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| Look at these harness wearing safety nerds. So lame. |
My family has a love affair with all things dangerous and borderline legal. By borderline legal I, of course, mean unenforced illegal. When I was quite young my dad built a zip line like the kind you see in an action movies or at a Boy Scout day camp. Somewhere that would require all types of silly legal waivers and safety equipment.
My dad put a telephone pole in the ground in the middle of our yard and ran a cable between it and the large weeping willow tree that was in the front of our yard. To get to the top of the platform, you climbed several steps onto a little un-railed platform. A friend would then swing you the rope with the handle and pulley. All that was left was to hold on and ride to the bottom over a hundred feet away.
Besides your grip, there were no safety devices as such. For those too short my dad added a length of yellow 'do-not-use-for-live-loads' utility rope and affixed a second lower handle. This second lower rope added all kinds of variation in the type of danger a typical rider could expose themselves to. It allowed me to jump sideways on takeoff making the ride swing wide from right to left on the way down. I could also flip upside-down as I rode and hook my knees over the bar like a proto-Cirque du Soleil.
To make sure you are clear on this, I was hanging 12 feet off the ground from my knees, on a little piece of rope which is not intended for live loads. I never had a problem.
It turned out that was only safe for regulars and the yellow rope tried to assassinate a neighbor girl. It was my brother Matt's friend, a girl named Emily, who was almost too scared to go, let alone doing any good tricks. She got talked into going down, but it seems like it's always the scared people that terrible things happen to.
She rode down and the rope snapped. She flipped over and broke her neck on the ground. The ambulance came and took her away and luckily she was able to recover, all she had to do was sit in bed for the entire summer and play video games. After that, our families were not friends anymore but at least they didn't sue which was good.
My dad did take the hint and sawed down the poor zip line, which in retrospect should have never been put up. Especially in a situation where there was almost no parental oversight and a huge potential for grievous harm and death. As an interesting side note, my dad in his older age has become terrified of anything dangerous. He is constantly talking about long-shot-worse-case-scenarios wherein he may have liability for injury or loss.
