Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  For his eighteenth birthday, Jeb’s grandparents bought him two tandem skydives at the drop zone at Bermuda Dunes. And in the spring he graduated, acceding to his family’s wishes that he continue his education. That summer, tired of teasing about his bushy hairdo, he allowed his new friends to shave his head with a disposable razor. Nicked with cuts, his scalp was so bare it resembled a helmet. He nevertheless preferred this sleek look, which he embellished by wearing only black.

  As his classmates headed off to college, Jeb enrolled in scuba training in Florida in hopes of becoming an instructor. He would repay the tuition by working in Fitzmorris’s office. Equipped with a phone and a list of numbers to dial, Jeb began cold-calling companies in an attempt to gather information on their executives so that he might sell them insurance. No one had the slightest interest in talking to him, however, and his exasperation grew with each hostile hang-up. Unable to stand it any longer, Jeb marched into Fitzmorris’s office, begging for another assignment. He had lasted thirty minutes.

  Jeb worked off his debt around the house alongside Mexican laborers as they laid tile for the patio and pool, dug garden beds, and planted shrubs. His diving ambitions went unrealized. It turned out that teaching in the cold, murky Pacific off California delivered none of the joy he’d experienced in the warm, sight-rich Caribbean. His gig as a gardener ended, too, after another argument with Fitzmorris.

  Jeb found work at a movie theater fifteen minutes up a canyon road from Malibu, in Agoura Hills. He tended the concession stand and ticket counter and worked his way up to operating the projector. “He didn’t filter a lot,” recalls another employee. “He was a very real person who said what was on his mind.”

  Jeb enrolled in classes at Moorpark College, a local junior college, but he had no career aspirations. At twenty, his life lacked a plot. Stern recalled his friend despondent and discussing suicide. “It wouldn’t matter if I were dead,” Stern remembers Jeb saying. Stern chalked it up to angst, but privately Jeb was still flirting with dangerous mental territory. Lacking any purpose, he truly didn’t care if he lived or died.

  Miserable, without fear of death, he had nothing to lose by risking his life. And it was then, toward the end of 1997, that Jeb strode up to Helliwell at the Perris drop zone. Back on Fitzmorris’s payroll, working as a graphic artist and earning more than he ever had, Jeb could afford to ramp up skydiving training and enroll in Helliwell and Shoebotham’s first jump course.

  • • •

  ONCE HIS CLASSROOM LESSONS were complete, Shoebotham put Jeb through several bungee jumps from a hot air balloon to refine his exit technique. Satisfied, he handed Jeb a rig and they rode in the basket of the balloon above a thick bank of fog that obscured the ground.

  “Is this okay?” Jeb asked, scanning for some visual reference of the landing area.

  Shoebotham explained that with a big open field below, Jeb would be fine.

  “Really?” Jeb said, stepping to the edge of the gondola, gripped by terror. “If you say it’s okay . . .” Launching into the marine layer, a strip of ocean fog trapped by hot inland air, he pitched blindly, his chute snapping open as the ground appeared. He skittered across the grass safely, and his training was complete.

  Shoebotham recommended a bridge in Northern California for a first jump from a fixed object. It was best done after dark, he said, when no one was around. Jeb had questions, but Shoebotham cut him off. “Figure it out,” he said.

  Figure it out? Jeb thought. Figure it out?! . . . Welcome to BASE jumping.

  • • •

  Jeb could think of no one else to ask for this errand but Stern, who steered a maroon Mercedes sedan—which he had inherited from his grandmother and promptly painted black—north along I-5, through the Central Valley. They picked up I-80 in Sacramento for the final thirty miles to the Foresthill Bridge, a metal truss 730 feet above the roiling waters of the North Fork of the American River, swollen with winter runoff from the Sierra Nevada. Jeb said little on the ride, and Stern suspected nerves. “I knew it was risky and dangerous,” Stern says. “I don’t know if I knew how risky or dangerous, but I think I knew pretty well the consequences and the likelihood that he could die on his first jump.”

