High wires, not wireless hijinx: An essay on real summer adventure.

High wires, not wireless hijinx: An essay on real summer adventure.

By Erik Cushman

Hang out with parents of teenagers for any extended period of time and the conversation always moves to bemoaning kids and their electronics. In fact, unsanctioned studies actually show 98.8 percent of their conversations at graduation or at the barbecue center on screen time, text messaging and games on smartphones.

Often the talk includes some reference to how things used to be, when kids – the complainer, for example – would play baseball in the street, or ride their bikes to the beach and go surfing, or at minimum play cowboys and Indians in the woods, no cell signal needed.

Spend a little time in the woods around the Monterey Peninsula this summer, however, and it seems the happy days are here again. The report from the forested front line shows that just a hop skip and a jump from a quiet Peninsula neighborhood – which will remain unnamed to protect the innocent fun – the forest is alive with a veritable backwoods summer X-Games.

Within the span of a quarter mile in this patch of woods, a dog walker can encounter a couple of well-regulated militias engaged in an Airsoft shootout, downhill mountain bikers fully ensconced in helmets and protective gear hitting six foot high jumps, an old-school DIY disc golf course, and a most epic bootleg zipline that spans a 150-foot deep ravine.

Yes: a zipline. In the deepest part of the woods some enterprising soul – or posse of fun-lovers – had attached a quarter-inch galvanized braided steel cable to trees on opposite sides of a narrow but steep canyon.

Just off a game trail the cable was wrapped around a high branch of a live oak well overhead and secured to itself with a trio of U-shaped clamps. It runs about 400 feet to the trunk of a sturdy pine on the opposite side of the ravine.

The zip line drops about 40 feet in elevation from one side to the other traversing a canyon that may be home to a stream after a big winter rain, but mostly remains native habitat to bramble, berries and boundless poison oak.

The zipline represents an impressive bit of clandestine engineering. It also screams out at me to test it – and myself.

I look at the obvious work that went into installing the zip line with equal parts marvel and apprehension. I check the bolts and find them tight, I grab the dog leash and hang my full weight from the cable, bouncing up and down, and the cable holds.

I bushwack to the other wall of the canyon and repeat my very scientific safety measures and then I do what any other complainer at the barbecue would do: I go and get my kids to come ride the zipline.

Although there were three pulleys and a climbing rope clipped to the anchor tree on the high end of the zip line, there is no harness to slip into nor handle for us to hang from. With my 14 year-old daughter in tow – who does know her way around an iPad a little too well – I go and get the industrial strength trolley and zipline seat from a crazy daredevil neighbor. I also dig a good ski helmet out of storage.

Then I place the trolley on the cable, clip and lock the carabiner in place, check the bolts one more time, try to relax my breathing and puckering sphincter and then let gravity take hold.

It turns out summer fun is out there waiting for us, just as it always was.