Rocky said the knuckles were a typical feature found in this area called travertine, a buildup of soft minerals deposited in layers by the water and hardened over time. “I don’t think anyone has ever kayaked over them,” he said, “but I’ve heard of people jumping off the highest one.”

That was all the Gypsies needed to hear. They pulled their boats out and began clambering up to try it out. They took turns flinging themselves into the foaming wash more than fifty feet below.

“That looks too fun.” Rob turned to me. “The old guys can’t get left out.”

But when I scrambled out onto the launching point, I found slippery, wet, and exposed roots hung from space. I questioned the sanity of the leap. The landing zone wasn’t that forgiving either. In fact, Rob said I needed to leap out about eight feet to clear some protruding rocks and nail the window of water that spanned about twenty feet. I pointed my trekking pole exactly where I needed to hit, once, twice, and then a third time. I stood for a minute, listening to the crashing waterfall and the open expanse below me.

As I jumped, the thought that this might be a really stupid idea flashed through my mind. Then I was soaring through the air, for longer than I would have expected or intended, my stomach flip-flopping, my arms flailing in windmills, and then my body slapped hard into the roiling pool. As my head emerged, I heard whoops and hollering from the onlookers, but I immediately knew something was wrong. Like a bonehead, I’d left on my helmet, and upon entry, the visor had snapped my head back. My neck felt rubbery, with the tendons firing, like I had been whiplashed.

As I clung to a rock on the side of the pool trying to stretch my neck, Rob leaped. Eddi and the gang described his jump to me. Rob leaned too far backward in the air and hit the water at a bad angle, like he was reclining too far back in a chair. The impact lurched his upper body abruptly forward, and when he reemerged, he flailed and groaned, barely able to swim to shore. The boys immediately swam in and pulled him out, but as he lay on his back in the sun, Rob continued to grimace in pain. Immediately he knew he’d made a big mistake. His medications had weakened his bones, and he feared he’d ruptured a disc or caused a compression fracture in one of his vertebrae.