Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  But Karin Sako had expressed her concerns before the trip. She knew everyone would expect Weston to be the best, and he would be loath to disappoint. She knew he was unfamiliar with the new wingsuit he’d brought to the event. There was also a subtext to Loïc’s flight at Verbier that could not be ignored. Months before meeting Weston, Sako had dated Loïc, and that fact weighed on Weston’s mind, friends would say. Weston was proud; he had prominent buttons that were easily pushed. “Just go and just have fun and make good decisions,” Sako had told him before he departed for Colorado. “Just remember, you don’t have anything to prove to anybody at this point in your life and your career. Just go and enjoy yourself.”

  The first two days of the festival went off without a hitch. Climbers scaled the gorge, jumpers launched from the platform into the narrow canyon, and Weston confirmed that his acrobatic maneuvers had lost nothing during his time off.

  The night before his planned wingsuit flight, he called Sako in California and left a message. He said he was being safe and having a good time. “I’ll be home tomorrow night, back in your arms,” he said.

  On the appointed day of his flight with Jeb, the plan called for the two to exit an airplane and swoop past the bridge. Wearing his customary black suit, Jeb would sweep beneath, while Weston, clad in the bright yellow wingsuit he had bought recently, would soar above the span.

  In the belly of a plane lifting toward three thousand feet, Weston donned goggles and Jeb pulled a shiny black helmet snug to his skull. As their ears popped, dulling the prop’s whine, Weston, wind blowing back his hair, appeared uncharacteristically nervous.

  Jeb thought to ask if his partner was okay. Did he want to call off the jump? If it had been anyone but Weston, Jeb would have spoken up. Instead he bit his tongue and let the matter drop from his mind and concentrated on what came next.

  Minutes later, standing in the rear of the plane, wind roaring through the open bay door, Jeb was ticking through a final mental checklist when Weston grabbed his hand. Between the prop noise and the wind and the helmet covering his ears, Jeb had to stoop, pressing his head to Weston’s mouth. “Jeb,” he shouted, words carried off in the wind. “Just remember, whatever happens, happens.”

  Stunned, Jeb shook his head. Weston had seldom breathed a trace of doubt on more difficult jumps and now he sounded just spooky. But no more was said. There was no time to talk. The time had come to exit.

  When the pilot signaled their position, both men bailed out in quick succession, tumbling past the tail as the plane floated away. Jeb glimpsed Weston’s distinctive yellow suit in his peripheral vision for a moment, aware that the first part of the jump had been executed without hiccups; they had not collided with the plane or each other. Turning his attention toward the bridge, he spread his arms and legs, pressurizing his wings, scanning for markers to guide him to his target. The canyon loomed below, and, according to the rough flight plans they had plotted earlier, his course would carry him beneath the steel-and-cable span. Although comfortably on target, even a slight lapse at a hundred miles per hour could send him crashing into the bridge or the canyon’s granite walls. Focused, he was vaguely aware that somewhere above, Weston had his own target.

  Hundreds of spectators had gathered on the bridge, watching as Weston screamed out of the sky, the yellow of his suit stark against the gray belly of clouds in the background. As he neared, his suit cut through the air with the sound of tearing paper.

  He moved at a steep angle, knees slightly bent, chin up. The crowd howled their approval as he cut closer, moving so fast that some ducked for cover instinctively. A yellow blur, Weston flew over thick suspension cables on the near side of the bridge, but then he dipped beneath them on the far side. Head-high to those standing on the deck, he aimed between vertical suspension wires. It all happened so fast, but the first sign of something gone wrong was a stomach-churning rending of metal, and a man crying out from the bridge, “Oh, no!”

  Weston’s parachute opened directly in Jeb’s path as he emerged from beneath the bridge. Moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, Jeb swerved hard to avoid a collision and passed through a shower of debris. Confused, he wondered if people were throwing things from the bridge, but he quickly regained his composure. Any small lapse in concentration could kill him in the narrow gorge. “I don’t have time to think about this right now,” he told himself. “I just need to fly.”

