Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  On the set of Conan, the host also evinced genuine concern for his guest, who had appeared on the show six months earlier, before Jeb traveled to China. Had the accident changed Jeb’s attitude toward what he does?

  “It’s changed my attitude in that I’m going to be much more careful in the future,” he said. “I became too comfortable, too confident, and I was pushing way too hard. Six feet is already close. But to try to push where you’re coming within inches of things, I was stepping over what I should have been doing. And it basically spanked me, and I am very happy that I was able to make a mistake so massive and be able to recover from it. Because usually when you make a mistake like that—if you had told me before that happened that you could survive, I would say impossible, you’ll die for sure . . .”

  The rest of the answer went on to detail the internal conversation he’d had in the air, debating whether or not to pull his parachute. Finally he got around to a bromide of the kind TV talk shows have been dispensing since talk shows were invented. “What it taught me is,” Jeb said in summation, “it taught me, you know what, no matter how bad you think it is, never give up, because it may not be as bad as you thought it was.”

  “I’m glad you made the choice you made,” Conan said, over applause from the audience. “I have to ask, because we’re completely out of time: how soon are you going to do this again?”

  Jeb said he would be walking without crutches in about two weeks and jumping in about three months.

  “I’d do it with the crutches,” Conan cracked. “But that’s just me. I kind of live on the edge.”

  Not everyone would find humor in Jeb’s act, though. Karin Sako had visited him in Palm Springs, and he cajoled her into watching his crash footage from Table Mountain, which she resisted over concerns that it would be too upsetting, akin to witnessing Jeb’s death.

  Karin had scaled back jumping since becoming the mother of two children, allowing her to “look at it from some different dimension, not only as a friend, but the impact it has on the people around and the other people that are left behind. Of course you can say, ‘Oh, he died doing what he loved doing, blah blah blah,’” she would say. “Yeah, that’s true, but it’s still hard, because you miss them and want them there.”

  But Jeb was still there. And when Karin broke down in tears while watching his crash, Jeb was confused. Why are you crying? Why are you getting so emotional? I’m right here. He happened to be reading Shogun, by James Clavell, and was captivated by the samurai code of Bushido, particularly the act of seppuku, the ritualized suicide by which honor is restored. The manner in which one died held significance. Some would take that as a death wish. A reporter had actually asked him about that—whether he had a death wish. “Bro,” Jeb said, “if I had a death wish, I would be one dead motherfucker, and it would have happened a long time ago. If you wanted to die doing the shit that I do, you’d die right away.” Put that way, it was hard to argue with.

  Chapter 21

  THE RIGHT NUMBERS

  Flying is the 2nd greatest thrill known to man. Landing is the 1st.

  —Sign on the wall of a bar in Canton, New York

  Talk shows and reporters were one thing. But big-money sponsors remained leery of the risks associated with landing a wingsuit. They did not want to touch it. “The reaction was ‘You’re mad!’” Mark Sutton would remember. “‘You’re just going to kill yourself. Bug off and leave us alone.’”

  The Civil Aviation Authority would require convincing, too, before it would permit using a helicopter. Failing that, Gary and Mark would use paramotors, a paraglider with motor-driven fan propulsion. On a project with scant funding, paramotors would be a cheaper option, and Gary was already deep in debt on his credit card for expenses, which would eventually reach £40,000 (about $65,000). He called the enterprise “very Heath Robinson”—the British counterpart to Rube Goldberg.

  Gary had ordered 18,600 boxes, to be stacked on landing day in a configuration 12 feet high, 40 feet wide, and 350 feet long. The site was a field adjacent to a bend in the Thames, in South Oxfordshire, just across the river from Henley. As word spread concerning his plans, people began reaching out to help however they could. Eager to volunteer, they lent the feeling of an old-fashioned barn raising. They would need to be fed on landing day, though, and toilets would need to be provided. Much of the logistics would fall to Vivienne.

  Despite a growing volunteer army, Gary maintained close counsel with only a few confidants. He was as anonymous as ever among wingsuit pilots, who weighed in online on him and his project. Gary never replied to their questions or corrected wrong assumptions. The only message he would reply to was sent to him personally by Robert Pecnik, wingsuit-design pioneer and operator of Phoenix-Fly, one of Tony’s competitors. Pečnik urged Gary not to attempt a landing, arguing that a landing would not advance the sport. He begged him to reconsider. If Gary was injured or killed, it would only stir a storm of negative publicity, with the fallout affecting other pilots and manufacturers, Pečnik himself among them.

  Gary wrote back and politely told Pečnik he was moving ahead. He could not back out even if he wanted to, not after the good vibes and the response from eager volunteers. Sponsors, friends, and family had supported him thus far, and he was loath to let them down.

  • • •

  Toward the end of March, Gary explained to the Civil Aviation Authority how he planned to rotate his body when he was about three or four feet above the boxes so that he would land on the fleshy part of his side, limbs pulled tight, teeth gritted. He would be wearing a neck brace and, beneath his suit, body armor of the sort used by motocross racers.

