Sports in Hell (18 page)

At last we climbed up those two waterfalls and, like Tom Sawyer and Becky, spied our first glimpse of sunlight in what seemed like months. I half expected CNN to be waiting as we crawled out. But, as it turned out, the only injury we had all day was at the free soup and bagel afterward. A guy from Canada was so starved and freezing, he burned his hand trying to hurry up the toaster.

Bagel toasting? Perceived danger: low. Actual: high
.

Cave rafting as something to do for fun? Perceived: high. Actual? Lower than eel turds
.

We arrived in Queenstown, the Extreme Sports Capital of the World, to a macabre site.

Three stories below the balcony of the apartment we rented,
there was a funeral bouquet that marked the spot where, three nights before, a drunk young man had fallen off the roof, exactly above our apartment, trying to awaken a girl he'd met in a bar. Add to that the item in the paper about a parasailing instructor who wrecked into the lake the day before. An instructor! And the TV story about a rugby field at the end of a dirt runway at the Queenstown Airport. Several of the kicks had near misses with small planes. “Somebody's going to die soon,” a neighbor said.

Queenstown: A Thousand Ways to Die
.

In Queenstown, you can pay to bungee from a cliff, bungee from a bridge, bungee from a helicopter, ski from a helicopter, bungee from an airplane, parasail, parasail off a roof, bungee from a parasail, swing from one canyon wall to the other, snow luge, and land luge. You can hunt sharks, feed sharks, and swim with sharks. We rode on a 700-horsepower Jet-Ski boat (Jet Skis were invented here) down a narrow river, at times on no more than three inches of water, coming within a foot of rock canyon walls while spinning 540s. Queenstown mainlines thrills. We took a “flightseeing” trip in a little twin-engine that skimmed maybe 200 feet over 13,000-foot glaciers, then navigated a narrow fjord into Milford Sound on a runway no longer than a Hong Kong driveway.

All that was probably dumb. But none of them seemed dumber to us than Fly by Wire.

Fly by Wire involves strapping yourself into a rocket-plane contraption that looks like something Wile E. Coyote would've ordered from ACME. It's about ten feet long, bright red, with a big propeller at the back. You lie facedown on it, with your legs all the way back toward the propeller and your arms extended out in front of you so you look like Superman in a bad helmet. They belt you in and hook the plane up to a steel cable that hangs down from an even bigger cable, which bridges two sides of a 1,500-foot-wide canyon. That's it. It's like a gigantic swing set, except instead of a swing you're in your own mini-rocket. They tow you up, let you go, and for five minutes you fly around the canyon, steering this way
and that as your stomach threatens to fall out of your mouth, though you're still not as scared as the poor people on the observation platform below, whose haircuts you buzz at ninety-one miles per hour. Very bad place to work if you're Shaquille O'Neal.

“Theoretically, nothing can go wrong,” the bus driver said as he took us up a heart-in-throat road to the canyon. “You can't fly into the canyon wall and you can't fly into the floor.”

To which I added, “No, we can't do anything wrong. But you guys could? Right? Like not hook the cable up right?”

“I guess,” he said. “It's never happened.”

I wanted to say, “Wrong, Bus Boy,” because, one time, something did go very wrong.

Fly by Wire was born out of a dream. A Kiwi named Neil Harrap woke up, made a bunch of drawings, turned it over to some engineers, and had it built. Everything went fine until the day a Swedish woman got into it and was happily zipping all over the canyon when she suddenly hit the handrail of the observation platform, breaking her arm. Turns out the winch that towed her to the top had slipped two and a half meters, just enough to change “buzz over” into “buzz straight into.” In America, she'd own Neil Harrap forever. He would cut her lawn and make her spritzers the rest of her days. But in New Zealand, the government paid for her medical bills and sent her on her way.
And yet she lived!

Still, word got out about the wreck and tended to slow profits. Harrap took the idea to the U.S. instead, building three of them off I-35 in Fort Worth. He only had them open six weeks when nineteen inches of rain buried the whole site like Pompeii. Plan C: back to New Zealand, and Queenstown, where we found it.

Hoping he'd worked the bugs out, I climbed onto the liftoff platform. The guy running the whole thing, Darryn Tarkington, thirty-two, said that while I was in the air, he'd tell me what I was doing wrong via giant signs. Then he started holding them up to demonstrate:

I went second—right after a big, handsome, twenty-three-year-old kid from Melbourne. As he was getting out, elated, I was getting in, slightly panicked.

“You didn't sweat this thing all up, did you?” I kidded, starting to lie down, face-first, into the bizarre little plane.

“Nah,” he said, “but I did piss myself.”

Feeling weak in the knees, I was looking for a way out. I'd noticed small planes and choppers and even a biplane fly overhead. “I notice the planes coming by,” I said to Darryn. “Aren't we kind of close to the airport?”

“Yeah, but this is controlled airspace,” he said. “They need permission to fly over us.”

“But what if they forget to ask?” I thought. “Wouldn't I still be dead?”

By then, Darryn was pointing out the red emergency stop button “in case anything goes wrong,” and also the green button to request another minute at an extra $15. One minute for $15. You don't see prices like that this side of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch. For some reason, I kept thinking of that poor kid and the funeral bouquet, and I was laying 7-to-5 I'd hit the red button before I'd ever hit the green. I felt the winch start to tow me backwards up the hill, whether I was ready or not. “Say hello to the goat for me,” Darryn said as he waved good-bye.

The goat?

Sure enough, a hundred feet below me there was a goat, nibbling at the cable as it winched me up.
Wait. The goat is eating the cable? What if he bites through it? Jane! Stop this crazy thing!

