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Teetering on a Cliff of Regret

A Story of Red Rock Cliffs and Addiction

By Michael J. HeilPublished 3 years ago 13 min read
3
Photo Credit Riener Krienke on Unsplash

In High School, I was a drug addict, and then all this happened.

I was a drug addict who felt extremely guilty about doing drugs. I hated lying, and I hated getting arrested. I hated the fact that I needed drugs in order to feel okay. My guilt drove me to excel in school. I guess I was really guilty because somehow, I finished High School with my Associate's Degree in college. I took the distance education program through which my High School actually paid for my degree. I went to class high pretty much every day. I'd take ADD pills to give me energy and help me focus. In the evening, I'd take other things to help me sleep. I felt pretty messed up inside. During the summer where I was set up to finally finish my degree, I worked hard every day and pretty much locked myself inside.

That summer, I took one week off school for our family's annual trip to Lake Powell. Lake Powell was as much of an innate contradiction as I was. It was a massive lake in the middle of an even bigger dessert. The only thing that made the lake possible was a giant dam that blocked up one of America's mightiest rivers. I could not stave off my impulsive need for adventure. It was one of those sure, solid things that brought me joy, no matter the circumstances. Adventure and adrenaline were almost as much of a high for me as drugs were. I was trying so hard to get off drugs, but I just couldn't.

The more I tried to refrain from drugs, the more important snowboarding, wakeboarding, longboarding, skating, biking, hiking, bouldering, cliff jumping, and every other thing that got my adrenaline pumping became to me. I realized these things couldn't be my purpose in life, they couldn't balance me out inside, but they were good outlets. That feeling of insidious fear, the big 'what if' that pulsates through your mind while suspended in midair. The split second where everything seems to freeze before you go plummeting towards the ground like a bolt of lightning. That feeling felt like freedom, whereas drugs just made me hopelessly dependent.

After doing drugs so long, it seemed impossible to enjoy a normal life. I couldn't enjoy reality as it was. I always seemed to need to artificially fabricate it in order to enjoy it. It was even becoming difficult to enjoy Lake Powell the way I used to. Even it was becoming less about quality family time and more about drinking. It was less about quality conversation, adventure, and water sports and more about booze. I was the addict, not them. They just thoroughly enjoyed drinking on their vacations. But I was feeling it the most because I'd put the most hope in drugs. The more you turn to something, the more hope you put in it, and the more you functionally rely upon it for your wellbeing.

My parents always loaded up on booze before heading out to Lake Powell. If their stash was ever short, then my sister and her friends more than made up for it. I was seventeen, but my favorite thing to do was climb the rocks and boulders, jumping from one to the next, seeing how far and long I could fly. Whenever I did this, I felt like a kid again. I would scale the cliffs like spiderman; the only difference was that my safety depended on technical abilities and innate skill rather than superpowers. In the mornings, we would wake up at six while the water was still smooth as glass to go slalom skiing. After that, we'd have breakfast and coffee. Then people would start breaking out beers, and the drinking would continue throughout the rest of the day.

As a teenager, I was still not technically allowed to drink, but in an environment like that, what else can an addict do? I would swipe the stuff when they weren't looking and store away small stashes of it in emptied plastic water bottles. One day I remembered to drink booze but forgot to drink water. We went on a long hike that day. At some point, we found the most delightful looking crag I had ever seen. I had to climb it. But as I was ascending, we realized it was too technical and difficult for my friend. She decided to turn back, and we agreed to meet at the houseboat later. I gulped down my tiny bottle of Vodka and Orange Juice as I needed both hands to navigate the climb.

