Bird Dream Read online

CHECK, PLEASE!

  Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.

  —T. S. Eliot, preface to Harry Crosby’s Transit of Venus

  Having achieved the status of a master, Jeb was a candidate to take on a student, and she would find him in the winter of 2002, down in Cape Town. Karina Hollekim was one of dozens of competitors from five nations at an event in South Africa called the World Championship Extreme Air, partly put on with help from Omer Mei-Dan, Jeb’s friend the orthopedic surgeon and BASE jumper from Israel. Each athlete at the multidiscipline competition had been selected for some specific skill that lent to the team’s overall strength. A professional big-mountain skier from Norway, Karina is a tall, striking blonde, the kind of woman who turns heads. Yet whenever the athletes from the various teams mingled, sharing meals and riding together in a bus to competitions at sites around the Eastern Cape, while everyone was looking at her Karina’s eye was drawn to a tall guy on the U.S. team with a head as bare as a baby’s. At mealtime, the guy talked like . . . well, unlike anyone she had ever known, holding the others spellbound with stories of adventure and BASE jumping around the world. Other times, though, like on the bus, he would withdraw, sitting alone, earphones plugged in, his head bopping, not necessarily in time to the music but to some other internal rhythm. He appeared to be tuned in to some separate personal frequency ricocheting around his skull. There was something, well, different about him, and it wasn’t just his black wardrobe. She asked the other athletes about this Jeb Corliss. “I had never heard of him before,” she remembers. “I spoke to the other Americans and the teammates on my Norwegian team. They also spoke very highly of Jeb, especially his skills as a BASE jumper. I also saw some of the videos he had taken himself and I realized he was a very skilled BASE jumper.”

  To Karina, Jeb was somehow apart from other jumpers. “I didn’t trust them completely, because it was all based on whether you had balls or not,” she says. “And they wanted to show off, in a way. I felt like Jeb wasn’t really showing off. He was doing it for himself. When he was on travels, trips, or expeditions, he could go on his own. It wasn’t about showing off for anybody.”

  Karina had been captivated by jumping ever since she saw video of two climbers launching from the twenty-thousand-foot Trango Towers, in northern Pakistan, some years earlier. She had nurtured a childhood fantasy of flying, shirking terrestrial bonds and an anvil’s weight of terror, strife, and insecurity that those who encountered her would never have guessed at. Soaring above all of life’s petty hassles and responsibilities seemed pretty appealing. To Karina, BASE jumping looked like one way to capture that elusive feeling.

  She had begun skydiving the previous summer, and she finally worked up the nerve to ask Jeb if he would teach her to jump. He said yes—if she ever came to the States. But he doubted whether she would follow through. Chicks were always asking him to teach them to jump. They didn’t mean it, it was just something to say. If circumstances hadn’t intervened, perhaps Karina never would have followed through either, but then she got sick in South Africa, winding up in a Cape Town hospital with a stomach tumor after competition ended. All the other athletes had returned home except Jeb, who had stayed on to fly his wingsuit from Table Mountain, and he visited with Karina every day, sitting and talking for long hours. “So we kind of got to know each other fairly well throughout those days in the hospital,” Karina says.

  Back in Norway, Karina finally had surgery for what turned out to be a benign tumor. Once fully recovered, she called Jeb in May to take him up on his offer of introducing her to jumping.

  He picked her up at LAX and drove her to his place, out back beyond the patio and pool of the big house in Malibu. There, Karina confessed that she had actually only made 23 skydives, not 223, as Jeb had been led to believe. Jeb took a look at her skydiving jump log and was like, What the . . . ? Annoyed, he fixed her with a look and said, “I don’t know if I’m able to take you BASE jumping. With twenty-three skydives, I’m not sending you on a suicide mission.”

  Then he had an idea. To evaluate her readiness, Jeb took Karina to Perris for a series of skydives. Her athletic background was an asset. He could see that much. In free fall, Karina demonstrated aerial awareness and tracking ability. She handled her canopy in flight and nailed the landings. Satisfied, Jeb booked them tickets to Twin Falls, Idaho, to begin training at the Perrine Bridge.

