Hostage to joy in the Norwegian woods

Once upon a time, I found myself staring over a ravine, inching closer and closer to the edge of an iron grate, the unwitting and unwilling participant in a spontaneous bungee jumping event.

I use the term "jump" loosely because I tiptoed toward the ledge with the harness around my waist and the cord tied to my ankle saying, "I really don't want to do this. Jesus, I don't want to do this."

The three days leading up to this predicament were like a masterclass in unmet expectations and a deep unwillingness to participate in things rooted entirely in the body insecurity that had haunted me since the 90s.

But this was the summer of going outside my comfort zone. Not quite by force, but not entirely by will, either. I had the opportunity to travel throughout Europe and call England home for a spell, and the combination of being so far from home and so far from the small-town minds I had grown to loathe gave me a sense of fearlessness I hadn't experienced before.

Traveling alone in a lot of places, I would end my days at a bar or pub, eating dinner alone and striking up conversations with strangers. And while this might seem like that was the out-of-my-comfort-zone I was talking about, it wasn't. I was comfortable chatting up strangers over a beer and a cigarette. I wasn't trying to pick up guys or land a date. I was making human connections, and in that world I was pretty comfortable, no matter what country I was in.

On one of my solo adventures, I found myself sitting on a plane on the tarmac in Spain with the worst stomach ache on the planet, next to a ridiculously tall Norwegian guy who would later become my reason for standing over that ravine wondering if I was going to die.

This beautiful Norwegian was named something I couldn't spell for lack of letters in that alphabet, and couldn't pronounce because I'm American and apparently I speak like I have potatoes in my mouth. His last name was Erikson and he didn't care if I could pronounce that either.

There he was. Tall, funny, cute, and impervious to the sounds my stomach was making. I was sweating profusely but shocked and genuinely delighted by the unwavering attention and line of questioning from this Norwegian sitting next to me. From taxiing to takeoff, landing, and baggage claim, he spoke and asked and asked as if I was the most interesting person on the planet and everything I said was terribly important.

I had never felt so seen by someone I actually wanted to see in return.

A week later, I was on a plane to Norway. It was all so cool and glamorous. Look at me just hopping flights to meet a tall, handsome Scandinavian. I had visions of nights in Oslo listening to music, sipping wine, dancing in some weird new wave bar where A-ha played on repeat. I brought cute outfits, curlers, and a dream.

When I landed, there were four young, strapping Norwegian men waiting outside in a tiny little car.

Not quite what I expected, but the abundance of nice, handsome young guys more than made up for the Yugo I was about to get smooshed into. Like Whatever Erikson from my flight, they were all so genuinely excited to see me and full of questions. They waved, they hugged, they asked a million more of them.

This was pre-cellphones, and I had promised my mother I would call as soon as I landed and let her know who I'd be with and how to reach me. But I was too embarrassed to slow down the smiles and the chatter to find a payphone. I was drunk on some kind of attention-from-cute-boys euphoria that I'm pretty sure was a form of hypoxia.

We drove from wherever I landed into the mountains, along the coastlines, through towns. It was dusk and I was in awe. I had never, and still have never, seen anything so unbelievably beautiful in my life. Eventually we drove through a town not unlike the one I live in now, with a bridge running over a river in the main part of it.

And as we talked and laughed and I flipped my hair and made goofy, hopefully-hot-but-probably-not faces, the car stopped rather suddenly in the middle of the road, in the middle of this bridge. Before I could ask if everything was okay, every single one of those tall Norwegian guys rushed out of the car to the railing and jumped off into the river.

In the span of three seconds we went from driving like normal people to a hard stop, my buddy cutting the engine, and all of them fleeing the scene as if the cops were coming.

I watched, frozen, still sitting in the middle of the backseat of that small car.

Um, what the hell just happened?

A few cars beeped. Most just drove around like this happens all the time. I crawled out and walked to the railing. I could see them one by one swimming toward the shore near a riverside restaurant, emerging from the water by the tables, enormous dripping swamp creatures, and they turned up and waved at me from the railing with smiles and laughs. Diners looked mildly horrified as the guys wove through the tables and started the rather long walk back to the tiny car.

I don't remember the explanation. I think there wasn't one. There was just more laughter, more smiles, more questions. I had been abducted by really happy aliens.

The journey continued toward my plane-ride friend's home. Darkness fell, and as we navigated an endless road into the deep, dark Norwegian woods, there was casual talk of moose and bear and stars. By that point, the darkness having set in and the aliens having done some kind of spontaneous bridge jumping, I was exhausted and fairly concerned for my own safety.

