Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  He was not alone. Around the globe, at least a half-dozen groups—in France, South Africa, Australia, Russia, and the United States—had the same goal. Although nobody was waving a flag, the quest evoked the spirit of nations’ pursuits of Everest and the North and South Poles.

  The landing, as one might expect, posed the biggest challenge, and each group had a different approach. In France, a wingsuit flier and champion skydiver figured that a pilot could glide to a stop on a snowy mountainside. “The basic idea is getting parallel to the snow so we don’t have a vertical speed at all, there is no shock, and then slide,” he explained, while also acknowledging the risks: “You might do it well one time and try another time and crash and die.”

  In South Africa, a costume designer for the motion picture industry turned wingsuit maker had a suit in mind that would allow pilots to land on their feet along a horizontal surface. “I think people will recognize this makes sense,” she said. “Why didn’t someone think of this long ago? I’m hoping that will be the reaction.”

  In the meantime, Jeb pursued his own plans, talking publicly about how he intended to land headfirst, on his stomach, at 120 miles per hour, using a massive landing apparatus that would borrow from the principles of Nordic ski jumping. The project would require millions of dollars, a team of engineers and scientists, and uncommon vision and courage.

  “We laugh and we think those guys are crazy, but they’re not,” said a physics professor at St. Louis University who for thirteen years performed parachute-inflation research for the U.S. Army. “I will not be the one person who thinks that they’re lunatics or they’re stupid. These folks are very smart.”

  “Is it possible?” asked a gruff aeronautical engineer from California who had worked on projects for NASA and the U.S. military and who created his own concept for landing without a parachute. “Yeah! Anything’s possible. It requires time, money, and innovation.” He added: “Everybody wants to be the first one to do it.”

  For those inclined to wonder why—why dedicate many years and many millions of dollars in a perilous and uncertain outcome that could claim your life—Jeb possessed a ready answer: “Because everybody thinks that it’s not possible,” he explained. “The point is to show people anything can be done. If you want to do amazing things, then you have to take amazing risks.”

  And with his amazing risk at the Crack, Jeb appeared at last on the verge of assembling the final components—including funding—for what he called the Wingsuit Landing Project. In the coming weeks, before the summer was over, video footage of his close call at the Crack would go viral, luring many millions of views, as well as interest from TV executives eager to hear his proposal for landing.

  Among those who marveled at the video footage from the Crack that summer was another wingsuit pilot, from England, who worked as a stuntman for TV and film. This particular pilot had no access to major funding, and hardly anyone knew who he was. He could not claim a name or much reputation within the wingsuit world, although he had a record of performing a range of dangerous stunts safely. Yet he possessed vision and an obdurate temperament not easily swayed from a task. Inspired by what he had seen of Jeb at the Crack, by late summer this pilot would vow to become the first to fly and land without a parachute. His reasons were personal, and he made no public announcement of his plans at first. That’s why no one would see him coming. Jeb had no way of knowing, but this contender was quietly making moves, setting up a final, frantic finish that would nearly cost one of them his life.

  • • •

  Yet there was no hint of all that was to come as the pilots sat in the lobby of the hotel, debating where to seek refuge as the weather turned wet and windy in advance of an unseasonable cold front advancing across Europe. One of the pilots mentioned Arco, a charming small town at the base of a mountain in northern Italy. France, outside Chamonix, was also briefly considered. But some French jumpers had resorted to vigilantism against interlopers, and no one had the vital connections, so the idea was dropped.

  While all of this was under discussion, the brakes of a touring bus sighed in the parking lot outside, and pensioners entered the lobby, gabbing loudly in Swiss German. An older woman, gray hair in a bun, finally waddled over to the pilots. “Are you da fly-ing boys?” she asked in lilting English.

  “Yes!” Jeb said with great gusto. And pointing to Steph Davis, a rock climber and pilot from Moab, Utah, and one of the few women in the wingsuit scene, he added: “And the flying girl!”

  The woman clapped her hands. Her companions, all male, were touring singers from Bern, she explained, and they had seen footage of pilots flying the Crack and wanted to offer a song in tribute?

  “Sure,” Jeb said.