  That first night in Twin Falls, Karina came down with food poisoning and curled up on the bathroom floor of their hotel room. It was humiliating but Jeb was nice about it. While her strength returned, she learned to pack a parachute. Once well enough, she visited the bridge to observe other jumpers scaling the railing, eight hundred feet above a green river, the Snake River, the one Evel Knievel planned to launch over in his Skycycle X-2 before that stunt turned into a debacle. Passing motorists roared by, honking and shouting encouragement, issuing thumbs-up out open windows.

  After two days of rest, Karina was well enough to try. She wore a wetsuit, which left her feeling uncomfortable, not exactly ladylike. She carried a round parachute on her back. Landing in the river, she would be scooped out by a waiting rescue boat. Car horns blared, this time for her as she made her way along the bridge. Jeb followed with a video camera, firing questions to gauge Karina’s readiness. Probing for some sign of nerves, he was shocked to observe that Karina appeared the very picture of cool confidence. He did not know that, as she scaled the railing and stepped onto a lumber plank set up as a launch platform, clutching a pilot chute in her right hand, thoughts swirled like the river’s currents: Hold tight! This is unnatural! You shouldn’t do this! You don’t want to fall from this bridge!

  Jeb coached her from the other side of the railing, barking commands. The particulars would be difficult to recall. But she remembered the basics. Three, two, one . . . See ya! Pushing off with both feet, Karina delayed two seconds before pitching, her round chute opening with a whoosh. Pulled into the rescue boat, dripping wet, she wondered if that was it. Is this BASE jumping? It had been a blur. Was she changed somehow?

  For four days, Karina would launch from the bridge, her awareness and impressions expanding and intensifying each time. By accretion, internal voids of which she had been only dimly aware began to be occupied, and she understood at last what was meant by fulfillment. Her training at the Perrine ended suddenly when, on a two-way jump with Jeb, he broke an ankle while landing downwind along the riverbank.

  On crutches, Jeb continued to coach, taking Karina to a dam in the Sierra Nevada. Because he could not get around easily, it was up to her to walk the landing area alone beforehand and get acquainted with the terrain. She couldn’t do it. She was frightened—not of the jump, but of the dark. Reaching the landing zone would require walking through a wood at night. This brave girl was petrified of the dark.

  So they drove to Auburn, where Jeb delivered instructions from a walkie-talkie as Karina made her way alone onto the Foresthill Bridge in the dark and dropped into the canyon.

  “He had something about him that made me feel very confident about his skills, and he was also very honest and very direct, maybe to the point of morbid in the way he spoke about BASE jumping,” Karina would remember. “From the point I came to the U.S. and started learning, he was very direct about the fact that I would get injured and could get hurt through BASE jumping. I would see other people die, most likely some of my very good friends. And potentially, very likely, I would die doing it myself if I kept on doing it. He was always talking about death and people dying and accidents and stuff that I never really talked about. The way he put it out there, it forced me into making a decision about whether this was something I wanted to do or not. If I wanted to do it, I had to do it 100 percent.”

  At times, a fed-up Karina would say, “You’re always so negative about it. You’re always putting an emphasis on worst-case, and it’s not always like that.”

  “I’m not negative,” Jeb would reply, voice risin
g an octave. “You’re walking through a minefield, and I’m going to tell you there’s a minefield out there. If you need to get to the other side of the minefield for whatever reason, you need to get to the other side, fine, I’ll help you. But even with all my help and doing everything right, you can step on a mine, [and] there’s nothing I can do for you if that happens.”

  • • •

  THAT SUMMER, CIRCUMSTANCE WOULD offer an object lesson for what Jeb was trying to convey. His ankle healed, he returned to Lysebotn and jumped Norway’s big walls at Kjerag with Karina. When they parted the first week of August, Jeb headed to Switzerland and the Lauterbrunnen Valley.

  The valley had fast gained a reputation in the jumping community for the big walls and permissive attitude of the locals, who decades earlier had grown accustomed to extreme sportsmen—climbers, skiers, and paragliders—lured to their town. An added appeal for jumpers came in the convenience of cable cars and trams rising from the valley floor to Mürren, Wengen, and Winteregg, all of which offered jumpers short hikes to the exits. That summer, Karin Sako was there with some of the crew from Portland—Weston and Dr. Death, Nik Hartshorne.

