by Matt Higgins
The day after locating a new landing area, Tuesday, April 3, he wrote to his volunteer brigade:
hi everyone, hope you are all well
its [sic] seems i would be silly to say lets start building on friday
the weather is pretty unsettled with wind and some rain forecast
we could be lucky and get a good window of opportunity but who knows, i run the risk of lots of wet boxes being blown all over everywhere
i cannot afford that
thanks for your understanding
will be in touch
gary
• • •
MARCH 2012 had been the driest March in the UK since 1953, and the sunniest in England since 1929. In the papers and on TV, they talked of drought and water shortages and hosepipe bans. For the first two days of April, the pattern held; it was dry and unseasonably warm. Then, on April 3, everything changed. Thundershowers broke out ahead of a cold front moving south. Temperatures plummeted all across the country. Heavy drifting snow snarled high passes in Scotland. Snow fell as far south as the Midlands. Across most of England, though, it rained. And rained. And rained some more. It was the start of what would be the wettest April on record across the UK—and the coldest April in more than twenty years.
Gary could see it coming on the weather forecasts he and Sutton studied. On April 4, Gary sent what would turn out to be his final missive for more than a week. The subject line: “the madness goes on.”
hi everyone
due to the weather or the unknown weather i have had to call it off this weekend
i am sure you all understand my concerns of setting a box rig [big box rig] that could get wet and blow away
i will now focus on a very real 5 day ‘high’ window and do it at the right time when everything will be a little more predictable
so go and have a great long weekend and thanks again if you had planned to come to help, i cannot do it without your support
will be in touch soon
best wishes
gary
“It’s so British it’s untrue,” Mark would say about what happened next. As rain continued falling, a battle ensued to keep Gary’s $32,000 investment in cardboard dry. “The rain was awful,” Nick English recalls, “weeks and weeks and weeks of rain. He was worried about his boxes. There was no point in jumping on a wet mush. He spent ages covering them up, and the tarp would blow off, and we would go back and cover them up.”
Flat-packed and stacked in a field at Mill End Farm, the boxes were at the mercy not only of the elements but of cows that roamed the pasture. They were protected only by a massive tentlike structure consisting of eighty tarpaulins, lashed and tied. But wind tore at the tarps, and rivulets of water searched out gaps, threatening to turn the cardboard to pulp.
Gary was joined by Vivienne, Mark Sutton, and Nick and Giles English in securing their investment. “Pretty much every day I was there retying, resealing, getting up there with a brush, brushing water off,” Gary says. “It was a bonkers nightmare. It was a logistic operation just keeping them dry.”
Vivienne checked on the boxes when Gary couldn’t, scrambling on top of the stack in downpours, crawling along to inspect the tarps for gaps where water could get in. She spent a lot of time tying up loose sections. “The cows are in the field wondering what on earth is this great big mass of boxes, and what is that crazy woman doing on top?” For Vivienne, there was no question about what to do. “It was Gary and my money,” she says.
The longer it rained, the further he postponed landing, the worse Gary’s financial situation grew. Vivienne’s long hours at the café were not enough to keep them afloat. Gary needed to return to work. And on April 15, he sent an e-mail update to a patient but increasingly dubious volunteer force. As usual, Gary struck a positive tone.
hi everyone, hope you are all well
thought i would drop you a line to update you
as you know, the weather has been a little windy and therefore not right to set a big box rig and jump
i need at least 3 stable days back to back, this does not look likely on the long range forecast for the next 10 days
i have a short break to morocco booked towards the back end of april
before i do the landing i must go back to switzerland or italy, for a few days to get fully up to speed again as i am not now current
thanks for your understanding and continued well wishes, i am humbled by all the great messages and vibes surrounding this stunt
look forward to seeing you all soon, [when the weather changes]
lots of love
gary
Behind the scenes, though, not all the vibes had been exactly great. “We’d go and meet with Nick and Giles and have a chat,” Mark recalled. “We’d go to PR and everyone was going, ‘Come on, you said you were doing it in April!’ We know Jeb is out of the picture, but there’s chatter someone might attempt a snow landing. This would be a good time to do it—in spring snow.”
With raindrops exploding on the surface of the Thames, Gary and Mark sat in the café drinking coffee and talking for hours, examining their options from all angles. If somebody landed first, well, they had done the best they could. They couldn’t take the landing abroad. All they could do was wait for a break in the weather. “He had to turn down a lot of work,” Mark said about Gary. “Suddenly he has to go back to work to pay for all of the boxes. Everyone is going, ‘It’s all rubbish. You said you were going to do it, and nothing has happened.’”
Vivienne had been with Gary for seventeen years, through all of his projects. Although busy operating the café, she could see her husband’s frustration. “Mark was the calm, level-headed one,” she says. “Very philosophical. It will happen when it happens.”
