The Fear of Falling and other Primordial Terrors

What Mexico, flying, and Bob Dylan remind me about the need for resiliency and finding our people despite living in a terrifying world

Bodies are falling from the sky again. This time a NYC helicopter with its rotors and tail boom severed, the body flipped upside down—a bird with all its lift capability completely chopped—a terror in mechanical form—no control inputs viable, a pilot’s worst predicament, helplessly plummeting inverted into the Hudson.

Two days ago, near the same time six souls on board the Bell 206 fell from the sky to their deaths, I launch from La Playa de los Muertos into the sky, my body strapped into a harness and dangling below a hot pink and white parasail. The speed boat below slingshots out into the bay as I fly upward, higher and higher—the boats and people shrink away. And though I have never parasailed before, this launching and floating a couple hundred feet above the water and earth, feel familiar, slightly terrifying, and comfortable. My time as a pilot on pause for now, flight is an old lover you revisit to find they have aged and put on different clothes, yet stayed recognizably the same with their mannerisms, their inflections, their stubborn and wild updrafts, and moody drops.

The afternoon is busy heating up. Out on the beach, my two teenage travel companions get harnessed up. They wait anxiously for their turns to fly while doing fit-check videos as I feel the afternoon updrafts surging my body higher and higher.

This is my first trip to Mexico and in the days before the parasailing, I decide to do what I do in foreign countries—go for a wander however the locals do. Though the teenagers protest such pedestrian travel, I hand each ten pesos and we board a local bus headed along the coast for Boca de Tamatlan where we negotiate with men at the dock for water taxi tickets to the village of Yelapa. After the bus ride, we eat fresh mango, cucumber, and pineapple with chile from the snack stand and then bump across the water into the bay where a village perches on a hillside and a beach wraps around to another high dock. We hike cobblestone streets wide enough only for donkeys or ATVs to the waterfall. There are open-air restaurants with wooden tables and saltshakers shaped like traditional Mexican mejurs and hombres and merchants along the paths selling bracelets. The trek complete, we hop another speed boat to the barely populated beach and nap in lounge chairs while Mexican women in bathing suits down a bucket full of cervezas and sing unapologetically loud in Spanish to the music blaring from their portable radio.

We’ve only been a day in Puerto Vallarta before the crowds and the tourists and the constant pressing of merchants and the boys and men far too interested in my blond teenage companions have me exhausted from hypervigilance. No man with us as a built-in repellent, I stick my hand out in the universal stop position and say, “They are children. Go away,” to Mexican and American men who call out to them and want to approach too often.

My days of solo travel in my twenties had felt this way. Each night, emotionally exhausted from carrying the armor of navigating the world alone while sorting the harmless men from the dangerous, when I simply wanted to be anonymous and solo. And so to Yelapa we went for the day. To hike to the waterfall and drink in quiet cafes and nap under umbrellas without bother and let my guard down for the afternoon.

The next day, we zipline in Negaro Ecopark because again, escape.

“Things are getting pretty wild in America,” Javiar, our guide, says to me as he hooks me into a line and pauses with a long questioning look. He’d spent some time living in Oregon and had been to Bellingham just north of where I live and I already feel like I know him.

“I didn’t vote for him,” I reassure him. “I’m part of the resistance.”

“How did you know what I was thinking?” he asks smiling and soon we are bonding over sharing trauma—tariffs and deportations and dick-tators in between zip lines.

“You must do more than protest,” he says. “You must divest.”

“I have.”

“Your president looks like a Russian asset”

“I know, he probably is.”

By the time we’ve completed all the ziplines he and I are thick as thieves and conspiring a plan for me to direct our enemies to his jungle.

“Cut their balls and disappear them,” I whisper as we giggle together at the end of the day. I hand him my helmet and he unbuckles my harness.

“What are you doing the rest of the week?” he asks and I explain we are thinking of parasailing, but my teenage companions just want to lie on the beach and tan because they are idiots, while I want to escape to more places like Yelapa.

Then he brings up Bob Dylan.

When I was fourteen I heard Bob Dylan for the first time. It might have been Idiot Wind or Lay, Lady, Lay or Subterranean Homesick Blues or Maggie’s Farm, I’m not sure. What I do know is that his music gave me safe refuge to be a total freak. There’s time before Bob Dylan existed for me and time after. In the after, there could not be enough Dylan and I understood then that there was nothing I could think or do or say or write that could ever be too weird. Bob cracked the freak world wide open. I had seen into the mind of someone who I understood saw the world the way I did and no matter how much I did not fit, there was a lyrical place in his music where I did.

