My friend Lee Walker says I got "pitched back." What he means is, I almost died, and possibly even did die a little, but then I got pitched back into the world of the living. I know they're out there, lying in their hospital beds, with those damn drip poles, watching the damn chemo slide into their veins, and thinking, This guy had the same thing I do. She knew where I'd been.Īt what point do you let go of not dying? Maybe I haven't entirely and maybe I don't want to. The first time I ever did it, my wife, Kik, just looked at me and rolled her eyes. I burst through the door, and I shout at my son, Luke, and my twin daughters, Grace and Isabelle, and I kiss them on the necks, and I grab a Shiner Bock beer with one hand and an armful of babies with the other. Then I climb back up and towel off, and I drive home to my three kids. I come up whooping through the foam and swim for the rocks. As I jump, there are certain unmistakable signs that I'm alive: the press of my pulse, the insistent sound of my own breathing, and the whanging in my chest that's my heart, which by then sounds like an insubordinate prisoner beating on the bars of my ribcage. Long enough to think first one thing, A little fear is good for you, and then another, It's good for you if you can swim, and then one more thing as I hit the water: Oh fuck, it's cold. It's long enough for a guy to actually think on the way down, and to think more than one thought, too. It's a long drop, so long that it makes the roof of my mouth go dry just looking at it. I stand there next to a 45-foot waterfall and examine the drop-and myself, while I'm at it. It seems only right that a place called Dead Man's Hole should belong to a guy who nearly died-and who, by the way, has no intention of just barely living. In any event, I'm drawn to it, so much so that I bought 200 acres of brush and pasture surrounding it, and I've worn a road into the dirt by driving out there. According to conflicting legends, it's either where Confederates tossed Union sympathizers to drown, or where Apaches lured unsuspecting cowboys who didn't see the fall coming. Dead Man's Hole is a large green mineral pool gouged out of a circular limestone cliff, so deep into the hill country of Texas that it's hardly got an address. Let's say it's my own personal way of checking for vital signs. But whenever I need to reassure myself of this, as I sometimes do, I go out to a place called Dead Man's Hole, and I stare down into it, and then, with firm intent, I strip off my shirt and I leap straight out into what you might call the great sublime.
So, it looks as though I'm going to live-at least for another 50 years or more.
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