Learning to Fly

by Steph Davis

  “This is our landing area. You can see the flag, and you can also see the trees by the water,” Marta said, smiling. “Those trees are very soft and flexible, so they are going to move a lot in the wind. You can always look at trees to check wind conditions if you did not plant a flag. If the trees are rocking and rolling, we are not going to jump. You can also check water. If there are whitecaps, the wind is about twenty miles per hour, which is much too strong. So if you have no flag or no trees, no smokestack to look at, and you see whitecaps on water, that is another wind indicator you can use. So here we look good, the trees are not rocking and rolling, the flag is blowing slightly away from the object. When you open up, fly to the landing area and turn back to land toward the bridge, so you are landing into the wind. If anything is wrong at all, go to the very edge of the water and land in the water. If you land right next to the shore, you will have no problem getting out, but be prepared to cut away. So remember, if you have any malfunction, take the water. If you’re coming in too fast, drop and roll. Don’t try for a stand-up landing, just roll it out. It’s better to get wet or to drop and roll than to break your ankle.”

  The bridge cast a thick, dark shadow across the deep green water. The meadow looked small. This bridge was 486 feet tall, so my parachute wouldn’t even be open until I was only 450 feet above the ground. Skydivers think that opening at two thousand feet is sucking it down close to the ground. Jay’s rig felt so small and light on my back compared with my heavy skydiving gear with its second, reserve parachute. It was really happening.

  Geared up in Jay’s rig

  We left the overlook and walked up to a small landing between the walkway and the bridge.

  “So we’re going to practice our exit here,” Jimmy said. He climbed over the metal railing, holding it behind him with his arms as his toes stuck over the edge, his rig pushing against the railing and forcing his body farther out into the air, a grassy patch two feet below him. “You’ll climb over the railing; make sure not to let your pilot chute scrape against it. Get turned around and reach back to the railing. It might feel strenuous because your rig is pushing you off a little. So hold on. Look up at the horizon line and push off hard,” he said, launching forward into the grass. “So everyone practice climbing over. And practice the launch too if you want, into the grass.”

  We all climbed back and forth over the railing, some people hopping out into the grass as Jimmy had done. After a few minutes of circling up and around like lemmings, we continued up to the sidewalk along the side of the bridge. The walkway was hemmed in by a cement guardrail on the traffic side, and by the vertical posts of the metal railing on the side that faced air. The huge bridge shuddered under my feet as big trucks thundered past. It was a strange contrast, walking on pavement beside speeding vehicles, surrounded by metal, noise, and vibration, with the pastoral river valley curving off into the distance just below. If I turned my head in one direction, I saw the Magic Valley Mall, T.J.Maxx, Old Navy, Famous Footwear, IHOP, and the Outback Steakhouse. In the other direction, I saw angular rock bluffs above a soothing expanse of water, a fall palette of greens, yellows, and browns. It was like being between two completely different worlds, separated by only five hundred vertical feet. We straggled out in a line, taking glances over the edge as we walked farther from the earth, toward the middle of the bridge. Jimmy and Marta stopped when we were standing just above the river.

  “We’ll jump here so we are over the water, but we are also still close to the landing area. Who’s first?” Marta asked, looking around.

  I didn’t want to be first. When trying a new climb, the more climbers I watched trying it first, the more information I got about how to move up the rock. If everyone fell in the same place, I knew it was difficult there. By watching which edges other climbers touched or moved from, I could tell which were good handholds and which were more difficult to pull on. Being the first to try a climb with no information was more challenging and exciting. Being the last to try it after watching everyone else was more conducive to success. On my first base jump, success was much higher on my priority list than excitement. I wanted to jump last after observing and analyzing what everyone else did. This didn’t seem like it would be a problem, since most of the group were eager to get over the railing. In a way it was harder to wait, with the anticipation of the jump jangling up inside, but I felt sure that taking the opportunity to watch was worth it.

  486 feet above the Snake River

  Several of the guys stepped forward, and a thin guy in a black helmet climbed over the railing. Everyone stood at the railing, watching him intently. Behind him, Marta stood petite and blond, with his pilot chute in her hand to give him a “pilot chute assist,” or PCA. This way he didn’t even have to reach back to grab his pilot chute and throw it into the air in the three seconds of time he had to freefall. As his body fell forward, the fifteen-foot bridle of flat webbing would stretch straight from his rig and rip the pilot chute from Marta’s hand. The resistance would be enough to pull the curved pins out of the small loops, open his container, and tug his canopy out into the air. A lot was going on in a first base jump, to the point that a person could get completely overwhelmed. So Jimmy and Marta insisted on a PCA jump for the first one to ensure that all jumpers would have a canopy over their head, no matter what they did when they left the bridge.

