Learning to Fly

by Steph Davis

  I tried. I really did. For six years I migrated to Yosemite each spring, setting off on that twelve-hour drive between Moab and California on Highway 50 across Nevada, “the Loneliest Road in America,” to climb those huge granite walls until it was too hot or too cold. Highway 50 wasn’t as lonely as advertised, with Fletch curled up in the passenger seat of my Ford Ranger pickup and music playing as the pale mountains of Nevada slipped past, but it was a pretty long drive.

  I spent days on the sides of El Capitan and Mount Watkins and ran up and down the trail to Half Dome. I free climbed El Capitan, then freed it in a day, then freed a harder route on it. I walked the trails and climbed the walls in the dark and in the light and knew all the tricks for avoiding rangers and spiriting Fletch out of sight quicker than a flash, since she stubbornly insisted on being a dog and thus inherently illegal. I got a PO box in Yosemite, and a library card, and told people when they asked where I was from that I lived in Moab and Yosemite. But to me Yosemite was a place of strange conflict—tantalizing beauty sullied by maddening restriction, consumerism, and the dark legacy of iniquity that was quietly remembered by the Native Americans’ annual gatherings in the park. The place felt deeply wrong, as much as I tried to immerse myself in the granite and forests and make it my home.

  The end of my marriage also meant the end of my penance in Yosemite. For me, Moab would always be home, heaven on earth.

  Freeing El Cap in a day, Yosemite Heinz Zak

  I turned from I-70 onto the final stretch toward Moab, feeling emotional as the landscape turned red and orange, with the pointed tops of the La Sal Mountains above it. I crossed the Colorado River and turned off Main Street past the park. Fletch stood up expectantly as I pulled into the driveway, where the creeping William vines were spilling over the wood front fence, the rosebushes blooming furiously in the front garden. The sprinkler timer had done its job, and the yard was lush and green, almost junglelike. Inside, everything was just as I had left it, quiet and clean. During my marriage, my husband’s refusal to dig, plant, build, renovate, or repair with me had been a constant source of disappointment and occasional conflict. Walking down the hall as Fletch nosed around, I realized for the first time there was almost no trace of him in this house. Being home felt simply good.

  That afternoon, Dr. Sorensen took X-rays of Fletch’s back legs and shoulders. He showed me the spurs that were growing from her bones, the gradually increasing arthritis in all of her legs and also her spine. The spinal arthritis explained the strange floppiness in her back legs. He said she didn’t seem to be in too much pain and to take her on easy walks if she wanted to go. But why would she limp if she didn’t hurt? The only thing I could do was give her Rimadyl and glucosamine and make sure she had lots of soft places to be comfortable. I bought the biggest bottle of Rimadyl, the one with one hundred tablets for half a pill each morning and night. I hated the idea of my happy, stoic little dog hurting with no way to stop it. She smiled at me in the truck as we left the small office, an extension of the doctor’s house with a barn and horse pastures beside it. Was I just being paranoid, or was her grin a little less wide than it used to be? We would definitely never be running anymore, but I’d lost all my interest in running anyway without Fletch careening ahead of me on the trail. It was time to do different things, and mostly I wanted to do things that Fletch could do too. If I climbed at Rifle, where the longest hike to a climb took about two minutes, she could poke around the bottom of the cliff during the day and survey things in camp at night. She was happy nesting under the truck when I went skydiving. In a week, we would drive up to Idaho and she could lie in soft grass next to the Perrine Bridge while I learned how to jump off it with Jimmy and Marta.

  Marta and Jimmy were icons in the small world of base jumping. They had based in Moab for years, but the circles of base jumpers and climbers took a long time to overlap. When I’d finally met them, well before I ever entertained the thought of jumping myself, Marta turned my preconceptions about macho, adrenaline-junkie base jumpers upside down.

