Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  Inside, the Cape Times quoted Merle Collins, spokeswoman for Table Mountain National Park. Authorities were considering fining Jeb and pursuing criminal charges for jumping without a permit. “He was absolutely not allowed to jump,” Collins told the paper. “It is worrying to me, because people may think they can do this now without permits.”

  Iiro worked to minimize the damage. In an e-mail to authorities, he explained that there had been a misunderstanding over permits, and in any case Jeb and his insurance company would bear the costs for rescue and medical treatment.

  The press refused to let the story peter out. Reporters posing as friends sneaked into the ICU to talk to Jeb. Moose was hounded because he had called in the chopper rescue. He hid out at home and refused to answer his phone.

  The increased attention was not welcome among BASE-jumping and wingsuit enthusiasts in South Africa, who worried that they would be under scrutiny and no longer permitted to jump. Julian Boulle explained how hardfisted jumpers from Johannesburg had vowed to come down and teach Jeb a painful lesson.

  The fallout from the crash affected everyone in different ways. Succumbing to stress and exhaustion, Moose had been practically carried off the mountain by friends, like a wounded soldier. At the car they dumped a five-liter bottle of water on his head to revive him.

  Later in the week, still dodging the press while Jeb remained in the ICU, Moose invited the others to screen footage of Jeb’s crash at his home. Iiro whipped up lasagna for dinner. There was wine, vodka, and whiskey. Everyone watched from Moose’s cramped office as Jeb, in slow motion, clipped a rock just below the knee and cartwheeled over the ledge. It didn’t seem possible that he should survive.

  “Let’s just enjoy him,” Joby said, toasting to Jeb’s recovery, “because a person like that won’t be around long.”

  Moose sat in a chair on the deck outside, cradling a cup of Cape red. “Danger is,” he said, summing up his feelings, “you become an extraordinary person. Jeb is rapidly becoming or already is extraordinary. He’s unique. He’s extremely skilled and has an amazing perspective on this sort of thing. So he shoves himself into a position of esteem or uniqueness. The danger is getting addicted to the dream of being unique or being up there on this pedestal and keeping yourself up there. He’s on his own little mission. He doesn’t give a fuck. One way or another, he’s going to get there . . .”

  Moose mentioned how he had talked to one of the doctors at the hospital, a man Moose knew personally, who had put pins in Jeb’s legs during surgery. The doctor recalled, just as Jeb was about to go under from anesthetic, the patient’s last words: “I know I can land it.”

  • • •

  In the ICU, Jeb’s legs were covered in white plaster, from the knees to where his long toes, black with bruises, peeked out. He was surrounded by beeps and alarms, monitoring vital signs, and strange tongues from fellow patients, reminding him that he was in Africa. His bed was surrounded by flowers, stuffed animals, and balloons. More than two hundred e-mail messages swelled his inbox, from friends and fans inquiring about his well-being.

  Lying alone in bed afforded him time to think. He hadn’t expected to impact the mountain—and didn’t know he had until he was tumbling through the air. Years of acrobatic training activated at the level of muscle memory allowed him, after flipping and rolling five times, to get belly down again, like a falling cat locating its feet. It was only then that conscious thought intruded. His sense of time slowed, and he began to think. Had he done so much damage that his situation was hopeless? Was it worth the effort of opening a parachute? Maybe he should just let it go . . . Maybe he could survive this hit the way he had survived all the others. Maybe it was not that bad. It was now or never . . . Pull now!

  The lines of his parachute twisted, and two seconds later, Jeb crunched down on a bush, only feet from the face of the cliff. It was as if he had fallen out of a barn loft and landed, out of sheer luck, in a haystack.

  He would jump again, a decision the doctors could not understand. “My biggest fear is dying of old age,” he explained. “I fear that more than anything—getting cancer, HIV, dying of disease.”

  He was accustomed to people not understanding his reasoning, and he did not fear their judgment. “They’re so worried the other monkeys are going to make fun of them,” he said about social opprobrium, “or the other monkeys are going to reject them. Hell, I was rejected at birth. I’ve been rejected my whole life. I got over that a long time ago. I stopped trying to make the other little monkeys happy when I was a kid. I don’t care what the monkeys think. I only care what I think. I know what I’m doing. I’m okay with it. I’m okay with taking risk and making the decisions I do. And I’m okay with dying. None of that bothers me. I know that it’s going to happen. I’m going to fight to make it not happen, but when it does, it does.”