Mark saw in their circumstances a national ethic. “The British, in our psyche, we snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory,” he said. “And it was going to be another one of those stories. It was like ‘Remember that Gary? He said he was going to do it, then so-and-so did it.’ One of the reasons he wanted to do this, he had skied very well and never won. He had represented Britain in kayaking, but he’s never won. He’d felt like he’d always come second place. He felt like this was his time to turn around to other people who thought he was a nutter and go, ‘I can do this,’ and then turn around and say, ‘I have done this.’ Yes, he was very stressed somebody might take that opportunity away from him.”
To cope, Gary resorted to running extreme distances. “He’s very good at doing stress if it’s a short period of time,” Mark said. “If you turn around to him and say, ‘Right, I want you to crash that car at eighty miles an hour’ or whatever, he’s very good at dealing with that. What he’s not good at dealing with is the long-term stress of a situation he can’t do anything about.”
Gary would tie his shoes and blast out the door at a trot, disappearing on grueling long runs, chewing off twenty miles at a time. Sutton remained behind, crunching numbers, scouring forecasts, reaching out to his brother, a commercial airline pilot, for sophisticated weather projections. “He did it all the time when we were away,” Mark said about Gary’s rambles, “and he did it when we were back, and I think that gave him something else to think about and got him through to the next day.”
A month passed as Gary fell into a routine of running, inspecting his boxes, and taking occasional stunt-work assignments. Finally, on May 13, nearly a month after his previous missive, he sent an update to his volunteer corps.
hi everyone,
i thought it was about time i got in touch with you again.
its been a long and now [due to weather ] tedious journey, as you know, since the end of march the weather has been totally crap if you are wanting to build a huge box rig and fly into it
i am constantly looking for the right opportunity/weather break.
all i can say is that i do not know when this will be
looking at reports now there seems to be unsettled weather continuing in the UK, bit of a bum
mer as keeping 18,600 boxes dry under tarp tents is not easy
i wish to avoid the jubilee weekend as this will be a big weekend for many, big news for the press and it would be nice for me to get a little coverage
thanks again for your support
best wishes
gary
ps. remember, there is a drought
• • •
GARY COULD finally afford to joke. He and Mark had just returned from a trip to Brento to brush up on their wingsuit skills after five weeks off.
In Brento they had jumped five times, and they returned to the UK with confidence at an all-time high. The landing was a stunt, and Gary knew stunts. He also knew boxes, and he knew he could fly accurately to the boxes and walk away unhurt. In his mind he had done so hundreds of times. The only unknown concerned what would happen in his head when he actually dropped below two hundred feet, too low to reliably deploy a parachute, and he would have to either land or die trying.
• • •
ON FRIDAY, MAY 18, five days after Gary’s most recent message to supporters, Mark finally saw a promising weather forecast. The coming Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday looked clear. Three consecutive days would allow enough time to build the box rig, make test flights to satisfy Gary and the Civil Aviation Authority, and finally go for it. But when the time came to make a decision, Gary hesitated. After such a long wait, he wanted to be certain. The next day, he convened with Nick and Giles and Vivienne and decided to sleep on it one more night. If the weather report called for good conditions in the morning, he would push the button.
On Sunday, May 20, the forecast held, and Gary blasted a message to his nearly four hundred volunteers. The subject line read “landing.”
Hi guys,
Finally the landing is on! It would be great if you could all come to be involved and be a part of history being made!!
Time of arrival and planning
The plan is to gather on Wed at 07:00 at the landing site for breakfast with a briefing from 07:45. The box rig building will then commence and I plan to jump mid afternoon. We’ll then need to strip out the box rig to make sure we leave the field as we found it so, I’d appreciate any help later in the day for dismantling before we move on to P-A-R-T-Y! The more people we have the quicker the process!!!!!!
If you have a friend that is fit and willing to help, then please bring them along (and let us have their name too). The location will only be sent to those attending and who respond to this email with the intention of coming as crew.
Catering & Requirements
We have made catering arrangements for 100 people but as we have no idea how many will make it, please do bring an extra sandwich and some water in case we have more than what we’ve catered for. Please also bring some sunscreen and something to sit on (as we’re in a farmer’s field!) and be dressed in comfortable clothing and footwear. If you have girlie hands, perhaps bring gloves.
Spectators
This is NOT allowed to be public event, so please don’t encourage spectators or friends unless they are able and willing to be part of the box building team.
The message told of a campground nearby where lodging had been arranged, and of vouchers for catering, before concluding: “when it appears in the news and papers, you can say ‘I was there!’”
The following day was Monday, and Gary sent out a final message revealing the location as Mill End Farm. On Tuesday he rose early, stopping at the Chocolate Theatre Café for coffees, which he’d delivered to his team at Mill End Farm by 7:30. There was Mark; Robin, the forklift operator; a jumpmaster and stunt coordinator named Dave Emerson; Chris Wright; and two locals named Tim and John.
The forklift ferried pallets of flat-packed boxes to where the rig had been mapped out on the grass, stacking twenty-two thousand pounds of cardboard along a one-hundred-meter line for volunteers to begin building on Wednesday. A representative from the Civil Aviation Authority arrived. So did Andrew Harvey, thundering out of the sky at the controls of his Hughes 500 helicopter, a powerful, fast, nimble, and stable five-seater.