At one point, I had both hands on one cliff face and both feet on the opposing face, with my body spread between the gaps. I loved doing this and had gotten pretty good at using pressure to keep myself elevated and even push myself up large gaps like these, sort of like Kronk and Prince Llama Face on the Emperor's New Groove. At the top, I had to push hard with my feet to launch the rest of my body onto the opposing ledge. By now, I was at least 250 feet above the water, but much of that terrain had been sloped. Only the last fifty feet had been directly vertical. Each time I thought I was nearing the top, I would poke my head over the ledge to find another spectacular challenge awaiting me. When I finally got to the top, my torso and hands clung to the slick sandstone while my feet and legs dangled over the cliff.

The night before, it had rained hard and created a waterfall that poured down the cliff face towards our houseboat. My throat was getting so dry that when I swallowed, it felt like sandpaper was grating it. The raging desert heat had eradicated any trace of last night's rain. If even a puddle remained, I wouldn't have hesitated to wet my mouth with it. A day in the desert with no water was a day too many. The top of the cliff was not flat but smooth and rolling. Hills went up and down in every direction, some of them stretching 75 feet upwards at a slant and then down again. I made my way back towards the cliff where the waterfall had been so that I could shout down to everyone in the boat, letting them know I was safe. But before I could make it there, I hit an impasse.

One of the steep slopes curved in on itself, dropping straight down into a cavernous hole in the rocks. It was a forty-foot drop, and only after I dropped would I be able to work my way up another slope towards the houseboat. I turned left, hoping to find a way around it but found myself once again at the edge of the massive cliff I had ascended. I went right for a ways but kept running into bizarre cliffs that dropped off into pits made of solid stone, similar to the one I'd found before.

As I walked, the remaining light faded from the sky. I kept pressing on, knowing that I needed to somehow make it back to the boat before nightfall. Luckily I brought a flashlight, but it was a piece of crap. It was an eco-friendly light that was self-powered and didn't use batteries. To power it, I had to rotate a small knob in continual circles. It made an obnoxious whirring sound, and the light it generated shined about five feet at its maximum. This was just enough to make the light hit the ground that immediately surrounded my feet without shedding any light on my surroundings. To make it shine this far, I would all but have to stop moving and focus on doing nothing but twisting the knob as fast as I could. If I tried to generate light while walking, the beam went about three feet.

As I walked down one of the steep slopes. My foot headed towards what looked like the shadow of a rock. But when it came to the point where it should have connected, it just kept dropping. The rest of my body followed, teetering until it hit the rock, and started slipping downwards. I pressed my body hard against the sandstone, hoping the friction would slow the fall. I slowed enough to grab hold of a piece of rock, and fortunately for me, it held. I shined my light downwards, and although I could not see far, just inches in front of me was another one of those cliffs that dropped straight down.

I remembered looking down those pits earlier. The floor of each of them was solid rock, sometimes smooth and other times jagged. A thirty or forty-foot fall onto a solid rock in the dark was survivable, but I would need rope to get out and someone at the top to pull me. I wasn't sure whether anyone else in our group could even rock climb this high to retrieve me, even if they waited for daylight. If I did fall in one of these pits and somehow survived it, having to wait through the night with broken limbs would be torture… I gathered my strength and pressed on, all but crawling at this point.

Even at this slow pace, I found myself slipping and sliding down the steep rock. One more scare, too close. As I clung to the sandstone, I realized I wasn't going to make it down tonight. I stood up, shaking. Just a few more inches and I would have… crap. What's happening to me?

Have you ever heard the expression scared shitless? Well, I guess it's a real thing. I mean, I didn't crap myself or anything like that. But the adrenaline pumping through my veins was so intense that I literally could not do anything other than pop a squat. So I left a memento right there on that cliff face. It was a primal sort of, "Hmpf, that's what you get if you mess with me cliff." I didn't have any TP, so I pulled off one of my socks and, after using it, left it on top of the pile. Usually, this kind of thing made me feel alive, but my dehydration, drunkenness, and fall were wearing on me. I decided the best thing I could do would be to save my energy, spend the night, and navigate my way down in daylight.

