Daily Breeze, July 2003
Learning the ropes at a Adventureplex
BY COREY LEVITAN
PHOTOS BY KIM HAGGERTY ZYLIUS/DAILY BREEZE AND ROBERT CASILLAS/DAILY BREEZE
When you're as low to the ground as me, height is not a natural sensation. Ditching my lifelong fear of it was one of the reasons I skydived with flying Elvises a couple years back. But things didn't quite work out. Plunging to my death still teeters high on my list of things I obsessively try to avoid -- although I no longer fear Elvis impersonators as much.
Today I've brought my resistant strain of acrophobia to an ultramodern athletic facility called the Adventureplex. Opened last December by the City of Manhattan Beach, it features a ropes course and climbing walls.
The ropes and walls are only 30 feet high, you can only fall a few inches before safety cables kick in, and, oh yeah, the whole place is designed for prepubescent children. This is my speed of adventure.
"The ropes aren't even 30 feet high," says my instructor, 29-year-old Scott Ammons of Redondo Beach. "They say they're 30 feet but they're more like 15 feet. It's 30 feet to the top of those poles."
Three little girls and I walk across a wooden platform toward the first of four segments of high wires, each designed for different training.
"Don't worry, you'll do good," says Carole McKenzie, 10, of Manhattan Beach, who's toed this line twice before.
And why shouldn't I do good? Standing only 5'6" in size 10 1/2 shoes, I have better balance than your average Weeble. Push me and I'll wobble, but I won't fall down.
Besides, I know I can't possibly hurt myself. We're wearing harnesses clamped to safety ropes that glide along other, higher, wires as we walk. Each wire can support several thousand pounds, Ammons says. And I haven't weighed anywhere near that since giving up beer.
But it's only the
thinking center of my brain that knows I'm safe. Once the survival center gets a
visual of the ground 15 feet below where it needs to be, there's no reasoning
with it.
Automatically,
my legs start shaking like Ozzy Osbourne's Jell-O.
"Corey's first walk is going to be blind-folded," Ammons tells us.
That wasn't the particular remedy I had in mind for the scary visual. Being blindfolded while hanging from a rope sounds like a method of execution to me. In this case, it's a challenge Ammons enjoys posing to his young students. They have to get themselves across while simultaneously helping a blind person.
The first set of wires is connected by wooden planks you can stand on, but only one or two every several feet, like a rickety footbridge. I concentrate on memorizing where the planks are before Ammons lowers the blindfold, but to no avail. The combined everyday use of my day planner and cell phone directory has atrophied my ability to recall most real-world detail.
"You can hold each other's hands for balance, but no one can hold onto their safety ropes," Ammons says.
Naturally, I grab my safety rope within a blink of stepping onto the first plank.
"OK, every time he does that, you guys all have to start over," Ammons says.
Grabbing the safety rope slightly allayed my fear of falling. But it introduced a new fear, too. The harness it tugs on is secured to my groin, and the implication wasn't clear until now. This is an area a grown man does not ever want to hang by. I calculate whether a 15-foot plummet might be preferable.
The girls assume their positions ahead of me, then Stephanie Barak clasps my left hand as she extends her left foot out to guide mine. I press tread against tread as my tennis shoe tries locating this allegedly nearby plank.
"Come on, it's easy," says the 12-year-old Hermosa Beach resident. That's big talk from someone attracting 100 lbs. less downward pull from the earth than me.
I find and walk the plank, and several similar Twister moves transpire before things start getting really tough.
"The next board is too far away," says 11-year-old Audrey Martin of Hermosa Beach. "You have to walk the wire to get to it."
I have no response. I am now dumb as well as blind.
"Just think of it as a really, really thin board," Martin continues.
As I venture out, I know how Wile E. Coyote felt when he walked off cliffs by mistake.
"You can do it!" my tiny teammates encourage me. And the balance they provide does make it easier. Before I know it, I'm across.
We traverse the other three cable sections similarly and my feet give out only
once -- when I decide to walk one wire alone, without any little helping hands.
"Woah!" I scream as I take a very unWeeblesque tumble. Laughs abound as I hang in place by my harness. It's less painful than I feared, but more embarrassing.
"Don't worry, Mister," says Martin. "Your nose would break your fall anyway."
Ammons uses my misfortune to make a point instead of a joke.
"By now you've figured out that this isn't really a physical challenge," he tells us. "It's a challenge of teamwork and leadership."
Yeah, um, of course it is. That's why I kept nudging the girls aside so I could walk in front for my close-up photo. It's also why I showed no concern for how anyone else on my team fared once I made it across.
It was all to demonstrate how NOT to behave.
Martin isn't biting. She's a sharp cookie.
"You probably think you're funny," she says.
Fortunately, the
Adventureplex's 30-foot rock wall tests only my strength and courage, not my
social skills. My only interaction will be with a rope and plastic hand grips
that don't care how inappropriately self-absorbed I am. I grab hold and hoist
myself up as an automatic belay strap takes up the slack.
"You won't feel it fully support you until you put all your weight on it," Ammons says.
At the halfway mark, I gaze upward, like Jimmy Stewart at the beginning of "Vertigo." What I couldn't tell from the ground is that the hand grips get progressively tinier, until you hang practically by your fingertips near the top. And each one isn't only above the other, it juts slightly out from it.
That other brain center wrests control again. My arms go totally Bird's Eye peas and carrots.
"I can't go any further!" I scream. I try climbing back down.
"No, you have to jump!" Ammons says. "It'll be fine."
When I was 10 years old at day camp, we played that game where you fall backward and someone catches you. Well, this one time, Michael Solomon thought it would be funny not to catch me.
I blame him for this moment.
After 30 seconds of rigorous negotiation with my central nervous system, I let myself fall backward into plain old air. The automatic belay cable tenses up even tighter than my spine, then glides me smoothly to the pebbly firmament. I breathe a sigh of relief.
But Daily Breeze photographer Robert Casillas demands that I ascend again, even higher. He wants a shot of me at the virtual summit, hanging off by one arm.
Yeah, right. Then I'll do a headstand.
"Just take someone else's picture and paste your friend's face in," says Christy
Patterson, a 15-year-old Hermosa Beach resident waiting to use the wall.
Ammons has another idea. He retrieves a rope and hangs it from the top. He's going to hoist me like a Mt. Everest hypothermia victim. To his knowledge, this is the first time anyone has ever required assistance up one of his walls.
Even with the gravity boost, my arms go completely on strike at the same spot, refusing to honor all demands to move. I fall off the wall, dangling like a flesh wrecking ball, until Ammons agrees to honor my crazed pleas to be lowered.
"You jumped out of a plane and you can't do this?" Patterson asks.
I was strapped to an Elvis who jumped out of a plane. I didn't exactly do it myself.
Patterson steps into a harness and scampers spiderlike to the top of the wall within 25 seconds, loudly ringing the bell embedded at the top.
"How did you get to be an adventure reporter again?" Casillas asks me.