  Once the CAA granted provisional approval, Gary and Mark set off for a week in Lauterbrunnen to launch from the High Nose, which, at nearly two thousand feet, would allow them to simulate the low altitude of landing. Gary and Mark stayed at the Horner, which was deserted except for a few hardcore winter jumpers. Deep with snow, and dark in the last days of winter, the valley was bereft of life. The crowds were up on the mountains, skiing at the resorts at Wengen and Mürren.

  Up on the Nose, Gary would struggle. “It took him awhile to get the suit,” Mark said. “He would exit steep and get nervous after exit, and the flight is not great and the landing is not great. That’s the time when I noticed he was having a lot of trouble. It was at that time we made the decision to leave Lauterbrunnen and head to Walenstadt, and we knew that with a hill to fly to, we could replicate the flight.”

  On a snowbound and slippery Hinderrugg, they cleared a path to the Sputnik exit, where Jeb had famously leaped to start the sequence in “Grinding the Crack.” Someone had placed a sign reading WALENSTADT, 1:30, indicating the flying time to town. Gary and Mark would spend ten days jumping the mountain, and Gary never once aimed for the Crack. He pointed the Rebel at an area dense with evergreens to the right of the ravine, a bulbous feature beyond which the cliff falls away quickly. The trees were his box rig. He flew to them and stalled, edging ever closer, before diving away over the cliff to gain altitude and open his parachute. He repeated the sequence again and again, each time growing increasingly familiar with the range and geometry of attack.

  One variable that no amount of simulation could account for, however, was the mind game during landing. How would he cope after exit? Once the pressure was on? And then once he passed the floor where he could safely deploy a parachute—somewhere around 150 feet—and the ground was rushing up at him? Would he freeze? Freak out? Overshoot the box rig? Flare early and come up short?

  “Knowledge dispels fear,” he said at the time. “I think paranoia is a very good state of mind, because that keeps you very focused . . . It’s about accepting that fear and being with it . . . dealing with the mind mess that comes in between.”

  He had been in funky situations before as a stuntman and nailed it. He was, after all, One-Take Gary.

  • • •

  FROM SWITZERLAND GARY SENT the GPS readouts from his flights to Tony. In
his Florida workshop, he sat under fluorescent lights at his sewing machine, accompanied by John, Paul, George, and Ringo, who drowned out the din of cutters and machines drifting in his open door. It was on March 21 that Tony received a FlySight readout from Switzerland attesting to a 3:1 glide ratio and forward speeds of fifty to sixty miles per hour with the Rebel. Vertical speeds hovered at around thirty miles an hour, some lower.

  Tony was working on an order for a suit for a pilot from Norway, who was killing time in his workshop. They took up the subject of Gary’s speeds. “He’s doin’ fifty forwards, thirty-five down. He weighs nuffin’! He weighs a hundred thirty-five pounds. I weigh one-eighty last munf. You never see good fat skydivers.”

  Foot on the pedal, the needle drumming a seam on a blue scrap of fabric, Tony suddenly launched into a monologue on performance. “Exactly!” he said, punctuating some private thought. “I come out the turn. I had speed coming out that turn. Speed at that position generates more speed and more lift. If you tip up, you go forwards and up. Speed . . . more lift. You’re still going down, yeah . . . I’m doing less than thirty miles an hour. Gary’s doing twenty-five. When you de-arch—say, tracking—you go back up or slow down. When you’re tracking, you point your toes and start doing this with your butt.” He stuck out his rear end on the wheeled chair he was sitting on. “Trying to get Bernoulli’s effect—that’s the key to performance . . . Some people just don’t get it. Then you just got to stick it out and go for it. Then you do a dive . . .”

  Cauterizing the end of a section of white piping with a disposable lighter, he suddenly wheeled on his chair several feet to his laptop and pulled up fresh data. “GPS, and this is your readout . . . Gotta like music,” he said, selecting something other than the Beatles for a change. He pointed to a graph on the screen. “Gives me overall on jump-average, thirty-three miles an hour, minimum of twenty-six . . . That’s my speed. And this is time: four seconds, five seconds, six, seven . . .” Gary’s average was twenty-five miles per hour. “Twenty-five is the best I’ve ever seen in competition with a dive,” Tony said in wonderment. Those fresh numbers from Switzerland showed that Gary had the necessary speed dialed in to attempt a landing.

  A wingsuit instructor from Skydive City had walked in earlier and caught the tail end of Tony’s monologue. Gregarious and barrel-shaped, the instructor defied Tony’s dictum about fat skydivers. “So, you working sewing all day or coming out jumping?”

  “Sewing,” Tony said, gliding his chair back to the machine. He had several orders to fill. One came from California. It was for an Apache, to replace the one Jeb had trashed on Table Mountain.

  Chapter 22

  RAINY DAYS

  My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep,

  But a continuance of enduring thought,

  Which then I can resist not: in my heart

  There is a vigil. . . .