  Marta was a slender, gracious Brazilian who had been base jumping since the beginning in the 1980s. A keen businesswoman, she had channeled her interest in sewing and testing the quickly evolving base equipment into a gear-manufacturing company called Vertigo BASE Outfitters, which eventually grew into Apex BASE. When she married Jimmy, an equally avid jumper, they began organizing special events for base jumpers to pool the costs of permits and helicopters, and first base jump courses for people who wanted to learn in a structured setting. Jimmy and Marta were revered almost like parents by the many jumpers they’d taught, and it would be nearly impossible to find a base jumper who didn’t know them. Living in Moab, they were the quintessential locals in one of the world’s base jumping meccas, and they’d been in the forefront of Moab’s expansion into a world destination for base jumping.

  A former pro free flier, Jimmy had curly, sandy hair, relentless energy, and a penchant for practical jokes. Both he and Marta had done plenty of stunts that might appear reckless to an uneducated observer. But Marta emphasized the “conservative approach” to base jumping. I’d seen a few YouTube videos of guys riding bikes off cliffs and yelling “Woohoo!” as they executed sloppy backflips from a bridge after swilling cheap beer. Jumping off objects looked like a crazy, gonzo free-for-all, an adrenaline-junkie pursuit for people who weren’t athletic enough to do real sports. Getting to know Marta made me see that my ideas about base jumping were based on stereotypes. Respected throughout the base-jumping world, she had never been injured in her twenty years in the sport. Her style was graceful and deliberate, like a dance with gravity. Listening to Marta talk about intelligent decision-making and procedures for dealing with gear problems made me consider that perhaps those off-putting videos were merely portraying a loud minority.

  I got some insight into the mental differences between climbing and base jumping through my friendship with Marta, well before I’d ever thought of starting to jump myself. Marta had become interested in climbing after being so completely immersed in base jumping for so long. She had the perfect build for a climber, small-framed and naturally lean. Like many Moab climbers, she occasionally came over to use my backyard climbing wall, and she was eager to learn about techniques and body positioning. Like me, she wanted to know specifically how things work and how to do things better, asking tons of questions and analyzing her efforts.

  As a climber, I was used to seeing quivering muscles, to hearing grunting, heavy breathing, kung fu screams, and near–mortal combat in the effort to slap at one final hold before falling off. Sometimes that’s what it takes. Most climbers throw themselves at things that are beyond their reach and progress in the sport by persistently trying climbs that are too difficult for them. Watching Marta climb on the wall, following the routes I’d marked with pieces of colored tape, I was puzzled by seeing her let go of holds and step off before she even got tired. She often held herself back from making moves that were well within her ability. My wall was no taller than ten feet and was surrounded by a bed of deep pea gravel that was covered with thick foam pads. Falling off it was about as dangerous as bouncing on a mattress. Surely this woman who made a career of leaping off tall objects and flying a nylon wing into boulder-strewn landing areas wasn’t afraid of dropping a few inches onto a padded surface? With her natural physique and her years of experience in a technical adventure sport, I couldn’t figure out why Marta wasn’t climbing better on the wall, and I could see it bothered her to let go before finishing a climb. One day I flat out told her that she was capable of much more than she was doing, and that she just needed to try harder.

  Marta sighed. “I know, Steph. I get very frustrated climbing sometimes.”

  “I see that,” I said, “but it makes no sense because you have the strength to do a lot more than what you are doing. You’re so light, and you have the perfect build. You just need to push yourself more.”

  “It’s a hard mental change,” Marta said in her lig
ht Brazilian accent. “With jumping, I am very conservative. So I always make the effort to hold myself back, below what I know I can do. That’s the way to jump safely, for a long time, and to be ready for the unexpected things.”

  That made sense. It was the same as my approach to climbing without a rope. When free soloing, I would never consider trying to push the limits of my climbing ability. Rather, I wanted to know those limits and operate below them, exactly as Marta had described. And Marta knew what she was doing. She was one of the best; she’d been base jumping for decades and had never been hurt.