  As he and the other pilots listened politely, the singers belted out harmonies. None of the pilots had any notion what the singing was about, but it sounded traditional, authentic, stuff of the volk, evoking all the Swiss tropes. When the song was done, the pilots applauded the gesture with an understanding that, yes, their feats on the mountain had moved men to song. They could not imagine how, soon, footage of Jeb’s close call at the Crack would, buoyed by a popular song, captivate the wider world.

  • • •

  IN THE ZEND, FLEEING wind and rain in Walenstadt, which grounded any chance at flight, Jeb and some of the others headed southwest into the Bernese Alps of Switzerland, winding up in Lauterbrunnen, an ideal redoubt in which to ride out bad weather, if only because of diversions. Lauterbrunnen is a fairy-tale town, located in a steep-sided valley with neck-straining views of the frosty peaks of the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau, some thirteen thousand feet high. The gray cliffs bracketing the valley rise two thousand feet in some places and issue a series of thin waterfalls, filling the air with a magical light-altering mist and feeding a cold glacial stream, the blue color of a barber’s antiseptic, which courses through town and down the valley to where cowbells clang in green pastures. The presence of so much moisture lends the valley air a faint mineral taste and, perhaps lyrical inspiration. Byron, who came to Lauterbrunnen fleeing the private storms of his own life, compared the largest cascade, Staubbach Falls, to the “long white tale of the pale horse upon which death is mounted in the Book of Revelations.”

  Eventually, many in the valley would complain that it was the BASE jumpers who brought death to the valley as they launched from the cliffs. Jeb had been coming for ten years, staying at the Hotel Oberland, a modest, staid place on the main drag, with green painted shutters and geraniums in the window boxes. In that time, owners Mark and Ursula Nolan had gotten to know him well. A sturdy and gregarious Australian with white hair, Mark Nolan arrived while on a rugby tour and never left, marrying a local woman, building his business interests. Mark recalled that when Jeb first arrived, a decade earlier, he spoke so loudly on the terrace during dinner one night that other guests asked to be moved. Nolan had to request that Jeb turn down the volume. “He used to be crazier and take more risks,” Mark says, “but now he’s calculated, like an athlete.”

  The Oberland is a quiet place, where families feel comfortable staying. Much of the extracurricular action in town takes place down the road, at the Hotel Horner, a four-story wooden structure with a steep gabled roof and long eaves. You never know who you will encounter there, a guy wearing a T-shirt with the words “Fuck Normal Life” printed on the front, or a group of jumpers seated on a table on the porch, wielding a set of crotchety electric shears, giving each other Mohawks. Many jumpers lodge upstairs in rooms that start at thirty-five Swiss francs (about $40) a night. Lodgers pass most nights and days gathered at tables on the stone porch at the pub downstairs, nursing beers and rumors and gossip in the long, dull hours between jumps that inevitably make up the bulk of a jumper’s life.

  In the convivial atmosphere of rough wood and dim lighting on the first floor, regulars and repeat customers cultivate reputations and acquire nicknames, such as Black Simon, Jewbag, Special Tom, the Girl Whisperer, and Douggs. Still, an
egalitarian spirit prevails, and newcomers are always welcome.

  One summer afternoon, a smallish dark-haired kid bounded up the porch and stopped short. “You can’t be Jeb Corliss,” he said.

  Jeb looked up from a table. “Hey, dude,” he said. “How’s it goin’?”

  “I just arrived from Argentina,” the kid said. Continuing into the bar, he announced that he had just met the famous Jeb Corliss outside.

  No one inside was too impressed, not least because they already knew Jeb; that, and getting starstruck constituted bad form.

  Yet that’s what it had been like in the summer of 2011. Trainloads of newcomers unloaded in Lauterbrunnen and failed to observe established codes on which rested a delicate and hard-won relationship between visiting jumpers and a local community unconvinced they wanted them. Media coverage of fatalities in the valley had earned Lauterbrunnen a reputation as the place where jumpers go to die, a potentially serious problem for an economy promoting a tourist idyll.

