Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  AMERICAN SOUTHWEST, LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  One bright day in 1997, Anne Helliwell was out at the Perris Valley drop zone, teaching tandem skydiving instruction, when a tall young guy with a shaved head walked up and, without preliminaries, launched into some questions about BASE instruction. Helliwell was accustomed to getting feelers from experienced skydivers. But novices generally found the prospect of jumping plainly daunting. Not this guy, though. “This guy came up to me,” Helliwell would recall, “and it’s more common these days, and he said, ‘How many skydives do you require for somebody to go through your course?’ We had a minimum of two hundred skydives. The reason for that is we need you to know how to fly your parachute. We can teach you how to jump off the object and save your life. When your parachute opens, you really need to know how to work that vehicle. Skydiving can do that for you.”

  Jeb Corliss, twenty-one, had amassed forty skydives at a small Cessna drop zone at Bermuda Dunes, near Palm Springs; it was not enough to begin training. “See you in a couple years,” Helliwell told him, “or however long it takes you to get the jumps.” Then she quickly forgot about him. Until her phone rang three months later. It was Jeb on the line, explaining how he had made more than a hundred jumps since their meeting, a staggering number in so short a time. Although this was short of the two hundred required to begin training, he wondered if she would make an exception and permit him to enroll.

  Helliwell said she needed to talk it over with Shoebotham first. When he raised no objections, she called back. “You can start your class next week,” she told Jeb.

  • • •

  AS A CARETAKER OF his sport, Todd Shoebotham considered it his sacred duty to size up the students in his ground-course classroom at the Perris drop zone. He could spot a certain type of student from a mile away, the way they walked in, having paid $1,000 for the privilege of his and Helliwell’s twenty-eight years of accumulated wisdom, already convinced of things they knew not a whit about. Their mix of energy, enthusiasm, and ignorance tended to make him nervous. He would recall thinking, Whoa, dude, you’re scaring me! You’re not thinking about the consequences of your actions!

  BASE still occupied a radical fringe, even among skydivers, and each new injury or fatality tended to stir a tempest of negative attention that Shoebotham and other leaders would simply prefer to avoid. Intent on weeding out the kinds of characters who might go forth, do something dumb, get killed, and bring scorn on the sport, Shoebotham appraised a tall young man with a shaved head and tuning-fork tremulousness, bristling with big ideas of jumping iconic monuments and some of the most challenging sites around the world. It was brash stuff for someone who had yet to make his first jump. And Shoebotham asked himself: Is this Jeb guy someone we should invite into our sport? He decided to get to know Jeb, who was already an accomplished scuba diver. Jeb understood that to stay alive underwater, you needed a dive plan that defined the parameters of exploration and time spent at depth, taking into account a range of potential variables. It was a mentality and training that lent itself well to jumping.

  “I remember most of the conversations where I got to know him a little bit, thinking, This guy is not a whack or a kook,” Shoebotham would say later. “He has a character that we all need. You need to be able to calculate this stuff. You’ve got to be able to think these things through, develop a plan, find flaws in your plan, reevaluate around that. I could see that in Jeb very early.”

  Still, Shoebotham would eventually regard Jeb as too much in a hurry at times. “Dude, slow down,” he reminded him. “Don’t go too fast. This sport is not forgiving. You mess up a little bit and it kills you.”

  If Jeb seemed in a hurry, it was because he was. He had endured a privileged but melancholy life, and in jumping he imagined a burnished future. In a sport few were willing to even try, Jeb was determined to distinguish himself. Shoebotham recalled that before Jeb had even made one jump, this student was certain he was going to love the sport, talking about his coming travels in which he would plunge from objects all across Europe. Aimless for years, Jeb saw in BASE something to order his life around.