  For a week, Jeb and Weston “had a friendly one-upsmanship going,” Sako says. But Weston always seemed willing to go further. When Jeb balked at jumping in the rain one day and began walking back to the cable car, Weston raised him on the walkie-talkie. He told him everything would be fine and called him out for a lack of courage.

  “Dude,” Jeb barked into the radio, “you’re better than me. I know that. Go ahead, call me a pussy.”

  Weston argued that eventually Jeb would have to jump in marginal conditions, so he might as well learn.

  But Jeb spotted the flaw in such reasoning. Continuing back to the cable car for a return trip to Lauterbrunnen, he understood that you never had to jump in marginal conditions. You never had to jump, period.

  Days later, though, Jeb would be called to account for his own reckless conduct. Flying his wingsuit, he had pulled low over the pasture, practically going in before his parachute popped open. Dr. Nik brought the episode up one night over dinner with Sako and Weston and some other jumpers. “Jeb, we like what you do,” he said. “But you’ve got to be more careful, because we’d like to keep you around a little longer.”

  “I get it,” Jeb said. “I know.”

  Dr. Nik had been thinking a lot about the future. He’d been saving up to marry his girlfriend and was debating whether to buy a new Jaguar or pay off his student loans first.

  “Bro,” Jeb said, “why wait? Pay the student loans later. You never know how long you’re going to live.” He had a good point, everyone agreed.

  “I have to be responsible,” Dr. Nik explained.

  “Buy the Jaguar!” Jeb insisted. Everyone agreed that buying the Jaguar would not be a wrong decision, exactly.

  As dinner broke up, Dr. Nik had not yet made up his mind. Everyone agreed to get up early the next morning and jump the High Nose, a promontory just beyond Staubbach Falls. It is almost two thousand feet above the valley, but a nasty ledge looms about a seven-second rock drop, or 640 feet, below the exit.

  The next morning, August 6, Jeb overslept. Making his way down to the street, he figured he would wait for the second load so he could join the others on the cable car. Through a light rain he spotted Sako and Weston approaching up the street. “So are we going to go do a jump?” he called out.

  They didn’t reply until they were nearer, their faces uncharacteristically somber. “Naw,” Weston said finally, “Nik died.”

  His canopy had opened 180 degrees off-heading, sending Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne sailing straight for the cliff. He had managed to land on a ledge, but, forward motion arrested, his parachute deflated and he fell backwards, striking the cliff several times as he tumbled to the valley floor. He was thirty-eight.

  • • •

  Two months later, reunited at Bridge Day in October, Jeb and Karina stood in the shade along smooth river stones nine hundred feet beneath the graceful steel arch when a cable TV reporter approached and made a proposition. She was compiling a program on illegal sports that would include street fighting, drag racing, and, if they were willing, BASE jumping from a building. Her producer would pay, she said, if Jeb and Karina would jump for their cameras. Jeb said he knew just the place.

  A few weeks later, he and Karina were in Manhattan, waiting out the weather, passing time in Central Park and sitting through movies and Broadway shows, basically behaving like a couple, although they weren’t despite Jeb’s growing feelings for her.

  One night, once the skies finally cleared and the wind died down, sometime after midnight, Jeb crouched on a thin ledge fifty vertiginous stories above Madison Avenue. He had disabled the locking mechanism on the window of his room at the New York Palace Hotel with needle-nose pliers, just as he had done years earlier with Iiro. Opening the window as wide as possible allowed him to maneuver his long body through the narrow opening, and invited the city’s familiar music inside—car horns, the percussion of speeding tires on potholes, whinnying brakes, and a distant rumble from a truck’s diesel engine.

  Earlier in the evening, staff in the opulent lobby had stared as a crew hauled video equipment to the elevators, to the room where the bald guy and the blonde were staying. They were unaware of what was about to occur from the upper floors. Like . . . were they making a porno in there or what? Accomplices waited in the streets, and Gigi fretted in her room, several floors below. A conspiracy requiring weeks of planning and the right weather conditions had entered its final phase.