  But climbing was not a high-risk activity when using ropes or crash pads to cushion falls. Falling off climbs was just a side effect of pushing oneself. A person could climb for a lifetime without ever being at serious physical risk, and my backyard wall was all about training with no concern for safety.

  “I think that for rock climbing, it’s kind of the opposite mindset,” I said. “If you’re not pushing to the point of falling, you’re not trying hard enough. So I think it’s a mental shift from your approach to base jumping. When I’m free soloing or climbing in the mountains, I can’t fall. Sometimes it’s really hard for me to make the switch from that to normal rock climbing with a rope, where if you don’t fall, you’re not trying hard enough—my brain is still sure that getting out of control equals death. It can be really frustrating for a while during the transition time, freezing up, and being unable to commit to hard moves in a situation where it’s completely safe. I’ve just seen that it’s two different brains, for two different times, and you have to learn to make the switch.”

  That difference was so simple yet so hard. It was like non-attachment, or never getting angry—easy to believe in, but hard to put into practice. Much later, I would live firsthand the conflict between the base jumping brain and the rock climbing brain. It wasn’t the same as the difference between climbing without a rope and climbing with a rope. When climbing, whether roped or not, my instincts told me to hold on, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. When jumping off the edge, my deepest instincts were telling me not to do it, but I forced past them with my mind. The trick was understanding which to listen to, and when. That’s what a veteran jumper like Marta knew, and what a new jumper usually couldn’t hear above all the other voices shouting in the brain.

  Jimmy and Marta’s base jump courses were held at the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho, three hours north of Salt Lake City. The Perrine, sometimes referred to as “the potato bridge,” is famous among jumpers because of its comparative safety and extreme accessibility. The bridge supports a four-lane road, Highway 93, atop a strut-work metal arch that spans 486 feet above the Snake River. It’s the entrance to Twin Falls, and the town’s main link to the outside world, and it was built to its current design in 1976 as a replacement for the original bridge. Nice grassy meadows are at both the top and the bottom, and jumpers spend the whole day there jumping, hiking out, repacking their parachutes, and chatting with spectators. The railings and the iron park benches around the viewpoints all echo the arch design of the bridge, clearly the town’s pride and joy.

  The Perrine Bridge is a major tourist attraction, and the people of Twin Falls love base jumpers. Instead of outlawing jumping from the bridge, they quickly decided to encourage it as a boon to the economy. The Perrine Bridge is the town’s emblem, and the residents proudly commemorate with a monument and a plaque Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump his motorcycle across the canyon in 1974. Base jumping just adds to the show, drawing even more tourists to visit the bridge and spend time watching the jumpers. The jumpers themselves pour money into Twin Falls, staying in hotels and eating out, especially on windy days when they can’t jump. Twin Falls was savvy enough to embrace base jumping and its revenues rather than to waste resources and time by trying to outlaw it. Though this sort of attitude is inherent in Europe, it’s almost an anomaly in the United States. No other bridge in America permits, let alone encourages, base jumping. It takes a visitor only five minutes at the park beside the end of the bridge to see that everyone is happy: the base jumpers, the town, the visitors, the dogs, the kids.

  The Perrine Bridge, Twin Falls, Idaho

  When jumping off cliffs or buildings, it’s possible to either fall or fly into the wall, which is at the top of the long list of bad things that can happen to you. The Perrine is considered a safe object to jump since the bridge is an open arch and you won’t hit it if you find yourself facing the wrong way. The Perrine also spans a river, so if you find yourself in serious trouble you can aim for the water, which is a lot softer than the ground. Still, a handful of jumpers have died or become permanently injured there, maybe because most everyone goes there to learn to base jump or to try out crazy tricks.

  Base jumping was not really to blame for some of the deaths, though—most notably that of a man who jumped alone and landed safely on a winter afternoon, but found himself unable to make his way twenty minutes up the rocky hillside at the base of the bridge to the lights of town. Somehow he didn’t come up with the idea of wrapping himself in his massive nylon parachute or simply walking back and forth until dawn, and he froze to death.

