it costs 250 francs per jump. And so, the shock for me, other than watching normally sane people jump off a bridge, was to see how quickly the effect or "thrill" wore off once they were out of the harness. The first jumper needed a new sensation within the hour, and was impatient waiting for the others to finish. Like an MTV-junkie who's lost the remote control, this generation has a hard time recognizing that you can't change channels faster than MTV already does, and gets unwittingly impatient for not being allowed to try.


But of course, you don't want my socio-religio-philosophizing. You want the pictures:


The dam from the far right edge. That's the jumping platform in the middle.


This is what the insanity looks like when you first see it from afar. You wonder if aliens visiting our planet would first think this was a "new method of health recovery" or a "failed suicide attempt."


If it's good enough for Pierce Brosnan's stunt double, it's good enough for Franklin College students spending mom and dad's money...



Brooke jumped first, and went so fast that I missed her leap into nothingness, but caught her on film striking her dramatic "help me I'm falling" pose as she is buoyed back up on the tether.


Adrian, an otherwise sane and rational human being, jumps into the void.



Davis, an otherwise nice guy, jumps off a perfectly good dam.



Rob takes a deep breath, wraps his lower lip around his bottom teeth, and then leaps into thin air.



Shannon, a perfectly nice college girl, embraces the abyss.



BOI-OI-OI-OI-NNNNGGG!!! The bungee cord recoils after the first bounce.

This is why they ask you to put your hands on your head immediately after you bounce: you don't want the coil to wrap around your neck and quickly snap your head off you while you go down for the second bounce (yes, this was learned in the industry from experience).



The students strike a "Bond, James Bond" poster-style pose while I hold up two sections of bungee cord, smiling idiotically at not having lost any students to the irrational act of jumping off a dam, and paying good money to boot for the right to engage in such stupidity.



The tagline of the James Bond film, Goldeneye. It could also be the tagline of the ancient Hebrew high priests who entered the holy of holies once each year to encounter God face-to-face.

They also had a rope tied around their ankle...