  Three days after his accident, on January 19, Jeb was out of the ICU. He had been hidden away on the hospital’s maternity ward to keep him from curious reporters. A station nurse appraised all visitors with skepticism before allowing anyone into his private room, one with an expansive view of Table Mountain.

  Michelle Norris arrived that afternoon. More than a hundred media outlets had requested comment, she said. “The best comment you can give,” Jeb said, “I want to thank the hospital and staff for taking such good care of me, and the rescue crew and Table Mountain for being such wonderful people.”

  “I’ll say you’re not speaking to the media and not doing interviews,” she said. Such a bland statement would not fly with a hungry press horde. Norris knew that.

  “Say Jeb is lazy and he just wants to rest. But that I’m very grateful to everyone involved in all this, and I hope it wasn’t too much of a negative impact on their lives.”

  After a moment, Jeb had another idea. “You might say, ‘Hey, for a couple million dollars I’ve got some footage to show, too, for the right amount of money.’” Laughing, he added, “I’m a whore. I’m a very expensive whore.”

  Jeb had reason to be in a jolly mood. It looked as if authorities at Table Mountain would not pursue charges. His only complaints concerned grooming. His hair had grown long enough to cover his scalp. “It already looks like a hippie’s,” he said.

  His most vexing condition, though, concerned his inability to use the bathroom. “It’s worse than being a baby, when you’re not aware of it—you’re a grown man!” he thundered. “It sucks ass!”

  He did not intend to remain helpless for long, though. He had future plans. “My next goal?” he intoned. “Get my ass into a wheelchair.”

  Chapter 20

  “THE REBEL”

  ZEPHYRHILLS, FLORIDA, JANUARY 2012

  Halfway around the globe, in another hemisphere, Gary took a seat with Tony inside the dark, air-conditioned dining room of a Ruby Tuesday’s overlooking U.S. Route 301. Surrounded by the salad bar and booths packed with lunchtime patrons, Tony had something on his mind other than what to order.

  Gary had come to Zephyrhills for two weeks to fly the Apache, and he had brought a FlySight GPS to track his speed and glide ratio. It was a busy time. Gary would make more than forty-five jumps—sometimes more than three per day—rattling up the runway at Skydive City, breathing the thick fuel smell in the cramped fuselage, knees hunched to his chest in close quarters with the rest of the load. Each jump, he focused on a new wrinkle. Sometimes he tried to maximize glide. Other times he experimented with turning. There were times when he experimented with holding his hands differently to gauge the effect on flight performance. Afterwards he studied the data on a laptop in Tony’s shop.

  The results, as far as Tony was concerned, were not impressive. This bothered him. Every wingsuit pilot in the world was preoccupied with flying faster and farther, maxing out. That was the measure of his skill. And here was this stuntman, a smart man, obviously athletic, whom he really liked. Yet he could not get it right.

  Sitting at a table along a bank of windows at the restaurant, thinking of some
fillip to performance, Tony offered poor Gary tips on how to fly faster. Gary stopped him short, though. “I actually want to go slow,” he said.

  Tony stared in disbelief. Nobody wanted to go slow.

  Gary explained that he had found a couple of lines he hoped to fly. Carrying too much speed through a turn would mean he wouldn’t make a crucial corner, which would be catastrophic. “It’s a BASE jump,” he said, as if that settled it. “Valley stuff.”

  Tony’s bright blue eyes hung half lidded, so heavy were they with skepticism. “You can’t bullshit me, mate,” he said, summoning a no-nonsense cockney he usually held somewhere in reserve. “I think you want to land this thing.”

  Gary’s earring and eyes twinkled back at Tony. The jig was up, and there was no point pretending otherwise. “Yeah, actually, you’re right,” Gary said finally. “I want to land this thing.”

  Tony wasn’t upset. He was inspired. He suggested making a suit that would fly slowly and began sketching designs on a napkin. Tony had a challenge before him, and he liked challenges. “The whole idea was to go slower,” he would recall. “All my life is trying to go as fast as I can. All wingsuiters want speed. So now I’m doing the opposite.”

