Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  Omer Mei-Dan is a BASE jumper, an internationally known orthopedic surgeon originally from Israel, and a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He described BASE jumping and surgery as exercises in control. “At the end of the day, it’s a game of numbers,” he said about jumping in a profile for the Colorado medical-school publication CU Medicine Today. “Can I live with a 90–10 or an 80–20 chance? I want to feel that I control almost everything that I can control.” Mei-Dan likened jumping to surgical procedures he performed on players for FC Barcelona, one of the world’s premier soccer teams. Some of the players he treated were earning $15 million and more. “It was a lot of pressure,” Mei-Dan said, “and I like pressure.”

  For some, the pressure of treading to the margins, and launching beyond society’s rules and safeguards, can serve as an act of self-discovery. Out there, you find out who you really are.

  • • •

  Such a moment arrived for Jeb Corliss on his sixth jump. He had been sizing up an antenna at a place known as the Conejo Grade, a few miles from Malibu, on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, at the base of a steep stretch of the Ventura Freeway outside Camarillo. Practically in his backyard, a jump there would satisfy the A in the coveted BASE cycle.

  Consulting a sectional chart published by the Federal Aviation Administration depicting the altitude of objects that could pose a potential hazard to aircraft, he learned that the antenna topped out at three hundred feet. That was less than half the height of the Foresthill Bridge, and the minimum recommended by Helliwell and Shoebotham during training, because of the limited time to deploy and fly a parachute. The chart did not specify whether the height counted the hill the antenna sat on, however. To confirm, one night Jeb visited the antenna armed with an altimeter watch and a laser range finder. Parking his car, he walked alone along a strip of asphalt in the dark, traffic humming along the freeway. Climbing a chain-link fence topped by concertina wire, he scaled a ladder rising through the center of the antenna. At the top, his alti-watch and range finder confirmed the tower’s height: three hundred feet above the ground.

  There was a problem, though. Transmission equipment mounted on the antenna would be impossible to clear from the top. So he climbed down to where he could exit cleanly and measured again. The watch and the range finder read 260 feet.

  The following day, he phoned Helliwell, who urged him not to jump. She said he wasn’t ready, and that he could wind up in the guy wires in the event of an off-heading opening.

  Jeb asked her how long it would take his parachute to open if he used a forty-eight-inch pilot chute and pitched immediately.

  It could take 150 feet, she said, thinking that would be a deterrent.

  Thank you, Jeb said, and hung up.

  Subtracting 150 from 260 meant he had 110 feet to make any corrections, avoid guy wires, and fly his parachute to a landing. It was a sliver of time, offering no margin for error, but the jump was doable.

  On the appointed day, Jeb packed his gear. Around dinnertime, as the sun dipped into the Pacific outside, he slung his rig over his shoulder and headed for the door. Gigi intercepted him in the foyer. In the six years since Jeb had vowed his intention to jump, she figured he would outgrow the fascination. When he didn’t, she turned into a nervous wreck.

  She had been waiting in his room when he returned from his first jump, at the Foresthill Bridge, tears in her eyes. When he went to the bridge again, she repeated her lonely vigil. Returning, Jeb found her sitting on his bed. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing, and you can’t stop me. For you to sit here and waste your time with the worst possible terror inside isn’t helping anybody.”

  So when they came face to face in the foyer, Gigi girded for another showdown. This time she would be firm. “I never tell you not to do anything and I never have your whole life,” she began. “I never once told you not to do something. But this I’m telling you: Don’t do this! I don’t have a good feeling about this. I don’t think you’re ready for this. I think you need to get more experience for this. I don’t think you’re being smart—”

  “Well, I’m doing it,” Jeb cut her off.

  “I feel so strongly about this,” Gigi continued, her voice quavering with emotion, “that if you walk out that door, you’re not welcome back. You will no longer live here and you will have to find your own place to live!”

  Jeb considered her words—for about a second. “You’re going to do what you have to do,” he said with perfect equanimity. “I’m going to do what I have to do.” Then he walked out the door and drove off.