  They checked in to a hotel in Auburn, a quaint town among golden foothills. They scouted the bridge and landing area, a narrow gravel road to the immediate left of the river, which would require precision, particularly in the dark. Jeb’s equipment was minimal. He brought nothing but his parachute rig. He treated the jump as he would any skydive. He planned to jump after 1 a.m., and glow sticks to mark his landing were the only concession to the nighttime conditions.

  That night, they parked along the approach to the bridge and crept like ninjas for the quarter-mile to the middle of the span. Each approaching set of headlights caused them to duck behind a concrete abutment separating the roadway from a pedestrian walkway. Uncertainty about the legal consequences only ratcheted up their nervous excitement. At the center of the bridge they huddled. “Let’s do it,” Jeb said, climbing into his rig and scaling the railing. Before heading up, he had set the glow sticks, and they gave off a faint green light more than seven hundred feet below. “All right, Shawn,” Jeb called, crouching down, prompting Stern to lean over the rail and press the viewfinder of a camera to his eye.

  “Later, dude,” Jeb yelled into the night. Stern caught him with the flash from the camera for an instant before darkness swallowed everything and Jeb was gone. A second later, Stern heard the crack of a parachute opening, echoing across the canyon like a rifle report.

  Sprinting back to the car, Stern encountered some hostile locals who had stopped their car on the bridge. They grabbed for his camera, but he brandished a pocket knife, and they fled. Arriving beneath the bridge and parking, he made the rendezvous on foot. Jeb emerged from the dark, teeth glowing in a stupid smile. He walked with an almost drunken swagger, words pouring forth. He sounded delirious with joy: I threw my pilot chute immediately . . . flying blind . . . couldn’t see the ground coming . . . impacted hard . . . pants and shirt torn . . . sliced the flesh from my palms . . . bleeding . . . never happier in life.

  Jeb had overshot his glow sticks and slammed into the ground. Back at the hotel room, he wrestled his canopy, repacking with bloody hands, smearing blood on the carpet, walls, and, somehow, the ceiling.

  The next night at the bridge would be a virtual repeat, with Jeb overshooting the glow sticks and smashing into rocks along the river, scraping his knees, palms, and elbows. That was when he resolved to wear a helmet, kneepads, gloves, and other body armor. “When you eat shit,” he told Stern about the difference between BASE and skydiving, “you eat shit hard.”

  The room resembled the scene of a murder, which, he would admit in retrospect, it had been. By jumping, Jeb had killed some aspect of his former self, some part that for years had prevented him from truly pursuing his purpose in life.

  • • •

  YEARS LATER, STERN WOULD see the transformation clearly. “Here was something interesting about that trip, and it shows a little bit about how Jeb’s brain works,” he says. “The very first BASE jump he’s ever done, before we even drove up there, part of the drive was going to be, we were to drive back through San Francisco so he could check out the Golden Gate Bridge. His first jump, we had to go see the Golden Gate Bridge, because he wanted to look at it and be next to it. Before he ever made his first jump, Jeb was already visualizing his incredible jumps. He was already starting to see where he was going to take himself.”

  What Jeb had to do on that particular day was get intimate with the Golden Gate Bridge in all its dimensions, take in its art deco ladder towers and coiled strands of suspension cable. He wanted to walk on its roadbed and trusses, run his hands along the round heads of its rivets and its peculiar dried-blood cast of paint, officially called “international orange.” On the bridge that particular day, Jeb Corliss would reach for a destiny he was ready to seize.

  If he could see a do
zen years hence, he would see the many coming crashes in which he would break his back and ribs, and bones in both of his feet, legs, and arms. He would glimpse how some of his injuries would require weeks in the hospital. He would witness friends crippled and killed. All of which would be enough to make someone of lesser resolve consider quitting. But Jeb Corliss was beginning to consider the coming physical and emotional pain a worthwhile trade-off, because by risking his life he knew he would win something else: psychic relief and a growing sense of self-awareness and confidence. Already he was beginning to appreciate certain truths about himself. He recognized how, although fear caused most people to fumble, he hardly flinched.

