I’m not a heights guy, that’s a part of it, but the larger part is that I’ve got a job to do here and experiencing ‘The World’s Long Zip-Line’ in full is just not in the cards. It is the zip-liner’s Pacific Crest Trail. That, in fact, is one of the many ways it attempts to sell itself, not by sheer length alone but also in the normalization of the extreme. No other zip-line course comes close to ‘The World’s Longest Zip-Line.’ No other outfit thinks a zip-line that stretches across the majority of the continental U.S. is a good idea. By aligning itself with the PCT, the operators attempt to pass this off as just one in a number of challenges the world has to offer. Extreme, yes. But strange? No.
But it is strange and arguably stupid and it’s expensive and time-consuming and testimonials suggest its boring in long stretches too.
So I won’t do it.
Instead, I visit ‘The Place Where the World’s Largest Zip-Line Intersects I-90.’ It is near the middle-point of the full course and where users start to flag. It also represents the largest stretch of the course without an anchor point or a ladder- the longest stretch without a break from hanging, so people crossing the I-90 here tend to look rough and some beg bystanders to do whatever it takes to get them down. Cut the line. Kill them.
Whichever.
These, I’m told, are symptoms of the line blues and I’m also told they pass so it’s largely discouraged to actually interfere with a zip-liner’s journey, here, no matter what they offer or how much they beg. Instead, volunteers have erected a pulley system where visitors can offer small gifts of snacks and water and changes of clothes for those who have soiled themselves while riding the line. I offer some trail-mix I made and watch a weeping woman carry it off into the sunset, gliding slowly along the line that continues for nearly a week south.
I don’t know that it feels like a good deed.
‘‘The World’s Largest Zip-Line’ operates 11 months of the year, closing in January for repairs and to allow for the glide of ‘The Skeleton Crew.’ ‘The Skeleton Crew’ is a community term for that small bundle of hanging corpses that requires shuffling off at the end of the season, their meat largely dehydrated in the sun. Theses rattling husks are pressed along by gravity alone, the line lifted, as a whole, from its origin point and temporarily extended into the Gulf of Florida, where the dead hydrate, burst, and sink into the sands they might have reached alive with a little more care.’
-traveler
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