Bird Dream Page 3

  “Yes, we are,” Joby said in his down-home Southern accent.

  “That’s all I want to hear. I don’t care if it’s a lie. I don’t care if nothing happens. I just need a little hope to get me through. It gives you so much more drive to do stuff. Worst-case scenario, I’m going to live and jump off shit.” Douggs laughed, eyes glowing, and added: “But I’d like to do cool shit.”

  Several members of the Red Bull Air Force, a cadre of parachute sport athletes sponsored by the energy drink company, had been haunting the Horner and the high cliffs around Lauterbrunnen all week. The Red Bull Air Force, in the minds of many jumpers, had coveted status, having mastered the art of getting paid for their stunts. They carried themselves with an easy grace.

  Yet Jeb was the biggest name in the life, having fashioned a career with his black wardrobe, black talk, and appearances on television delivering homilies about mortality and living one’s dreams. Still, his shtick tended to get under the skin of some of his peers.

  “People only get to see his spiel during a documentary,” Douggs said in Jeb’s defense, “which is what he has to do to earn a living. It’s done in a way that BASE jumpers will say, ‘The shit he’s saying, he brings down the sport.’” Douggs had a ready reply to such a charge: “The sport’s down already. He imparts truth in a way non-jumpers will sometimes get shocked by, sometimes appreciate, sometimes get emotional by. He works harder than anyone, by the way. I tried it for a while. You’ve got to work your balls off to get one out of twenty projects. Most people can’t sustain that. And he’s in a position where he can now, whereas the rest of us have to go back to work.”

  Douggs and Joby agreed that Jeb’s avoidance of booze and drugs had contributed to his success. “I wouldn’t like to give him anything, either,” Douggs added, muttering darkly and shaking his head. “Jeb on pills? Jesus!”

  All week in Lauterbrunnen, Jeb had elicited mixed reactions. “Some people don’t like him,” a kiwi wingsuit pilot at the High Nose admitted with a shrug at the mere mention of Jeb Corliss’s name. “I reckon he’s good for the sport.”

  While out walking the valley one afternoon, Jeb happened to meet a Dutch jumper who had moments earlier plunged from the High Nose and was stuffing his parachute into a stash bag at the edge of a farmer’s field. The guy introduced himself as Jens.

  “Hi, good to meet you,” Jeb said as they shook hands.

  “You don’t say your name?” Jens replied, an edge to his voice. “Everyone knows you?”

  Taken aback, Jeb stammered a half apology, although Jens obviously knew exactly who he was.

  “They’re all jealous of Jeb because he’s loud and American and one of the best,” Mark Nolan would say of critics. “I don’t think many could do what he does.”

  And yet the advent of online video had made the prospect of instant fame and glory, in the manner of Jeb Corliss, suddenly seem tangible for a fresh generation of pilots. “Someone like Jeb has slowly worked his way over fifteen years to get where he is now,” Douggs said on the crowded porch at the Horner. “These new punks are coming in and trying to do it in six months. And they haven’t carried their friends’ dead bodies. They haven’t dealt with the injuries, and they see YouTube and say, ‘I want—’”

  “‘To go through the Crack,’” Joby said, completing the thought. “‘I’m going to put my cameras on and go through the Crack like Jeb Corliss.’ Bad idea. You might make it. Probably not. That’s a super-advanced deal. He’s doing multiple jumps to hone it down.”

  As the night wore on, conversation would veer in many directions, from the serious to the strange to the profane, banter steady as the rain. A man would threaten to expose himself. “Let me fluff it up for a second,” he was heard to say. “I don’t want to be embarrassed.” A burst of laughter followed from the crowd. Cosseted under the awning in the close heat of human contact, cigarette smoke, and the occasional cloud of cannabis—the clink of empty bottles marking the passing hours—the crowd on the porch would grow more congested, the night gauzier. Outside, the pavement was slick with streetlight and gathering rain poured in torrents from the big walls, roaring like applause for the flying men and women of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, safe at least for another night.

  Chapter 1

  BEGINNINGS . . .

