Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  The second phase begins when he reaches behind his right hip for a handle on his rig, grabbing it and flinging it into the air. This releases a small parachute called a pilot chute. Caught by the air, the pilot chute inflates, creating drag and tugging a bridle made of a length of webbing connected to his parachute container, held fast by a pin or Velcro system. Tension on the bridle from the pilot chute pulls hard, releasing the pin, causing the main canopy, folded and packed tight in the container, to spill out. As the lines stretch, the canopy opens with a resounding crack. Air rushes into vents along the parachute’s leading edge, inflating cells that give the pressurized fabric the shape of a wing.

  A skydiver typically deploys his parachute at between two and three thousand feet. That way if there’s a malfunction, he has the option of yanking a handle to cut away the main chute and deploy a reserve.

  This is where the main differences between skydiving and BASE equipment come into play. BASE jumpers frequently leap from objects that are less than a thousand feet tall. They seldom reach terminal velocity, and the lower altitudes involved in BASE leave insufficient time to deploy a reserve parachute in the event of a malfunction with the main. Therefore, a jumper requires one canopy that opens reliably and quickly and can be flown adroitly in the confined spaces that make up many BASE landing areas.

  “A lot of accidents happened in BASE because we were using gear meant for another sport,” DiGiovanni says. “We didn’t have our own.” Helliwell was determined to do something about that. She filled two pages of notes with specs gleaned from her own experience and those of other trusted jumpers in an attempt to design a proper BASE parachute. The gist of her scribbling called for a square-shaped chute (to improve handling) that opened both quickly and “on-heading”—that is, away from the object jumped.

  Working at a loft where skydiving parachutes were rigged, packed, and repaired, Helliwell sat at a sewing machine and fashioned what she would call “the Gray Thing,” owing to its unattractive color. It was “sewn atrocious,” she admits, but looks weren’t everything, and the parachute “actually flew quite well.” With her parachute, she would partner with Todd Shoebotham, a jumper who had moved to California from Texas and ran a small business selling stripped-down BASE containers, pilot chutes, and accessories out of a catalog advertised in the back of a skydiving magazine. They called their concern Basic Research.

  There was little business at first.

  • • •

  THE BEST GAUGE OF the sport’s size was an event that took place each October in Fayetteville, West Virginia, at a festival called Bridge Day, where jumping was permitted from the 876-foot New River Gorge Bridge. In 1986 more than three hundred took part, presumably a good share of the worldwide jumping population.

  Spurred by popular media, skydiving was on the verge of a surge in popularity, though, and BASE would enjoy a spillover effect. The 1991 movie Point Break, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, depicted a group of California surfer/skydivers who robbed banks to fuel their lifestyle, a story that struck a chord with males of a certain age and bent. They were part of a whole generation that had been practically raised on amazing risks as entertainment, going back at least to Evel Knievel. By 1995 this generation would get its Woodstock when ESPN created a festival for radical sports in Providence, Rhode Island, called the Extreme Games, soon to be rechristened the X Games. Aggregating mountain biking, adventure racing, sport climbing, bungee jumping, street luge, skysurfing, skateboarding, in-line skating, BMX, windsurfing, and kitesurfing, the games were beamed to households around the world. And if audiences did not exactly comprehend the finer points of downhill mountain-bike racing, they could at least anticipate the possibility for serious carnage resulting from high-speed wrecks.

  Around this time, Helliwell and Shoebotham noted a corresponding uptick in orders. They heard word of jumpers dying in such far-flung locales as Australia, Europe, and South America, all of which testified to the sport’s broadening reach.

