Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  Exhibit A was an Austrian named Felix Baumgartner. Baumgartner had acquired skydiving training in the military and began performing parachute demonstrations for civilians in the 1980s for a then virtually unknown beverage company called Red Bull, with headquarters at Fuschl am See, Salzburg. With the backing of Red Bull, Baumgartner would make two record-setting jumps in 1999—the highest from a building (a 1,475-foot leap from the Petronas Towers, in Kuala Lumpur) and the lowest ever, a 95-foot drop from the Christ the Redeemer statue, standing sentinel over Rio de Janeiro. Handsome, articulate, fearless, Baumgartner stepped straight from central casting as a classic pitchman. In BASE, though, he was a creature without precedent, a figure who profited from high-profile acts that repudiated the jumper’s ethic of “leave no trace” in favor of a “look at me” approach.

  He was not the only one, though. In 1998 and 1999, an offshore oil worker from Norway named Thor Alex Kappfjell went on a spree in Manhattan. He parachuted from the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, eluding security and police and defying Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Kappfjell sold footage of his Empire and Chrysler stunts to the syndicated tabloid show Extra and made headlines worldwide. In interviews, he called the Empire State Building episode “my biggest dream for many years.”

  Giuliani called the antics “irresponsible,” and Police Commissioner Howard Safir threatened to punish Kappfjell if he followed through with a vow to jump from the World Trade Center. “I know it gets a great deal of attention,” the mayor said. “It’s really a stupid and jerky thing to do, and it’s a very dangerous thing to do, not only for him but for the people below.”

  Still, Kappfjell returned to New York months later. On March 25, 1999, he sneaked to the top of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and leaped from 110 stories into the city. Landing on West Street, he vanished into the World Financial Center. “It was fantastic,” he told the New York Post. “I have no words to describe it.” He told Oslo newspaper Dagbladet that he “jumped to applause from those on the roof and the street.” Kappfjell again sought to sell footage to Extra. However, instead of sending payment, as promised, the TV show arrived at his room at the Hotel Carter with cameras and cops, capturing footage of the arrest of Kappfjell, his cousin, and a photographer.

  Kappfjell would plead guilty to three counts of reckless endangerment and admit to sneaking into the country using his brother’s passport after he had been placed on wanted lists by New York police. Sentenced to seven days of community service, he sued Extra for breach of contract for airing his Trade Center footage without paying him and for tipping off police to his whereabouts. Before the matter was resolved, however, Kappfjell was killed in Norway while jumping off Kjerag in fog early on July 5.

  Helliwell and the old guard, who had done so much to emphasize values of maintaining a low profile to Jeb and other students, looked on such prominent and illegal jumps with dismay. “‘Look at me on television and this bandit illegal thing I just did, and showing it to the rest of the world,’” she says. “The rest of us are kind of going, ‘Oh, no.’”

  Not everyone saw it that way, though. Some would see an alternative to a wage earner’s lifestyle.

  • • •

  Although Jeb had acquired a wingsuit, he continued to devote himself to BASE adventures. At a café in Arco, he and François had discussed the subject of freedom. Their conceit: What would you do if you could do anything? Francois said he would jump from Angel Falls, in Venezuela, and in the spirit of spontaneity, he and Jeb decided that was what they would do.

  They drove to Paris and booked flights to Caracas. After landing, they boarded a bus crowded with Indian peasants and their bawling babies and livestock, enduring a long overland drive on rutted roads to a town near Auyántepui, which means “Devil’s Mountain” in the language of the local Pemon Indians. From the top of the mountain, Angel Falls spills 3,212 spectacular feet into Devil’s Canyon, a brown squiggle through dense vegetation deep in the jungle in Canaima National Park. Located in the Guiana Highlands of southeast Venezuela, the park is larger than the state of Maryland. Characterized by canyons, flattop mountains, and dense tropical forest, the region remains as rugged, if not as remote, today as when it served as the inspiration for the setting of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic The Lost World, a primeval place, largely unexplored, where dinosaurs had escaped extinction.

