60-foot Fall From A Cliff!

Please continue to give feedback in the immediately previous post, "Lyric Analysis." I will be updating the column Tuesday evening, and will explain my process in writing the song, as well as what I think is needed in the revision, based on my own instincts and those of all my Monkey Maniacs. But until then, here is the strange but true story of my brush with sudden death:

I was one month shy of my sixteenth birthday on the day I should have died. 18 years ago this August. I should be eighteen years gone -- long enough to be a distant memory to those who knew me when; long enough to be as if I'd never existed to those of you who have met me since ... probably all of you who are reading this.

Hayswood Park. Corydon, Indiana. My best friend LeAnn was leaving for Norway in a week's time, where she would live with a Norwegian minister's family for a year on a foreign study program. Our church had thrown her a going-away party in the rustic park. Hundreds of woodland acres surrounded the main clearing, where we played volleyball and ate hotdogs.

While LeAnn basked in the attention of elders, her sister Jeanna, her cousins Tammy and Chuck, my brother Darrell, and I had sauntered onto a trail that led into the woods. Tammy was my first love, a spunky, sandy-haired track star with a mischevious smile. She was my world and I was a giddy moon, orbiting around her smile, reflecting her light.

The woods was a good place to show off my machismo for my girl, or so I thought. I was a natural hiker and "explorer of rugged terrain." So now I would get to play Davy Crocket. Too bad about Darrell, Jeanna, and Chuck hanging around, but no matter. This was my element.

CUE THE OMINIOUS MUSIC FOR SOME FORESHADOWING ....

Signs along the wooded path: Danger! Keep On Trail.
I knew the reason, because my cousin Michael and I had explored this section a couple hours previous. To the right of the trail, the ground dipped precariously into a long, steep hill, ending at the edge of a cliff that towered some sixty feet above the grassy forest below. Michael and I had thrown rocks over the side of the cliff, just to watch them fall. Ironic statement of the day -- Bobby to Michael: "Man, if anyone fell off this cliff, they'd be dead for sure."
Michael to Bobby: "Or they'd be crippled for life."

But Michael had left soon after, so here I was, back on the same dirt path with a younger crew, holding hands with my sweetie. I slipped free of her fingers and dashed to the other side of the danger sign, swinging out over the hill on a small tree. I did it two or three times on different trees, ignoring Tam's chastisement. She was worried about me! Guys dig that.

"I'm an expert woodsman. I can tell how much weight a tree can support." Those were my last words before the tree I had swung out on snapped and I careened down the hill. Just before I began my descent, right after the SNAP, I had one of those "frozen in time" moments. My eyes met Tammy's. Our expressions said "Uh oh." Then I was gone.

I whisked down the hill on my back -- no somersaults or anything like that. I know this because of the position of the cuts on my back and arms afterwards. When you're sliding as fast as I was, let me tell you -- grass cuts. You might think of grass as a benign decoration, but to me each blade was, well, a blade. Think about when you've gotten a paper cut. Imagine that happening hundreds of times, all over your back. Sucks.

Then I plummeted off the edge of the cliff. My brother Darrell says my hand clawed onto the side, and, for a second, held steady, as if I'd caught myself right on the edge, but then my fingers slipped off. I don't remember that at all. I remember sliding off the hill into nothingness.

They say that in the last second of your existence, your whole life passes before your eyes. Not mine. I didn't even think to pray. The one thought I remember -- and I remember it clear as a raindrop -- was "This is it. Wow. 15. This is my life. And it ends like this. Something that only happens in the movies. I can't believe I'm dying now." And it wasn't a screaming thought, not a pleading thought, not a desperate thought. It was as if I'd spent all my desperation skidding down the hill, and now had no emotion left but resignation. Then there was nothing. Blank. Maybe I fainted.

The bottom of the cliff. A grassy plain. Flat on my back. Pain? Didn't feel it. But I knew where I was. Didn't have to consider whether I was in heaven -- I had fallen the entire length of the cliff and lived. I heard Tammy's brother Chuck, the youngest of our group by a couple of years, sobbing from above (they told me that as soon as I fell, Chuck dropped to the ground, convinced that if he took one more move, he too would fall. They also told me that Tammy and Jeanna were speechless, light-headed, and that my brother had stoically said, "I'll go get him." As if meaning, "I'll retrieve the body.")

Now, I said I was feeling no pain. But how could this be? Surely, as soon as I tried to sit up, I would discover my back was broken. It would be the worst pain imaginable. But first things first -- I had to quiet Chuck down and restore peace to the others. I hollered "That was fun!" The second I did that, Chuck stopped crying and Darrell howled with laughter that could have shaken a tower. Tammy hollered something like "You idiot!"

Okay, that was taken care of. I was back to being my true love's idiot -- the jester for my Queen. So now -- about this broken back ....

I sat up. Still no pain. Huh. "Well, I bet when I try to stand, just as I get to my feet the pain will shoot through my body and I'll collapse in a gnarled heap on the earth."

I stood. Still no pain. A miracle! Just like all those Bible stories I'd always read, and that I'd heard from a hundred different gospel groups in a thousand different gospel songs in my dad's record collection. Jehovah had parted the Red Sea, toppled the walls of Jericho, shut the mouths of lions, raised His son Jesus, and kept Bobby Gilles safe in a battle with a cliff. The scars would take a couple months to heal, but that was no biggie. Heck, they were a badge of honor. Made me look like a tough guy! Every kid wants to have macho scars, and now I had a heap of them.

My friends were shouting at me from on high. I don't know what they were saying, I was still trying to grasp the fact that I was alive and well. I told them that I would simply scale the cliff and rejoin them, if not for all the spiders on the wall. You see, this served the purpose of letting Tammy know that I was heroic enough to scale the cliff I had just fallen from. She knew about my arachnaphobia (which continues to this day) so naturally she couldn't expect me to climb up when there were spiders, but she would have to understand that if it wasn't for the spiders, I was certainly strong enough to climb.

I walked about a quarter mile to where the cliff tapered off, and I traipsed back up to my companions, laughing and shrugging off their concern. I made them promise not to tell my parents, and I assured them that I didn't need to go to the hospital. Indeed, I never went to the hospital.

I'd like to be able to say that from then on, I lived my life with purpose -- that I recognized the gift God had given me, and I determined to never take life for granted again. That I have made every second count since then. But alas ....

It has only been in the last couple years that this lesson has really sunk in with me. The person I was died that day. Who I am now is not who I would have been if not for that fall. I'm sure of it. It is a delayed sense of purpose, but it is here nonetheless. If I didn't have this incident to look back on, to draw from, I know I would have less sense of mission, less purpose, and less dedication to the things that are important. When people say that life is fragile, that it is a gift, that it could end at any time, I know. I know.