Harvey had come on board the landing project only a month earlier. He jumped at the chance, agreeing to a fee that would cover only his operation costs. “This partner of mine in the helicopter world knew him and had met him a couple of times,” Harvey says about Gary, who happens to be a licensed helicopter pilot himself. “And he was having problems finding a pilot in a helicopter who would do what he wanted him to do, i.e., drop him out of a helicopter without a parachute. I said, ‘I’m game for that.’ It sounds a bit more exciting than the normal sort of stuff when you’re bogged down in Health and Safety,” he says, referring to Health and Safety Executive, a government agency dedicated to preventing workplace death, injury, and illness. “Can’t do this, can’t do that, without informing in triplicate, wearing Health and Safety jackets. We’re becoming so risk averse and pathetic over here. It was right up my street, really.”
A shareholder in a company owned by his family, Harvey was beholden to no one. He consulted with his lawyer, who saw no reason not to join Gary’s outfit. “It’s nice to be part of something off the wall and a world first and it’s waving two figures, not at safety but at Health and Safety. It’s nice to do something that’s risky that hasn’t been stopped by the do-goods of society.”
When Harvey turned up Tuesday, the big question concerned where Gary and Mark should exit the chopper. They had been given clearance to jump from no higher than 2,500 feet, and they were facing a variable headwind. Although provisions had been made for virtually every aspect of the landing, they still had to work out details of the flight. For example, how would Gary guide Harvey to the proper position?
Suits on and zipped, Gary and Mark shuffled onto the right skid, clutching the door frame under a shower of rotor wash.
Below, the rolling English countryside ran to the horizon—roads, green fields, dense woods, and the Thames bending and looping back, scrawling its signature on the land. As the sun rose, the air warmed, and red kites wheeled between thermal columns, scanning for small game and carrion.
Once in position, Harvey gave a thumbs-up, “which means ‘Okay, guys you’ve got ten, fifteen seconds.’ And I’m just running really slowly. They were outside the aircraft, and the responsibility handed to Mark as stunt master. ‘It’s your call now. Go, or sit back in the aircraft and strap back in and we’ll go back down again.’”
Perched on the skid, the pilots communicated with Harvey through hand signals or shouting. “I don’t want to say telepathy,” Harvey says, “but it’s almost facial looks and expressions. Slow down and left a bit by hand signals and winks and nods and everything else. I’ve got a headset on. I’ve got to ask the jumpmaster on the ground is it clear to drop. There are aircraft flying around.”
Gary and Mark had honed a countdown process over months on cliffs around Europe. This time, though, Gary had to shout over the whirring blades.
“You ready, Mark?”
“Yeah!”
Mark had a sixth sense of when Gary would go by reading his body position.
“Set,” Gary said. “Okay, here we go. Three, two, one . . .” Gary pushed free from the skid, followed a second later by Mark. It was clear that communication was something they would need to work on after the first test jump turned into a disaster. “He jumped off and landed 3,400 meters short,” Harvey says.
“Sure enough, we got it wrong,” Mark said. “We kept working on dynamics we had used for BASE jumping, but with wind, we kept coming up far too short. And that had a major implication on the jump itself.”
Back on the ground, they huddled and worked out their communications and visual references. Harvey would hover over a hill separating the Thames from the A4155 road, lining up for a flight parallel to Skirmett Road, toward the box rig, north into the wind. The second time they came up only 150 meters short of where the rig would be laid out. A third time they landed closer yet, but with wind gusting, they called it an afternoon.
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• • •
THE DAY WASN’T FINISHED, though. There were media commitments and administrative issues and tending to last-minute logistics. That night, Gary drove to London to fetch his son, Kali, at the airport. He had flown in from Austria, where he was training as a downhill skier.
Climbing into bed that night, Gary would not stop thinking. He did not know how many volunteers would show up, or whether they would build the rig in time, or how the wind would blow. His mind tended to race 24-7, and he was not a great sleeper under the best of circumstances. Still, this was different. Questions ricocheted around his head. What are you doing? Have you done everything in your power to make this work? Have you missed anything? Convinced he had dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, he lay in the dark a long time, hoping desperately for sleep to come. He did not dare get up for a drink of water, or for any other reason, concerned it would keep him awake for good. He listened to the abiding quiet of the house and Vivienne’s steady breathing beside him. It would be a long time till dawn, when, having not slept a wink, Gary rose in the blue light to get ready.
• • •
HE WAS AT MILL End Farm by 6 a.m. for a live interview with Sky News for breakfast TV. Volunteers parked on Skirmett Road and at a narrow lane lined with rosebushes at the north end of the field. There would be about 120 volunteers that day, tramping in the dew-wet field. They were stunt colleagues, friends and family, friends of friends. Hazel and Chris were there. So was Jon Bonny, Chris Wright, Nick and Giles, Lydia and Kali, all tearing open bundled boxes, pulling out the flat-packed cardboard, and folding it into cubes. Those boxes damp from rain they laid in the grass to dry. In short order, novice box builders became experts, and slowly the rig began to take shape, cubes stacked twelve feet high, forty feet wide, and a hundred meters long.