by Steph Davis
With some radio direction from Brendan, who would already be on the ground watching, I would then steer my parachute toward the giant landing field and pull the brake lines down hard at the right moment to flare the canopy and stop its forward speed exactly as my feet touched the ground. All of which is harder than it seems it should be when you’re filled with adrenaline and need to accomplish it in under one minute because you are falling through the air at 120 miles per hour. I was nervous about failing the jump, for the obvious reasons, but also because each of these AFF jumps costs a lot of money, despite Brendan’s refusing to accept his instructor’s portion of the cost. Failing an AFF level would mean having to repeat that jump, which meant paying an extra $220 to try it again instead of moving on to the next jump. So far it was all extremely stressful.
Outside by the runway, Brendan and I waited, along with twenty other skydivers, a mix of tandems and experienced fun jumpers, for the twin engine Otter to land. The plane came in and taxied off to the side, and we all hurried over, walking behind the tail to give the large, spinning propellers a wide berth (naturally, someone has been hit by a propeller at some point in the history of skydiving), sheltering our eyes from the powerful blast. The propeller seemed loud and close, blowing my hair wildly as I climbed up the four-step metal ladder into the open side of the plane, just behind the wing. The clear, Plexiglas door was rolled up inside the plane, and two wooden benches lined the plane’s body. The jump pilot sat up front looking at a clipboard, waiting for everyone to pile in. I was the only student on the plane, sitting in the front near the pilot with Brendan and my other instructor, feeling glad to be far from the open door. It was physically reassuring to be wedged in among the other jumpers, shoulders and thighs pressed between the two people next to me.
The video guys had flat-topped helmets clamped tightly under their chins to bear the weight of both a large video camera and a full-size digital still camera with a lens mounted on top. They looked like something from A Clockwork Orange with their small, round camera sights, rigged on a tiny, jointed metal arm directly in front of one eye. Everyone was rowdy and exhilarated, making jokes, reaching over shoulders to pan camera lenses into each other’s face.
Jumpers riding to altitude in the Otter
The tandem customers, each sitting beside a tandem master, were a little more conventional-looking, equipped only with wide-strapped body harnesses instead of parachutes. They seemed nervous yet exhilarated in the midst of this colorful group, and many of them had come with a friend or two, so they smiled and laughed at one another, anticipating the rush.
The plane taxied slowly at first, then accelerated madly until it tilted up from the ground, climbing into the air directly toward the Rocky Mountains. Some of the skydivers grew calm, closing their eyes to visualize the routines they were planning to do in formation during their fifty seconds of free fall. Others got more wild and rambunctious as the plane climbed, whooping, laughing, and performing elaborate fist-bumping, hand-slapping routines with their buddies. Many of them did this all day, every day, for work as tandem masters or cameramen, and they were genuinely lit up.
I grew up flying in small airplanes with my dad, an aeronautical engineer who worked for Cessna, and I always experience an exhilaration in my chest at the moment a plane lifts off, even on a commercial flight. It’s one of my favorite moments. Despite my anxiety, as always my heart rose as the wheels left the ground. I was going up.
I watched the altimeter on my wrist, as the dial pointed from one thousand to two thousand to three thousand feet. I’ve spent a lot of time at thirteen thousand feet and above, but always with solid stone under my hands and feet. From the windows, the earth got smaller and smaller as the dial climbed, and I started to feel doubt. As a free solo climber, when trying extremely difficult or dangerous movements on rock for the first time, I try it first with the safety of a rope. This way I can work out the difficult moves and make calculated decisions about my ability to do them in a more dangerous scenario. I was nervously realizing that there is no rope in skydiving. The only way I could do my first skydive was to actually do it and hope I didn’t mess up. I was not convinced I could do this new thing perfectly, first go.
The pilot leaned back and said something about wind and numbers to Brendan, and he shouted it out through the plane. Everything seemed to happen quickly. Someone threw the door up, and cold air rushed in the gaping side of the plane. The engine cut slightly, changing the frequency of the sound. People shuffled over and disappeared out the open door in rapid succession, as though they were being sucked out into the air.