  From August 2010 through August 2011, seven jumpers were killed, bringing the total in the valley to twenty-eight over two decades. On July 23, 2011, Berner Zeitung, the daily newspaper in Bern, published a story beneath the headline “Reckless Jumpers Annoy Valley Dwellers.” Der Spiegel, in distant Germany, followed, stating the case more forcefully: “Village Appalled by Thrill Seekers’ Deaths.” Both papers told of jumpers flouting posted rules governing their activities. Some had failed to pay for a registration card, the proceeds from which compensate farmers for meadows trampled when jumpers land there, affecting their silage.

  Ruined grass was one thing, but much more serious were incidents in which schoolchildren witnessed jumpers screaming to their deaths from the cliffs. The papers told how some valley residents wanted jumping banned altogether.

  Mark Nolan embodied the ambivalence. In addition to running a hotel, he worked on the local ambulance rescue, observing jumpers broken physically and emotionally on the valley floor. “I think they’re selfish people,” he admitted. “They’re gone. Think about the people they leave behind—friends, loved ones.”

  Meanwhile, each summer more arrived. In 2010, an estimated fifteen thousand jumps took place in the valley. To Dr. Bruno Durrer, the valley doctor responsible for treating injured jumpers and scooping up the dead, the figures suggested that the sport was actually getting safer, at least in Lauterbrunnen. Durrer had been present for the first BASE fatality in the valley, on April 14, 1994. And his records showed 170 accidents since, with an average of fewer than two fatalities annually. Yet 2011 was shaping up to be an especially deadly year worldwide. Citing twenty-one fatalities that year, Outside magazine would deem BASE the “world’s deadliest sport.” Of those deaths, twelve involved wingsuits.

  Even the doctor’s support for jumpers had begun to waver following incidents in the summer of 2011. “It’s that this year now we had crazy groups coming into the valley that didn’t actually play into the rules,” he explained. “And we have rules established here.”

  The rules required jumping only at marked exits, having at least the minimum required level of experience, and respecting the airspace of paragliders and the helicopter ferrying skydivers to altitude. Enforcement was lax, however, and jumpers relied mainly on self-policing. “Now we had a few groups that didn’t care about the existing rules,” Durrer said. “They’re ruining the goodwill we have in the valley towards the BASE-jumping scene.”

  One of the doctor’s patients was a former Marine from California who went by “Jewbag,” and his example was instructive. A hard landing from an exit called La Mousse had left him limping out of the health clinic in an ankle splint while clutching anti-inflammatory ointment and pain meds. Durrer had instructed him to wait two to three weeks before jumping again. “But I’m only here a month,” Jewbag said. “I’ll be out there soon. I’m retarded.”

  • • •

  Jeb had been incorrigible in his earlier days, too. He had a mentor who told him not to do certain things, which Jeb would do anyway. But he had learned to avoid some unnecessary risks, like jumping in foul weather. One morning, when the skies finally cleared and sun slanted in the front window at the Airtime café, Jeb scraped the last bites of egg from his fork and finalized plans to hike up to the High Nose, a promontory some two thousand feet above the valley floor and one of the more popular exits. Across from him at a varnished wooden table sat Joby Ogwyn, one of his closest friends that summer. Muscular, thirty-seven years old, with a nest of thick curls and an easygoing Louisiana twang, Joby was an accomplished high-altitude climber who had once been the youngest to scale the world’s Seven Summits (the tallest mountains on each continent). He had been the youngest American to reach the summit of Everest, at twenty-four, earning an invitation to the White House, where he met President Clinton in the Oval Office. Next: he planned to launch from Everest with a wingsuit.

  Joby had come to BASE jumping and wingsuits while hosting a show on the National Geographic Channel called Adventure Wanted; each episode revolved around his learning some new outdoor-sports discipline, from race car driving to bull riding to white water kayaking. He met Jeb at the Horner one night, and, given their shared background in television, they wound up hitting it off. It seemed only natural for Jeb to invite Joby to be a part of his project in China.

