“If you gaze into the abyss…”
… the abyss suddenly looks like a really, really fun place to freefall into.
“You go first and tell me what it’s like…”
I’d ask if I’m the only person who gets the urge to jump from vertigo inducing heights or run towards a tornado, but I know I’m not. That’s just a rhetorical question I sometimes employ to hear , “No, Ashley. You’re not going through this strange lengthy event we call living and feeling weird about it alone.” But, I suppose, my question isn’t just “why” we feel this way. From what I’ve read and heard smarter people say, this kinda stuff makes us feel more alive because of the duality of it. Much like we enjoy summer better after a long winter or relief after a barrage of kidney stones, we enjoy life more after we’ve perched ourselves right on the precipice of death – and felt just how easily it can be taken away. For most of us, it’s not that we wanna die. Contrarily, it’s often to remember that we’re alive. But there’s also the genuine intrigue, too. Like:
“What would happen if this bridge broke?”
“How would I feel going through a black hole?”
or, as Bjork aptly asks in that one song:
“…and when I land – will my eyes be closed or open?”
Which is why today, we’re going to learn what’s inside an infernal mountain that vomits lava.
Because this dude Sam Cossman, who clearly does a nightly application of testicle fertilizer, did actually travel down into the flaming abyss of a volcano. Just like the death-wish Simba up above. Unlike what would happen if you threw a baby animal off a cliff, though, he emerged from Marum Crater alive to magnanimously share his magma experience with the rest of us.
Mostly because he wasn’t thrown in by a monkey.
And he was wearing a heat suit. With a poison filtering gas mask.
But none of those precautions made it any less awesome:
First: Is this real life? Or a scene from “Sunshine”?
Second: You know that whole suit was full of charred fecal matter by the end.
Moving on – but my Sunshine speculation isn’t too far off.
In a DNews interview he described it thusly:
“It’s really just unlike anything else… completely alien landscape. It’s kind of like what I would imagine being on the surface of Mars is or maybe even seeing the surface of the sun at close range.”
Then he went on to describe the two-football-field-long lava lakes that leap with flames, the campfire-strong heat you can feel even at 1,200 feet above, the fire coming from every direction, and (my fave) the “lava bombs”:
“We were standing there on a couple occasions, and the lava burps and it goes into the air, it cools as it’s coming down, hits you on your helmet, burns your clothes… these lava bombs are about the size of your fist…” Keeping in mind that they recorded the projectile fire after it’d been cooled by an upward trajectory and returned to earth, the temperature of these things was still roughly 600 degrees.
He dded that grabbing them, “with leather gloves – it smells like a steak burning.”
(Anyone have a sudden hankering to watch Sunshine again?)
Not only did he share his experience, but since he’s an adventurer entrepreneur, he also wants to bring experiences like these to people who enjoy a bit of abyss gazing in their downtime, too. At least, that’s what he plans to accomplish with his company Xola that sends people like me on adrenaline junkie journeys of this nature. That’s right. Soon we can all book a molten holiday in the inner circle of Hell to delightedly shit our pants in front of skyscraper high kajillion degree fountains that span twice the length of the field you just watched your football team lose in yesterday.
And make our “normal” friends stay up at night, wondering why they feel so jealous.