by Julie Prince
The first thing I did after we got home from our summer vacation was pick up the phone, call my sister, and tell her,
“I went parasailing!”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Yes! I did!”
I know. I’m not the type. I don’t like to drive on the outside lane of a bridge. I don’t even like to walk too close to the glass barrier wall on the second floor of the mall. So I don’t know why, after all these years, that this particular morning of this particular vacation I woke up to the sound of waves of Delaware Bay sloshing into the deck of our rental house and decided before I even lifted my head off the pillow,
I want to parasail.
But I did, and as soon as I said it to myself, I knew the person I wanted to do it with.
“Zack!” I went into the next room and shook my fourteen year old son awake. Ever try to wake up a teenage boy at eight thirty on a summer morning?
“Zach, wake up! Do you want to go parasailing?”
“Huh?”
“Parasailing. You. Me. Wanna try it?”
OK, so I had to give him a few minutes to wake up enough to A, grasp the question, and B, believe it was coming from his mother. He sat up. He scratched his head. He asked how high, how far, how long, and if I would throw up on him. All valid questions I answered to the best of my ability. I looked up the details online: three hundred feet high, five hundred feet of line, a twelve minute line. And no, I didn’t think I would throw up (I didn’t have to look that up online.)
I didn’t push it. Zack needs to know a few details before making any decision. You have to allow him to change his mind a few times. Yes…No…Maybe…before he’ll decide to go for it without looking back.
Well…maybe just a quick glance or two.
We drove to the parasail place on the edge of Cape May, and I directed my husband, Peter, to make a stop along the way so I could pick up a box of Dramamine for “pre-launch” (that vomit question had begun to weigh heavily on me), and a bottle of wine to settle my nerves afterward.
Peter decided once we arrived at the place that maybe he would go up too, but the parasail manager said (while carefully and wisely directing his gaze toward Peter and away from me) that we were too heavy to go up as a triple.
“Tell you what,” the manager said. “You can go up as two doubles, and one of you will get to ride a second time for free.”
Neither Zack nor I would commit at the moment to going twice. We just knew we wanted to go up together. Peter could go up the second time with whichever one of us had the nerve to do it again, which might mean he’d have to go up by himself.
Out we went on the boat with the two young men running the trip—the “Captain” (all twenty five years of him) and Robbie, the guy who managed the actual parasail—and our motley group of “flyers.” By chance of where we all unwittingly sat in the boat, Zack and I were fourth in line to go up. Darn. Not that I wanted to go first. But neither did I want to be almost last and have to sit nervously through practically everyone else’s turn.
As the Captain putted the boat out into the ocean, Robbie gave us the rundown, how to sit in our harnesses properly and how to position ourselves on the back of the boat and—most importantly—what to do if we wanted to come back down early. He demonstrated a scissor-kick, chopping his legs from side to side. This was the signal for “Get me the heck down from here!” Or whatever expletive you prefer.
We watched as the other people, all in pairs, went up. The first pair was a mom and her son, who was about eighteen. They got in their harnesses, sat on the back of the boat and WHOOOP! Seconds later they were in the air, waving down at us and taking pictures. When they came back down twelve minutes later, I pounced on Mom.
“How was it? How did it feel? Were you scared?” She said it was exhilarating, and assured me it was a piece of cake.
Well, if Mom could do it, then I could do it, too. And what’s more, since Mom did it…
…I would have to do it.
Two more pairs went up—two giggly teenage Japanese girls who enjoyed themselves immensely, and a pair of buxom blond twenty-somethings who I think Robbie wished he could ride up along with. They came down in short order and without mishap.
You never really hear about freak parasail accidents, do you? I reassured myself as our turn came closer and closer. And if it weren’t safe, then they wouldn’t advertise ‘from ages 9 to 99,’ now, would they?
The moment of truth. What sounds trite on paper after the fact never felt more real in my life as I reached that “Zen” moment where you let all nervousness go, all doubts go, all fears go….if for no other reasons than it’s too late to do anything else…
…and you really don’t want to chicken out in front of everybody and look like a jackass.
Zack and I got up to take our turn and Robbie instructed me to sit on Zack’s right.
“Why is that, Mom? Why does it matter? What would happen if you sat on my left side?” I didn’t know. Though I really didn’t need to know why myself, I would have asked for Zack. But I didn’t have time because we were now climbing onto the back of the boat, (“The stern, Mom. It’s called the stern!” “Sorry.”) and walking along nonchalantly. Me in my Zen state, on the stern of a boat in the Atlantic Ocean, which is not somewhere I would normally be. We sat down in our harnesses, and Robbie clicked us in with hooks which weren’t all that heavy-duty looking but were meant to hold us securely(?) to a scrap of bright orange fabric with a smiley face silk-screened onto it suspended three hundred feet over the water, while our bottoms rested on simple strips of airplane seat belt.
Hey wait a min—
–WHOOOP!
Up we went. Quickly. We were up there before we knew it, just like they had said. It was quiet up there, just like they had said.