  Posing as tourists, Jeb and François each offered a pilot $25 to fly a small plane over the falls, ostensibly to take photos. In their packs they stowed skydiving gear, and once in the air they secretly donned their rigs and instructed the pilot to fly to a higher altitude, all a precursor to the real jump they had in mind. François thrust $100 into the startled man’s hand for his trouble and followed Jeb out the door. They parachuted to the top of Auyántepui, and that was where the improvisational nature of the trip began to go haywire. Unprepared to spend longer than a day out in the jungle, they had few provisions—little water or food and no tents or sleeping bags.

  They slept on the mountain that night and in the morning hiked to the falls, only to discover the landing obscured by clouds. They waited all day for clear skies, and finally jumped that evening, a beautiful and long free fall to a trouble-free landing. But with darkness coming, they found themselves alone and facing another night in the jungle. Seeking shelter in a cave, they were devoured by mosquitoes during another long night without food. They would spend yet another night in the jungle. On the fourth morning, boats carrying tourists to the cataract finally arrived on the river. Bug-bitten, ragged, and starving, they used their remaining money to buy chicken and water from the boat’s crew, greedily devouring it on the ride along the river to Canaima, deflecting questions as to what exactly they had been doing out there alone. They explained to the skeptical captain that they were nature photographers.

  When he arrived home in Malibu, Jeb recounted his adventure for a baffled Gigi and Fitzmorris, neither of whom could fathom why he would go to such lengths for a thrill that lasted only a few seconds. “It was all about the preparation,” Jeb explained. “It was all about going to the places, meeting the people. It was the entire experience. It’s not about the sixteen seconds of free fall.”

  His parents remained skeptical of the value of his adventures, particularly as they concerned career prospects. They wanted him to come home and continue graphic design work. Jeb had other ideas; anyway, he was terrible at graphic design. Endeavoring to find out just what his footage was worth, Jeb phoned television producers about selling videos from Venezuela. A producer for the show Real TV agreed to pay $10,000, a baseline for further sales. Having figured out a way to make jumping pay, Jeb turned to plotting further adventures.

  Soon he was in South Africa, where he and a jumper from Russia named Yuri brought their wingsuits and hooked up with a South African police officer named John, whom Jeb had met on Kjerag, the big wall in Norway where jumpers gathered each summer. In Cape Town they linked up with a righteous crew of South African jumpers and wound up on Milner Peak, a six-thousand-footer in the Hex River Mountains of the Western Cape. Milner Amphitheatre is a three-thousand-foot wall the color of a coppery sunset, with a monster ledge about two-thirds of the way down, making it a two-stage jump—a sixteen-hundred-foot plunge to a landing on a ledge, where you repack your chute, for another nine-hundred-foot finale. It was to be Jeb’s first BASE jump with a wingsuit, and he and Yuri intended to clear the ledge in one fell swoop.

  A Jet Ranger chopper whisked them to a ledge, and they rappelled a hundred feet down to a ledge. It was nerve-racking just getting into position. The measure of a wingsuit pilot at the time was his ability to fly far, getting maximum glide. And Yuri distinguished himself as one of the world’s superior pilots, “a natural,” in Jeb’s words, who easily sailed over the monster ledge and pitched with plenty of altitude. When it was Jeb’s turn, though, he struggled to find his glide, and became aware immediately that he would not clear the outcropping. Having planned for this possibility,
he dipped hard left for a fissure gouged in the rock, dropping into a ravine, walls rising on either side as he traveled the trench the way Luke Skywalker had in his X-Wing on the surface of the Death Star in the climactic scene from Star Wars. Moving at more than one hundred miles an hour, Jeb burst through the end of the ravine into open air and pitched immediately, grateful to be alive. He had a lot to learn about flying a wingsuit.

  Yuri headed home to Europe, but Jeb remained in South Africa to tour jump sites without his wingsuit. Wind canceled many of his plans, but from Durban, he and John drove an hour outside Pietermaritzburg to a place called Howick Falls, a three-hundred-foot plunge along the Umgeni River in the hilly midlands of KwaZulu-Natal Province. It was the rainy season, and the swollen river churned brown like chocolate milk.

