Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  Neither he nor his fellow jumpers could anticipate how, soon enough, the deed of one man would invigorate them and alter expectations, and their destiny, in the coming decade.

  Chapter 9

  SKYDIVER OF THE DECADE

  SWISS ALPS, SPRING 2003

  Looking back, his early life would make his later deeds seem almost preordained, like he was meant to fly. The pattern started early for Loïc Jean-Albert. He was raised on Reunion, a lush volcanic French island territory in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. He grew up racing sailboats in the tropical waters offshore, where under sail he had learned to read air currents, scanning the skies and the roll of the swells as if he were studying a second language. The son of skydiving instructors, Loïc began jumping from planes at age fifteen, applying lessons and principles from sailing to tracking and maneuvering through the skies, catching and deflecting air resistance. By eighteen his skills were sufficiently advanced that Loïc was selected for the French national skydiving team for eight-way relative work, a discipline in which participants create choreographed formations—like synchronized swimmers in the sky. He moved to the French Alps to train and was responsible for maintaining the team’s equipment, spending much of his time sewing, drawing on his experience repairing sails. It was in this capacity, in Gap, France, in 1996, that Loïc met Patrick de Gayardon, the world’s leading skydiver and inventor of the modern wingsuit, who admired the lanky teenager’s talent, resolve, and easygoing manner. The two became friends and began jumping together outside of team activities, trading ideas, sharing their dreams and ambitions. Loïc became a protégé of sorts to the older man, trailing Deug, packing his rig, sewing his wingsuit. Learning at Deug’s elbow, Loïc was one of the first to build and fly a modern wingsuit, incorporating principles from sail construction into wingsuit design. He continued his mentor’s work after Deug died, founding a wingsuit-manufacturing company he called Fly Your Body.

  Testing designs for this company, Loïc honed his skills as a wingsuit pilot. By 2000 he had begun pushing into new realms. Rather than attempting to maximize glide to soar as far away as possible, free from the danger of a collision with a cliff, he wanted to see how close he could come to terrain. Jumping from a friend’s Pilatus Porter, he buzzed mountains around Megève, a ski-resort town in the Rhône-Alpes region of France, near Mont Blanc. In Italy, he made a BASE jump from Monte Brento and hugged the big wall with his wings. When he was featured in a skydiving film, Crosswind, cruising cliffs on Reunion, the footage sealed his reputation. At a time when a pilot’s skill was measured by how far he could travel from his exit point, Loïc’s approach turned the sport on its head. “He was an artist,” Jeb would later say.

  Using his body as a brush, the terrain as a canvas, with precise strokes, Loïc traced memorable, heart-quickening lines. His masterpiece, though, from an aesthetic point of view, would be a stunt he had trained months for, scouting and selecting a snowfield in Switzerland with an ideal slope of thirty degrees. And on a bright March day over Verbier, Switzerland, Loïc, twenty-five, was at last ready to put his plan into action.

  On that day, a white chopper lifted off, thudding into a cloudless blue sky above the Pennine Alps in western Switzerland, where daggers of rock and snow rise fourteen thousand feet into the atmosphere. Inside the helicopter, wearing a UN-blue helmet and headphones, Loïc sat calmly in a white-and-black wingsuit.

  As the helicopter hovered a thousand feet above the peaks, he stepped onto one of the skids and into position. Falling toward a blade of rock, belly first, wings filling with air, he edged forward gradually until he was nearly on top of a pristine snowfield. Adjusting his body position, Loïc glided forward faster, accelerating to more than a hundred miles per hour, roaring through the air, his angle matching the slope of the muscular frozen landscape. Head up, feet down, body canted at a forty-five-degree angle, Loïc resembled a fast-moving Nordic ski jumper moments before touchdown. Except that the gap between his body and the snow never changed. He appeared immune to gravity, his shadow on the snow resembling the skirted figure that restaurants place on the door of the ladies’ restroom.

  Two accomplices on skis lay ahead, along a glaciated strip of mountain. Stopping, they turned to watch, waving their poles as Loïc ripped the air a mere six feet overhead, near enough that if they had tried, they could have reached up and touched him with the tips of their poles.

