Living Dangerously.

• Author: Englebert, Victor
• Position: Travel narrative

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Where are you going like that?" I asked eleven-year-old Jonathan. He leaned over two loops of rope tied to a pulley resting on a cable that stretched over a half-mile-wide abyss. Below, at vertiginous depths, the Rio Negro rolled its muddy waters.

We were in the Andes Mountains of Colombia. five miles down the road from Guayabetal, a small town of about 6,000 people. Bogotá, the country's modern capital. was only 50 miles away to the northwest. But here was a different world, where television was still new to some. Guayabetal had just got it itself ... two channels.

At 4.821 feet. we were at a relatively low altitude, but tall and nearly vertical mountains surrounded us on all sides. The sun was pleasantly hot. The air smelled of grass and flowers. And two humming-birds fluttered over a cluster of reddish bougainvillaea nearby.

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"I'm going to help my grandmother herd her calves back to her corral," Jonathan said. "I do that every afternoon." Oscar, 14, and Jefferson, 10, two good friends, would be crossing the abyss after him, and helping him turn a chore into a game.

The day before, a man who had zipped down to my side of the canyon with a dog squeezed between his legs had told me that about fifteen people had fallen to their deaths from the cable in the last twenty years. "They may have had a drink too much," he explained, "or perhaps they got so used to the experience that they lost all prudence."

Another man landed at my feet with a dog. He unhitched a heavy milk keg hanging inside a burlap bag from a second pulley. "Yes," he said, "the cable has caused accidents. But many more people die every year from bus plunges. When one of those speeding coffins misses a mountain turn, there is no pulley to keep it hanging from a cable."

"A mi me encanta!" I love it! Jonathan said as he sped away, covering the half mile in only 26 seconds.

Children as young as six used to ride the cable to school and back. They lived in El Pino, a vereda , or collection of small scattered farms on the other side of the abyss. And not every child enjoyed the ride. "I never lost my terror of it," a girl told me later. "And others were afraid, too."

Five years ago, the local government built a school in El Pino, and then it was the teacher's turn to ride the cable. Four years later, however, the last family with children moved away from El Pino, and today the little school stands empty and forlorn, visible across the...