Brendan leaned toward me and shouted, “Students aren’t allowed to jump when the winds are gusting above twenty-five miles per hour on the ground. We’ll have to ride down.” It had taken Brendan and me so long to organize that we’d gone up just in time for the daily late-afternoon weather buildup. I slid sideways on the bench as the plane banked sharply, engines roaring back to full speed, and seemed to dive straight toward the runway. I looked out the window by my head, watching the landing strip grow before us until the wheels bumped down. I felt an intense mix of extreme relief and anticlimax as the propellers wound down into sudden silence. We hopped out the door of the empty plane, a four-foot drop onto solid ground, as the other jumpers’ canopies came in to land in the field beside the runway. It felt a little weird to be watching them float out of the sky, standing with my unused parachute still packed away inside the heavy rig on my back.
Back in the hangar, Brendan told me not to worry because the storm cells would quickly pass, and we would be able to go back up once the winds had calmed again. I went out to my truck to check on Fletch. She was denned up underneath it, hiding from the dark clouds. I sat on the tailgate and called my brother, Virgil, in Arcata, California. An ER doctor and avid surfer, he’d started skydiving the year before. Virgil had been a strong and motivated rock climber for ten years, but had been slowed down by chronic-overuse shoulder injuries, which weren’t aggravated by skydiving or surfing. In typical style, he had quickly become a jumping fanatic and was already fairly advanced, traveling to various drop zones to jump during vacations and long weekends.
Virgil cheered me up with his usual gentle logic, helping me get some perspective larger than the pencil point of reality my focus had narrowed into. It occurred to me that I had actually done the plane-ride portion of my first AFF jump, so now I would have less newness to absorb all at once on the second trip. I suddenly felt much more at ease. The sky was turning from gray to blue, and the winds were dropping down. I walked back inside to get my rig back on.
The buildup of anticipation started all over again, as it does all day at a drop zone, and we climbed into the plane. But I felt prepared and ready this time. Everything was the same—the rowdy, animated group of jumpers, the plane slowing audibly at thirteen thousand feet, the door sliding open to let the air rush in. One by one, people disappeared out the door. It was my turn. I looked at Brendan and the second instructor and hopped out the door into the cold air, feeling its force pushing on my limbs as though holding me up. I went through the drill we’d rehearsed for this skydive, making eye contact with both, arching my back as hard as I could. The air caught my lips as I smiled, blowing the skin of my cheeks into rippling waves, and holding my body with an almost comforting push from below. I checked the altimeter on my wrist, touched the pilot chute on the skydiving container behind my back, and looked at the altimeter again, surprised by how much time seemed to be left.
Suddenly it read four thousand feet. I tossed the pilot chute and let it catch the wind, to pull the main canopy into the air. The parachute blossomed out above me. I was on my own in the quiet air, floating under my own parachute, looking at the open fields below. The winds had come up again, and it dawned on me that my giant student parachute wasn’t moving forward enough to fly to the main landing area.
Flying over Longmont, Colorado
I knew a story of a recent AFF student, also a climber,
who had been badly injured by trying to make it back through winds and ending up in a ditch bordering the drop zone. I was above a field just on the other side of that very ditch, being pushed back from the landing area by a strong east wind. The flat, open landing zone was inviting and enormous, the size of a couple of football fields. But I didn’t want to come up short and end up in that ditch. Though the helmet was covering my ears, I could hear the wind moving around, keeping me from going forward. My heart started to beat harder. I scanned the ground, trying to figure out how high I was by how small the trees looked.