  Hewing close to the mountain, Loïc hurtled away, running out of terrain where the snowfield ended at a cliff. Gaining altitude as the ground dropped away, he pitched his pilot chute and descended under a canopy colored to match his helmet. His feet finally touched down in another snowfield, unblemished but for two ski tracks.

  It’s hard to understand the significance at this late date, but in the ensuing months, video of Loïc’s run made the rounds in the skydiving and BASE-jumping realms, studied and deconstructed with the kind of intense concentration associated with the Zapruder film. Online forums and drop zones crackled with word of Loïc. “Amazing . . .” a typical poster on Dropzone.com wrote, “just stoked . . . can’t go back to work . . .” In recognition of his achievement, Loïc would eventually be named Skydiver of the Decade by Paramag magazine.

  In the aftermath of Loïc’s close flight, discussion focused on the prospects for landing a wingsuit without a parachute. Not everyone agreed that it could be done, or that it was even worth attempting. But those who felt otherwise seemed convinced that, now that he had shown the way, it would not be long before Loïc or someone else with the proper proportions of brains and balls made a serious attempt. A new era of wingsuits was about to begin.

  • • •

  While Loïc had been in Switzerland in March 2003, the buzz surrounding wingsuits had lured a curious Gary Connery to California, where he and a friend made a jumping junket in which his friend would make his first skydives. Gary preferred the United States over the UK for skydiving. One factor was weather. Another was culture. In the UK, he’d roll his eyes at the drop zones when he encountered what he considered a bunch of failed rock stars telling one another failed-rock-star stories. In the States you simply showed up, signed a waiver, and were on your way.

  When they arrived at Perris Valley, Gary inquired about making a wingsuit flight. “I hadn’t discussed it with anyone,” he would later recall, about the potential for landing, “but I was aware that other people were discussing it. But I needed to then experience wingsuit flight before I could make a considered assessment of whether it could be done or not.”

  At Perris, Gary walked right up to the manifest, where you check in for each skydive, and explained that he wanted to try a wingsuit. He had the required experience, but it was recommended he use another parachute than the sport canopy he owned, because if he pitched while unstable, he would likely wind up with line twists, necessitating a nasty cutaway. Gary bought a secondhand parachute someone was selling on consignment at the shop at the drop zone and paid to have it rigged.

  The following day, he picked up his new canopy, signed his name in the ledger at the manifest, and met his instructor. The instructor took Gary through a ground course, explaining all they would do in the aircraft and in the air. Gary would make five jumps that day. The first four, he kept it simple, gaining a feel for the suit, and the necessary body position. His head slightly down, something he needed to correct, but he was ready to attempt some more advanced maneuvers. For the fifth jump, the instructor explained that he wanted Gary to look at him. He would be to Gary’s left. Then they would make a left-hand turn together, and look at each other, before making another left-hand turn. In that way, they would make a descending corkscrew pattern before finally pulling.

  Once at altitude, Gary and the instructor checked out of the plane together, tumbling past the tail. When Gary looked around, though, his instructor was nowhere in sight. He looked left. Nothing. He looked right. Nothing. He finally spotted the man far below.

  Alone, Gary went through the drill they had discussed
, making left-hand turns before dumping at four thousand feet. He was somewhat unprepared for the force of his chute opening in full flight and performed a front somersault through his lines. Still, he had no other problems and on landing Gary walked up to the instructor. “What happened?”

  The man admitted that Gary had flown so well that there was nothing more he could teach him. He had passed the lesson. Just keep going, the instructor urged.

  • • •

  THOUSANDS OF FEET UP, the ground hadn’t appeared to be moving, but Gary had felt the glide, and the possibilities for landing without a parachute. As a stuntman, he had leaped from ledges a hundred feet high before and landed in hundreds of empty cardboard boxes at more than fifty miles an hour, the crumpled cardboard absorbing all the energy, allowing him to walk away without a scratch.

