The high dive

The summer camp, like every summer camp that has ever existed in the Platonic ideal of childhood, had a high dive. The high dive was terrifying. A long slab of concrete, a ladder that seemed to climb like a bean stalk into the sky.

I knew, as most children know, that climbing to the top of the board was a rite of passage. And yet, not every rite of passage was or has been useful. And so I stood all summer on the hot concrete, in the small puddles of water, watching girls and boys ascend the ladder and then plummet to the earth.

As a very young child I'd been obsessed with dinosaurs, and I had a blue book, which spelled out the names across eons and posited fights between Triceratops and T-Rex. It was the eighties then, so it's likely that most of the information is now wrong that the dinosaurs they posited all had feathers or turned out to be vegetarians. However, it made an impact on me, pun intended. Because the last page of the book shows a pair of dinosaurs lying in the green grass and posits their extinction at the hands of a meteor.

Up above, a girl, years and years older, walks to the edge of the high dive. She pauses, hair and red swimsuit catching the light, and then she falls towards the water like a meteor, like a cannon ball, like an extinction event waiting to happen. She parted the waters and rose up like Christie Brinkley in the Vacation movie, and I watched her from the edge of the pool, toes resting in the water, waiting for things to change.