  That night, he ate alone in a restaurant and lingered until nearly midnight before driving to the antenna. Stern and a few other friends he called were not available. It was just Jeb and a new moon casting meager light on the shadows in the brush along the path. Over the hum of traffic on the 101, he heard rattlesnakes alert to his presence. Picking up a long stick, Jeb swept it in front of him to clear the way in case he encountered a snake. His heart drummed, and the merest hint of a breeze would have persuaded him to cancel. But the night was still.

  He draped a carpet remnant over the razor wire along the fence, slipped over, and began climbing. With each rung, a reason not to continue tolled in his head. He was alone. No one would alert help if he were hurt. The antenna was too low. He was too inexperienced. He could always come back. The antenna would always be there . . .

  He stopped beneath the transmission equipment, sitting with feet rested on metal supports, catching his breath and taking in the view of headlights and taillights floating along the freeway, the world oblivious to his presence. Pulling out his pilot chute, he stepped through the frame of the antenna and looked down at the glinting razor wire. I cannot do this, he thought. Watchful for signs, he noted a red light, marking the halfway point at 150 feet, flashing a steady message: Stop . . . Stop . . . Stop . . . As emotion strangled reason, he screamed into the night, “I’m not fucking doing this!” As his words echoed over the scrub terrain, his body pushed off involuntarily. Free from the tower, falling, he pitched his pilot chute immediately. One . . . Arms windmilling, he plummeted belly down, air flowing over bare skin on his arms and face, the road and cactus standing out starkly in the darkness. Two . . . The tower’s guy wires and cross supports slid by in slow motion. Falling past the blinking red light, air rushed in his ears, roaring like a hurricane. Spotting the gleam from razor wire growing closer, he crossed his arms in front of his face, turned his head, and braced for impact. Three . . .

  The force struck with such sudden violence that it knocked the wind from Jeb and left him seeing a constellation of stars. The only evidence he was alive was that he was upright and swinging, under canopy. Blinking, he watched the ground coming up quickly. With no time to grab toggles, he reached for a rear riser, connected to the parachute’s rigging and steering system, and yanked hard, turning fast for the road and slamming into the asphalt, coming to a sudden stop on his back. Gazing up, the lights on the antenna seemed to blink red to a rhythm of blood squirting in his capillaries, which he could hear and feel with the utmost clarity. Sucking for air, his body went into nervous spasms. Senses hyperalert, Jeb heard insects crawling in the brush nearby and felt the presence of each molecule of air on his skin. Searching the darkness, he spotted rattlesnakes distinctly coiled among the cactus.

  When Stern’s phone rang late that night, he heard Jeb’s breathless voice. “Dude,” he said, “you don’t understand . . .” Jeb always said, You don’t understand. It was one of his favorite expressions. Shouting into the phone, he went on to explain how he felt a surge of power afterwards. He tried to convey to Stern what it had been like, the sensory experience of jumping this particular tower, but he was only beginning to understand the significance himself.

  • • •

  JEB CRAWLED INTO BED that night, but sleep would not come for two days. His mind reeled through the years he had wondered about jumping, and abo
ut himself. Is this something I’m capable of? Is this me? Maybe it isn’t . . . At last he had the answer, along with some others. “I’m wired in a way where when I get scared, I operate better,” he would say. “I think clearer. I move faster. My body works better.” He was certain of something else, too. He could do anything with his life. Nothing would stand in his way. Not fear, not even for his life.

  Within weeks Jeb had boarded a plane for Norway to continue training with Helliwell and Shoebotham outside the port city of Stavanger. They would jump from the big walls at Kjerag, an imperious gray slab 3,000 feet above the cold blue waters of Lysefjorden. A jumping club operated out of a tiny village called Lysebotn with the blessing of Norwegian authorities, luring jumpers from around the world in the summer months.