  Could he fly accurately enough to land a wingsuit in stacked boxes? Grabbing a pen and paper, he sketched out a box rig, outlining a rectangular shape and a target for landing. Quick tabulations told him that he would need eighty-seven thousand boxes to build a rig the size of a soccer field and as tall as a basketball hoop. More calculations told him he would need about $250,000—for the boxes as well as to rent a helicopter and pilot and to put on a large-scale production for what would amount to a world’s first in aviation—in his words, the “Holy Grail of human flight.”

  As his mind expanded on the subject, Gary came to believe that landing would be similar to summiting Everest: everyone knew that Sir Edmund Hillary had been first, but few could say who had been second. From Neil Armstrong to Roger Bannister, everyone always remembered the firsts, and the chance to etch his name among the immortal warmed Gary’s blood.

  Landing in boxes would not be altogether different from his stunt work. All he needed was sponsorship to cover the costs, and additional training. Vivienne would recall her excited husband walking in the door at their house in Wales with talk of his wingsuit flights. “When he came back from California, he said, ‘That could be landed,’” she said.

  Yet beyond Vivienne and a few close friends in the stunt industry, who weren’t sure what to make of his plans anyway, Gary said little about his ideas. If he was going to proceed, it would be in near secrecy. Later that month he traveled to Empuriabrava, on the coast in Catalonia, Spain, home to the largest drop zone in Europe, where he practiced flying for a week, trying to get a feel for his capabilities.

  By May 9, 2003, Gary was back in England. That morning a crowd gathered at Trafalgar Square, in the center of London, among the many missions and consuls belonging to the nations of the world wishing to be near the arms of British administrative power. The crowd gazed up at Gary, perched on a 170-foot platform atop Nelson’s Column for a stunt conceived by the Act for Tibet organization, a group protesting Chinese occupation of Tibet. The group had recruited Gary in order to draw attention to their cause.

  Arriving at the square early on a Friday, Gary and accomplices handed out pamphlets apologizing for any inconvenience and asking citizens to be “patient and understanding.” At 5 a.m. British Summer Time, he and three activists began scaling the monument’s gray Corinthian column, like rock climbers. An hour later, they reached the platform. They unfurled a fifteen-yard banner depicting the Dalai Lama and draped Tibetan prayer flags over the statue of Admiral Horatio Nelson that crowns the monument. Gary wore black nylon pants and a blue nylon Windbreaker, a white bandanna printed with a pattern on his head, and a parachute on his back. At last ready, and with rush hour at a pitch, as morning commuters streaming along the streets around the square stopped to stare, Gary jumped, arching his back, bending his knees and elbows, hands positioned to grab his risers as soon as his parachute opened. He had three seconds to get his chute open and operating or he would hit the ground at more than sixty miles an hour.

  To ensure the chute opened, he used a static-line setup, in which a cord attached to the platform would pull his parachute from its pack as soon as Gary fell a few feet. Working as designed, his chute popped open, a blue-and-gray pattern. Gary flared immediately, feet hitting the ground as onlookers screamed in a mix of shock and delight. It was all over in seven seconds, and as he gathered his parachute, constables from the Met moved in to arrest him.

  “I know I’m coming with you,” Gary said to police as reporters fired questions. “Can I get my parachute in the bag?”

  No worries, the inspector said.

  Gary explained to reporters that although he was “frightened,” he had jumped “for a good cause.” He described being “scared shitless,” adding, “You’ll have to excuse me—I’m in a different space at the moment.”

  Gary was bundled into a van and driven to Charing Cross Police Station, only a few blocks away on the Strand. He was booked for causing criminal damage. Later, an inspector visited Gary’s cell, carrying a tray containing tea, toast, bananas, and a copy of the Evening Standard. On the front page was a photo of him under canopy, flying in front of Nelson’s Column.

  The inspector was a Buddhist from India, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile, and he was intent on making Gary’s stay as comfortable as possible. He encouraged him to visit the nurse, a pleasant and attractive young woman who fixed Gary another cup of tea. In the end, Scotland Yard treated Gary as well as the metropolitan police had and did not pursue charges. They were not interested in Gary Connery, for jumping Nelson’s Column or anything else.