  • • •

  Jeb Corliss had come into the world in Abiquiú, New Mexico, a remote former Spanish mission fifty miles north of Santa Fe. Surrounded by rugged red chimney rocks and desert blooms under a huge western sky, Abiquiú had attracted Georgia O’Keeffe, who favored the landscape and the light and maintained a home and studio there for most of her adult life. Beyond scenery and solitude, though, the town offered little else, and no hospital. That was why, as the time drew near for his pregnant wife, Gigi, Rick Corliss plunked coins into a pay phone and summoned an outback doctor to deliver their first child in a bedroom at a friend’s house where they were staying. The baby was born on March 25, 1976, and in the spirit of the times there was some talk of calling him X-Ray Mujahideen. Tradition prevailed, however, and the child was given the Christian name J. Ray Corliss IV; everyone called him Jeb. He had an older sister, Sonia—Gigi’s daughter from an earlier union—and before Jeb was out of diapers, Rick and Gigi would welcome Scarlett to complete their family.

  Rick and Gigi were not in Abiquiú long, though. They never called any place home for long. They ran a business dealing in indigenous artifacts and folk art, traveling the world for, say, masks from New Guinea, war clubs from the Solomon Islands, human bones from a Buddhist sect in Tibet, and embroidery from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. These items were a hit with wealthy collectors back in the United States, but it meant long stretches on the road. Children in tow, Rick and Gigi went from New Mexico to Palm Springs, where Rick’s family was prominent, then on to India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, where Jeb celebrated his first birthday. There were camel rides and romps with monkeys. In India, the children watched in wonder as corpses burned on the banks of the Ganges.

  The Corlisses’ only son was willful and heedless of danger. At eighteen months, he wriggled free from a swim instructor and leaped from a dive platform, swimming to the side for another plunge. “That’s basically what Jeb has been like since the beginning,” Gigi recalls.

  Once their children were school-aged, Rick and Gigi settled in Santa Fe, where Jeb was enrolled in Catholic school. Many of his classmates were Native American. He was blond-haired, blue-eyed, a new kid whose experiences and beliefs suggested he came from some other planet. He clashed with clergy and classmates over doctrine, which didn’t mesh with his experiences abroad. “When a six-year-old child starts contradicting adults and other children, it’s considered rude,” Gigi says. “It’s considered disrespectful. His beliefs clashed with others. He argued with other children, and they called him a liar.”

  By second grade Jeb was at public school, seeking a fresh start, furthering a pattern of dislocation that reinforced his status as an outsider. At home, Rick and Gigi were headed for divorce.

  Jeb’s imagination was his refuge. One day, riding in a car with an aunt, he gazed out the window, transfixed at the sight of birds perched on telephone wires, opening their wings and soaring. “When I get older, I’m going to do that,” he announced.

  His aunt explained that when he got older he would realize that humans cannot fly.

  Jeb considered her words for a moment. “Maybe you can’t,” he said finally, “but I’m going to.”

  Gigi would remember that “he had real dreams about going up into these mountain areas and flying through earthworks and tundra and flying through massive cracks in the earth . . . Incredible dreams, anyway.”

  Jeb’s reality, though, was less Jonathan Livingston Seagull and more Lord of the Flies. In the desert, he and other boys played a game called “rock war,” from which participants staggered home with bloody head wounds. Rambunctious boys, they threw knives and ninja stars and jumped from bridges and rooftops. They attempted to capture rattlesnakes and scorpions. Left to his own devices, Jeb seemed to be regressing to a feral state. He grew ungovernab
le and did not respond to multiple groundings. He began to look dangerous to the parents of his friends, who barred their children from playing with the Corliss kid. Even Jeb’s cousins weren’t permitted to associate with him. “He had conflicts with his cousins, who were shooting birds with BB guns,” Gigi remembers. “He was horrified. He admired snakes, and its life and its beauty, rather than wanting to stomp and kill it.”

  Soon Jeb’s only playmates were those very snakes and spiders and the desert creatures he captured while scouring dry riverbeds around Santa Fe. Noting her son’s loneliness, Gigi indulged these peccadilloes. He made a study of handling rattlers, anticipating when they were about to strike and maneuvering them so they couldn’t. He was developing skills and a mind-set that would serve him decades later. He was fascinated by horny toads, and the way they shoot from their eyes blood containing a noxious chemical to ward off predators. Jeb could appreciate such a defense mechanism. His obstreperousness left him unpopular at yet another school. Without friends, he became an attractive target for bullies, who turned him into a punching bag. He tried threats, but the boys called his bluff and beat him anyway. Striking back was the only response that granted any breathing room. Still, each morning he woke sick with worry, girding for another assault. By fifth grade Jeb began to take a hard turn. When pushed, he shoved back. When another student landed a blow, he went ballistic. Fellow students learned to grant him a wide berth.