  John planned to film Jeb and a blond kid known as Rat as they jumped from the rim of the gorge adjacent to the waterfall, the river below providing a margin of safety if anything went wrong. Grabbing a handful of grass, Jeb tossed the blades to the wind, and they fell mostly straight down. Wind did not appear to be a factor. Only a malfunction would pose a potential problem. “In the analysis of risk versus reward, the risk didn’t seem very high,” Jeb would say later. “We decided to go ahead and jump.”

  As the more experienced of the two, Jeb jumped first, pilot chute in his hand for a quick pitch, given the relatively low altitude. “All right, bro,” he announced to Rat. “Let’s go.”

  Pitching without delay, Jeb nevertheless made a small but significant error with his body position as his canopy inflated. Because he had dipped his left shoulder, his parachute opened asymmetrically and swung hard to the left, ninety degrees, steering Jeb toward the veil of water pumping off the ledge. Oh, no . . . As he came in, legs out defensively, the water swallowed him and his parachute in one gulp, slamming Jeb into a ledge behind the falls in a seated position, insides crackling with the impact. In the ensuing chaos, rocks punched into his ribs and he plunged downward, a long fall headfirst into a cool green pool beneath the turbid water at the base of the falls. He knew he was deep underwater from the pressure expanding in his ears.

  Kicking in desperation for daylight, he broke the surface and gulped air. He was a few feet from the waterfall. Slowly stroking for shore, bug-eyed with adrenaline, he paused in shallow water. In an area littered with large rocks, he rolled onto his back, exhausted. His parachute surfaced several feet away, rippling like some marine monster in the wash from the falls. Without strength to stand or crawl, his back throbbing with pain, Jeb hoped for a speedy rescue.

  It took his friends an hour to reach him. When they did, John dragged Jeb as far as he could from the water, which wasn’t more than a few feet. Jeb was heavy and waterlogged, and the rocks were slippery. Jeb lay shivering, small crabs scuttling from the rocks to feast on the raw, wounded flesh on his back.

  Due to the coming darkness, a helicopter rescue was out of the question. It would be a long night. Three hours passed before a rescue team arrived. When it did, Jeb refused painkillers, out of his normal aversion to drugs and alcohol but also in the belief that he would be better able to determine the source of his pain if it was not blunted by morphine. On the rugged, dark terrain, it would take rescuers six hours to carry Jeb to an ambulance. They stopped to rest several times along the way, including once to pump Jeb with muscle relaxant when he experienced violent convulsions. He was too shattered to argue.

  In the hospital, machines monitoring his vitals, Jeb lay shirtless in bed, tubes taped to his arms and disappearing into his nostrils.

  “BASE jumping is fun, right?” John asked.

  “Yeah,” Jeb said weakly, waving a finger. “Ouch!” He had broken his back, sacrum, tailbone, ribs, sternum, and a knee and somehow chipped a tooth.

  His resolve, though, remained intact. A doctor entered the room and said, “I’ll bet you’re never going to do that again.”

  Jeb responded in a voice quavering with emotion. “Dude,” he said, “there’s only two things that will prevent me from BASE jumping.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Quadriplegia or death!”

  The doctor laughed.

  Jeb would spend a month in the hospital in Pietermaritzburg, long enough to develop a romance with the daughter of a family friend from South Africa. She came to read to him in the hospital most days, and this would lead to an emotional parting when finally Jeb flew to LAX on a commercial flight, accompanied by a paramedic and nurse. They occupied nine seats in coach. He wound up spending one night at a hospital in Compton, and that frightful experience was enough to cure Jeb. He told his parents to get him home.

  Within a week of arriving home, Jeb discarded a back brace and boarded a flight to Mexico, where his friend Omer Mei-Dan, the orthopedic surgeon, arranged for a jumping expedition to Mexico’s Cave of Swallows. A one-thousand-foot sinkhole in the jungles of the Mexican midlands, the cave got its name from the groups of swallows that nest in the walls, flocking like a feathered tornado twice a day while leaving and entering the hole on their rounds. Yes, he was back.

  At home again, Jeb began a yoga regimen to rehabilitate his injuries. He never thought he would practice yoga, but he had to admit that it worked. By and by, he began to feel better. His life was looking up. The entire ordeal in South Africa had been filmed, and would make Jeb a small fortune when he sold the footage to producers from Real TV, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and eventually something on cable called Holy @#%*!

