Rip-Cord

I am an only child and was lucky enough to grow up close with two of my cousins.  Bobby and Tommy are the sons of my dad’s brother Kevin and growing up they have been like my two older brothers.  When I was younger, this meant that I pretty much did anything that I thought would make me look cool or to show that I could hang tough with them.  I was about 11 years old, when we were at Worlds of Fun in Kansas.  The older brother, Tommy, really wanted to do the rip-cord, but couldn’t get anyone else to do it.  We were signed up to go an hour later and left to roam the park.  So, of course, I volunteered and my dad felt obliged to join us.  I felt awesome and like I was the coolest cousin ever… for about 10 minutes.  Then the fear started to set in.  We watched someone go and started to realize just about how terrifying it would be.  But, backing out would be extremely “uncool”, so I had to just bite the bullet. 

It was finally our turn to go and we returned to the rip-cord area.  As the three of us walked out onto the platform to get rigged up to the system, I thought I was going to pass out.  The platform is in the middle of a makeshift pond and they were hooking us up to a lifting device that would lift us about 15 stories in the air.  Once our feet had been lifted off the ground, I knew this was it and was horrified.  We were lifted 15 stories in the air with our stomachs parallel to the ground.  The minute before my cousin pulled the cord felt like a century.  Once he pulled the cord we were sent plummeting towards the water and ground at an extremely fast speed.  I was momentarily concerned that we would hit the ground and it would be all over.  All three of us were screaming and I’m not even sure if you could tell who was who at that point.  After we slowed down and finally came to a stopping point, they lowered us onto the platform and unhooked all of the wires.  It ended up being kind of an exhilarating experience, but also rather terrifying. 

I found out later that the whole time we were being rigged to the thing and lifted up in the air, people were down there simply aghast that someone was letting their young daughter do this.  My mom was hearing everyone saying these things and thinking “oh no, what have I done?” the entire time.  I’m pretty sure that she would have kept her eyes closed the entire time if we had not asked her to take pictures of it.  My dad will still bring it up to this day and I still think about how I went through with such a frightening experience just to impress my cousins and myself.