  Back in Malibu, Gigi paced nights, and the Pacific roared on the beach as relentlessly as the storm of worry in her head. One restless morning, drawn to her balcony by a blood-red dawn, she spotted a swarm of bees blanketing the floor. Two decades earlier, pregnant with Jeb, she and Rick had rented a houseboat, a gingerbread barge, on Dal Lake in Srinagar, in the Kashmir Valley. It was autumn in the hills of the Hindu Kush, and they had hiked with porters in search of wild bee honey to collect for sale as part of their trading business. Back at the boat, the porters were packing honeycombs in crates when they were struck by a sudden swarm of vengeful bees from out of the mountains. The boat was pandemonium as everyone sought cover, but there was nowhere to go but overboard. Watching in wonderment, Gigi somehow remained untouched as men screamed and swatted around her. She would later reflect, “I always felt protected.”

  So when she saw the bees on the balcony in Malibu decades later, Gigi was seized by awareness that the cosmos, operating in its mysterious way, was sending a message. The bees . . . Yes! That’s when she knew that Jeb would be fine, that what he was doing was not just okay, but it was a great thing. And just like that, she was released from worry.

  • • •

  For years after he vaulted the fence and fled the military in Dover, Gary strived to get on with a new life. If the army had been looking for him, they weren’t doing so with any great gusto. He and Vivienne, the parents of a girl and boy, worked long hours to support their young family. Having gotten on the Actors’ Equity Stunt Register in 1997, Gary advanced through the ranks. He took stunt work seriously and sweated to make it look realistic, gaining a reputation for professionalism and for saving money for productions with his efficient approach to scenes. In the industry he was known as “One-Take Gary,” because that was usually how many times a director needed to shoot a fall or knockdown to nail it.

  One day he was on location on Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea, working on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a movie starring Nicolas Cage and Penélope Cruz, based on a book by Louis de Bernières about love amid a massacre during World War II.

  One shoot consisted of putting a howitzer into action down a street while bullets stitched the walls of the buildings and explosions and fire rained from aircraft. During the course of filming the battle scenes, Gary recognized the face of a man on the set, but he couldn’t place him. “I’m not sure where, but I’m sure we’ve met before,” Gary finally said.

  The man puffed out his chest and announced, “I used to be a sergeant major in 3 PARA.”

  Gary admitted that he, too, had been in 3 PARA. His service and the man’s had overlapped by several months. Although they must have crossed paths somewhere in the battalion, the sergeant major had left before Gary took flight and gave no hint he knew about it. He told Gary, “I have something that will interest you,” pulling from his pocket a piece of paper—a list of men currently serving in 3 PARA who would be joining them on set as extras when shooting resumed in a few weeks.

  Gary looked at the list and recognized several names. His heart sank. If the men showed up on set, he was in trouble. When he returned for three more weeks of shooting, Gary pulled his cap low and avoided the 3 PARA contingent as best he could. It was no use; some of them recognized him, and were eager to talk. They made no mention of turning him in, but Gary guessed it was only a matter of time before the army picked up his trail again. He was two thousand miles from home in a Mediterranean idyll, working a job he had strived to obtain to support his family, and still he was looking over his shoulder.

  Not that he had exactly been keeping a low profile. In 1998 he made a BASE jump by riding a BMX bike off a five-hundred-foot cliff at Beachy Head, a chalk headland in East Sussex, near Brighton. The stunt landed him in the papers and on television. Still, Gary was tired of running, and before returning home he made up his mind to do something about it.

  Back in the UK after shooting for the film wrapped, Gary rang up a friend who worked as a civilian lawyer and explained that he wanted to bring the matter of his status with the military to a close. They wrote a letter to the adjutant, the head of personnel for 3 PARA. Among other things, Gary recalled explaining in the letter that he had friends in the press. Toe the line with me, he remembered writing, or I’ll go to the press with stories about bullying and the way the regiment deals with certain issues. Two weeks later, an administrative discharge arrived for Gary in which the army determined his military conduct to be “UNSATISFACTORY.” He was no good to the regiment, and a lost cause as a soldier. He was finally free.

  It was a relief to no longer be on the run. Vivienne’s mother was off his back, too, having been dragged into the deception once when the police showed up at her door looking for Gary. His parents also breathed a sigh of relief.

