That Takes Ovaries! (16 page)

Driving home, I realized what a crazy person I was. I thanked God for being a woman—if I was a guy, I could’ve gotten my butt seriously kicked. Maybe next time I’ll offer to be a target for the pig pile at a football game.

Two years ago, as I was driving down a major street on my way home from work, I passed a young man hitting a teenage girl and throwing her to the ground. As I zipped by, I saw her repeatedly get up and try to run, only to have the guy push her down again and again. Now past them, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw him dragging her into the bushes.
My god, he’s going to rape her.
Almost without thinking, I made an illegal U-turn on the busy road and pulled up alongside where he was slapping and dragging her.

“Leave her alone!” I shouted, as I jumped out of my car. Part
of me couldn’t believe I was getting in the middle of this, but mostly I was too enraged at this guy to stop myself.

The girl stood up again, and ran toward me with a look of sheer panic on her face.

“Get in the car,” I yelled to her. That was all I could say at the time: “Get in the car,” I repeated, though by now she was almost inside.

Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, her assailant followed after her, and the realization suddenly struck me,
Ohmygod, what if he has a knife or a gun? I have two young kids at home, what would they do without me?
I didn’t even have a car phone to call for help.

So I shouted at him again, “You! You stay right where you are. The police are on their way.” A big fat lie.

“Whaddya mean?” he said.

“You heard me, I called the police. Stay away from her.”

Meanwhile, people were driving by in their cars. I looked at the faces of the drivers as they sped past, hoping someone might stop and offer help. Instead, they gawked and drove on. I couldn’t help thinking,
What if I had acted like all those other apathetic drivers? Who knows what he would have done to her?

As the teenager climbed into my car, her attacker began pleading: “Don’t do it, baby, don’t go with that lady.” Luckily, she closed the door fast and we sped away.

Now where should we go?
I wondered.
Of course.
“I want to take you to the police station, to fill out a report,” I said.

The girl was breathing hard, catching her breath, and visibly shaken. “I don’t know … maybe I should just go back to class … can you drop me off at the high school?”

“High school?” I asked. So young. “Is that guy your boyfriend?”

Turns out they had been dating for three years, since she was just fourteen. Now she was seventeen, and he was in his twenties. This was not the first occurrence of violent behavior. It was ongoing and getting worse—including the night before, when he had smashed the windshield of her family’s car. I could tell
just by looking at her that she was deathly afraid of him. I’d seen the look before: My sister’s boyfriend had stalked her. I tried to convince the girl that she needed to get some help, today.

When we arrived at the station, we both wrote down our versions of the story. But she obviously didn’t want to go through with any procedures. Fortunately, she did call her parents. The officer said the police department would contact me to testify if she decided to press charges. Behind the girl’s back, the officer added, “Don’t hold your breath.”

Before I left this young girl I was now so afraid for, I told her how hard we’d worked to keep my younger sister out of danger. It was not easy, but in the end, my sister’s ex-boyfriend stopped bothering her. As I pulled the keys out of my purse, I said, “I’m scared if you stay with this guy, I’ll be reading about you in the death notices.” I had never felt so sure of anything in my life.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes. “You’re not the only one who thinks that.”

This story doesn’t have a happy ending; it has a real-life ending. I was never called to testify. I don’t know what happened to this poor girl. I pray she is safe and happy, but deep down I know she is just one of many women and girls who, for any number of complex and personal reasons, stay in abusive and sometimes deadly relationships.

In a way, I can’t believe what I did that afternoon, especially given how crazy and violent people can be these days. But I’m sure I’d do it again if I saw the same thing happening tomorrow.

Wouldn’t you?

Learning to skydive is electrifying. At two miles up (as in
in the sky
), I smiled crazily at my instructor, a strapping Vietnam vet I called
Mommy,
let go of the airplane, and slipped into the utter freedom and excitement of falling through the air at more than 150 miles per hour.

As I lay panting and pale-faced on the ground after my first jump, a seasoned sky diver who had heard my screams during free fall kneeled down beside me. “Congratulations,” he said. “You just experienced your first airgasm.” The sport of skydiving had initiated its newest adrenaline junkie; knees shaking, ears pounding, clothes damp with sweat, I hobbled to the ticket window to sign up for a second jump.

Skydiving is never boring. Sometimes it is downright terrifying. But the initial shocks of adrenaline I experienced as a student soon gave way to the calmer pleasure of enjoying bird’s-eye views and mastering the art of flying my own body. So with 550 jumps under my belt, I decided to give
skysurfing
a try.

