My brother, Tristan, has an outgoing and electric personality. He has passion-infused blue eyes, a smile that dispels fear, and an affinity for risk. One autumn day we decided to get together at the self-proclaimed City of Magnolias – Durant, Oklahoma – where my brother attends college at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. A lot of our friends were headed to Durant with me, where we were planning to spend the night in the basement of the Baptist Collegiate Ministries building after a day of cliff diving.
When I first heard of cliff diving from my brother, I was a little alarmed for him, as his exploits have been known to cross the line between risky and unwise.
“It’s not that bad,” he reassured my mother and me, and I could share that notion to a certain extent. A few years prior we had swung into the Feather River in California from a rope suspended to a railway truss 50 feet above the water, but that memory did not eradicate my concern for our safety.
There are many life experiences that involve risk, and one needs to evaluate how to approach those potentially dangerous situations. Cliff diving is one such situation, to be handled with care, as we soon discovered. We arrived in Durant and changed into swimming trunks before heading over to the site of our expected adrenaline rush: an abandoned rock quarry. My brother explained what would happen.
“Coleman [the place we were driving to] used to be a huge rock quarry. The company that owned it drilled hundreds and hundreds of feet into the ground, but they hit an aquifer unexpectedly, and the mine began to fill with water. It filled up so quickly that they had to abandon a lot of their heavy equipment; there are backhoes and stuff at the bottom.”
“How tall are the cliffs?” I asked.
“They range from about 20 feet above the water to about 70.”
“Have people jumped off those before?”
“I think someone might have jumped off the taller ones, but they might have broken their arm or something.” We would stick with the smaller cliffs.
Article comments