  To further fix his future, Gary married Vivienne, and they settled in a seventeenth-century cider mill on two acres in rural Wales. Vivienne recalls that Gary did nothing to improve the interior of their home, but he did clear the woods to build the children tree houses. He bought them all-terrain vehicles and bicycles and led them in jumping from cliffs into the water. Living life with an eye to the next adventure, he eagerly pulled his family along. “When I was pregnant with our son, he would say, ‘How would you like to go to Pakistan in November?’” Vivienne recalls. “‘Hmm, I think I’m having a baby in November.’ He was fun, different, and never a dull day. He taught me to ski, taught Lydia to ski, took us to Amsterdam in January time. When we would go out for a walk with Gary, a lot of people will walk on the trail along the path. Gary always goes off the beaten trail to climb on trees . . . When we went on family holiday, the parachute was always in the back. We would sit on the top of the car and watch Dad jump off and parachute down to us, and with the police after us, gather the parachute in and go off, and can’t stop until we’ve lost the police.”

  Having put to rest the uncertainty surrounding his status with the army, Gary settled down to a life in the country—not for the quiet, necessarily, but for the promise of fertile ground to hatch future adventures.

  Chapter 5

  WINGS

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  —Sir Arthur C. Clarke

  They come to Arco for adventure, too, the rock climbers, hikers, windsurfers, and jumpers, and they find it here in the Dolomites of northern Italy, on limestone cliffs favored by climbers, where a medieval castle clings high above narrow cobblestone lanes. Windsurfers skitter across Lake Garda, and from Monte Brento, jumpers enjoy a mile-high plunge into a broad valley. In the morning, they all meet at a café at the base of a cliff for the very best coffee and to share rides up the mountain to a trailhead followed by a hike to the exit.

  Jeb Corliss first came here in the winter of 1999, having worked like mad as a graphic artist to afford another trip to the big walls of Europe. He was doing it, living the life. He had connected online with an excitable Frenchman named François, then met him at the airport in Geneva, and they traveled across Europe, jumping their way to Arco, where they encountered, among others, a group of Russians whom everyone called the Russian Mafia—and indeed, some were genuine underworld figures, brandishing big wads of cash and generally making ever
yone nervous.

  One day up on Brento, Jeb and François watched as one of the Russians laid a garment on the snow, a thing that resembled a wetsuit, with webbing sewed under the arms and between the legs. No one had ever seen anything like it. “What are you going to do with that?” someone asked. The owner explained that what they were looking at was a wingsuit, and that he was going to jump with it from the cliff and fly.

  With all eyes on him, the man geared up, stepped into the suit, and penguin-walked to the edge. Performing a countdown, he launched, plunging straight down at first, legs shoulder width apart, arms extended at right angles to his body. Subtly at first but steadily, he began to glide out over the valley. From the mountain they watched with intense concentration as the wingman became the merest speck before finally, a half mile distant, his parachute bloomed in the sky. “There’s the future,” someone remarked, breaking a stunned silence on the mountain, and yes, everyone had to agree.

  As jumpers, they had all liked to think that BASE made them truly birdlike. Someone was always saying that the sport was the closest approximation to flying. You could track from a high terminal object, after all. But those who witnessed the Russian’s flight were forced to reconsider their stance. His weird suit and webbed arms and legs gave him a distinct advantage. Jeb, for one, thought: This dude’s flying! This changes everything!

  Jeb was determined to get his hands on a wingsuit. His timing was impeccable. The Russian had fashioned his suit from a photo of one used by a Frenchman named Patrick de Gayardon. As it happened, two other men, Jari Kuosma of Finland and Robert Pecnik of Croatia, had recently taken de Gayardon’s inspiration even further. Skydivers both, they had teamed up in a commercial outfit they called Birdman, taking orders for custom wingsuits. Pečnik brought experience constructing jumpsuits for skydiving, and Kuosma applied a degree in international business. “It was just such a big jump into the unknown,” Kuosma would say about their venture. “We were doing something that we knew some people were doing before . . . but they were all dead.”