  Indeed, there once had been a time when Anne Helliwell knew just about every jumper, or at least had mutual friends in common. By the late 1990s she couldn’t make that claim anymore. As the sport expanded, Basic Research’s business had made it so that anyone could plunk down a credit card and get fully outfitted, and this would present a dilemma for the company’s owners. “We wanted to sell equipment,” Helliwell explains, “but we didn’t want to sell it to people to kill themselves.” To help ensure that customers were qualified, she proposed training requirements, similar to those for skydiving. But the backlash from the jumping community was swift and noisy—they liked that their sport was loosely organized, and bristled at the suggestion of a sanctioning body. So Helliwell and Shoebotham created a strictly voluntary training program, with classes taking place over several days whenever enough students signed up. Their pitch to prospective students was plain and simple: “Can we help you out so you don’t kill yourselves?” Helliwell says. “Teach you in the right way?” Students began to trickle in.

  The point of the class was to prepare for jumping, but also for the inevitability of things going wrong. With problems occasionally presenting in rapid-fire sequence, and seconds to spare before impact, pausing to ask What do I do now? leads to certain demise.

  Complicating matters are the altered states resulting from the physiology of fear. As chemicals course from the amygdala—a pair of almond-shaped nuclei, located within the brain’s temporal lobes, where fear originates—blood coagulates and blood vessels constrict; heart rate and blood pressure shoot up; and hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline, surge through the body, tensing muscles for action. All of which attenuates the ability to think and reason clearly. Cortisol, in particular, interferes with complex thinking. Even simple problems become difficult during stressful situations, and simple problems in BASE jumping quickly turn deadly. So Helliwell and Shoebotham taught students not only to plan for perfect performance but to practice every conceivable problem scenario, making each motion an economy of choreographed muscle memory and reflexes honed by repetition.

  DiGiovanni had assumed the role of unofficial historian for the sport and began compiling something called the BASE Fatality List, a catalog of deaths designed to serve as a memorial and an educational tool. “A lot of those people on the list, the first fifty or sixty, weren’t strangers to me,” DiGiovanni says. “They were people I knew. If you look at the first seventy-five fatalities, they’re all sort of unique. After that, it’s people making the same mistake over and over again . . .”

  Just as in aeronautics and skydiving, incident reports on the fatality list testified to mistakes, miscalculations, and malfunctions you didn’t want to repeat. Eyewitness accounts, interviews, and follow-up gear inspections amounted to cautionary tales. Where possible, Shoebotham and Helliwell acquired surviving video of a fatality and showed it to students as a lesson.

  Together, this created a catechism spelling out the traits and attitudes of a serious jumper, which most students badly want to be. A serious jumper cares for his equipment, inspecting and double-checking several thousands of dollars’ worth of essential gear—pilot chute, bridle, container, and parachute. He fastidiously packs his parachute. Because he carries only one, his backups are sound judgment and skill. He monitors weather conditions and interprets their meanings. He performs conservatively rather than pushing into more difficult mental and physical territory. He practices to maintain his training—in the language, staying “current,” particularly as his next jump demands. He has familiarized himself with the jump site, through either experience or thorough investigation, by walking the landing area, memorizing the locations of any rocks, trees, buildings, fences, power lines, light poles, or roads that could present a hazard. He has consulted the weather forecast, paying special attention to specific winds at the area he’s jumping. He knows that by failing to prepare in this way, he would imperil himself before he even reaches the exit point. He has also cons
ulted local jumpers with expert knowledge. As a result, he carries a map in his mind of the landing area, exit point, and any salient physical characteristics in between. Armed with this information, he has a plan for every phase of the jump. He is prepared for any potential malfunctions and has formulated backup plans because a good jumper enjoys planning and preparation almost as much as jumping itself.

  Once at the jump site, if he observes that conditions are not right, or if he’s feeling uncomfortable for some reason, he understands that there is no one to save him. He has chosen an inherently perilous activity and will have to rely on his inner soundings for judgment and safety. It’s possible that a more experienced jumper, if present, would offer advice, an admonition, or a cursory inspection of gear at the last moment. But just as likely, he may not. So a good jumper consults his own knowledge, experience, and an internal voice that may raise a critical question or provide some vague inkling that something is askew. If the voice is well tuned, the good jumper listens with a willingness to walk away or climb down from an object. He knows that a cautious, patient approach may keep him alive, because he accepts the maxim in the sport that says, The only way to not die BASE jumping is to not BASE jump.