  Back at the shop, they fired up the cutting machine, trimming fabric to size. Tony hunched over his sewing machine, feeding fabric beneath the needle. He had other reasons for wanting to make a slower suit. A niche discipline among skydivers had sprouted up that involved flying wingsuits together with high-performance parachutes in formations; Jeb and Luigi Cani had been among the first years earlier while performing testing to determine possibilities for landing. Since then the practice, called extreme relative work, or XRW, had grown into a full-blown discipline, and these suits needed to be flown slowly, too. There were commercial opportunities for such a creation, which Tony attacked using Bernoulli’s principle, fashioning a fat wing by increasing the distance between the top skin and bottom skin when inflated. Over more lunches of chimichangas at Los Chicos, a Mexican joint in Zephyrhills, he and Gary hashed out a design that would deliver aerodynamic lift, stability, and slow flight. It was a task easier said than done, and the first prototypes were unstable. Gary noticed during testing that they felt “twitchy.” They did not improve on the Apache. They did not even fly slower.

  • • •

  WITH TIME RUNNING SHORT for an April landing attempt, Gary returned to the UK with his Apache. He linked up with Mark, and the two of them headed to Italy and the Dolomites. It was January and they knew midwinter was a bad time to be in the mountains, but they were desperate to get low-altitude experience with the Apache, which they could get only by BASE jumping. Gary had never made a BASE jump with his Apache before, and at Monte Brento he and Mark planned to fly as slowly as possible from the four-thousand-foot cliff, which would simulate the experience of exiting a helicopter at low altitude.

  The resulting GPS and other flight data concerning flight paths, fall rates, altitude, and the time required for their canopies to open would be compiled and used to demonstrate to officials from the UK’s Civilian Aviation Authority that they possessed the skill to land safely—“that said we were professional and not a bunch of nutters,” Mark said. All of which would help make their case for permission to use a helicopter for a landing attempt.

  As they had feared, the conditions at Brento did not cooperate. The temperature was five degrees Fahrenheit. The mountain was so snowbound that the road was impassable, forcing them to hike the entire way on the first day, a journey of several hours. “We knew everything was against us,” Mark would recall. “The mountains in winter are full of snow. It was completely the wrong time to be out there training, but we had no choice, because everything on the Web or in the press was effectively that Jeb Corliss is going to land the suit. If he had managed to land, who cares about number two?”

  They were at Brento when the news came that Jeb had struck Table Mountain. “With Jeb going in, all sorts of chat surfaced” that others would attempt a landing soon, Mark would recall. “There was a guy who had been flying on a lake north somewhere with jets, and he was trying to take one off. There was chat somewhere in South Africa, but it was all rumor control.”

  Weather conditions in Brento permitted Gary to make only four jumps. The flights hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped, and he had spent his fast-dwindling savings to travel to Brento. He was worried.

  While still in Italy, he and Mark received an e-mail message from Tony. “Tony says he’s cracked it,” Mark would recall. “He sent us an e-mail saying, ‘Boys, I’ve got this amazing suit. It falls so slow—it’s brilliant, stable.’”

  For five days, e-mail traffic hummed between Italy and Florida. “We’re going, ‘Right?’” Mark recalled. “‘Do we completely change our plans? Is it as good as he says? Do we go to the States and get a completely new suit, or do we stay where we are?’”

  They decided to take Tony’s word for it and headed to Zephyrhills. The suit Tony had created turned out not as brilliant as advertised. It needed refinements. “It was all hands on the deck,” Mark said. “I was sewing. Gary was sewing. Tony was madly sewing. In about thirty-six hours, we managed to make these suits. We did a couple of jumps in them and flew back to the UK—and they were brilliant.”

  The new suit flew slower, with increased stability over the Apache. Gary gave hard inputs. Check. He leaned hard, dipped an arm and leg to turn. Check. He was like a driver testing the brakes, steering, and acceleration on a sports car. He flared hard. Check. In the Apache, a hard flare had sent him skittering out of control; not so with the new suit.