  When he pitched and his canopy opened, a wave of exhilaration washed over Jeb. He guided his parachute to the canyon floor, back near the bridge, along a railroad bed, rocks crunching beneath his boots. He had completed the best flight of his life and looked for someone to hug or high-five. All eyes were aimed upward, and Jeb whirled around in time to watch Weston’s yellow canopy settle on a ledge high up on the gorge. The faces around him registered shock.

  “What?!” Jeb yelled. “He hit the cliff?”

  “He didn’t hit the cliff,” a woman explained in a shaky voice. “He hit the bridge.”

  Looking around in confusion, Jeb spotted a severed leg not far from where he stood. Recoiling, he touched his wingsuit and noticed it was wet. Looking down, he saw that it was drenched in a dark liquid. That’s when it hit him that he was covered in Weston’s blood.

  • • •

  IT WOULD BE A long time before Jeb came to terms emotionally with what had happened. But the facts were plainly obvious: Weston had struck the bridge with such force that he bent a metal guardrail, scattering blood, tissue, and body parts dozens of feet in every direction. He was killed instantly, thirty years old, the violence of the collision opening his parachute directly in Jeb’s path.

  Iiro drove to LAX to retrieve Jeb, who carried the bloodstained wingsuit in his luggage. “He’s a tough cookie,” Iiro recalls. “He can handle, but I could see he was shaken and stirred.”

  Four days later, dozens of jumpers arrived at the Malibu beach house for a memorial and paddle-out ceremony. A half-dozen surfers sat on their boards in a circle beyond the waves and scattered Weston’s ashes to the water. Jeb caught a wave on the way in, clutching Weston’s remaining ashes in a plastic bag. “This is your last wave, dude,” he said.

  DiGiovanni was there. So was Iiro, wearing a neck brace and using crutches, having been injured in a low-pull competition at the Perrine Bridge. Both men would recall a debate among those present about Weston’s motive for cutting his flight so close.

  “That was his playground—that dangerous area, that riskier area, that walking-on-the-edge place,” Karin Sako would say.

  Someone floated a suicide rumor. But Iiro, Jeb, and DiGiovanni argued otherwise. Weston had not been an experienced wingsuit pilot. “He had the comfort level of taking risks as a BASE jumper, but he tried to implement those skills in wingsuits, and it’s a different sport,” Iiro would say later.

  “He came into wingsuits and didn’t treat it with the same kind of mind-set and same kind of training,” Jeb would say. “He thought that, because he was so good in one area, it would transfer into wingsuits, which it doesn’t.”

  Days passed before Jeb experienced a cathartic release of emotion. Waking one morning, he swung his feet off the bed and crunched down on a box containing Weston’s ashes and that’s when it hit him: He recalled plans he and Weston had made to meet in Bali for a surf trip, plans that were now beside the point.

  “He realized that if you put yourself in these situations, you’re going to miss all these BASE-jumping adventures,” Iiro recalls. “Life ends with death. You can glamorize death, but then when you really experience it, life just goes on. That was the turning point.”

  That winter, Jeb did not make his annual trip to South Africa for training. He spent long hours in his room, contemplating the meaning of life, and how jumping fit in. He wondered if it was worth dying for, and how his family would feel if it had been him instead of Weston.

  The answers did not come easily. Still, he would return to jumping, fulfilling a commitment on February 1, 2004, to plun
ge from rafters 265 feet above the field at Reliant Stadium, in Houston, for a Super Bowl crowd about to watch New England defeat Carolina, 32–29. The excitement of the game was overshadowed by Justin Timberlake’s ripping Janet Jackson’s blouse during a halftime dance routine, exposing her breast to millions of TV viewers. A tempest of outrage among newspaper editorials and TV pundits swirled all the way to the floor of Congress.

  Reaction eventually passed from headlines, replaced by some fresh scandal, a cycle similar to that playing out in the wake of Weston’s death. Once he had been the talk of the drop zone, but Jeb and others noticed that as the months went on, Weston’s name was scarcely mentioned any longer. Life had marched inexorably onward, as it does.

  “It’s okay to die,” Jeb would say later about the accommodation he made with losing someone whom he idolized, “because it’s going to happen to you, so get over it. And get on with living your life, because that’s what’s important. Not dying. But what you do with your life while you’re here.”

