Suicide Gorge

I touch the water in the pool at the end of the trail and a shockwave crawls up my toe through my entire body and I shiver. I look right and tell Claire:
“Check it out; it really is a gorge.”
She looks up at the jagged rocks surrounding us, and the trees growing up trying to catch a glimpse of the sun, and smiles back at me. It’s midday so the sun shines directly overhead and it warms our skin. Quickly Claire, Josh, Pieter and I strip and get into our rented wetsuits as the hot South African sun beats down on our American restlessness. It was Pieter’s (the only South African) idea to go kloofing.
“Kloofing means starting at the top of a gorge and getting down it in one piece. Once we take that first jump we have to take them all, hey, so there’s no going back, bru.”
South Africans love their filler words. I look up at the top of the gorge again, where the grass grows and the impala run; it must be two hundred feet up. Trees grow up from the sides of the cliffs. They look like the teeth of a Venus flytrap, slowly closing in on a fruit fly, so we must be inside Nature’s Mouth.
We swim across the pool to a small waterfall to reach our first jump. Our shoes are heavy and they squeak as we climb atop a rock and look down the waterfall and into the next pool below.
“It’s so beautiful.” Josh said. The walls of the gorge surround us and protect us from the wind; and we can see our future jumps laid out in the distance.
“You go first.” I say, to no one in particular.
“Why me?” Aaron responds.
“Ach, maasa-poes.” Pieter says, teasing Josh.
“Ah, alright.”
He leans over the edge and looks into the water below.
“It’s not that far down, only around ten feet!”
He’s right; the plunge seems altogether rudimentary. The water is black.
“How deep is it?”
None of us know.
“Only one way to find out.”
I think back to something my dad used to say to me:
“Jump into the future never knowing exactly where you’ll land.”
I’m almost certain he didn’t mean this. It’s not like they have lifeguards at each jump; this is Africa.
“I’ll go.” I say.
“Just jump out into the middle, bra’.” Josh says. I think about Josh’s accented “bra’” and Pieter’s “bru” and how similar all people really are.
I pray my girlfriend will take care of me if I get hurt, count silently to three, and jump. I tuck in my knees, bracing for rock…and sink down through the icy water deep into Nature’s gullet. My feet don’t even reach the bottom and when I resurface I yell out in ecstasy–I am alive!