  We are not the sole authors of our destiny, each of us; our destinies are entangled—messily, unpredictably.

  —Firmin DeBrabander, philosopher

  PERRIS, CALIFORNIA, LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  For centuries, people have jumped off objects with primitive parachutes. During the Age of Discovery, in fifteenth-century Italy, Leonardo da Vinci sketched a pyramid-shaped device to save those who during fires were trapped in the upper reaches of stone towers, hundreds of feet above medieval settlements. Meant to be constructed of linen and wood, the parachute was among dozens of concepts that never made it further than the prolific polymath genius’s drafting table.

  The French would eventually give the parachute its name, which means “to prevent falling.” But early constructions were crude, without manuals, tutorials, or design specs. And testing was dicey. In 1783, a physicist successfully plunged from the top of an observatory in Montpellier, France, with a design similar to Leonardo’s concept. But attempts just as often went wrong. In 1837, a watercolor artist tested a two-hundred-pound creation, built in the shape of an inverted cone, from a balloon over an expectant crowd in south London. When the chute broke apart in the sky, the parachutist plunged to his death in a field.

  By the twentieth century, structural steel construction had made the first skyscrapers possible, and a dozen vertiginous buildings had altered Manhattan’s profile. It was the job of Frederick R. Law, a steeplejack, to maintain the city’s rising monuments to commerce, painting flagpoles on the likes of the Singer and Pulitzer buildings. During a period when work was slack, Law acquired the necessary permits and a camera crew and, on a February day in 1912, parachuted from the torch atop the Statue of Liberty, more than 300 feet above New York Harbor. His parachute was primitive by modern standards and lacked any steering mechanism, so Law swam desperately through the air to avoid a dip in the frigid harbor. Limping away following a hard landing on coping along the island’s perimeter, he declined a request for an interview by the New York Times. But four days later, Law stepped from a taxi on the Brooklyn Bridge and parachuted 133 feet into an East River choked with ice as movie cameras captured the scene. A waiting tug rescued him. Two months would pass before his next act, a leap from the thirty-first floor of the Bankers Trust Building, at the intersection of Broad and Wall Streets. With stockbrokers and newsboys gaping, Law settled on the roof of the Sub-Treasury Building. According to the Times, he called over the edge to a stunned crowd on Nassau Street that he was unhurt and “feeling fine.”

  For the next fifty years, an occasional daring soul would make a fixed-object jump—a building here, a cliff or tower there, and the occasional bridge—but the resulting headlines and notoriety resulting from these stunts was fleeting. A new era had opened following the breakthrough in powered aircraft flight by Wilbur and Orville Wright in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. Two world wars would transform aviation, and beget recreational skydiving. By the 1960s a growing population of experienced and skilled parachutists would include some with a thirst for stronger thrills than exiting airplanes. Appraising the proportions of large fixed objects, they allowed their imagination to roam unchecked.

  That is more or less what led two men to pose for a snapshot at a trailhead beneath towering ponderosa pines on a sunny July day in 1966. That day, an accountant named Mike Pelkey and a truck driver named Brian Schubert, both from Barstow, California, would launch from El Capitan, a hunk of cracked gray granite like an elephant’s hide, rising three thousand sheer feet above California’s Yosemite Valley. They wore bulky military-issue parachutes, and on the way down both men were battered mercilessly against the cliff by winds, ending up with multiple fractures. W
hen their ordeal made national news, Schubert told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, “I would suggest no one else do it.”

  It says something about a strain of skydivers that his warning served as a challenge instead. By 1971 a stuntman named Rick Sylvester would ski off the top of El Cap with a parachute (a move he repeated five years later on Canada’s Baffin Island as a double for Roger Moore in the opening sequence of the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me). Then, in July 1975, a skydiver from Queens named Owen Quinn sneaked to the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center while posing as an antenna repairman and plunged 1,368 feet into Manhattan, the sight of lesser buildings rushing up at him, like “jumping into a glass full of pencils.” Months later, as workmen constructed the CN Tower 1,510 feet over Toronto, a member of the crew, Bill Eustace, parachuted off and was promptly fired.