And it was smooth and floaty up there. A little gusty, but not bouncy and jarring.
Just like they had said.
“Mom, would you please stop shouting ‘omigod'?” asked Zack.
I wasn’t shouting it; I was just squeaking it to myself over and over. A little Minnie Mouse mantra. I calmed me, and I wanted more than anything else not to alarm my son. Peter and the folks on the boat waved up at us as we had waved up at them on the boat during their turns. Zack waved back, but I couldn’t The best I could do was waggle my fingers as I kept a tight grip on the straps.
“Mom! Look down! It’s so cool!”
Though I had stopped the omigod-ing by then, I couldn’t look down. If I did, I’d have to think about where I was. And if I thought too hard about where I was—three hundred feet up in the sky, in case you forgot—well, I might just freak out, whatever “freaking out” might entail way high up in the sky in a nylon harness. It might just be a load of ridiculous screeching and crying, or I might end up dangling over the Atlantic by one foot.
Either way, with Zack next to me, that would not be good.
No, no, just relax, self. Don’t look at your feet and the water so far below them. Jeeze, that’s a nerve-wracking perspective. Just look out, self. Look out at the beautiful strip of Wildwood Beach. Look out, not down, at all the sunbathers and all the colorful doo-wop motels and all the plastic palm trees. I do love plastic palm trees…
It was working. I was calmer. I was cooler. Zack was calm and cool, too. This was going to be fine. Wait until I told everyone about our excellent adventure. They’ll never believe it.
I wasn’t sure I was enjoying it quite yet. Burt I wasn’t hating it.
Who cares? I was doing it.
We sailed along, Zack and I, and cast an occasional and very brief glance to the Captain and Robbie down there, just to make sure they were paying attention and hadn’t forgotten us.
The, the Captain turned the boat to the left—sorry—to the port side. Zack and I—or, more accurately, our smiley-face parasail—was caught by a gust of wind that tipped us diagonally as we swooped to the south. I caught my breath, managing to keep my commentary to a mere, though squeaky, “oops!”
“I think I want to go down, Mom! I think I want to go down!” said Zack.
I respected that impulse as, goodness knows, I was just as suddenly thinking the same thing, but I took a breath and made Mom decision.
“Wait, Honey.” Wait. Ride it out. It’s OK,” I said calmly, but through secretly clenched teeth. “Give it a few seconds…let’s see…wait for it….”
And it evened out. We were OK. We resumed our motel survey for a couple more minutes. “There’s the one we stayed at a couple of years ago, Zack. The one where the sea gull swooped down by the pool and stole your sister’s cheeseburger, remember?? Ha ha ha…”
The wind kicked up again as the boat turned back north.
“I want to go down, Mom, I really want to go down now.” Insistently, he said it. Yet calmly. He didn’t want to alarm me any more than I wanted to alarm him, my sweet boy.
Yet insistently, and I respected that. So we made a joint decision to scissor our legs, and immediately Robbie started to reel us back in, as he had promised. As we got closer—and it took a couple of minutes to rewind us all the way in—Zack waved down at Peter and everyone else on the boat, and I unhinged my hand from the strap long enough to wave a little myself. We may have been coming in a little early, but we were coming in proud; we’d been up there a good eight or nine minutes.
We were legit.
“We just had enough, right, Zack?”
“Legs straight out! Legs straight out!” Robbie called to us so he could set us down nice and pat on the back of the boat. He unhooked us and I climbed back in as Peter stood up and passed me to take his turn.
“I’ll go with you, Dad!”
What? I turned back, just in time to see Robbie hook Peter—and Zack—back up to the parasail. The captain took off again and WHOOOP!
They were up in the air. In mere seconds they were too far away to see their faces, but when I waved, they waved back. I could see them pointing at the shoreline, at the sunbathers and the doo-wop motels and the plastic palm trees. They swooped a little on the turns, but they seemed unbothered.
There was no leg scissoring. They stayed up the whole twelve minutes.
I never thought I’d parasail. And I’m not sure why I decided to do it then, that morning of that day that summer. I’d been on plenty of summer vacations over the years and would have been no more likely to do it one of those years than if you’d suggested I go skydiving or sail solo to Bermuda.
Is it a half-baked “Bucket List”? I did suck it up and walk over a bridge the previous spring, and not just any bridge, the George Washington Bridge. That took some doing, but I did it.
Maybe it’s just time to stop being afraid of things, in my own little way. Baby steps, dontcha know.
Maybe it’s time to teach my son to dive into valuable experiences, little and big, without taking too much time to fret about it. There’s so much to do out there.
So, parasailing. I did it. Just once, and I don’t know that I’ll do it again. But I’m content.
No, I’m more than content. I’m proud of myself.
And Zack. At the same time, Zack discovered he could face the fear, as well, and what’s more, do me one better by turning right around and doing it again. I’m even prouder of that.
Because anything I do for myself, I’m doing for him.