This past Sunday I watched the live coverage of Felix Baumgartner diving from the edge of space and plummeting to the earth in a free fall faster than the speed of sound. It was riveting for me. As the announcers on my computer spoke of the possibility of his blood boiling and other such “side-effects” of his unimaginably high speed decent, memories of my own high velocity daredevil days came rushing back to me.
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I was walking down the curved hall that circled the floor of the arena after the act and I felt unusually dizzy… granted, I should have been a little dizzy considering that I had just been suspended forty feet above the ground from a rope looped around my neck while my partner spun me like a helicopter blade at a speed that caused my body to elevate… but generally, I was not dizzy after this feat. On this particular day though, I was dizzy to the point that I was not entirely confident that I was even walking a straight line. I chalked it up to the change in elevation between the site of the previous day’s performance and this one and proceeded into the locker room that was more often occupied by visiting NBA basketball players than female circus artists.
When I entered, one of the more veteran aerialists looked up to greet me. She started to smile and then her face contorted oddly as she coughed out an ominous suggestion that I stop where I was. I did as I was told. Then she asked, “Um, Leslie? Has anyone ever mentioned to you what the side effects of a well-executed helicopter spin can be?”
“Side-effects? No?” (Huh? What is she talking about? Why is she looking at me with that odd smirk on her face?)
My head (and/or the room) began to swirl a bit. She walked toward me, put her hands on my shoulders, and explained herself (somewhat) as she gently walked me around the corner to a large mirror on the wall. “Now don’t worry,” she said, “this is something that can happen and is not anything to get concerned about, but you have the worst case I’ve ever seen and it might scare you a bit when you see it.”
(What the hell is she talking about? Why am I feeling so dizzy? And why do my feet hurt?)
She was standing between me and the mirror and very sternly said, “Really. Don’t worry.” And then she stepped to the side.
As I peered at my own reflection in the mirror, I slowly came to understand what her odd behavior was all about and why she was looking at me so sympathetically but at the same time giving the impression that she might start laughing (or crying?) at any moment. The reflection of me in the mirror looked like something from a bad horror movie. I had android-like eyes with opaque blue centers and where my usually human eyes should have been white, they were now a deep purple. I also had strange little purplish dots on the skin around my eyes that looked as though they belonged on some half human character from Star Trek.
“Oh… my…” was all I could squeak out. Then after a moment of glancing back and forth between my reflection and my friend’s in the mirror, we both started laughing. The speed at which my partner and I were known to perform the helicopter spin had actually been fast enough on this day to send my blood rushing outward and seeking an escape. The centrifugal force was such that it burst the capillaries in my eyes and also on the surface of my feet.
Frightening as it might sound I really did not have anything to worry about, and it did not take me long at all to embrace the scars of my accomplishment, wear them proudly, and actually have some good fun with my altered appearance. In fact, a few nights later as we made our way from Albuquerque to L.A., we were stopped by a border patrol agent who got quite a start when he lifted his flashlight from my ID to my face. I will never forget the look in his eyes as he jumped back from the open truck window and proclaimed “What-the-hell-happened-to-you?!!” I just started to laugh, pointed at my partner who was seated next to me and said, “He did it.” The long explanation followed and this guy wound up radioing ahead to one of his colleagues who pulled us over a few more miles down the road just so he could “see the girl with freaky eyes.”
It took weeks for my blood-stained eyes to return to their normal appearance… especially since I had to keep performing the same trick numerous times every day (though we slowed down the spin a little)… and by the time I was looking like myself again we had performed our way up the west coast of the US, into and across Canada, and back down. The color had morphed from purple to red to orange to yellow and finally back to white. The reactions that people had to my appearance became a bit of an educational experiment in sociology and culture for me. There was a marked difference between the responses of store clerks and others whom I encountered in the states and those whom I encountered farther north and I learned from observing people’s responses.
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Sunday afternoon as I stared into my computer screen I felt a real affinity for and kinship with this daredevil stranger who was risking it all before me and the rest of the interested world. He landed his high-velocity flight just miles from where I had once spun fast enough to transform my own appearance to a droidian illusion.
What I risked and accomplished all those years ago is nothing compared to what Felix did, and he walked away without a single visually evident side-effect. But make no mistake—there were side-effects, and his accomplishment most definitely left a few marks on him. Some have scoffed at the whole display in the days since and cannot see it as much more than a foolish and wasteful stunt by an adrenaline-hooked overgrown teenage boy. I understand that critique. But– I also understand him. Perhaps a little better than most are able.
Felix Baumgartner scarred his own soul on Sunday… and the markings are beautiful. I am proud to have a few similar (though smaller) scars. He dared to wander beyond the edge of reason and to fly in the face of fear, not because he had a death wish, but because he wanted to fully live.
Keep shooting for the moon, Felix!
You can hear Felix speak of his own experience a bit here:
Hup! 