  Stash bags slung over their shoulders, the two men made their way to the cable car station as parachutes and paragliders drifted from the cliffs behind them like tossed confetti. Somewhere unseen, the Air-Glaciers chopper thumped skydivers to altitude. At the cable car station they encountered other jumpers and joined them for a one-mile ride to Grütschalp, then a transfer to an electric train to Winteregg. From there, eight pilots hiked through thick stands of pine, and a logging operation, arriving twenty minutes later at an area of flat rocks where someone had placed a woodcut memorial in a notch reading STEFAN POR SIEMPRE, a reminder that men had died there.

  Through the trees, the skies had turned the color of wet cement, and a rumble echoed across the valley, from either thunder or a distant avalanche.

  Gearing up rapidly to beat the coming rain, they snapped POV cameras and clips into place. A quick call to the helicopter base and they were cleared to jump. With the chopper’s flight path beneath the Nose, no one wanted a collision.

  A short path wound to the exit, and any misstep would translate into a tumble straight to the valley floor, 1,910 feet below. In pairs, the pilots moved to the precipice, where two pine trees with knotty roots like rheumatic fingers gripped the rock. Beyond was a fifteen-second plunge to a certain demise. A length of climbing rope lashed to a tree provided a handhold on a vertiginous traverse to a slab of rock and dirt scarcely large enough to hold two people. The only thing between the ledge and the scenery of tiny farmsteads was an outcropping, a seven-second rock drop, and a hazard to anyone who didn’t fly away urgently.

  On the ledge, each man performed a final inspection of clips, fasteners, straps, and zippers, making sure cameras and GPS were activated. There were no histrionics or bravado, only supportive banter.

  “Have fun!”

  “Okay. You, too.”

  “Be safe!”

  The first pair dove off, stable, arms wide, fabric on their suits fluttering like flags in a stiff wind until their wings inflated and went rigid with pressurized air. The pilots disappeared fast beneath the ledge, heading hard left, hugging the wall, in the direction of town.

  • • •

  THEY HAD ALL WOUND up in Lauterbrunnen eventually: the Italian beauty, the magician from Finland, the Australian computer programmer, the financial analyst from England, the professional skier from Norway, the former bricklayer in Florida, and an international collection of champion skydivers and professional stunt performers. Anyone serious about BASE jumping and wingsuits passed through the valley, their inheritance a hazy history of human flight that spanned centuries and continents and included many thousands of jumps, from before recorded time and through the Depression, a he
yday of deadly homemade winged contraptions flown at barnstorming air shows around the world. Earlier trials were messy, ending in tragedy; it was not until recent times that science and skill had finally caught up with human longing.

  Some would flirt seriously with fulfilling an ancient archetypal idea of flight. Much of their training was while falling from the big walls of the Lauterbrunnen Valley.

  • • •

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS THAT summer, though, it was mainly rain that fell. When the weather turns, jumpers catch up on laundry and e-mail and paying bills. They read and watch movies, too. But when lonely or bored, they frequently lapse into a barroom routine, like skiers or climbers or anyone who spends too much time in mountain towns. In Lauterbrunnen, bad weather can mean brisk business at the Horner. Because he does not drink, such gatherings quickly grow tedious for Jeb, if he attends at all. One dark and rainy night when he remained holed up at his hotel, the bar action picked up early.

  At the center, as he often is, was Douggs, a garrulous Australian with the Christian name Christopher McDougall. With his arms, back, and neck covered in lurid tattoos, his hair in a Mohawk, and his ears and eyebrow pierced, Douggs was a well-known character about town. He had overstayed his visa and was dodging authorities for as long as possible, hiding in plain sight. Returning home to Australia meant he would be back at work as a carpenter, or inspecting offshore oil platforms somewhere. Douggs did not love the work, yet he maintained a bright outlook on life, a philosophy he expanded on in a madcap, hilarious memoir, Confessions of an Idiot. His upbeat attitude and often deranged quips, delivered in a voice corroded from hard living, made him one of the more popular figures among his fellow pilots. Douggs had known Jeb for years, and it was a given that he would be invited to China to participate in his fly-through event.

  Rain drumming the awning overhead, Douggs huddled in amber light on the porch at the Horner, brown liter beer bottle in hand, Aussie voice booming above the crowd. He was in his customary high spirits. “I get about one job every year or two, and we’re gonna change that, aren’t we, Joby?”