I needed to let go of trying to make it back and focus on landing safely on the other side of the ditch in the green field, away from the fence line. The ground rushed up before me as I got closer, but I could see the field was flat and free of obstacles. The tall grass looked soft. Brendan’s voice came over the radio clipped to my chest strap, telling me to flare. I yanked down hard on both steering toggles, bringing my arms straight down to my thighs to pull down the back of the parachute in a flare, and met the ground lightly as the canopy draped down around me. I stood in the bright green grass about a quarter mile from the main landing area, down and safe, with a huge, real smile on my face. Whatever else had happened or was happening in my life had been shut down for this space of time. I was awash in feelings of freedom and lightness, sensations I hadn’t been sure I’d ever feel again. If this was what heroin felt like, I understood immediately how people dropped their lives into it. Free soloing took the edge off things, dulled them. Skydiving made me feel good—better than good. I knew one thing without a doubt. I would not stop doing this.
Chapter Three
Brave New World
Tracking over Longmont, Colorado Jay Epstein
I opened my eyes and tipped my head back against the sofa arm in my friend Brad’s apartment. The shadows shifted across the high ceiling as light crept through the tall window sheers. Fletch was still asleep on her fleece blanket next to me, paws twitching. I felt quiet, emotionless. It was the mindset I cultivated for long routes in the mountains, a kind of climbing I’d specialized in for many years. Being a naturally ebullient person, I’d learned over time to enter a state of detached efficiency when climbing for hours or days in dangerous, unforgiving environments, thousands of feet off the ground. It was the way I’d found to endure storms, fatigue, fear, and hunger while climbing at the edge of my limits, without being controlled or weakened by emotions. Out of the danger zone, safely back in civilization or base camp, my natural self revived. It was strange to be nowhere near a mountain, locked into the alpinist’s mind, machinelike.
I was too ashamed to talk about it, but I’d spent a lot of time sifting through ways to end things in those desolate weeks in California. A climber in Yosemite, surrounded by sheer drop-offs and walls, shouldn’t have to look too far for a way out. Plenty of big cliffs in Yosemite were staring me in the face. Though I hated myself for even fantasizing about hurtling off one, every minute felt relentlessly bleak and painful and I couldn’t see any relief. But the worst part was that I simply couldn’t do it. Sixteen years of climbing, avoiding falls at all cost, had rendered me incapable of stepping off a cliff edge into free fall. I was more viscerally afraid of falling to my death than I had been before I became a climber. I hated myself for that too. Every other option I came up with seemed too violent or horrible, or too difficult in the actual details, which was also kind of pathetic. I hated myself for being so weak, in every way, and I was above all disgusted with myself for giving in to what I saw as self-indulgent depression. My so-called problems were nothing compared with the real suffering that I knew millions of people and creatures were actively enduring, so I found it ridiculous and even offensive to be wading in a swamp of self-pity and anxiety. That intellectual self-chastisement didn’t snap me out of my mind state—it just made me despise myself more for my lack of mental strength, for my petty, egocentric inability to get it together. I’d always been hard on myself, a trait that made me relentlessly improve at things. Now it relentlessly tore away at my remnants of self-esteem.
The things I’d been most afraid of losing—my life partner, my support system, my career, everything I believed to be my past, present, and future—I’d lost. I hated feeling miserable, hopeless, and isolated day after day, merely living because I lacked the courage not to. It seemed like I’d never be able to get anything back in control, including my mindset. The prospect of feeling this way for the rest of my life was almost unbearable. But I had Fletch back now, and she needed me. In the last few weeks, the black thoughts had turned to gray, and dullness was much easier to endure. Numbness worked, a way I knew to keep on through cold and fear, whether on a mountain or inside my mind.
Skydiving was a life preserver I could grab on to. The intense mix of feelings, from standing in the open door of the Otter to screaming through the cold, open sky, had poured directly into the void that seemed to be consuming me. In those moments the void felt as if it were inside me, rather than the other way around, and if nothing else, I felt compelled to plunge back into three-dimensional space just to see it again, to feel around for the boundaries of my reality.
