Taking the Plunge
When I was eight years old, my mother tucked me and my brother into her 1958 Imperial convertible and drove us 2,021 miles to Mexico.
Random as it was, I soon learned that my father was flying into Acapulco to meet my mother for a quick divorce.
Our last dinner together was at a restaurant in the El Mirador Hotel at La Quebrada, which was perched on the top of cliffs where the La Quebrada cliff divers dove off of 100-foot cliffs into the sea below.
The depth of the water is between 16 and 19 feet, and the width of the channel is about 48 feet. Elvis Presley filmed “Fun in Acapulco” in 1963 and highlighted the cliff divers.
Unable to eat, I pushed the food around on my dinner plate while trying to imagine my future as a child of divorced parents. And then something amazing happened: I turned my gaze and attention to the cliff divers and made up my mind that this was exactly what I needed to do in order to fly and be free from the unbearable sadness of that night.
So … I became a cliff diver.
From that moment on, I took advantage of any opportunity that arose whereby I could soar off cliffs perfecting my swan dive and jack knife skills. Certainly, I would never be as impressive as the La Quebrada cliff divers, but I have been known to dive at 40 feet.
An ear, nose and throat doctor once asked me, “Do you dive into cold water, because you have these growths in your ears? He noticed, and I was impressed.
My last cliff high dive was 20 years ago in Vermont along the shores of Lake Champlain. I was in my mid-fifties. The lake was low that year. As I was contemplating my dive, a few young boys about the age of 11 or 12 showed up to jump and they asked me what I was going to do.
I told them I was a diver and planned to dive. I was hesitant because the lake was low that summer, but the kids began to chant “dive, dive, dive, dive” … and with that, I placed my toes around the edge of the cliff rock, bent my knees and pushed off and out into a perfect swan dive.
I watched as the cliff wall passed me by and within a split second I realized I may have made a tragic mistake. When I hit the shallow water, I pulled into a tight tuck and somersaulted. I rose out of the lake to the shouts and applause of these youngsters high above.
I got out of the water, ran up to the cliff, and told the boys to go home and not jump because the water was too shallow. They listened. I was saved that day by divine intervention and my gymnastic skills. This was my last high dive.
A few years later I was walking down Church Street in Burlington, Vermont (my home) and I heard commotion behind me. I turned around and there was this group of young men now in their early twenties and they ran up to me and said “hey, hey—you were that lady who dove off the cliff.” They remembered; it was my five seconds of fame.
I have not done any cliff diving from high ledges since that day. I am heading to Milos, Greece, this week. I have promised myself that I will make one more high (well, sort of high) dive off of the white volcanic cliffs of Milos into the Aegean Sea.
It is my gift to my now 74-year-old self that I can still fly—a saving grace that became my reality some 66 years ago at the El Mirador Hotel.
