My vision flickers as I step off the bridge, and the world disappears. Wind claws at my face, and blood rushes in my ears. I realise I left my stomach ten metres above me. My vision cuts back in, blurring with speed. The dry riverbed approaches impossibly fast. I’m falling too fast to scream. The ground flashes up to meet me. I’m clasping onto whatever I can hold.
Then, the rope catches.
I stop dying and start flying, and I swing, pendulum like through the air, soaring through a canyon as onlookers cheer and whoop. For a second, I’m mother-fucking Spider-Man.
A few minutes earlier, I’d been staring over the edge of that bridge in Altea, a point I must’ve crossed a thousand times as a kid. My parents have finally sold the house I grew up in, so I flew back to say goodbye to the place where I grew up. Spain felt different now – kinder, warmer – and I wanted to leave the country with one final memory that wasn’t nostalgic.
✓ Project Bucket List is, after all, a Bucket List, so it was always going to have a bungee jump on it. Most bucket lists will include bungee jumps, sky diving, or something equally as adrenaline-inducing, like having to speak to customer support on the phone, or arson.
Sure, this might be a cheesy angle, but for me, this jump was symbolic, kind of like a Dante’s Inferno “out through the devil’s arsehole” before and after. Jumping off that bridge acted as a before and after, wherein, afterwards, I wouldn’t be going back to my childhood home ever again. (Those of you with media literacy skills will note, I’m shoehorning in melancholy by describing bungee jumping as a “goodbye”. It’s no wonder my favourite album of all time is Black Parade.)
My fiancée, Kymberley, walks alongside me, chipper and happy, but I can see by how she clasps her hands that she’s incredibly nervous.
We arrive just before 9 am, and the heat is just starting to build in the late October sun. Hidden between the mountains, three bridges arc across the Mascarat Gorge. Once home to masked robbers, it now hosts men in high-vis shouting about rope.
As we hike through the gorge, we see ropes dangle into the void below, as instructors shout up and down at each other.
Slowly, a box full of white helmets descends into view, and the instructor ushers us jumpers up a piece of rope winding up the cliff face.
After a climb and a scramble that would put any UK mountain to shame, I arrive at the top of the bridge, and fork out an extra €25 in what I call “fat tax“. See, while my height accounts for some of my extra weight, cake accounts for most of it. I’ve found that some experiences use my target weights around words like “max” or “no greater than“.
In this case, it meant that I had to pay for the use of an extra rope. Nothing boosts self-esteem quite like being categorised as structurally significant.
At the top, a family from the Netherlands listens to instructions before me. I watch two kids make the jump, and they’re incredibly brave, then comes my turn.
They pass ropes from one bridge to another, and hook me up with carabiners as thick as my thumb. I climb over the edge , and look down, a 60m drop beneath me.
I notice that I’ve started to sweat, and I can hear thumping in my ears. I’m not scared of heights, but something strange happens when you’re staring down at such a heigh drop, palms slick on the rail. Memento Mori kicks in, and that little survival instinct voice in the back of your head says “hey buddy, maybe don’t jump down there, it’s quite high“. The instructor grabs onto me, and tells me he’s going to count down from 3, then, before I have a chance to think, I hear him reach 1, and I jump.
The first half of a second is pure panic. My vision flashes black, then white, then nothing. Then back again. The air punches me in the face so hard I forget to breathe, even if I could. My cheeks peel back, eyes water and the wind screams in my ears. I accelerate faster than I’ve ever felt before, too fast to keep up. Every cell in my body is convinced that I’ve just made the last mistake I’ll ever make.
The rope bites.
A firm tug that drags me out of the cruel maw of gravity and pulls me tight. My eyesight is working again, and I’m swinging, shooting under the bridge, and arching perfectly out the other side, high into the air. It’s impossible not to shout, and I let out half holler, and half roar as I reach the apex of my swing, before spinning around and falling back towards the ground, gliding back under, and out of the other side.
My pulse is back to normal, and I can see properly again. And slowly, I start to get closer and closer to the ground, as the instructor below on the floor starts grasping at my foot as I swing by. Eventually, he manages to get a grip of me, and chuckles as he says that I’m so big that I nearly took him with me.
I reach the ground, and with shaky legs, walk back to Kymberley, where we head back to reality. As I reach the halfway point of ✓ Project Bucket List, I can’t help but think about the version of me 2 years ago, who was almost too anxious to go on holiday. I can’t imagine I’d believe it, if I met my future self back then, and knew what he’d done.
I’ve travelled through the proverbial arsehole, and as much as it made my body ache for 3 straight days afterwards. Pain fades. The feeling of flight never will.