  Jeb understood that planning and executing new challenges gave his life greater meaning. And new challenges beckoned, maybe the ultimate challenge.

  • • •

  In September 2004, eleven months after Weston died, three jumpers stared into a gaping sinkhole a half mile across, in the remote jungle highlands of the Chinese interior. One of the jumpers was Chris McDougall, the wildly funny, Mohawk-wearing Australian. The other was a nimble and fearless woman from Norway named Vibeke (VEE-beck-uh) Knutson, vice president of the Stavanger BASE Klubb, which manages jumps from the big walls over Lysefjorden. The third was Jeb.

  Accompanied by two female interpreters from China, the trio had set out from Shanghai to this spot, seven hundred miles west, near Fengjie, a journey that required a flight, a boat ride up the Yangtze, and a van for the final few miles along winding mountain roads, inches from a sheer drop into the jungle. Their destination: Tiankeng—“Heavenly Pit”—a sinkhole with an underground river running through its lower reaches. The cave had been discovered by a BASE jumper named Paul Fortun on a scouting mission. Massive, remote, mysterious, and challenging, the cave appealed to a jumper’s most basic instincts.

  Jeb, Douggs, and Vibeke were determined to be the first to jump the place. They were already in China, among forty invited jumpers representing sixteen countries who would plunge thirteen hundred feet from the Jin Mao Tower into the financial district in Shanghai. The exhibition was sponsored by the Shanghai Sports Bureau and scheduled to be televised nationally.

  They had not actually sought permission to jump into the cave, though. And as they geared up to clip onto the steel cable that was strung across the hole like a lone guitar string—which they would use to make their way out over the middle—security guards materialized and explained to their interpreters that jumping would require a permit. “There was no way we were going to be able to get permits there in the time we had,” Douggs would acknowledge, “so we politely nodded our heads, packed up our gear and started thinking of a way to sneak in and do the jump.”

  Making their way to the other side of the hole, they quickly geared up, clipped onto the cable, and began making their way out, just as security arrived on the scene. “I quickly clipped onto the wire,” Douggs would remember, “and managed to get just out of arm’s reach, to which the guard became very pissed off.”

  As they shimmied along the wire, security picked up logs and began beating on the cable, vibrations violently bouncing the jumpers and echoing into the cave. Then the guards seized their interpreters roughly, persuading the jumpers to turn back, and this time leave for good. (A year later, Jeb and Douggs would return, with Fortun—and a permit—to film a documentary about their pioneering cave jump.)

  Returning to Shanghai, they joined their fellow jumpers at the Jin Mao (“Golden Prosperity”) Tower. At eighty-eight stories and built in a tiered pagoda style in the city’s financial district, along the Yangtze, Jin Mao was a potent symbol of China’s growing economic might.

  The invited jumpers were the crème of the sport, including Slim, who had recovered sufficiently from his injuries to carry the banner for Australia in the event’s opening ceremony, on October 6. Although he walked with a detectable limp, Slim had moved back to Australia and lived outside Sydney, working as a forester.

  Seduced by the promise of wingsuits, Slim made a study of their growing use in BASE jumping, and the benefits and dangers. In an online forum, he noted: “God help you if you have line twists.”

  The day before the event, one dedicated to practice, Slim brought his suit up the Jin Mao Tower. Cunningham was jumping at the time. Under canopy, floating above the financial district, he recalled seeing Slim soaring in his suit. He watched as Slim’s chute opened off-heading and spun into severe line twists. Kicking frantically to free his lines, Slim ran out of altitude and options. He aimed for the roof of a lower building, disappearing from the view of Cunningham, who figured his friend would wind up with a broken leg at worst.

  It was not until later, back at the hotel, that many of the jumpers learned that Slim’s situation had been serious. On the roof, Slim had slammed headfirst into an air-conditioning unit, cracked his helmet, and fractured his skull. He was rushed to Shanghai East hospital with head trauma. Jumpers as a group are not given to superstition, but they could not help but note that it was one year to the day since Weston had died.

  The show proceeded as planned, with pomp and fanfare. Hundreds of thousands watched live in the streets, and millions more witnessed the spectacle on television as jumpers dropped a quarter-mile, the finale a dozen jumpers in the air at once, trailing colored smoke as they fell.

