Free Fall

Sean Dupuis
22 February 2011
RD 2

Free Fall

While reading Mark Rudman's poem “Chrome,” I was struck by how free this man was when riding his dirt bike. I could feel an exhilarating sort of isolation, the sort that comes with liberation from following leaders and leading followers. It was a wonderful feeling of loneliness. He removed himself from the world and all its rules for a small time. But even more than this small freedom, what impacted me the most about this poem was how Rudman's ability to let go was most freeing of all.

Though Rudman describes how well he soared across the uneven desert, he spends far more time describing how he didn't do so well. “Spills were rehearsals for free falling, a way to slow
time down, cease to feel your own weight, achieve clarity and edge,” Rudman writes (1). I could see him defying gravity and time, floating for a short eternity before crashing back to earth. He always paid a price for this defiance. Yet he always considered the price fair for a moment's worth of pure freedom. At least, almost always.

About two thirds of the way into the poem, Rudman describes a terrifying episode when he very nearly got himself into a fatal crash. As he was exiting one turn and entering another, he accidentally gunned the throttle wide open right towards the edge of a very sheer cliff. This was a fall that threatened to be his last, and he knew it. He saw his life about to come to a bone-shattering end and decided to do something about it. He let go.

Literally letting go of the bike saved Rudman's life because he fell backwards off his bike and came to a stop well before the cliff's edge. Vanessa Yamaoka also thought that “If he tried to gain control the bike, he could have gone over the cliff with his bike.” Which would mean he would've died and I wouldn't have had to read this poem and might now be writing a literary analysis on something more palatable, like William Blake or Paul Neil Milne Johnstone. But I digress.

Before he physically let go of his bike, Rudman had to let go of his bike emotionally. As he was falling, he had a flash of clarity. The same flash of clarity that he had experienced so many times on minor spills now gave him the edge he needed to survive. He realized the importance of his life and the relative unimportance of material possessions. He was free of attachment to his bike. He was free to let go. Incidentally, letting go also saved his bike as it didn't careen off the edge of the cliff, though it got close.

Like Rudman, I love being in free-fall. I like the stillness of it. For an instant, time stops. I become acutely aware of everything. The pounding of my heart, the breath I'm holding in, the ground rushing towards me, the wind wrapping around me, and that peculiar feeling in my stomach are all sensations I never experience the same way on terra firma.

Some people think skydiving is the ultimate rush. It's certainly nothing to sneeze at. It's truly incredible to stand at the edge of an airplane and look at the vastness of the land underneath before jumping. But skydivers have great faith in their equipment. They're safety tested and have redundancies and backups. And at the distances skydivers jump from, depth perception fails to truly convey how far down the ground is. A far greater thrill is to jump from a smaller distance without any equipment at all.

That was at Maunawili falls. For those of you not familiar with it, it's a waterfall with a couple of jumping ledges. The one on the right when facing the falls is pretty high up there, but wasn't too scary when I jumped from it. The one on the left, however, gave me some pause once I got up there. The pool of water looked about as big as a sheet of paper held at arms length. I couldn't quite make out my friends' faces. I was really glad I don't get vertigo. A hundred voices told me not to jump. But I eventually cleared my mind, released my fear, and jumped.