  • • •

  VIVIENNE HAD ALWAYS BEEN tolerant and supportive of Gary’s stunt work and ambitions, but the demands of his career, especially long periods of separation from his family, had created tremendous strain at home. Traveling from job to job, Gary had once not returned home for four months. Often he crashed on friends’ couches in London in order to be closer to work on set, rather than driving three hours on dark rural roads back home to Wales. These were especially lonely times for Vivienne. “So while we would keep in touch by phone, at night I had little children, an eleven-year-old and an eight-year-old,” she says. “I was very busy. And working—I worked in social services and also buying property.”

  Gary had made few friends in Wales and felt no particular attachment to the place, except for his family. He worried that one night, pushing hard to get home to his family following a long shift on set, exhausted and racing along winding lanes, he would exceed his capabilities and crash, possibly killing himself.

  So, toward the end of 2003, the Connery family cut their losses in the country and moved closer to London, packing up all their things, including a framed print of Peter Pan that Vivienne had given Gary as a gift. It was a reminder that when he struggled with his role and responsibilities as a husband and father, Vivienne viewed Gary as a boy who had never grown up, holding fast to youthful dreams of flying.

  Chapter 10

  WHATEVER HAPPENS, HAPPENS . . .

  I began to live truly independently of everything that could place limits on my inclinations. As long as I respected the laws it seemed to me that I could despise prejudices. I thought I could live perfectly free.

  —Giacomo Casanova

  COLORADO, OCTOBER 2003

  In the months after Loïc’s close flight above Verbier, Dwain Weston, the man who had done so much to alter BASE with his progressive acrobatic maneuvers, was bracing for life-altering changes. That summer, he had traveled to Europe for a last hurrah, jumping his way across Switzerland, Norway, and Austria. When he returned, he was to decamp from Portland for a new job at Boeing Defense, Space, and Security, in Seal Beach, California. He would be performing classified work, developing software for use in satellites manufactured up the coast in El Segundo. He would move in with Karin Sako at her place in Huntington Beach and settle into a standard nine-to-five schedule, with two weeks of vacation each year. Working at Boeing had been Weston’s dream, and living at the beach would allow him to surf every day. “The ocean was his church,” Sako says. The downside to the coming changes: BASE jumping was about to take a backseat in his life.

  As a resu
lt, when he arrived at the airport in Denver during the first week of October 2003, Weston was, in the argot of skydiving and BASE jumping, “not current.” He was rusty. He was there for the Go Fast Games, a three-day festival put on by an energy drink company called Go Fast that would feature speed climbing and BASE jumping at the Royal Gorge, outside Cañon City, Colorado, a hundred miles south of Denver in sagebrush country. The finale called for Weston and Jeb to fly wingsuits together from a plane and buzz the Royal Gorge Bridge, the world’s highest suspension bridge, a thousand breathtaking feet above where the Arkansas River carves a course deep through Fremont Peak. A half mile wide, the span features three-hundred-ton cables strung between 150-foot towers. Organizers of the games had built a platform extending from the deck for jumpers to launch from.

  Part of the Weston legend rested on his assiduous preparation. In the early part of the summer, he had written in a magazine article: “It is no secret that over the past five years I have pushed the limits hard. Although I train extensively and arm myself with the latest knowledge and technology, I have used these things simply to survive at the very edge, rather than allow myself any margin for error.”

  But if his recent hiatus gave organizers and other athletes cause for concern, they did not share it at the time. During a decade of jumping, Weston had never sustained a serious injury. “Every time he succeeded with one thing that we felt was the very limits of what you could do, he would then step it up and train for something even more extreme,” his friend Gary Cunningham recalls. “After awhile we gave up worrying about him and just accepted that he was invincible, as he did many extreme jumps and made them look easy.”

  Others were too much in awe of the man to suggest caution. “He was a god,” Jeb would say. “He didn’t even have a close second.”