When we finally arrived, my buddy turned up a long dirt road that wound its way up what might have been considered a hill to them but was Mount Everest to anyone from New Jersey. There was nothing at the top but his house and, to my surprise, his mother, who was already waving her arms for us to come in before we'd even parked. These people had a real problem with a slow stop.

When I climbed out of the back of the tiny car, instead of an excited introduction, the mother rushed at me saying, "Hurry, hurry." Being ushered inside, I felt my concern tip into actual panic, absolutely certain I was about to be smoked for the winter, canned with the mackerel, and eaten on some snowshoe expedition to see the northern lights.

Instead, I was handed a telephone.

I held the receiver to my ear and said "Hello?" slowly, with a shaky voice.

I shit you not, on the other end: "Do you have any idea how worried I've been, Marisa?"

Wait. Oh my god. Mom? How the...

Seriously, I barely knew this kid's first name. We wrote things on napkins back then. I had given very little information besides a region and a last name, and she hadn't even been with me when I booked the flight.

And yet.

My god.

Of all the Eriksons in Norway.

Turns out she is some kind of Carmen Sandiego and Liam Neeson hybrid, hunting down a kidnapper, and she had found me and struck up a lovely conversation with my buddy's mother that was still ongoing when we pulled up.

And just so you know. She will find you, too.

Like the others, my buddy's family was lovely, open, chatty, and full of questions and stories. I learned, to my surprise, that one of their favorite places on earth was Memphis, Tennessee, where the Billy Graham church center thingy was.

That Billy Graham. Hmm. Okay. Not what I was expecting.

None of them drank. There would be no cocktails on a dancefloor, no clubs at 4 AM, no croissant on a fjord at sunrise. They were a form of evangelical Christian that did Jesus camp and listened to literal Billy Graham records in the house. The fun they had came not from the familiar kind that a tail-end Gen X kid who grew up near Manhattan had, which was underage bar-hopping and disco fries on Route 3. Instead, they played volleyball, swam seventeen times a day in any pool of water they passed, and jumped, I kid you not, off everything they could find.

No wonder the mother prayed the way she did. These boys were like the worst ADHD 7-year-olds you've ever seen, trapped in the bodies of Thor. A broken neck felt like it was around every corner.

For three days, I was a hostage smooshed between giants who prayed and leapt.

And they never stopped being kind, or laughing, or doing insane things, and I endlessly wavered between terrified and sort of delighted. The more time I spent with them, the more I could see just how much light they found in the world and how much joy they pulled out of every single moment in it.

I was desperate for a drink and a smoke. One evening we went back to that small city on the river, but it wasn't for the nightlife. It was for a Christian youth gathering on the riverbank.

I was so physically close to an open-air bar with music and dancing, lights and people laughing in a way that actually made sense to my New Jersey brain. I remained in the mud, being approached over and over by unbelievably happy youth who each hugged me tightly and held eye contact for way, way too long. I was asked repeatedly if I was okay. Told I was so quiet. Hugged and smiled at some more.

In the background, there were bodies moving through the shadows from tree branches into the water. Jumping and swimming. Swimming and jumping. Smiling and laughing.

I had never been around such foreign energy and I had no idea how to engage with it, and I was visibly uncomfortable. Everyone spoke English, everyone looked pretty much like me, I was in zero danger. I still felt like I had been dropped at the edge of the Amazon rainforest into the territory of a hostile tribe. Back then we didn't really talk about social anxiety. I didn't even know it was a thing, and I had never been around people who didn't make fun of each other for smiling and laughing so much without being high.

They asked me to join them swimming and jumping. I politely declined. Volleyball. I damn sure declined. Holding hands for a prayer and song. Declined. Through the whole long weekend, I watched people living with unbridled joy and connection to each other while I sat on the side and watched.

And on some level, that might be how I had lived most of my life up to that point. My comfort zone was safe. I knew how to blend in. I loved a beer and a smoke so I hung out in bars too crowded for dancing where we could only sway or nod our heads. I had quit swimming after a traumatic hour on the swim team and refused to put a bathing suit on in front of people because it was the Kate Moss 90s and guys had no problem pointing out the physical flaws of the girls around them, some Fred Durst bullshit I had zero interest in inviting. Laughing the way these guys did only seemed to happen when people took whip-its at the Horde Tour or Lollapalooza.

I wanted to be the way these people were. At 22, I was wasting my time being anything but, just to avoid being made fun of or feeling like a fool. And I could tell these guys kind of felt sorry for me the way I was sitting on the sides letting the voices of assholes from my past dictate my ability to feel anything in the present.