  Taking note of these pioneering jumps was a skydiving cinematographer in California named Carl Boenish, who had filmed scenes in The Gypsy Moths, a 1969 Hollywood production about a wingsuit starring Burt Lancaster, Gene Hackman, and Deborah Kerr. An original thinker who called his skydiving documentaries “film poems,” Boenish avoided alcohol, drank buttermilk, and believed in the restorative power of avocados. Passionate and something of a proselytizer, he was, friends suggest, ideally suited to dream up a new sport.

  On August 8, 1978, Boenish coaxed four skydivers from a skydiving center in Lake Elsinore to travel some 275 miles north to the top of El Cap so he could film them. They used the latest parachute technology and tracking skills in an attempt to build on those earlier jumps.

  The resulting footage created a sensation. “We couldn’t believe we never thought of that before,” Nick DiGiovanni, a former Marine and surfer who was working as a jump instructor when he watched the film’s premiere at the Lake Elsinore drop zone, recalls about his reaction to the jump. “Instead of going, ‘That’s nuts, we’ll never do that,’ everyone was going, ‘Man, I got to do that.’

  “That changed my life that night,” DiGiovanni says. “As that film made its way around the world, it changed a lot of people’s lives.”

  Boenish launched from building, towers, bridges, and cliffs, and coined the name BASE after consulting a dictionary and finding the definition—“a platform on which someone stands”—and noting how the acronym lined up. He issued registration numbers to certify those who successfully jumped from each of the four objects, completing the BASE cycle. He created an organizing body and published BASE Magazine, all to lend respectability to this new pastime. He “opened” countless sites around the world, trained legions of new jumpers, and boasted to friends, “In twenty years, we’ll be shutting down the streets below the World Trade Center and they’ll let us jump.”

  He failed to anticipate the reaction of property owners worried about liability, though, or concerns among the skydiving hierarchy that these crazy jumpers would ruin a reputation for safety. The United States Parachute Association (USPA), the national governing body for skydiving, advertised the sport as a sensible recreational pursuit with a sterling safety record. Any association with a bunch of cowboys flinging themselves from buildings and bridges appeared to run counter to those claims. The very notion of jumping off a fixed object strikes terror in the hearts of most people and seems counter to the most basic instincts for self-preservation. Moreover, by dint of making a BASE jump, you were often flirting with breaking some law.

  Access to buildings or antennas often required trespassing. The National Park Service maintains jurisdiction over many of the cliffs in the United States suitable for jumping. Clashes with jumpers prompted the Park Service to invoke a preexisting ban on parachutes, meant to prevent hunters from resupplying with backcountry airdrops. Some continued to jump in defiance, stoking what would be a long-running feud with Park Service rangers determined to capture and prosecute BASE enthusiasts. The USPA went so far as to expel skydivers who performed BASE jumps, but it eventually reversed course after the jumpers brought a lawsuit.

  “They thought we were just stupid,” one early jumper would say about attitudes among skydivers toward BASE jumpers. “We were just illegal bandits. We were like criminals.”

  His advocacy for BASE pitted Boenish against his friends in skydiving, making him a pariah in a sport he had done much to develop and promote.

  “It’s funny; in the beginning we didn’t keep it to ourselves, because we didn’t think we had to,” DiGiovanni says. “We thought when people see this, ‘This is great. This is an accomplishment. This is amazing that humans can do this.’ [Boenish] didn’t realize and none of us realized that it would be against the law, considered reckless endangerment. We thought it would be the opposite. The sport didn’t go underground until that occurred. We realized that we can’t tell people we’re doing this, or they’re not going to let us do it.”

  • • •

  It was from the parched high desert of the Peninsular Ranges, an hour or so east from Los Angeles and San Diego, that Carl Boenish recruited his intrepid El Cap jumpers. It’s a region where, on average, less than ten inches of rain falls annually. The lack of precipitation in the region would present a peculiar problem in the late 2000s, when, in Perris (population 68,000), ground zero for California’s mortgage default crisis, the situation grew so dire that civic leaders approved painting green the burnt-out lawns of abandoned homes, to restore a sense of community pride.