  The numbers on his flight analytics fell within the ranges he had been seeking for landing. He managed to slow descent to twenty-two miles an hour, the equivalent of high-performance parachutes, while moving forward at sixty miles an hour. This speed was comparable to a 140-foot-high fall, a feat Gary had already done successfully. He knew the world record high fall into boxes was 220 feet. A sixty-mile-an-hour landing, at a 2.7 glide slope, on the other hand, he believed would be a walk in the park.

  Tony had made a suit that not only could fly as fast as an Apache but could cruise relatively slowly without sacrificing stability. “More efficient,” he would say, summing up his new creation, “like a machine.” He called it the Rebel, because it violated all the rules concerning performance.

  By now they were deep into February. With the Rebel in hand and an April deadline looming, Gary convened with his partners at Bremont. At last everyone was ready to unveil their plans for a landing attempt.

  • • •

  The press release would appear on the Bremont website on March 1:

  “The Bremont Wingman”

  Bremont Watch Company Supports Stunt Man Gary Connery

  in Setting a New World Record

  March 2012

  Bremont Watch Company is delighted to be supporting Henley based stunt man Gary Connery in preparation for his biggest stunt yet. In April 2012 Gary plans to make a new world record in being the first man ever to jump out of a helicopter with a wingsuit and land without deploying a parachute. April 2012 will see Gary Connery realise a lifelong ambition of jumping from a helicopter 2,400ft above the height of the box rig over Ridge Wood to the ENE of Henley on Thames. Gary will drop for 3 seconds before his suit starts to fly, he will then accelerate to approximately 80mph. He will get into his tried and tested best glide position where the speed will decrease to 60 mph forward speed with a 22 mph vertical descent rate. The flight to the box rig will be 1.4 km and as Gary approaches the box rig approximately 200ft away, he shall begin to flare bringing the speeds down to 50 mph forward and 15 mph vertical. The whole flight should last in the region of 50 seconds and will come to an end with Gary landing on a box rig.

  Having lived a life of adventure in many different ways such a pursuit was of natural interest to Gary and he has since become a pioneer in the field. Gary is now ready to take this to the next level and cement this fact in the world record books—
with some stiff competition out there Gary is determined to be the one to set this record.

  • • •

  THE PRESS RELEASE WENT on to describe Gary’s biography and background, including his stints as a competitive kayaker and skier and in the army—omitting the part about going AWOL. It told of his career on the Stunt Register, his more than fifty high falls, mainly into cardboard boxes, and his 100 percent safety record. The document described his jumps from Nelson’s Column and the London Eye, among others. An accompanying photo showed Gary wearing a wingsuit, standing on the stone balustrade of Henley Bridge in the Vitruvian Man pose.

  This would be Gary’s grand introduction, because hardly anyone in the wingsuit realm had ever heard of him. In the ensuing rush for information, the BASE and skydiving message boards buzzed. Gary who? His anonymity, in combination with an April landing date, left some to wonder whether the release wasn’t some elaborate put-on, perhaps an April Fools’ prank. Everyone also wanted to know what Jeb thought.

  • • •

  As it happened, on March 1, the very day Gary’s press release appeared, viewers of Conan on TBS watched Jeb appear through the curtains on a set on a Warner lot in Burbank, California. Head freshly shorn and gleaming under the stage lights, he was clad in black pants, black T-shirt, and black hoodie and leaning on metal crutches, a four-legged creature clomping across a buffed floor. Given his difficulty walking, flying seemed a distant and unlikely possibility.

  It had been less than six weeks since his accident and he was recovering at his sister’s house, in Palm Springs, attending physical therapy sessions and talking to producers from TV networks around the world who were eager—especially now that Real Sports had aired its segment, in February—to buy footage from Table Mountain. Fan mail and Facebook posts piled up, testifying to a range of powerful reactions to not only his near death but his unconventional life philosophy. One missive from an Army cavalry scout and infantryman who had done two tours in Iraq typified some of the responses. In his message, the combat veteran wrote of his detachment from haunting memories and how Jeb’s zest for life had reminded him of the person he used to be. One of the particular phrases he used that resonated with Jeb concerned the belief that Jeb was living a life worth dying for. The message concluded by thanking Jeb for reminding him what it was like to be alive again and for conveying the hope and strength this combat-scarred vet needed to continue living.