On the final day, after more spontaneous bouts of leaping and swimming and praying and hugging, I found myself standing on an iron suspension footbridge 145 feet above a rocky ravine.

We had been heading toward a museum at the top of a mountain, and the walk up required crossing this bridge over a ravine so deep you couldn't really see the bottom. Someone had set up a bungee jumping station right in the middle of it.

Of course. Because of course. We had to stop. They had to jump.

Again, the only female surrounded by gigantic men. The new guys running the jump, upon meeting my guys, got themselves incredibly excited. Laughter, high fives, cheers. My fear of heights was briefly overtaken by my fear of that level of enthusiasm and I stepped back from the group to give my nervous system a break. But as I watched them all get clipboards and start jotting down their information, I too was handed a clipboard and a pen.

"Nooooo. Nope. No thank you!" I protested immediately and vehemently. But I was protesting against a rock-solid bald man with tattoos everywhere who was running the whole thing and was as smiley as the rest of them, kind as the whole country full of people, and really freaking forceful. "You must."

I started to tremble. I started to well up with tears. I told my friend I couldn't. They all said I should. Do it! Come on! Why not, we're all doing it!

And like a bad after-school special, I found myself on a platform overlooking a canyon, a harness around my waist and a cord hooked to my ankle. Having avoided holding hands in a circle at least a dozen times, having avoided putting on a swimsuit or entering any body of water in eyesight, having avoided really "when in Rome" living, I couldn't avoid this one.

Maybe that was some sort of joy-avoidant karma happening in real time. If you're not going to live in the small ways, Marisa, you're going to be forced to live in the big ones. The ones that involve fearing actual death instead of actual life.

Before I could jump, they needed my weight. I didn't know my weight in metric, so I needed my friend to help convert.

And like a complete moron, I lied. By twenty pounds.

My fear of numbers on a scale, and what the world might think of them, came back with a vengeance and easily beat out my actual will to live. My travel companion dutifully converted my fake weight, relayed it to the heavily tattooed man, and that was it. I was being moved along into a harness and up to the platform, told to move forward a few steps, and left alone as some gate shut behind me. Just me and the ravine.

I was standing on an iron grate over the abyss.

In 8th grade we had to read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," a story about a Civil War deserter who was caught and led to the gallows. The man about to be hanged imagined, as the entire plot of the story, a whole escape and reunion with his wife in the moments before the executioner pushed him off the bridge.

Standing there on that iron grate, I remembered that story.

In my memory of the moment, there's a hawk cawing off in the distance, echoing across the ravine, but in reality it was probably the sound of me praying. My ears were ringing. I couldn't move. My buddies on the sides were yelling, "Jump! Go for it!" Each one of them had taken flying leaps without hesitation, and I could see why. Beyond being professional leapers off of things, they were surely protected by God. Me? That felt like a real gamble that day.

Slowly, I inched forward. At some point my feet were as far as they could go without walking on air. I remember saying something along the lines of "for fuck's sake" and leaning forward into the abyss.

It's really true what they say about time when your body thinks you're about to die. I was not my body, not a human, just a consciousness observing the scenery and wondering how long this fall was going to take. I wasn't exactly afraid I was going to die. I was just pretty sure this was a terrible idea.

When I finally reached the end of the rope, the cord caught and jerked me back up toward the sky. The sheer force of it sent my shirt flying up over my chest, leaving my stomach completely exposed to the audience above, and I panicked about how weird my stomach must look fighting against gravity.

So instead of focusing on the majesty of the canyon or the adrenaline pumping through my veins as I bounced wildly up and down, I spent the entire time desperately trying to tuck my shirt back in so I could look less weird when I made my reappearance on the bridge.

By the time they winched me back up, my shirt was safely tucked, my mind was blown, and a massive crowd had gathered to watch. They were cheering. The big, scary guy running the jump said, "Wow, wow, you are brave," which was a weird thing to say, but I'll never forget how the words sounded in his weird English.

Apparently I had stood on that ledge for over five solid minutes and no one had rushed me. No one told me to come back. No one made fun of me. They just let me do the thing I had no desire to do because it was so unbelievably scary. And then they hugged me, shook me by the shoulders, and told me how happy they were for me.

It was the most loved by a group of people I had ever felt in my entire life.

When I flew back to England, I called my mother and apologized for scaring her. I told her what I had done and she lost her mind, while my father laughed in the background yelling, "Way to go, kid!"