Skysurfing has pushed the boundaries of skydiving, a sport in which risks are carefully calculated (honest). The pro who flies a fifty-five-inch surfing board through a series of freestyle spins, flips, and twists is regarded by some skydivers as a renegade, a lunatic. Sounded like my kind of sport! The prospect of leaping from an airplane with my feet strapped together on a stiff metal board brought back that familiar feeling of dread, which, I realized somewhat sickeningly, I welcomed. I called to schedule my first lesson.

On a chilly Saturday morning, I met with Mike, a tall, athletic skysurfing pioneer who would teach me what little there was to know about this new sport that involved swooshing through the sky on an air-designed snowboard. Mike showed me how to strap into a puny-looking, twenty-four-inch beginner’s skyboard and accustom myself to the “trauma,” as he insisted on
calling it, of having my feet restricted to an object that exerted its own forces in free fall. Should I find myself trapped and spinning uncontrollably under the skyboard, as skysurfers sometimes do, I had merely to yank on an emergency release that would send the board to Earth under its own mini-parachute.

After practicing on the ground and taking a few warm-up skydives, Mike concluded his coaching with a warning: “Skysurfing is a dangerous and demanding exercise in dexterity. Spins can get extremely violent. I know a guy who lost control and was unable to release the board from one of his feet. He started spinning around helplessly and says he doesn’t even remember pulling [i.e., opening his canopy]. He landed with his eyes full of blood and a face covered with purple dots. Had he gone much longer, he probably would have suffered a stroke from the G forces.”

Gulp.

Now two miles up, feet bound to the board, I braced my arms inside the doorway of the airplane and leaned my body out against the cold, rough blast of air. I stared vacantly at the square plots of farmland below and the enormous blue sky around me, took a deep breath, and vaulted free to ride a 45-degree slope out the door. I held a downhill snowboard position for almost two seconds before the board unexpectedly pulled my body into a series of washing-machine twists and turns. As I fought furiously to regain control, Mike’s words about
trauma
drifted through my spinning head. A burst of adrenaline surged through my body, and I forced myself on top of the board. That’s when the ride got fun. My speed doubled and I darted through the sky, ears numb with the roar of the wind, face pulled back by the velocity, and eyes watering beneath my loosening goggles.

Looking at my altimeter, I saw I was dangerously low. I instantly fell into the flat, free-fall position necessary for pulling. Unfortunately, this move forced the board above me. It acted like a demon rudder and I began vacillating and pitching roughly,
too unstable to pull safely. Another bolt of energy shot through my bloodstream, and I was able to stabilize my body for a fraction of a second. I pulled. After my canopy popped open, I hung there, floating to Earth, wild-eyed and gasping.

Just before landing, I released the bindings and kicked the board free (turfsurfing in is reserved for the experts). Endorphins swamped my brain as I touched ground. Already Mike’s earnest warnings to progress slowly were fading as a louder, more insistent voice screamed, “I WANT A BIGGER BOARD! I WANT A BIGGER BOARD!”

My second jump was more fun. After gaining the stand-up position, I leaned forward over the board, kept my back straight, and felt the sensations of lift and glide—of
surfing.
I did a few turns and generally just played with my new toy. Next I graduated to my “BIGGER BOARD.” The wider, thirty-inch model was harder to control, but that meant a bigger endorphin rush and a more exhilarating experience of riding the sky.

Learning to skysurf reminded me of learning to skydive. Both are about performing in spite of choking fear. Both give me the feeling of mastering my own body and busting past boundaries others respect without question. I enjoy looking around at the skydivers and surfers on the drop zone packing their parachutes, carrying their boards, and swapping stories. We come back weekend after weekend, forever infatuated with the charge that comes when we squeeze all the sweet juice we can muster out of life. To risk my life, after all, is not nearly as dangerous as to risk never really living.

We were huddled together in a grass hut lit by candlelight, waiting for the guerilla fighters’ word that the timing was right for our crossing of the lagoon. It was midnight and we had traveled since early morning to reach the southernmost tip of this wartorn country. In the United States, with its high-speed highways, it would have taken us three hours. Instead, in humid, hundred-degree heat, we crammed into a van without airconditioning and endured road conditions that challenged even the most skilled jungle drivers for twenty-one endless hours.