Too late. I was at the top—about 250 feet above the platform—and it was time for me to gun the engine and start strafing and
soaring, except I felt nauseous, tilted ninety degrees upside down like that, watching the damn goat nibbling at my mortality.

Just screw it, I said, and I squeezed hard on the gas lever, which not only released the towing cable but goosed the plane so hard my hand slipped off it, which meant now I was just free-falling toward the platform, fishtailing as I went past everybody, in much the same style as a drunk America West pilot. I was sure I saw Darryn reaching for the
Crap
sign. I regripped and pulled hard and went flying up to the other side of the canyon, turned hard to the left, and felt my stomach do the rhumba in the zero gravity that was created at the top of the arc. Suddenly, I had only one thought:

Thank you, Neil Harrap.

Fly by Wire is not just dumb and dangerous. It's dumb and dangerous and wonderful. It's like driving a go-cart in midair. I buzzed TLC and then I buzzed the goat and then soared toward the top of the canyon on the other side. Now I had the hang of it. I'd get to the apex, then bank hard as if I were in a Sopwith Camel, feel this amazing zero-gravity rush, and then come swooping down the other side like a hawk after a rabbit. I swooped up and down that canyon, left and right. It was like being on that giant swing set, only Godzilla is your dad, and he's gotten ahold of A-Rod's roid stash, and he's pushing you so hard from one side to the other you think you're going to bump your head on a Quantas flight.

There was a hiking trail along the ridge of one side of the canyon and I noticed a guy stopped, looking at me. I supposed he was a little shocked to suddenly see a man, strapped to a rocket, gunning right at him. I think it caused him to squeeze his raisins pretty tight.

When the fifteen-second warning buzzer sounded, I hit that green button like a heroin-addicted lab rat. And I kept pushing it. I would've spent a month's salary on that damn button if I could've, but you only get one push. Still, it's not often in life you suddenly get an extra minute after you thought you were done.

“I'd like a button like that,” TLC observed afterward.

Funny girl.

After a while in Queenstown, you get so amped up doing all these adrenaline-rush sports that you start to lose a little perspective. For instance, there was this exchange in the apartment:

And then we found it. The Fort Knox of Dumb Sports, a place called The AgroDome, outside Rotorua, where they had more dumb sports than Liz Taylor has chins.

They had Shweeb. They had Swoop. They had Zorb. We had no idea yet what they were, but we knew we wanted them all. And it was odd to hear people's conversations near the ticket booth, as they contemplated which ticket packages to buy.

•   •   •

We Swooped first, which exists in America under a dozen different names. You get bundled into a harness and towed backwards and up about 150 feet and then you pull your own release button, which sends you free-falling to your death, except that at about fifty feet, the cable catches hold and swings you to the other side, like a pendulum, where you go through the whole spleen-flipping process again. I asked the guys running it what kinds of odd things people scream as they're free-falling.

“The weirdest we've heard is, ‘Holy Snapper Cow!'” said one of the guys. “Mostly, though, they just yell ‘Assholes!' at us.”

Sometimes, people get up to the top of the Swoop and can't get up the nerve to push the release button. They just flat-out can't make their hand do it. So they're just hanging up there, 150 feet above the ground.

So what do you do then?

“We go have lunch,” he said.

(Actually, they have to ratchet them back down.)

Swoop: definitely not dumb enough.

Then we Shweebed. Shweeb is German for “float.” And the slogan for the sport is “The Race Through Space.” Another good slogan: “Shweeb—the Dumbest Thing Since Nehru Jackets.”

A Shweeb is not the shortening of a “shitty dweeb.” No, a Shweeb is a kind of recumbent bicycle inside a clear-plastic bean pod hanging from a 225-foot-long circular monorail. You get in it and pedal your way around the monorail for three minutes as fast as humanly possible, because you're racing the clock and another idiot riding a kind of recumbent bicycle inside a clear-plastic pod hanging from another monorail. That's Shweeb.

“It's going to be public transportation someday,” beamed one of the shweebers running it. “They'll have these monorails all over the city and you'll just climb in and start pedaling anywhere you need to go.”

Really?
I said.
What if you're behind a really slow old lady assisted-living shweeber? How will you pass her?

“Well,” he said. “I don't know. But I know they'll be able to couple four and five shweeb capsules, like a train, for more power.”

Really?
I said.
But what if all five aren't going the same place?

“Hmmm,” he said. “I don't know. But someday they hope to get the speed up to seventy kmh. It'll be sweet-as [New Zealand for cool].”

Really? But how can that be, when the fastest speed Lance Armstrong can maintain for longer than twenty minutes is about 50 kmh?

“Lance who?”

Sigh.

We got in our pods, TLC in the left one and me in the right. It did look rather space-age, like something Captain Kirk might do in the exercise room on the U.S.S.
Enterprise
. There were seven gears to choose from and no brakes. You had handlebars, but it wasn't until later that I realized the handlebars were useless, since you don't have to steer when you're on a monorail. Where are you going to go, Auckland?

They reminded us we were being timed. They had the records of every nation posted. “Try to set your national record!” the kid told us. Yeah, right, coach.

With a bobsledlike push from the two shweebers, we pedaled our asses off for three minutes, our thighs burning by the time we finished. I did one minute and five seconds, and TLC did 1:10.

The one shweeber was tickled about TLC's time. Amazingly, she was only three seconds off the female American record. I was only five off the male. Wow! How cool is that? “Must be because we ride the recumbent exercise bike at home,” I boasted.

“Yeah, you've probably built up the same muscles that you use here,” the kid said.

In fact, I noted that TLC would've been the national record holder for Japan, China, South Africa, Germany, and Ireland. Holy Snapper Cow! Maybe this could be a whole new career for
her! TLC, pro shweeber! Endorsements!
The Queen of Shweeba!
That kind of thing. I was pumped.