  Jimmy and Marta vetted all applicants to the courses, and their absolute minimum requirement for skydives was a hundred. They also asked that students arrive at the course prepared to pack their own gear with supervision. Because we were friends and my transformation from a whuffo to a jumper was exciting for them, Jimmy and Marta had offered to let me tag along on one of the courses, as long as I had my packing down and enough skydives. Jay had sent me off with two of his identical base rigs, so I would be able to be more efficient by doing two jumps in a row before having to stop to repack.

  The hotel that Jimmy and Marta preferred, less than a mile from the top of the Perrine Bridge, even offered a discount to base jumpers and welcomed dogs. So we all gathered there the night before the course, a group of six men and two women, everyone excited and nervous.

  The first day of the course was spent inside a hotel room as Marta took everyone through ground school. Her English was softly accented, with each syllable equally emphasized in the Brazilian style. We all sat and listened as she went through a hit list of the main problems that can happen—facing the wall when the canopy opens, having all the lines wrap into twists above you, losing a steering toggle, coming in too fast on landing, landing in water—and the procedures for dealing with them. She gave explanations of wind conditions, body position, equipment, and, most important, decision-making. Marta told us about a few of the accidents she’d seen in jumping, to illustrate each potential problem and how not to deal with it. She offhandedly mentioned that all the carnage she’d seen in the sport had reinforced her belief in conservative decision-making. She told stories of jumps she had chosen to walk down from, even while the rest of the group jumped with no problems, and some stories of scary malfunctions she had corrected by using the right procedures. She told stories of choosing to drop and roll when coming in too fast on landing, while jumpers next to her tried to stand it up and broke their ankles. Having fast reflexes, a lot of experience, and a lack of ego seemed the key to staying uninjured in the sport.

  I didn’t envy Jimmy and Marta their job, though they had created it. Every single jumper in the room was dying to start base jumping and, despite Marta’s sound explanations and practical advice, most would assuredly not make any intelligent decisions if those decisions involved deciding not to jump. New jumpers were desperate to jump and couldn’t see much past that. All new base jumpers were also sure nothing would ever happen to them. I knew this because I too was desperate to jump, and I was secretly convinced that I would never mess up or do any of the careless things that had clearly led to all those other accidents. I’d taken all the steps required to be prepared to learn to base jump, and now I was learning from the best teachers. I would just keep doing everything by the book. What could possibly go wrong?

  Late that afternoon we followed Jimmy and Marta to the
bridge like ducklings, all of us dressed for battle in our base rigs, heavy boots, motocross kneepads and helmets. We walked through the small, lush park just beside the bridge, passing the manicured green grass and small rows of young trees. Jumpers packed on the lawn, while families walked by with dogs and toddlers, asking questions about parachutes and jumping. The bridge stretched across the canyon, a huge arch of hollow-framed iron scaffolding below the flat top of highway, each end built into the iron-colored rock bands of the canyon.

  Base students beside the bridge

  We walked along the bike path right under the edge of the bridge, hearing the sound of cars through the metal just a few feet overhead. On the other side, we all leaned against the stone wall overlooking the canyon. The wall, made of the same bumpy, pocketed rock as the canyon, was mortared together with cement, as thick as it was tall and obviously built to last. I looked down at the olive-green expanse of the Snake River, flowing smoothly along the waterway. Green, bushy trees waved at the water’s edge, giving way to slopes of dry, yellowed grass, sagebrush, and dark gray talus that had fallen down from the blocky cliff bands. The rock was bullet hard, obviously some kind of igneous stone, coated in spots by iridescent yellow lichen. The valley stretched out in the distance like an oil landscape, in muted pastoral tones of green, gold, tan, and gray, rising from water to earth to sky. The bridge vibrated above us with the thundering echo of cars rushing steadily back and forth. Marta leaned over the edge of the stone wall and pointed out the small meadow with an American flag posted in it, way down beside the river.