  The jumper crouched forward slightly, his hands gripping the metal bars behind him, and shouted, “Three, two, one … see ya,” as he pushed as hard as he could away from the bridge. His body shot forward into the air, his arms flying straight up overhead and his body arching up in the AFF student position. He dropped down fast. Jimmy bent over the railing with a small video camera, following his trajectory. In a flash, I watched the bridle yank straight up to Marta’s hand, tearing the pilot chute from her grasp just as his parachute banged open. We all leaned over the railing, watching the blue-and-gray square fly straight over the water, turn toward the flag, and then billow down as he touched down, with a loud whoop of elation. Everyone broke into smiles, looking over at one another. “Nice!” Jimmy shouted down. Then he turned back to us. “Who’s next?”

  I held back as each person stepped forward. It was engrossing to watch the different emotions and styles as they left the bridge, one by one. Some shouted with excitement, some were quiet; one guy yelled the punch line of an inside joke as he dropped from the side, making the small group at the railing burst out into surprised laughter. After watching the sixth jump, I felt I knew the sequence pretty well. The next to go was the other woman in the course. I watched her more carefully as she clambered over the rail, leaned forward, then quietly dropped off into the air. Her parachute opened and she flew over the water and then into the meadow, just as everyone else had. I looked at Marta and said, “I guess it’s my turn now.”

  “You got it, Steph,” Jimmy said enthusiastically. “We’ll see you down there.”

  I buckled my helmet and climbed over the metal railing, happy to start with something that felt easy. Climbing around in high places was second nature for me, but the familiarity stopped abruptly when I rotated around with my back to the railing to lean out face-first above the open air. I was surprised by how shaky I felt. Though my arms were strong enough to hold me on a rock face, I felt them getting tired on the railing behind me with the rig pushing me forward. I turned my head to look at Marta, holding my pilot chute. It was strange to know that I wouldn’t be totally responsible for deploying my canopy, but if I trusted anyone to do it, it was Marta.

  “Is it okay?” I asked.

  “Yes, all perfect. Have a good jump, Steph,” Marta said encouragingly.

  I looked down at the green river below and at the meadow surrounded by rocks and trees. As soon as I let go of the solid metal, I’d drop into soft air. It was a strange moment, at once exhilarating and intimidating. In these seconds, I’d make a choice that couldn’t be unmade. Once I left the edge, there would be no way to go back. I might reach the ground safe
ly, I might not. It was like the old saying “You pays your money and you takes your chances.” In this moment, it became totally clear. The future was entirely unknown.

  I looked up at the horizon line between earth and sky, out in the distance. I took a deep breath and felt my heart race as I decided to go. I counted for myself as most of the others had—“Three, two, one!”—and threw my arms up into the air. Almost as soon as I felt myself falling, the parachute billowed open above me, and then I was flying out over the water. Quickly I reached up for the steering toggles and yanked them free. I held them tightly in my hands. The steering lines ran straight from my hands to the back of the canopy, without going through small keeper rings above my shoulders as on my skydiving parachute. If I dropped a toggle, I wouldn’t be able to get it back and would have to crash-land the parachute without being able to flare it properly. The unattached lines made the steering feel different, somehow kind of clumsy and loose with my arms moving all around instead of within a narrow pivot range. I tried to adjust to the difference while turning the parachute to get set up over the meadow for my final landing. It was all happening so quickly, and it was somewhat disorienting to be making all of my decisions without the help of an altimeter. I had no idea how high I was, but the ground was getting closer. I could see the dry, grassy stretch becoming bigger ahead of me. At the last moment, I pulled the steering toggles down to my knees and came down with a hard thump, knees bent. My toes hit the front of my boots. The parachute billowed down in front of me. It had all happened so fast.

  Automatically, I reattached the steering toggles to their stow points and daisy-chained the parachute lines as I always did after landing, my hands shaking. I looked up at the bridge, at the small figures at the railing. I’d been up there and now I was down here. I’d thought about this moment so much, and now it was done, just like that. I felt strangely unsure of how to feel.

  I unbuckled the chest strap, loosened the leg buckles and stepped out of the rig, pulled out the large stash bag, and stuffed everything inside. Suddenly I realized I was still wearing my helmet, and I unclipped the buckle under my chin. The trees were now tree-size, the bridge impossibly high above, its arch stretching from one side of the canyon to the other like an iron rainbow. It was quiet, this span of meadow surrounded by rock slopes to the left and the smooth river to the right, belying the world of bustling commerce and rushing cars just five hundred feet above. I looked around almost in wonder, at this place I’d never been to until I dropped out of the sky. It was calm here, natural. There was no going back.

  I looked up again just in time to see Jimmy and Marta drop into the air together with an exuberant whoop, their canopies bursting open almost simultaneously. I could hear Marta laughing delightedly. I smiled, watching them fly together.

