Jumpy

"You sure you want to do this?"

Derek was looking at me with that usual wry grin on his face, but I thought I detected an undertone of real, genuine concern. I replied,

"Sure, no sweat."

Dammit. Little quaver in the voice there, and Derek's grin got a little wider. He turned and theatrically looked over the edge of the cliff.

"Hell of a long way down, you know?"

"I've done 'long way' before, plenty of times."

"Shyeah," he laughed, "not like this. I don't seem to recall you jumping down into clouds before."

He was right. Down below - way down below, to be honest, a cloud bank covered the ground I'd hopefully be landing on. No, scratch that - I'd definitely be landing, one way or another. It was HOW I landed that was the tough part.

"Just fog, man."

He didn't even grace that one with a reply, just turned to finish checking my gear. After a few moments he stood back up.

"That's it man, good to go. You ready?"

I tried to come up with a snappy response but suddenly I found my mouth was dry and my skin was getting clammy. What the hell? I'd done this hundreds of times before, maybe not from so high but really the only two parts that matter are the first step off and the last few feet that determine the landing - the rest is just in-between space. My heart was racing too, shallow little bip-bip-bip beats that throbbed in my ears.

Suddenly I needed to sit down, like right now.

As I dropped to the ground Derek hunkered down with me.

"You really don't have to do this, you know?" He looked at me sourly.

"Right, like Coke is just going to say, 'Oh, that's okay, no harm no foul.'"

"Dude, you give them back the money and tell them the site was squirrely or some shit. They don't make the calls up here, you do."

I thought about that for a moment. He was right, I do make the calls up here. And I sure as hell wasn't going to back down from this jump.