“Yelapa is where Bob Dylan used to go to escape,” Javier tells me as I realize we share not just a love for revenge but also music. On the plane to Puerto Vallarta, I’d watched the new Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, and had Bob on the brain ever since. I stood there beaming with delight at Javiar, understanding why without knowing it at the time, I had run away to Yelapa. I then reimagined every step I’d taken up the cobblestone winding streets. The boat ride in and the tiny pier we climbed onto. The crashing waves and the street cafes and the cats. The coconut tree I sat under for shade. And I saw Bob there seeing the same things and being weird and moody and wanting to sink into being anonymous again while also being uniquely amazing and fully himself. I saw him decades ago with his young skinny body and floufy hair and me superimposed over him with my backpack and my moody teenager companions snapping photos with smartphones. I saw Bob laying the trail once again for me to find him and escape to be solitary and solo but never alone.

In the sky over Puerto Vallarta, I’m not coming down.

When the boat whips its way around the bay and brings me in for the beach landing the updrafts keep sending me higher even though I know the boat and the men on the ground expect my parachute to begin descending. I am almost over the men and still hanging fully deflected in the air straight up and I am now a bit concerned and thinking thoughts like this isn’t quite right while also pretending I am flying this parachute like it’s a helicopter to keep my mind from worry. I know this is not going as planned, but I also know they don’t need me fighting the fix. I feel the cyclic and collective and I create an imaginary chin bubble to look down at the ground through. I know the updrafts will stop and I will begin to fall but that’s also what has me concerned.

I am a former helicopter pilot who is afraid of heights. An obvious contradiction that’s difficult to rectify except to say I tend to walk directly into what terrifies me as a way to manage fear. It’s a method I wouldn’t recommend to the literal heights I’ve taken it, but it works. It’s a technique by which you riddle yourself completely with anxiety as a method to rid yourself of that anxiety. It’s like a flash burn over and over that you become more tolerant of. In the end you’re covered in scar tissue, but it trains your body to become tolerant and resilient rather than debilitated. As time passes you grow increasingly confident with each fear you learn to manage, and slowly you begin to take on new challenges.

Farther down on the beach, I can see where we’ve frequented sunbathing in rented chairs under umbrellas. Where Esquel brings us drinks and chats in perfect English because he grew up in South Carolina.

“Why did you leave America?” I asked him the day prior, while sipping a green flash and he tells me his mom brought him to America when he was two months old. He was deported when he was seventeen in the first Trump presidency. My mind jumps to kids in cages. Now twenty-five, he brings Americans drinks and works for tips.

“My mom still lives there,” he says. “My dad’s somewhere here in Mexico but I’ve never known him.”

I then try to imagine the terror of being forcibly removed from the country you’ve called home your whole life when you’re just seventeen. My own kid at sixteen is fully grown in so many respects and yet so helpless in others. I’m not sure what makes us American but he seems just as American as me despite his lack of papers. Then I think back to Javiar my new bestie on the zipline who’d lived in Oregon and also had perfect English and I wonder if he too wasn’t deported.

On the ground, the men yell and run about and radio the boat with new directions for modifications. I wait patiently as the fall finally begins and the crew leader blows his whistle once to signal me to pull in the left side of the chute to slip it into the beach. I feel my left arm rise and pull as I follow his instructions over and over listening carefully to let go exactly when he whistles twice and resume pulling each time he blows once again. Forever the flight student, it’s more important to me, I realize, to execute perfectly all of his instructions than it is to hit the beach unscathed. I want the crash investigators to say over my lifeless body, she performed flawlessly. There was nothing more to be done.

“Like a pro” the instructor with the whistle says as he pats me on the shoulder after I’m safe on the ground and he unclips my harness.

These days the proving is for me. I’m here reminding myself I can still launch into the sky and come down in one piece. I can still feel the echos of crippling fear that’s always been there and fold it up like origami the whole way to the ground.

When my feet do hit the sand my daughter’s best friend is launched right behind me into the sky and my own child is waiting with her harness on. She asks if I think they’re too light. She heard the men radioing and yelling when I was too high and now she’s not sure about this though her bestie is now careening out over the bay.

After reassuring her she’ll be fine if she listened to instructions, I tell her, “You don’t have to go. I don’t care that I’ve paid.”

“I want to go” she says with a touch of worry and bravery. And of course, she does go up into the sky, and like all three of us, returns changed.