This post is part of Robert Hruzek’s latest What I Learned From … group project. This month’s topic is Mashing It Up, and I decided to take it literally.

The Preliminaries
When I was in high school, our family lived in Colorado. So let’s begin by talking a little about school, relatives, and recreation. When it came to learning, my best lessons took place outside the classroom. School felt like being trapped in a box with no air. I’m lucky my parents valued family and recreation as much as they did. They’d pile me, my brother, my sister, and our faithful and gentle pet Doberman, Shadow, into our Jeep Wagoneer and tote us all over creation hiking, skiing, exploring for artifacts, or just driving through the Rocky Mountains. At the time, I’m not sure we kids knew how much fun we were having, or how much we were learning.

The Story
One day we were packed in the Jeep driving up a mountain pass; I can’t remember where, but we were high, well above the tree line. As we came through a hairpin, we saw a steep jeep trail off to the right heading straight up the side of the mountain, finally turning sharply to the left maybe 500 feet up. Man, I was excited. Getting off the main roads and driving the jeep trails through the rugged terrain was the kind of adventure we all loved. (As I understand it, many of the jeep trails in Colorado have been closed off because of accidents. Makes sense when I think about all the close calls we had. But then, as you will see, I had enough problems just walking.)

We parked at the base of the trail. I couldn’t wait to drive up there! My parents weren’t quite as enthusiastic. They suggested I take a walk up and see where the trail went after it turned. Here were my parents being parentally prudent. The trail was steep and very narrow, barely wide enough for the Jeep, with a sheer drop of (what seemed like) 1000 feet all along the right side. If the trail became too rugged or disappeared altogether, it would be no easy matter to turn the Jeep around and get back down.

I didn’t walk up — I ran. Tough climb. When I finally reached the turn, I was thrilled — a piece of cake. The trail widened and leveled out, but the views would be incredible. I yelled down to my family with the good news, but they couldn’t hear me. They looked like dots. So I started down, still full of excitement. My quick walk became a jog.

That’s when I learned my lesson about mountains.

When you’re jogging down a steep mountain trail, you learn that gravity is more than a theory. In short order, my jog became a run. I started feeling a little out of control, so I decided to slow down. I couldn’t. My pace got faster and faster. My head was bouncing up and down and everything looked blurry, like an out of focus chase sequence from an action film. Even so, I could see my family at the base, still far off, looking up anxiously.

Now I was scared. My legs were pumping as fast as they could, paying no attention to my brain, which was telling them to STOP! I was hurtling toward the precipice like a rocket. What was I going to do? If I couldn’t stop, I would run right past my family and off the side of the mountain. That was a sheer drop of several hundred feet, maybe more. Space and time had become precious commodities. I was running out of both, and quickly.

Even though I was scared out of my wits, I gathered them at the last second. I tripped myself, bounced across a bunch of rocks, flipped, somersaulted, and slammed shoulder-first into the side of the Jeep. I thought I had broken every bone in my body. Luckily, I was quite muscular at the time, so I escaped without even one broken bone, although I was black and blue and sore everywhere for weeks. Had the accident happened today, I’d be dead without question.

The Musing
I don’t know which was worse — the pain, the embarrassment of doing something so stupid, or not getting to drive up the trail. Today, I think the worst of it was subjecting my parents to the horror. (My poor mother watched me slip off a diving tower years earlier and come inches from hitting the concrete instead of the water.)

As we all know, the younger we are, the faster we learn. Or do we? In this case, experience was a slow teacher. I continued to look for the most challenging Jeep trails I could and do other things I shouldn’t have done. High school kids consider themselves indestructible. You would think after this episode, I would have become older and wiser. But no. The rest of my high school career more closely resembled The Dumb and the Reckless as opposed to The Young and the Restless.

So although falling down a mountain didn’t necessarily teach me to use better judgment at the time, over the years I’ve recalled the incident on occasions where it most definitely helped me make better decisions. Time and space are funny things. Not having enough of them, like when you’re falling down a mountain, can be frightening. But having space and time to digest such a lesson can be enlightening. Have you ever had a delayed-reaction learning experience? One that took months or years?