  • • •

  GEARED UP AT AN exit, a jumper should already have an idea of the precise height of the object, which he can confirm using an altimeter or laser range finder. Often, though, he simply drops a rock and counts the seconds until he hears it smack ground. Consulting a printed table, he sees that by striking at six seconds the rock fell roughly 500 feet. That’s how much functional altitude he has to work with. Seven seconds means he has 640 feet until impact; at eight seconds, he has almost 800 feet, and so on.

  Ready to go at last, he will begin the first phase of a jump by leaping clear from the object and place his body in a position with belly down and shoulders level. As he falls more rapidly with each second, he encounters an increase in air resistance, which can be deflected off his body to “track,” or glide, from the object as quickly as possible. With each passing second in free fall, he’s accelerating. At one second, he’s traveling roughly twenty-two miles per hour downward. By four seconds he’s moving seventy-five miles per hour, wind whistling past. If the object is tall enough, at ten seconds he’s howling along at 114 miles per hour. Five seconds later he has accelerated to roughly 120 miles per hour, terminal velocity, and he hears nothing but a dull roar, his exposed skin rolling in rippling waves.

  With the ground coming up fast, he will begin the second phase of the jump by deploying his parachute, which starts by throwing the pilot chute, either clutched in hand or in a pouch attached to the back of his rig. Wherever he has stowed it, a good jumper throws his pilot chute to his side, into “clean” air—free from turbulence caused by his body—as if his life depends on it, because of course it does.

  Several seconds pregnant with tense anticipation may pass, a situation similar to slamming the brakes in a car and waiting for the vehicle to screech to a halt, meanwhile ground rushing at him with increasing intensity. If the wait between throwing the pilot chute and the opening of the main canopy seems too long, a trained jumper switches immediately to emergency procedures, searching out a snag or some other problem. This nightmare scenario could be the result of a packing or rigging error, or an entanglement. Perhaps the pilot chute has been incorrectly configured or catches on some part of the jumper’s body or has wound up in the burble of turbulence behind his back, a dead spot for pilot chutes where there’s little air resistance. Whatever the problem, if he cannot correct instantly, he is finished.

  In a proper deployment, when things go right, as the main parachute spills from the container and the lines stretch, the parachute’s cells begin to inflate—two hundred square feet or so of pressurized fabric forming the shape of a wing. The force from a parachute rising off his back and inflating will swing a jumper beneath.

  Even with his chute open, though, the danger has not disappeared. Chutes can open “off-heading,” due to poor body position at deployment, a shoddy pack job, wind, or just plain bad luck. This means that rather than moving away from the object he’s just jumped from, the jumper is flying fast under canopy straight for a cliff, building, antenna, guy wires, or bridge pilings, with only seconds to correct before smashing into rock, concrete, or steel. Worse, sometimes his parachute lines will be twisted, disabling the steering mechanism, which are toggles attached to lines that, in turn, are connected to the parachute and, when pulled, alter the shape of the canopy and affect its flight.

  An excellent jumper will have planned for these scenarios, freeing line twists and steering his canopy to safety, taking into account headwinds, tailwinds, and other variables.

  Even the landing, the final phase, can be fraught with peril. Under a parachute, hitting the ground at forty miles an hour would be a painful endeavor. So a parachutist flying a ram-air canopy performs a flare maneuver, say, a dozen feet off the deck, by pulling down on his toggles to convert forward speed into temporary lift, momentarily pitching the flight angle of the parachute upward. It’s an act that relies on timing and precise action. Flare late or insufficiently and you hit the ground hard. Flare too early and the parachute will eventually stall, causing a fall straight down or backward, neither of which will be pleasant, even from ten feet. A poorly aimed approach or even a misplaced step can result in bones snapping, or worse. Only once both feet are planted firmly back on the ground can a jumper truly be said to be safe.