  Chapter 4

  GIMME DANGER

  As the new millennium drew near, and BASE jumping moved into a more prominent and public phase, science was making serious headway in describing how neurochemicals form the basis for a range of risky behaviors. For centuries man had understood intuitively the appeal of risking one’s life, a sentiment Tim O’Brien summed up succinctly in “The Ghost Soldiers,” “It’s a hard thing to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.”

  Although more prosaic, science had lent its imprimatur, and a deeper understanding. A growing body of evidence suggested that preferences for risk can be traced partly to genes. Citing interplay between brain chemicals and physiology, geneticists said that those with a disposition toward risky thrills had at least partially been born that way.

  Many of the discoveries were the result of the Human Genome Project, a thirteen-year effort to map the human genome, completed in 2003. And researchers studying genetic code homed in on sequences within the dopamine D4 receptor gene, known as DRD4. One of the most variable genes, DRD4 contains a large number of sequences that differ from person to person. These discrepancies are known as polymorphisms. Investigations into the relationship between DRD4 polymorphism and psychiatric and neurological disorders produced some interesting findings that suggested a possible causal relationship between this gene and a whole range of human behavior. Researchers published papers citing alleles—alternative forms of the gene—that correlated with everything from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to schizophrenia, alcoholism, heroin addiction, and personality type associated with novelty seeking. The popular media would not be able to resist studies that associated DRD4 sequences with sexual promiscuity, and liberal political leanings, too. One journal called DRD4 “psychiatry’s repeat offender.”

  There was little disagreement, however, about how dopamine, a neurotransmitter manufactured in the middle brain that promotes pleasure, acts as part of an internal reward system. As neural signals converge at a small group of interconnected areas of the brain called the medial forebrain pleasure circuit, dopamine plays a crucial role. Although the relationship between risk taking and dopamine remains the subject of continued inquiry, studies demonstrated that, at least for some people, dangerous scenarios feel good.

  Through blood-chemistry analysis, clinicians discovered that those with a tendency to seek such intense stimulation have lower levels of monoamine oxidase, or MAO, an enzyme that plays a central role in breaking down neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. A protective enzyme, MAO regulates chemicals associated with arousal, inhibition, and pleasure the way a thermostat regulates the temperature in a room. As norepinephrine arouses the brain in response to stimuli, dopamine activates pleasure in response to arousal, and serotonin, in turn, counteracts norepinephrine and inhibits arousal. The resulting cocktail is tremendous arousal with tremendous pleasure. Although MAO is not completely understood, scientists agree that it at least plays a role in regulating the pleasure principle. Low MAO is associated with thrill seekers—hard-partying types, pioneers, police officers, social activists, and emergency workers. High MAO, by contrast, corresponds with depression and bipolar disorders.

  One theory holds that those who have lower levels of dopamine experience a chronic state of low arousal in the brain’s pleasure centers. For these people, novel and intense stimulation triggers a reward through the dopamine pleasure reaction, and lack of stimulation, otherwise known as boredom, seems a fate worse than death. Although arousal and pleasure can be stimulated by addictive substances such as heroin, cocaine, nicotine, or alcohol, they can also be activated by dangerous thrills.