  —George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred

  On Wednesday, March 28, Gary uploaded a fifty-second video to YouTube called “Less Corrr Than Corliss.” In the footage, he wears the Rebel, opening strains of “Sail” in the background as he peers around a large wooden sign with a cow and a farmer standing over the words WILLKOMMEN IN UNTERWASSER. Prancing around in his suit like some character from a Monty Python sketch, he glances around, finally launching from the ground face-first into a snow pile, a mock tribute to his and Jeb’s shared ambition. The video closes with thanks and “get well soon” messages to Jeb and the words “The ‘Bremont Wingman’ lands for real April 2012.”

  For his part, Jeb was gracious. He would say at the time: “You do get a little bit kind of sad when you hear someone’s going. I always kind of had a feeling because of how long it was taking me that eventually some raging psychopath who had bigger balls than me would come in and do one of those methods. I never expected someone to do a box-catcher method. I hope it works, because I’m excited to see it.”

  • • •

  GARY WOULD RETURN TO the UK from Switzerland inspired and confident. He had the suit and the skill. He had permission from the authorities. He had ordered boxes and secured land, and an army of volunteers stood at the ready. Weather conditions looked promising. And on Friday, March 30, Gary sent a message to supporters and volunteers with the subject line “april falls madness.”

  hi all, thanks for all your support and patience

  training has been fantastic and it has all worked out with me achieving my goals, [except the landing]

  i now have CAA approval and boxes, 18,600 of them arrive on monday

  it seems i may have a window of opportunity to do the build and jump on wed/thurs next week (4th & 5th April), any help would be great

  i can let you know on monday evening around 8pm if its a ‘go’ via email, and where to come

  i will be in touch personally with those who have offered equipment/gear

  i am very aware of the difficulty of doing things at short notice and that some of you will be able to come and share the experience/help out and some will not, i hope you can make it, please bring a friend to help out. I have no idea how many will be there but i would love for you all to come.

  Organising the logistics for this is a bit of a ‘mare’ as I have no real idea how many people will turn up. I’ve laid on catering for 100, the CAA are limiting the site to 200 when jumping but there’s camping space for everyone! i have also organised showers at the local sport centre for everyone I’m sure there will be enough food to go around but if you are able to help out by bringing some for yourself that would be a great help. Bar-B-Q’s are allowed as long as they are on the gravel tracks and stand up on legs and you have an extinguisher

  Once I’ve landed the first round is on me

  cheers to you all

  gary

  Before departing for Switzerland, Gary had been interviewed by the Sunday Times of London, the UK’s largest paper. The resulting story and photos were finally published on Sunday, April 1. The timing revived speculation that the stunt was merely an elaborate April Fools’ gag. But that would be the least of the problems stirred by the story. By Monday, April 2, days before he hoped to land, Gary would be scrambling to deal with a series of crises.

  • • •

  THE TROUBLE BEGAN THE morning after the story appeared in the Sunday Times as truck drivers delivered loads of cardboard boxes to Gary’s landing site, a picturesque centuries-old farm along the Thames, across from the starting area of the Henley Royal Regatta. The drivers called from the road and asked Gary to meet them there.

  Driving over Henley Bridge to Remenham Farm, Gary encountered two idling trucks outside the farm’s gate. As he approached, his phone rang again. This time it was one of the landowners. In exchange for using the family’s land, Gary had promised to make the landing a private event, over concerns about liability if a mob showed up and someone wound up injured. The newspaper story, however, had given away the location.

  “I got a phone call from the family that owned the land,” Gary would recall, “who said, ‘As a result of the news piece yesterday we’re pulling the land.’”

  Gary stood in the road, stunned, a trapdoor flung open in his mind, and what emerged would not be pretty. He quickly called Nick English and explained in stern tones what had happened. “I said, ‘Nick, this one’s for you to deal with,’” Gary recalls, citing Bremont’s insistence that Gary meet with reporters for advance publicity. “‘It’s your PR that’s caused this to happen!’ I threw my teddy in a corner. I was under pressure anyway.”

  “Over the phone he sounded very upset,” Nick remembers. “When I met him, he was very stressed about it. It had all been accumulating for the few days before the jump. He had nowhere to put these boxes. The [semis] are half an hour away, coming down the hill to put the boxes, and he had nowhere . . . As a character, Gary is on edge. You can see the adrenaline running around him. He’s that sort of guy. This was the only time I’d seen him under stress, which isn’t bad, really, considering he’s about t
o jump out of an airplane without a parachute. I think it would stress most people.”

  Nick suggested airfields he knew around England, but Gary was adamant they find a location near Henley. Friends and family had committed to helping unpack and stack the boxes. He did not want to alter plans at the last moment.

  Calling on local contacts, Nick pulled some strings and within hours had secured a new landing site. “I got onto some local farmers and estate managers we knew, and they helped,” he says. “So we ended up finding this great field near a village in Hambleden.”

  Three miles north of Henley, just over the border in south Buckinghamshire, near a bend in the Thames, the site was called Mill End Farm. Although not as picturesque from the point of view of video—the Thames did not drift darkly in the background—the farm offered an equally good location for landing.

  That night, Gary composed a message to his many volunteers. He did not mention the day’s turmoil, writing simply and briefly that the weather for Thursday didn’t look good after all. Having put one problem behind him, Gary faced another storm on the horizon, a literal storm: the weather was changing fast.