The Agony of De Feet

April 13, 2026

Greetings from the end of my rope,

I’m not sure how well they worked before the pavilion, but it seems to me that afterward they never really lived up to their potential. It’s a strange thing to say about your feet.

Most everyone I know, especially everyone in my family, can operate their toes as if they were another set of fingers. Wiggling them, picking things up off the floor. If I ever had this dexterity I don’t remember it clearly, but for certain it was gone after the pavilion. My feet are like two boards with unattractive pegs on the ends.

Sometime in our early teens, my friend Tom and I decided we were interested in mountain climbing.  Without going into too much geographic detail, I will share with you that I grew up in a midwestern city where the closest thing to a mountain we had was a landfill.

So, to be accurate, Tom and I weren’t much interested in the ‘mountain’ part of climbing. We just wanted to rappel.

By this time in the narrative, we had our share of climbing a variety of things. Trees, fire escapes, flagpoles, chain link fences, those TV antenna towers that seemed invented so young boys would get into trouble. Plus a variety of things that had trapped errant basketballs, baseballs and frisbees.

But somewhere in all of these adventures we caught sight of someone rappelling off the cliff of a mountain.  Neither of us had any idea about the technique or the equipment that would make this kind of thing happen, but there was something compelling about the activity.

The pavilion was not the most dangerous place, not the highest, it was just closest.  It was in Kearsley Park, home of all manner of mischief, and one day in search of such adventure we both stood looking up at the pavilion, and thought, “We could rappel off that.”  (Once we learned the word ‘rappel’, we were saying it almost daily.)

I would like to describe the pavilion as a towering edifice but in truth it may have offered maybe fifteen feet of elevation.  We had seen Batman and Robin making their way along the outsides of buildings, and while we both knew that wasn’t real (Was it?),

we figured if Burt Ward could do it, we should be able to.

The rope was thick, made of hemp, smelled like my garage: gasoline and damp and decay. We carried it, scratchy and unruly, the mile or so from my house.  We took turns lugging it as we hiked through the neighborhood, both of us imagining our adventure. We tromped over the tracks and into Kearsley Park and then summited the pavilion.

We looped the old rope around one of the columns, and since we didn’t remember any of the knots from Boy Scouts, secured it with the time-tested ‘Granny Knot’. We sailed the rope over the edge of the pavilion wall and heard it slap against the wall.  That was the extent of the safety check.

At the bottom of the rope was a concrete slab, a solid square where the giant set of steps rested. The slab was green with mold, littered with cigarette butts and beer bottles.  I leaned over the wall and looked down.  I had that sick/excited feeling you get when you are about to make a terrible decision.

I stood on the edge of the ledge, in the openings between the pillars, and held the rope, backing carefully onto the last inch, bending my knees and putting my feet against the side of the building.  Deep breath. Try to look cool.

You have seen people rappelling, graceful little arcs, almost dancing down the side of a cliff.  This was not that, Witnesses would not have included the word ‘graceful’ if they had to explain things to the authorities later.  I stood at the edge of the pavilion, rope in hand and pushed back and then fell like a sack of potatoes.

What surprised me, and honestly, surprises me still in this moment, was how fast I fell.  It seemed, at the time, that holding onto the rope would slow things down to some degree.  I think I erased some of my lifelines when I slid down it.  I will confess I don’t know the math behind a falling objects, but whatever it is, I maxed out the formula. 

When I hit the pavement, my knees came up and jammed into my chest, my head snapped down and banged into my knees. I hit the ground so hard all my memories were rearranged from chronological to alphabetical. Even today my earliest recollection is aardvark.

I bounced off the pavement and into the grass and let out a noise that was invented before language.  Tom ran down the steps to see if I survived, which would help him choose whether to jump off the building or not.  He helped me up and we decided to live to rappel another day.  I hobbled home, put the old rope back in the garage. 

I don’t know exactly when I realized it, but one day I noticed my toes didn’t work.  Maybe they never did, maybe it was something my parents never taught me or maybe the fall knocked that memory down into the T’s.

I don’t feel like my dumb toes have affected my life too much.  I’ll admit it sometimes annoys me when I have to bend my whole body over to pick up a pencil while my toes just look up at me helplessly. (Admit it, you weren’t expecting to hear about feet-relationships this morning. It will probably change your algorithms for the week.)

Hope this finds you leaping before you look,

David

This essay was written by the author and does not include Ai content.

Copyright © 2026 David Smith