  Two weeks later, on October 22, Slim died from his injuries at Canberra Hospital, in Australia, where he had been transferred. He was thirty-four. The deaths of Weston and Slim one year apart closed the book on an era in which they had defined avant-garde jumping. A new mode ruled by wingsuits began to take hold, and neither man survived the transition. This era would require a fresh set of skills for even the most accomplished jumpers.

  Jeb, who was present at Weston’s death and nearby when Slim went in, understood this as well as anyone. Back at Perris Valley Skydiving a month later, he teamed with a parachute test pilot named Luigi Cani to gather data on forward speeds, fall rates, and glide angles. Cani had come from Brazil to California to study at UCLA and turned a skydiving hobby into a profession as a parachute tester. He was small in stature, capable, and charismatic; those who met Cani noted how he instantly produced a business card. Sponsored by several companies, he is in every way the epitome of a “pro,” called on to test the smallest, fastest, and highest-performance canopy designs for manufacturers.

  For two days, in November 2004 he made test jumps with Jeb over the desert. Cani flew an Icarus VX-39—thirty-nine square feet of fabric, a canopy not much larger than a twin bedsheet. Fast and agile, Cani’s canopy kept pace with Jeb’s wingsuit, which had only half the surface area. The results of their tests were promising, and Go Fast, one of Cani’s sponsors, eager to seize an opportunity for publicity, issued a press release on their findings two days before Thanksgiving:

  PERRIS, CA

  (NOVEMBER 23, 2004)

  Pioneer B.A.S.E. jumper Jeb Corliss and Go Fast!–sponsored test pilot Luigi Cani, have paved the way for a world record landing attempt of a wing-suit, minus a parachute. Jeb and Luigi teamed up to gauge speeds and gather data to safely land Jeb’s wing-suit. Testing was critical, as no one has ever survived a landing attempt without a parachute. Jeb flew in free fall donning a parachute alongside Luigi, who was at the controls of the world’s smallest and fastest parachute, known as the ICARUS VX-39. The two were able to gather data using GPS systems attached to Luigi that tracked exact forward speeds, exact fall rate and glide angles needed for a safe landing. After two days of test piloting, Jeb Corliss said landing the wing-suit was possible as early as next year. “We found there is a definite and reasonable speed for a landing attempt som
etime next summer. We’re now developing four different types of technologies to land safely, it’s very important to land with zero injuries,” said Corliss after analyzing data from the test flight.

  Showcasing the evolution of the sport of skydiving, Luigi Cani remarked on the uniqueness of Jeb’s wing-suit project. “The testing shows the technology of the sport, nowadays we can jump a parachute that flies as fast as a person in free fall and currently we’re discovering technology to land a wing-suit without a parachute,” said Cani. “If Jeb lands the wing-suit without a parachute and survives, he is going to be my hero,” added Cani.

  Privately, though, Cani was less sanguine. “I’m afraid Jeb will be killed,” he confessed. Robert Pecnik, who had made Jeb’s wingsuits, remained skeptical, too. He suggested anyone thinking of landing with a wingsuit should first attempt to land a parachute face-first, an unpleasant scenario.

  Others remained undeterred, including Loïc. “What we are all aiming at is flying,” he said. “Natural flying. And you need to be able to take off and land, to be a little bird. It’s the dream of everyone since the beginning of humans.” He told the press of an idea he had for an air-brake method, wherein he’d flare his suit at the critical moment before impact, to skim either on a prepared snow slope or possibly land upright while running to a stop.

  In New Zealand, a former aircraft engineer and wingsuit pilot named Chuck Berry floated an idea for landing on a snow slope with skis. In Cape Town, Maria von Egidy, a costume designer for film and television, hefted a wingsuit in her hands and began experiments with modified designs that she hoped would permit an upright landing on a flat surface.

  Jeb closed ranks with acquaintances in the Hollywood stunt industry, inquiring about nets and decelerator fans. He wondered about landing in a box catcher, a low-tech airbag equivalent in which hundreds of stacked cardboard boxes compress and cushion during a high fall. Jeb, you could die, said the stuntmen he consulted. Unsafe, they said. Over and over, they dismissed his best notions as bad ideas.