National Sports Journalism Center

What kind of man wears on his forearm a tattoo of a hollow-eyed skull in a cowboy hat? This kind: a bear of a man, a beer keg for a chest, 280 if he’s an ounce, with a beard blacker than 100,000 miles of motor oil and eyes that suggest he knows where trouble lives.

His name was Ray. Came up to Alaska from Montana 20 years ago. Stayed and drove logging trucks most of that time. He was our bus driver on the mountainside logging road that led to Pretty Certain Death If Even One Thing Goes Wrong.

As we bumped along on the steep switchbacks, we passed a homemade tombstone. I marked it as someone’s memorial to a friend who crashed in that hairpin turn. It was seven feet tall, rising from a foundation four feet square, topped by small stones arranged in the shape of a cross.

I pause to confess that this is a column about nothing. On a national sports journalism website, I am about to write a column that has nothing to do with sports and nothing to do with journalism. Well, almost nothing – there is a wicked little twist here. I think a columnist who has thrown fast balls for a month ought to drop in a change-up that surprises readers. There’s value in the unexpected. Leave LeBron be. Forget Favre. Every now and then, a guy ought to write about losing his ever-lovin’ mind.

The adventure began when my brother-in-law, Jim, said, “Dave, that zipline! Let’s do it!”

Jim is the senior executive accountant for a construction firm in Illinois. Accountants are not famous for their wild and crazy behavior. But Jim is a roller-coaster aficionado. With my sister and my wife, we were on a cruise that had taken us to the Alaska port of Icy Strait Point. Jim was reading the next day’s tour schedule when he noticed the advertisement for the world’s longest zipline.

There seems to be no reason why Icy Strait Point should have a zipline 5,330 feet long with a 1,300-foot altitude drop that sends victims/passengers at speeds up to 60 miles per hour at 300 feet above the treetops.

But the world’s longest zipline has to be somewhere, so why not right there, in the clouds above our ship. From the pier I saw the cables stretched across the sky. They looked like threads. We watched people come down. There was screaming, both from the rollers on the zipline and from the victims/passengers harnessed in chair seats.

So we paid the $99, signed the obligatory papers saying that if we died doing this, it was our own damn fault, and there we were among two dozen riders in Ray’s bus grinding up the gravel logging road.

“Ray,” I said, “what’s that tombstone?”

Ray didn’t turn his head. “What tombstone?” he said.

“It must be 7 feet tall, we just passed it.”

He claimed to have not seen it. Sure. Chances are, he built it. But I have a rule of life that says never argue with a skull-tattooed bear of a man who could drive your bus over a cliff. Which was about what he did, only he stopped in a swirl of dust at a wide spot in the road and said, “We’re halfway up. Take a look.”

From halfway up the mountain we looked. This was like looking off the edge of the world. Way down there, in the Icy Strait bay, we saw our 13-deck, 2,500-passenger, 962-foot cruise ship. It looked like a toy in a bath tub. It was here that Jim, the roller-coaster hero, said, “Ohhhh, shit.”

Soon, we passed a bus coming down the mountain.

“Two chickens in that one,” Ray said. Meaning he’d seen two men who’d ridden to the top and decided to return to their loved ones via a 40-minute bus ride rather than be delivered by zipline in 90 seconds. “Everybody in here still OK?” Ray said.

OK, you bet, yes, sir, OK — except for the part about wondering what happens if the world’s longest zipride cable snaps and slings accountants and sportswriters halfway to Russia.

When Ray dropped us off at the summit, he said, “There’s Porta-Potties by the release site. Y’know, if anybody needs ‘em.” The man’s a laugh factory.

But we hadn’t come all the way to Alaska to slink into a Porta-Pottie and ride the chicken bus home. So they strapped me into a canvas chair. “Put your feet up here,” a young man said, telling me to put my feet against a door that blocked my view of just how oh-shit high we were.

“Three, two, one,” someone said, “and go!”

The door popped open and I fell into space.

I immediately quit breathing. But after a few seconds, an odd thing happened. I loved it. Floating up there. The world below. The ship getting bigger. The wind ripping against my face, the zipline screaming, me loving the reassurance of the scream. And just when I decided it would be neat to ride the thing another couple miles, it slammed into the plastic brakes. I was back on Earth again.

Naturally, Jim and I bought T-shirts and caps advertising that we had done this damn fool thing of paying $99 to throw ourselves off a mountain.

I wore my shirt for three days, in case anybody on the ship hadn’t seen it.

Dave Kindred’s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295