I found a small, flat overhang, roughly five feet long and two feet wide. I laid down on the rock with my knees tweaked up so that I could fit myself lengthwise. I let my eyes shift across the starry sky. I always loved looking at the stars from Lake Massive. It was the only place I could actually remember seeing the milky way. Where purple, black, blue, yellow, and golden streaks released waves of light that danced across the sky. The vast expanse filled with clear beaming lights that warped to a blurry pigment as each star flickered through countless lightyears of space and time. Each star shining so huge that it could fit tens, billions, or even quadrillions of our earth into it. So huge and significant and yet, at the very same moment, smaller than the point of a needle.

I looked up to the heavens and whispered into infinite space, "If there is really someone out there, please… please help me. I don't know if you made all this, I don't who or if you're really out there, but I need your help. Don't let a scorpion or something sting me tonight. Help me not to fall down this cliff. Help me not to die of thirst or dehydration. Help me not to freeze without insulation from the cold." I paused for a moment, trying to decide whether to continue or not, "I don't know if you could really care about me after all the messed-up things I've done, but if you do, please help me make it through the night and get down from this place."

My eyes closed, and I slowly dozed off until a shrill scream permeated the darkness. "MICHAEL!!!". It probed again, "MICHAEL, WHERE ARE YOU?" I jolted upright, trying not to fall off my ledge. I shouted back, "I'm fine, I can't get down, I'll try to find a way in the morning," but they couldn't hear me. At the top of my croaky lungs, I shouted again and again until my dry throat was too parched to keep it up any longer. I was screaming now, at the top of my lungs, but they couldn't hear me.

I could see an echoed haze of a spotlight now; they were shining it everywhere in a desperate search for me. Even if they had search and rescue out looking for me, no one was going to make it up that cliff at night. As the spotlight beamed upwards through the dark night sky, I wondered why I could hear them so well when they couldn't hear me at all. Finally, I realized their voices must've been echoing up the canyon walls while mine was being sifted away by the raging wind. After what seemed like hours of shouting back and forth, the voices finally quieted, and I lay back down.

The looming impermanent type of cold that can only be found in the desert in the dead of night descended upon me. I began shivering fiercely. The skin of my arms and legs pressed against the hard cold rock sandwiched between it and the cold air that blew fiercely around me. I scrunched my body into a ball under the tank top, hoping that it might dull the sharp cold or trap some of my escaping body heat.

I closed my eyes again, hoping for sleep, but my shivering was interrupted by little drops of rain that pelted me, sending goosebumps across my body. It was raining harder now, and my thoughts drifted towards the waterfall from last night. I wondered if the water might work itself into a frenzy around me and drag me down the cliff with it. It kept coming down, harder and harder. I cozied up closer to the rock and buried myself deep in my tank top.

Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore, "Please," I shouted, "Please make it stop." As if in direct response, the rain let up, like someone slowly turning off a faucet. "Thank you," I said, and I gazed up into the sky until the stars themselves started to fade. I couldn't sleep for even a minute that night. As I stared, shivering unabatedly, I wondered what life was really all about. I wondered why the things that feel so good at first always cost the most later on. I wondered how that innocent first puff of weed had led to a lifelong life-altering addiction.

I realized I'd been teetering on a cliff for a very long time now. It wasn't just this night, this instance. It was everything leading up to this too. I realized I needed help. I didn't want to hide anymore. I was done pretending everything was alright when I knew it wasn't. I was done floating on my pride and reputation. I was done boasting in an ego that was as much pretense as it was reality. I was going to find something stable to build my life on, something solid and reliable. I would need help, but after tonight, I realized I hadn't ever been entirely alone in this battle. At first light, the moment the hue of the darkness started to lift, I forced myself to get up and take my first wobbly step towards freedom.

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About the Creator

Michael J. Heil

From the time he first began forming sentences Michael has been a gleeful storyteller. He finds joy in the thought that his writings may encourage others and help them avoid making the same mistakes he has. For more see www.michaeljheil.com

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