  Chapter 7

  DWAIN, SLIM, AND DR. DEATH

  And immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he regained his sight, and he got up and was baptized.

  —Acts 9:18

  At the offices of Basic Research, in Perris, they were beginning to hear a lot of grumbling. Jumpers were calling up Helliwell and Shoebotham. Who is this guy? they demanded to know.

  “He’s definitely pushing the envelope,” Shoebotham would explain. “But he’s not doing it with carelessness. He’s doing it because he’s pushing himself; he’s pushing the sport, but he’s not doing it in a careless fashion.”

  Pushing the sport?! The guy needs to slow the fuck down!

  Shoebotham finally confronted Jeb. “Okay, we’ve seen other guys do what you just did and die from it,” he said. “We’ve seen kids come with a lot of energy . . .”

  In addition to the problem of glory seekers, the old guard contended with a cult growing around some of the most progressive and dangerous maneuvers in free fall that anyone had ever witnessed. Jumpers were attempting half twists, full twists, half pikes, full pikes, full twisting triple flips, often from seriously low objects—slider-down stuff just a couple hundred feet off the deck.

  Shoebotham was against the new acrobatics, or “aerials,” predicting that they would only lead to a lot of injuries and death. And injuries and death would only draw a fresh round of negative attention to the sport. “In those early days, when I was really active, doing fifty, sixty BASE jumps a year, a couple hundred skydives a year, we were just going out there trying to survive,” he recalls. “Not doing any fancy flips or anything, [but] belly to earth, open the parachute in the right direction, and not crash into anything.”

  Shoebotham argued with Jeb over aerials. “Why can’t I?” Jeb said. “Who says I can’t?”

  “You’re really pushing it. Just go out and fall safe off this thing. That’s really where the sport is right now.”

  But Jeb saw the sport heading in a direction that Shoebotham wasn’t ready to accept. The leaders of this movement were two Australians—Dwain Weston and Roland Simpson, whom everyone called Slim. They were the talk of drop zones and exit points around the world.

  An accomplished gymnast and surfer, Weston trained assiduously, enrolling in high-dive classes, incorporating maneuvers into free fall. He worked as a software developer and brought the same attention to detail to his jumping, applying mathematical calculations to determine time spent in free fall, time to complete maneuvers, ti
me to inflate his parachute. Weston combined an intellectual approach to jumping with a cocksure persona that left a profound effect on everyone who had occasion to meet him. He was known for his aphorisms: “Who has the guts to stand by and prove his convictions?” he would ask. “If you are not moving forward, then you are just moving backwards.” His credo: “Today is a good day to die, blah, blah, blah . . .” His motto: “No ethics, no morals, no conscience, no guilt.” Gary Cunningham, another Aussie jumper, who met Weston in the mid-1990s, noted that his friend appeared to lack something else, too—“the built-in survival mechanism called fear.”

  It was not so much that Weston wasn’t scared. It was that he treated the edge as his playground; he enjoyed mastering dangerous thrills.

  Outside Australia, though, Weston was more rumor than reality. Then, in the summer of 1999, word spread that he would be coming to Norway. The jumping community would have occasion to size him up. Cunningham accompanied Weston on that trip and would recall years later the shocked reaction. “Physically, Dwain was not really what most people expected when they first met him,” he would write. “He was a short skinny guy that had shoulder length blond hair. A couple of times people had mistaken him for a girl (I guess from a short glimpse from a distance). On first sight some were surprised to realize he was the legendary Dwain Weston.”

  On the cliffs of Norway, Weston showed that he was the real deal. Soon he would take the international jumping scene by storm. Weston and his protégé Slim relocated to Portland, Oregon, where they fell in with a group of competitive jumpers with a wicked sense of humor. They called themselves Suicide Solution. One member of this group was Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne, a former medical examiner in King County, which includes Seattle. Hartshorne, known to acquaintances as Dr. Death, had performed the autopsy on Kurt Cobain, and thus became associated with conspiracy theories surrounding the grunge icon’s death. Dr. Death was the kind of person who inspired stories anyway. He possessed a morbid sense of humor and was rumored to have collected the hands of fetuses belonging to pregnant women he had performed autopsies on. People said he kept the hands in a jar of formaldehyde at home.