  Yet one day, a group of boys pummeled Jeb in the schoolyard to teach him a lesson for some perceived infraction. Afterwards, vowing revenge, Jeb bolted into the school and seized the first solid object he saw, which happened to be an electric pencil sharpener. Stalking outside, he brought the object down on the head of the ringleader, then marched into the principal’s office and confessed what he had done.

  Alarmed teachers and school administrators reacted by isolating him from other students. They confiscated pencils, scissors, and books, anything they feared could be used as a weapon. They brought in specialists for testing. Finally the principal sat down with Gigi and urged her to consider homeschooling, noting that nothing about Jeb fit with other children. Gigi could not disagree.

  Homeschooling cooled Jeb’s rage, and he would never get in another fight again. Although Gigi tried enrolling Jeb in seventh grade at a public school in Palm Springs when they moved there, he lasted only a week. “I don’t want to go to school,” he pleaded, upset that some students had offered him a joint. “I don’t want to know these people.”

  Back at home, Jeb spent long hours alone while his sisters were in school and his mother worked at a health food store and as an acupuncturist at a resort. He passed his days watching conservation documentaries on cable TV and studying with tutors. Asked about his career ambitions, he would mention something vague about working with animals. Mostly, though, he had stopped dreaming and could not imagine any future.

  The Japanese media have identified a social phenomenon they’ve dubbed hikikomori (“withdrawal”) that has resulted in a “lost generation,” essentially legions of shut-ins who spend years of self-confinement in their parents’ homes. He wasn’t quite there, but Jeb Corliss was headed in that direction.

  It was around this time that the physical being of the cute, towheaded kid began to transform. Jeb shot up in height, and his straight blond hair turned dark and curly, as if the mind over which it grew were struggling for outward manifestation. Walled off emotionally from the world, he cultivated animus. When his family encouraged him to see life as worthwhile, his standard replay was a defiant: “Maybe for you!”

  A psychologist his parents consulted had earlier diagnosed “counterphobia,” a condition in which people—often those who are extremely anxious—intentionally seek out the subject of their fear. Jeb caught snakes because they scared him, and he liked the way fear felt. Numb inside, he hungered for any feeling, which only intense experiences seemed to provide.

  As it happened, circumstances would soon leave Jeb marinating in intense experiences.

  • • •

  A phone call would finally reroute Jeb Corliss’s life. It came a few days after his sixteenth birthday, when he was living with his grandparents in New Mexico, studying with a private tutor. His mother and sisters had remained in Palm Springs, and Jeb hadn’t heard from Gigi in a while. But there she was on the line, calling from Cancún. She wanted to know whether he could hop on a plane to meet her. She said she would explain once he arrived.

  An angry, skinny, sensitive, pallid teenager with a wild nest of dark hair arrived in Cancún on a flight from LAX to meet Gigi and her new boyfriend, a man named Barry Fitzmorris. Tall, with shaggy gray hair and a sonorous voice, Fitzmorris resembled an old cowboy. He was something else entirely. Founder of a prosperous insurance brokerage, he was wealthy beyond anything Jeb was accustomed to, and he put everyone up in a luxury seaside resort.

  Looking for something to bond over, Fitzmorris enrolled Jeb in a scuba certification course so they could dive together. One morning, a small boat motored out to Isla Mujeres, a popular reef in the aquamarine waters of the Caribbean. As everyone geared up, a squall came up, whipping the seas into confusion. The boat began taking water over the transom. Everyone on board clambered to the rising bow, nosing ever higher, until a voice called out to jump.

  Jeb hit the water and the boat capsized, coming down feet from his head. He had other problems, though. He had fastened a twelve-pound weight belt around his waist. Sinking like a stone, he hit the sandy bottom fifteen feet below the surface. Frantically working to free the belt, he blacked out. When he came to, he was on the hull of the overturned boat, a man hunched over him, administering CPR.