  In addition to the mechanics of jumping, Helliwell and Shoebotham imparted ethics for their marginalized and misunderstood sport. One of the most grievous violations of ethics concerns “burning” a site, which basically means getting busted jumping at a banned spot—for trespassing or some other infraction—and leaving the place hot with surveillance so no one can jump anymore without getting caught. The other rules, such as they are, can be summed up simply: Perform jumps you can reasonably handle or you will get hurt or die; do not damage people, property, or the environment. In other words, leave no trace. If you are jumping a banned site and happen to get caught, “try to be courteous to the arresting officer,” Shoebotham explained. “It may come back to help you out. Or at least might help the next guy who gets busted.”

  Helliwell told of a friend who, suffering from insomnia one night, rose from bed without waking his wife, grabbed his parachute, and headed to a high-rise hotel. Jumping unseen, he returned home, crawled into bed, and fell fast asleep. In the morning, his wife discovered the only evidence of his nocturnal jaunt: an open parachute stretched across the living room. That was the ideal jump.

  Chapter 2

  INTERNATIONAL LAUNCH

  ENGLAND, MID-1990S

  By 1995, jumping had made its way to England, specifically an army base in Dover, Kent, near the famous White Cliffs, where one day a paratrooper pulled some photographs from his locker. That day, a startled twenty-five-year-old private in the 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment of the British Army, also known as 3 PARA, got his first glimpse of BASE jumping. That fateful moment set in motion a course that would illuminate the history of BASE. The private’s name was Gary Bullock, and he insisted his fellow soldier take him along on his next jump.

  First, Gary needed to learn to fly more agile square parachutes, unlike the round canopies used by the army. Round parachutes work fine, but they rely on drag. Like jellyfish in the air, they drift on currents and can scarcely be steered. A square parachute, though, is an airfoil, an inflatable wing that can truly be flown. Their maneuverability is essential in the tight quarters and time sequences endemic to BASE jumping. In skydiving, a landing takes place at the grassy infield of an airport, under controlled circumstances. BASE, though, can occur in dense areas where a landing zone may be populated with trees, buildings, power lines, and sometimes people. And due to the low altitudes involved, a jumper may have only a few seconds to land after opening his parachute. Following a civilian skydiving course in which he got acquainted with square
chutes, Gary found himself one frigid February night along the Thames climbing an electricity pylon in the dark with three other jumpers. They were ten miles east of London and electricity hummed in high-tension wires overhead. In the distance, a corona of light suggested the city. The wires prevented them from climbing to the top of the tower and they stopped halfway up, 370 feet above the cold mud of the river’s tidal flats, puddles shimmering in the moonlight. Their height was not unreasonably low, but it would require lightning thought and action, especially for a beginner.

  It all happened so quickly that later Gary would be at a loss to recall the details of what happened. A flood of adrenaline washed away vivid memories as surely as a couple of downed cocktails. “When you’re in the moment, it’s difficult to capture everything,” he would say. He did remember “amazing” emotions after all the men jumped and—when the endorphins wore off—throbbing pain from an ankle injured when he landed on a length of driftwood lodged in the mud.

  Gary yearned to recapture the good feeling, though. Jumping again and again, he eventually sent away for a canopy designed specifically for BASE, built by a competitor of Helliwell and Shoebotham’s, a California company called Consolidated Rigging. Having discovered a sport that suited his temperament and ambitions, Gary was fully committed to continuing.

  • • •

  HE HAD ALWAYS BEEN athletic. Gary grew up twenty miles north of London, in Hertford, a Saxon settlement that in more recent times launched the hard-rock band Deep Purple. Gary’s mother, Hazel, worked as a school secretary. His father, Chris, operated a lathe at a factory, fashioning parts for submarines from polytetrafluoroethelyne, a material DuPont manufactures under the brand name Teflon.