  The climate may not suit grass, but sunny blue skies make for a fertile skydiving environment. Two drop zones, Skydive Perris and Skydive Elsinore, eight miles down the road, lure enthusiasts from around the world, many of whom stay on and work as instructors, or take jobs at the parachute lofts where riggers make repairs and repack chutes into their containers. Or they find employment at the related businesses attached to the airfields, doing whatever it takes to support their skydiving habit. It was from this population of dedicated, accomplished, and driven skydivers that an incubator for BASE would develop. It was not due to the presence of any particular cliffs, buildings, bridges, or notable antennas in the area; the advantages owed more to an emerging mental atmosphere.

  No one has to make a BASE jump after all, except those who actually do. In a sport as perilous as BASE, in which those who die are said to have “gone in,” practitioners owe their success to more than mere chance. They are assiduous in their preparation and planning. They are precise and deliberate in action. And they cultivate an ability to cope with sensations of fear so powerful they threaten to short-circuit brain function. A popular notion in the sport says that people fall into one of two categories: those who behave like jackrabbits and those who behave like deer. Caught in headlights on the road at night, jackrabbits hop free from danger, whereas deer freeze and get smashed to smithereens. Most jumpers, therefore, fall into the jackrabbit category; those who behave like deer don’t tend to last long.

  Anne Helliwell arrived into this environment in 1982, a recent émigré from New Zealand who came to the States on a German tramp steamer, in search of a skydiving life. “When I got here, I loved it so much I stayed awhile,” Helliwell says about the Perris–Elsinore region.

  Helliwell got her start in BASE when a skydiving friend asked if she wanted to watch a man parachute from a bridge. Afterwards, the guy asked Helliwell if she wanted to give it a shot. Following basic instructions, she leaped from the bridge, a photo capturing her perfect form as she fell. “I was just buzzing for a long time,” she recalls. “I had to come back and do it again.”

  Cracking the jumping scene, though, proved not so easy. A newcomer needed a mentor, someone who not only would teach but would vouch for her in the secretive jumping community. Given the prevailing attitudes in skydiving toward BASE, this was best done with discretion. Jump sites were often referred to in code, to confound the authorities or wannabes. A newcomer might be told discreetly to meet at a time and place for a jump, with the understanding that she would keep the information private. Often the first object she jumps from will be a bridge
with water beneath, to add an extra margin of safety, or a high cliff or mountainside where a few more precious seconds might allow for any errors to be overcome. Once at the site, she would meet experienced jumpers, forging contacts in an international network without headquarters, hierarchy, or membership rolls. No one knew how many other practicing jumpers existed, but probably not more than a few hundred worldwide by the mid-1980s. They were mostly a clandestine group. And when Boenish was killed, in 1984, while jumping a 3,600-foot cliff in Norway known as the Troll Wall, the sport—absent its greatest advocate—went seriously underground.

  Helliwell knew of a few jumpers by reputation at the drop zone, but they were not inclined to let a woman tag along. Eventually she learned of a rendezvous point for a coming weekend jump and drove eight hours to the spot, in Northern California. “I showed up and they went, ‘Oh, great, now we have to take her.’ So they squeezed me in the back of the car. They said, ‘We’re going to blindfold you. You’re not allowed to see where we’re going.’ There were four guys and me, and it was an antenna, and I was determined to be accepted in the group, so I made sure I wasn’t a slacking girl coming up from behind. So I stayed in the middle, climbing. By the time we got to the top, we made our jump and it was great. From then on I was accepted. As a group we all went and started jumping things.”

  • • •

  IN THOSE DAYS, JUMPERS relied on skydiving equipment. A standard skydive begins when a skydiver exits an aircraft at twelve thousand feet, wearing a harness and a container on his back holding two parachutes. In free fall, he accelerates to 120 miles per hour, which is terminal velocity, the maximum speed of gravity acting on an object relative to wind resistance as it plummets through the atmosphere. When the downward force of gravity equals the upward force of drag, this is terminal speed. It takes about twelve seconds to reach terminal velocity.