  When he relayed his ordeal to Gigi, she insisted that he would never dive again. But Fitzmorris argued that Jeb should try immediately, if only to triumph over any psychological trauma.

  On a bigger boat, with better weather, Jeb earned his certification. Freshly credentialed, he and Fitzmorris bought cameras and underwater housings and ventured down to Cozumel for advanced instruction. Snapping pictures of pastel fish and eels in gin-clear water acted like a salve for the petulant teenager. With communication reduced to uncomplicated gestures underwater, his social anxiety vanished. In the water’s warm embrace, Jeb discovered a comfort he had not known on land.

  For eight months, Jeb and Fitzmorris would embark on an uninterrupted diving odyssey. They splashed in the waters off Belize, Cuba, and Costa Rica, where they encountered whitetip reef sharks. Nothing like the man-eaters of Jeb’s imagination, they were beautiful and fascinating. Swimming in their presence summoned the old excitement of capturing snakes and scorpions in the desert.

  Back home from his scuba sojourn, Jeb was watching MTV Sports one day, and there was a man standing too close to a cliff, suddenly sticking out his tongue and leaping. The sequence shocked, terrified, and exhilarated all at once. The jumper was a man named John Vincent, an oil worker from New Orleans. Long-haired, crackling with charisma, and insouciant in the face of authority, he had used suction cups to scale the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to jump, and at the World Trade Center he’d given security the slip to parachute from the roof.

  For Jeb, who had dreamed of flying, here was something that came close. Not every man recognizes a glimpse of his destiny, or acts on it when he does, but when Jeb watched Vincent throw a gainer—an acrobatic maneuver consisting of a backward somersault while facing outward—from a cliff, he knew immediately what he was meant to do with his life.

  He phoned a local drop zone for information. They didn’t know much about BASE, but they suggested skydiving to start. The only problem was that Jeb needed to turn eighteen first. If he couldn’t jump yet, Jeb figured at least he could study it. He scoured the library for any references but found scant evidence of its existence. This strangely brightened him. For one thing, if he were to jump, he would be joining an exclusive group.

  Another motive was more morbid. “When I was sixteen years old,” he would later say, “I beca
me very suicidal, like actively pursuing things that could end my life.”

  “He was very depressed,” Fitzmorris would recall. “I used to walk with him almost every day, and he would talk about how unhappy he was, how the only solution was committing suicide.”

  At the end of their Mexico idyll, Gigi and Fitzmorris had been married in Oaxaca, and Fitzmorris was building an eight-thousand-square-foot house with six bedrooms on a bluff over a private beach in Malibu for his new family. Before it was finished, Jeb moved into the maid’s quarters to keep an eye out during construction. He was a seventeen-year-old security guard, living alone, waking each morning to the sound of workmen’s saws and hammers. Making his way down to the beach with a surfboard, he spent hours bobbing in the Pacific, watching the traffic wend along the Pacific Coast Highway beneath the Santa Monica Mountains. He was waiting for waves, and something else, too, to come and propel him along in life.

  When the catalyst finally arrived, Jeb did not like the form it took. Despite loud protests, his parents enrolled him in school in January 1994 so that he could graduate with a diploma. “He was freaked out by the prospect of returning to school,” Gigi says.

  He needn’t have been. Colin McEwen was a private school with fewer than twenty pupils per grade. Jeb walked in for the first day wearing a T-shirt printed with a marine scene of coral reefs and sharks. His curly hair was shorn tight on the sides and rose high on his head, calling to some minds Herman Munster. “He was this tall kid with this bright shirt,” recalls Shawn Stern, another student in his grade. “He was such an advanced scuba diver, and he had gone on a lot of fascinating scuba-diving trips, and his new father was super loaded and wealthy, so he always had the coolest, newest Nikon camera stuff. Jeb was interesting to all the kids right off the bat.”

  Jeb bonded with classmates over games of chess. He and Stern became fast friends. Jeb coaxed Stern to overcome a fear of the ocean, leading him on a swim beyond the breakers to deep water, where sea lions lolled on a navigation buoy. Stern would drive Jeb and Scarlett to school each day. Jeb eventually confessed that Stern was his first real friend.