Braver Than I Thought...

Remember this girl?



And the post I did about her?

As I said earlier, I was inspired by this awesome kid to develop a story about a similarly brave girl. I've been doing research and looking into background and inventing many multi-syllabic and well-nigh-unto-unpronounceable names and words (Bruce Memblatt may never read another story of mine again after this one!), and today I found more pictures of little Daisy Mora at the website of Christoph Otto, the German photographer who took the pictures we saw before. Go to his site, click on "Photostories" and then click on "Columbian Cable Runners" to find more pix of Daisy.

Why? Well, for one thing, she's cute:


Daisy and her little brother.


And her life is exciting:


"You call that goin' t' school? Why, missy, at your age we used ziplines to get to school and they was all goin' UPHILL!!! In ten feet of SNOW!!!"

But what really got me was this:


That's a close-up of the equipment Daisy uses to get to school.

It's just a couple of pulleys, and some ropes looped together to form a sort of breeches harness that takes her and her brother out over a gorge that is a full quarter-mile above the raging river below.

(For some perspective, that's how tall the World Trade Center towers were.)

Jeemany freakin' Christmas! If you picked a hundred tough American men and set them next to this crazy-ass contraption and told them they were going to get in it and get flung out over that gorge, I'm sure three-fourths of these tough guys would crap their freakin' britches.

And the remaining guys would suddenly remember that they had to go get their taxes done or something.

I will bet you a dollar to a donut that Daisy doesn't consider this brave at all. Recall what I said before about the article commenters who think this is dangerous:

Do these pampered first-worlders understand how people who live in places like this risk their lives all of the time just to live?

I bet that, to Daisy Mora, going to school via zipline (the Aussies charmingly call ziplines "flying foxes") is just a part of how she and her family live. School is across the gorge; they have to go to school; ipso facto, the kids are going to take the only way to get to school that they can.

I've created what I hope will be a wonderful story to honor this kid, and I've added all sorts of stuff to make it more interesting than plain facts often seem on the surface. But, dang! Look at that thing! You couldn't get me into it, and this kid uses it every day!

Daisy Mora is my new hero. And sometimes, just going to school is all it takes to be one.

^..^

(All pictures by Christoph Otto.)