  • • •

  NOT ONLY IS RISK taking a genetic predisposition, but it’s perfectly normal, according to psychologist Marvin Zuckerman, professor emeritus at the University of Delaware and a pioneer in the genetic aspect of arousal studies. Zuckerman calls people inclined to take risks “sensation-seekers.” Beginning in the 1960s, Zuckerman and his colleagues organized sensation seeking into a four-part scale, measuring the propensity for “thrill and adventure seeking,” with low sensation seekers on one end and high sensation seekers on the other. Zuckerman summed up much of his research in a groundbreaking text, Behavioral Expression and Biosocial Bases of Sensation Seeking. In it, he defined “highs,” as he calls them, as “seeking novel, intense, or complex sensations and experiences and willing to take risks to get them.” His research revealed they tend to be impulsive, uninhibited, and social and gravitate toward liberal political views. They enjoy loud music, pornography, and horror movies, although vicarious thrills seldom satisfy. They require actual risk—be it physical, social, or legal—to get them juiced. Among them are big bettors, drug users, and practitioners of adventure sports. Highs likewise hate boredom and need to up the intensity of activities in order to maintain their interest.

  “It’s called habituation,” Zuckerman explains. “Any experience repeated often enough loses its arousal. Even skydivers get bored. That’s what leads to things like BASE jumping . . . Because there’s more risk.”

  There’s more risk because events happen faster and there are fewer safeguards. But the risk is not exactly the point of the activity; it’s the sensation they’re after. “They accept the risk for the sake of the experience,” Zuckerman says, “the sensation. It’s a matter of balancing the reward of the activity against the anticipation of risk . . . They need that to be fulfilled in their lives.”

  One South African jumper has described the moment he approaches the edge as inspiring the most god-awful terror. The moment he jumps, though, all the sickness and fear simply drain away, replaced by rhapsody, “like a shot of morphine,” he says.

  In their most terrified moments, jumpers describe a sensation of sudden clarity similar to the enlightenment and consciousness of satori. In the present moment, the so-called now, they know that stepping off the building or cliff into the void could be the last thing they ever do. Tomorrow melts away, because it doesn’t exist—there’s a good chance it might not even happen. As far as yesterday is concerned, one jumper explains, “Who gives a rat’s ass about your bills? All that matters at that moment is what happens in the next three seconds of your life. You become completely, 100 percent focused on everything that happens right at that moment. You can feel the hair on your body stand on end, and you can feel the wind touching each pore.”

  Car accident victims describe a similar sensation of time slowing. Psychologists call it tachypsychia, Greek for “speed of the mind,” a false perception that our mental processes accelerate in times of stress. What actually happens is that fear allows subjects to gather more impressions, in greater detail, and only afterward does the resulting mountain of memories lend a distorted sense that time lengthened during a fearful episode.

  Such altered states are the result of the physiology of fear, a time when the body shifts resources from rational thought and fine-motor function to pumping blood and oxygen to muscles, and gearing up for a brute-force reaction to a coming threat. Not everyone reacts the same way under such duress, though. Some summon superhuman strength and stamina. Other
s melt down under the strain, unable to perform even the simplest tasks.

  The ideal response is what scientists call “the zone” or “flow state,” a sweet spot of optimal performance that brings such intense pleasure that it can convey a feeling of being godlike. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, who coined the term flow state, described it thus: “Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Flow is not strictly related to sports, according to Csikszentmihalyi. It can come during any activity requiring intense concentration, when applied skills and a challenge achieve a kind of balance, delivering a fleeting moment of fulfillment.

  Yet, paradoxically, it is the very unpredictability of what could happen that lights up the brain’s pleasure centers like the Vegas Strip. This is what happens when a casino roulette wheel is spinning, or a blackjack dealer prepares to hit a player with another card. There’s a possible financial payoff, sure, but such fraught anticipation in those very moments of tense uncertainty provides its own rewards. And what is adventure if not an activity with an uncertain outcome? The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language defines adventure as “a dangerous or exciting incident, or a hazardous enterprise,” and also as “a delightful experience.” Indeed, adventure conveys both danger and delight.

  Everyone defines adventure differently, of course. Some find satisfaction in waiting to watch a row of cherries line up on a slot machine; others need something stronger—say, stepping over the edge with a parachute. Still others obey the impulse to step over social boundaries, and some further, into extralegal territory.