—
I watched Fletch sleeping next to me, the rise and fall of her breathing, her thick white and black and brown fur, and thought about my house in Moab, my sofa and kitchen, my bed, my garden on the automatic drip system I’d made for it through trial and error. I wondered what my (ex?) husband was doing in California, and my mind started to wander through painful, swampy questions of what he technically was now or how normal people actually got divorces. I stood up and pulled on my shorts, set my sleeping bag in a corner, and straightened up the sofa cushions. Fletch led me to the high counter separating the kitchen from the living room and stood next to her nylon dog-food sack by the front door. Her crunches seemed especially loud in the quiet room as I waited for her to finish breakfast and lap up some water. We slipped out and walked down the wooden steps into the cool morning air of a Boulder July.
I drove the few blocks to Vic’s Coffee and crossed the street to Ideal Market, the quintessential local organic grocery store, to grab a spring roll, a peach, and bottled water for lunch. Fletch put her nose out the window, smelling the wind as we cruised down the flat twenty-mile stretch from Boulder to Longmont. A mile from the airport, canopies floated high over the fields, Longs Peak hanging in the distance like a movie backdrop. I felt my heart jump a little, with a sudden urge to be there right now. Things were happening without me. I stepped on the gas and drove fast to the airport turnoff, crunching over gravel past the hangar to the grassy field nearby. I grabbed a clean T-shirt from my duffel bag—the same clothes I’d thrown together before driving out to California a month ago—and changed behind my open truck door. I tugged out the heavy bag of skydiving gear and set up Fletch under the truck with her water dish and a long piece of rope clipped to her harness, purely for appearances, since we both knew she could easily slip out of her harness anytime she chose. “I’ll be back in a little bit, girl. You hang out.” She ducked under the tailgate, gave me the slightly put-upon glance, scratched a little at the grass, and curled up with her head on her paws.
I walked into the hangar, dropped my bag by the wall near Brendan’s stuff, and walked into the office holding my Visa. I slid it over the counter. “Hi, Emily,” I said to the girl standing at the manifest counter. “I’ll put two hundred dollars on my account.”
It’s impossible to emphasize enough how financially shocking skydiving is to a climber. A Mile-Hi jump ticket went for $22. In grad school, that was more than half my weekly food budget. When I was waiting tables and living out of my truck at climbing areas, a weekly rest day in town ran about $2.50 for laundry, $6 for breakfast at a diner, $10 to restock groceries, and $3 for thrift-store purchases. At the Mile-Hi drop zone, $22 bought thirteen thousand feet of altitude, which took two minutes to burn through. I’d easily jump through my $200 credit in two days. It was such an incomprehensible amount
of money by dirtbag climber standards that buying jump tickets somehow felt like spending Monopoly money—too outrageous to be real. Climbers pay close attention to the price of ramen noodles and chunk light canned tuna. Here I was surrounded by skydivers wearing equipment worth more than my vehicle who didn’t seem to think about it at all as they spent hundreds of dollars a weekend.
I couldn’t stand wasting money almost out of principle, a trait that was only magnified by living on a teaching assistant’s stipend in grad school, and then a hand-to-mouth climber/waitress existence in my car. Although I’d never earned a lot of money, I’d been a disciplined saver all my life, careful to keep a reserve cushion and to stay out of debt. To me, having enough money in the moment meant freedom, and having some money saved for the future meant stability. Working to maintain that balance was important to me. I had a few credit cards, habitually paid in full every month, and some money saved. I’d babysat steadily since the age of twelve, until I was old enough for real jobs. I’d never been without some type of work from then on, whether as a video-store clerk, a teaching assistant, or a climbing guide, and then finally as a sponsored athlete, work I took as seriously as any other. I seemed to be spending more money than I could ever have imagined, and to make it worse, I didn’t have a job. But whatever. Funny enough, I didn’t care. The future no longer seemed like a priority, and the present seemed to happen of its own accord. Whether I ran through my reserve cushion or racked up credit card bills didn’t mean anything to me right now, for the first time in my life. I didn’t think much about my sudden shift from conserving money to spending it with no concern and no income, beyond a somewhat intellectual interest in the astounding price of everything. At the drop zone, and even just eating in the city of Boulder, I felt as if I were on another planet where everyone was rich and it didn’t matter what anything cost. But this planet was fine.