  Jeb was dressed all in black, from his helmet to a rig on his back containing a single parachute. From the ledge, it was a six-second plunge to a fatal impact some 170 yards directly below. And although he had jumped from the hotel once before, that act had stretched his skills and composure to their limits. “Remember, you don’t have to do it,” he called to Karina, seated on the bed.

  “I know,” she said.

  The small window of the hotel required backing out first. Clinging to the frame by fingertips, Jeb performed contortions that only years of yoga practice could have prepared him for. As he faced forward at last, size 12 boots balanced on a thin sill, the building’s slippery skin descended hundreds of feet toward the suggestion of a rooftop. “Fuck,” he said, sighing. “Fucking sketchy exit point, dude.” After a deep breath, he added, “All right.”

  Clearing his mind the way he had trained, he banished any thoughts of tremors bobbing his legs like sewing machine needles, the dryness in his mouth, perspiration on his hands, his heart’s hard-thumping rhythm, and an acid panic rising like an elevator in his throat. In a city of millions, friends and family nearby, he stood alone on the ledge, utterly focused.

  “Five seconds,” he said, which Karina repeated into a handheld radio to the rest of the team.

  Exhaling, Jeb called, “See you, guys,” and jumped, commencing a precise choreography: One . . . Flinging his body backward, he executed a flawless gainer, fear draining as his mind tightened to the task at hand. Two . . . Air rushed ever louder through his helmet as he plunged into the night. Reaching behind his right hip for his pilot chute, he grabbed it and flung it into the air. Three . . . Caught by the air, the small chute inflated, tugging on a bridle connected to his parachute container, held fast by a single pin. Tension on the bridle pulled hard on the container, releasing the pin. As he fell faster, objects below gained size and detail in the first stage of a powerful sensation known as ground rush. Four . . . The main canopy, folded and packed tight in the container, spilled out, catching the air and inflating with a resounding crack that startled Gigi in her room.

  She and Fitzmorris had just happened to be in New York that week on business, and Gigi had maintained a late-night vigil, white-knuckle-gripping a two-way radio, eyes gazing at the silhouette of St. Patrick’s. She had switched the radio chatter off earlier to provide quiet as Fitzmorris slept nearby, in preparation for a meeting in the morning. So
she was startled by the sudden appearance of a black parachute bursting open before her eyes, causing her window to shudder as if buffeted by a strong wind. Legs buckling, Gigi dropped to her knees, overcome by a feeling she would describe as “breathtaking, like an out-of-body experience . . .”

  Outside, under an open parachute, Jeb descended slower, hovering feet-first thirty stories above an orderly grid of floodlit streets. Reaching above his head for toggles, he tugged hard left, sweeping ninety degrees in that direction. Lined up over Madison Avenue, desolate in the early hours except for a few cars and trucks inching along like insects, he traveled three city blocks. The lonely pavement rose to meet him until finally his boots skidded to a landing in a bus lane beside orange construction barricades, parachute deflating nearby like a sigh. Without the sound of air whooshing in his ears, the city’s sound track returned at heightened volume—a rhythm of clunking metal from a delivery truck, whinnying brakes, and horn echoes.

  He quickly gathered his parachute as a cluster of cars approached up Madison. A yellow cab edged toward him, stopping with a weary shriek. “Are you okay?” the cabbie called in a foreign accent through an open window.

  “How’s it going, man?” Jeb inquired, as if greeting an old friend.

  “Where you came from?”

  “The sky,” he said, with a trilling laugh, hustling away hugging his parachute down a darkened East Forty-eighth Street, where he hailed a different cab and disappeared into the night.

  On the walkie-talkie, Karina made it clear she had no intention of following Jeb out the window. The footage from the Palace Hotel jump would never air anyway; nervous corporate lawyers pulled the plug. And in a few months, Jeb and Karina would part after he confessed his growing affection and she expressed her wish that they merely remain friends. This brought to an end twelve intense months during which Jeb mentored Karina and made more than four hundred BASE jumps in sixteen countries. Having arrived at the top of his sport, Jeb was at loose ends, and exhausted.