JULIE AND THE CATWALK

This is the waterfall on my grandparents farm. It was a magical place to grow up. The catwalk was always the challenge and we knew we were pretty grown up when we had been able to successfully tackle it. For us it was a rite of passage.

My Mom would have preferred that we never went near it--but it was way too tempting for kids who were watching their older cousins go back and forth across it. The catwalk is about a two inch ledge where you can put your feet--er, uh, toes and its across the top is wall of shale rock that you don't dare trust to hold onto. If you do hold onto it for safety, you will most likely find yourself holding a rock that has come off of a rock wall and losing your balance at the same time. In order to cross successfully you just have to lean your whole body into the wall and shimmy across.

Were you to fall from the catwalk, it is a drop of about twenty feet into more jagged rocks. So, you don't want to fall. I had told Julie about it and she really wanted to cross the catwalk and I thought it would be cool to teach this rite of passage to my daughter.

I was very careful and explained all the precautions to Julie. I went all the way across and came back to get her so she could see how to do it. However, as I took her across I experienced the same fear I'm sure my mom used to have when we would get on the catwalk.

As we got almost halfway across Julie screamed and nearly jumped. Her body jolted backward a bit and scared the living daylights out of me. Why did she scream, you ask? That's what I asked--because she nearly lost her footing and could have fallen. It was a Daddy-long legs spider that made her scream. She doesn't like bugs. I calmed her down by telling her the spider didn't have a mouth big enough to bite her and that there were a million more bugs where she was putting her hands so she'd better get used to it. What would really hurt would be to fall from that height so she should concentrate on where her feet are and keeping her body against the rock. Forget about the bugs.

My original plan was to take her over and back on the catwalk but she was more worried about the bugs the whole way over than about falling and thus, scared me to death, so we went back a whole different way! I wanted us to live to tell the story!