  Chapter Ten

  Jumping the Gun

  Running off the Tombstone, Moab, Utah

  I made the seven-hour drive back to the Perrine twice more for bridge jumps. On the last few jumps, I intentionally crossed the risers inside my pack job as Jimmy had told me to do, so the canopy would open in a 180—an off-heading opening in which the parachute comes out backward, flying toward the open arch of the bridge. A 180 is one of the worst things that can happen, especially when jumping from short cliffs like the ones in Moab. On a cliff jump, if the canopy opened facing the wrong way, I would need to turn it around in a split second to avoid flying into the wall. By packing to have a 180 on purpose at the bridge, where there was nothing to hit, I could safely practice the maneuver to correct it and see if I did it fast enough to keep myself from a wall strike.

  Jumping from the bridge into the air knowing that my canopy was packed to open wrong gave me an eerie feeling. Though it didn’t have the true element of surprise, I was still a little unnerved to find myself facing the metal arch instead of the empty air as the canopy opened. As I’d been drilled, I instantly pulled on the rear riser, the shoulder strap that rose from my right shoulder to the back of the canopy, to turn away from the bridge instantly, without even taking an extra second to pull down and release the main steering toggles like I would normally do after opening. This was an important reflex, and I wanted to have the muscle memory drilled into my body. Using the rear risers to turn could save a fraction of a second, which could be the difference between flying away unscathed or scraping down the wall with a collapsed canopy and crashing to the ground. The need for this lightning-fast reflex was a major reason the Moab cliffs were not considered appropriate for inexperienced jumpers.

  After learning the basics in the safe Perrine environment, the recommended progression would be to do many more jumps there at the bridge, then to go to a three-thousand-foot “terminal” cliff for the first jumps from a solid object. I was all in favor of that plan, but there was one problem. In America, all the tall, “safe” cliffs are in national parks, which prohibit base jumping under an old wartime regulation against “aerial delivery,” which has been stretched and massaged to include aerial delivery of “oneself,” mainly because the Park Service admittedly holds a grudge against base jumpers and base jumping. The cliffs in Moab are just tall enough for base jumping and miraculously free of NPS boundaries, but their low height makes them more risky to jump.

  This creates something of a conundrum for a beginning base jumper in the States, trying to gain experience safely—and has also created decades of bitterness and animosity against the NPS from the base-jumping community, which is exponentially returned, creating a vicious cycle of conflict and legal aggression from both sides. America’s tall cliffs are the right height to be safe enough for a new jumper to gain experience, but the added complication of having to jump in the dark or run from park rangers detracts from that safety. In Europe, however, huge cliffs are about as common as trees, and base jumping is lumped in with all the other typical mountain sports, like paragliding or skiing. If I wanted to keep following Jimmy and Marta’s direction and continue on the approved path of base jumping, I needed to ignore the low cliffs all around me and travel to Europe for my first cliff jumps, which did not exactly fit in with my notion of conserving money by switching to base.

  It seemed much too good to be true when I received an e-mail invitation to come and speak at a mountain film festival in Poland, which would pay for all my expenses to Europe. I could appear at the festival and then go to Italy to make some jumps at Monte Brento, a mountain with a three-thousand-foot wall above a long expanse of forested hillside. After that, it wouldn’t be completely unreasonable to come home and start cautiously jumping in Moab. I felt lucky that things were falling into place so well, even if this apprentice phase required me to travel across the world to get the skills to simply jump my cliffs right here at home.

  I couldn’t deny that I was on an extremely accelerated path, one that any jumper would agree was not the smartest way to get into base. I was trying to do things right, but I was charging full speed ahead into jumping, the way I’d always done things since the day I’d first climbed up a rock face in Maryland. The full-speed-ahead method had taken me up some of the biggest walls in the world. As a climber, it had always been the right approach.

  A packed base rig is kind of like a loaded gun. In two months I’d leave for Europe. From every window in my house, the sandstone cliffs glowed red at sunrise and sunset. Only three miles from my front door, the Tombstone waited, a four-hundred-foot-tall cliff with a perfectly sheer face, split by a single thin crack from bottom to top. I’d walked the narrow path that wound up the back of the Tombstone, past petroglyphs and sandstone arches, countless times. The Tombstone was one of the best-known and tallest jumps in Moab, and I’d seen plenty of jumpers run off the top or fall past me on the wall.

  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed ridiculous to drive back to Idaho again to jump off the bridge. The Tombstone was right there. I knew it bottom to top, back to front. It seemed destined to be my first cliff jump despite what I’d been advised. I’d spent so much time on that rock, it alm
ost felt like a member of my family. But I understood that the Moab cliffs are not for beginner jumpers because they are low, four hundred feet or less. Altitude equals safety in jumping, since that gives more time for reaction and to get away from the wall during free fall. On a tall cliff, you might have up to fifteen seconds to fall through the air before you have to deploy your parachute. On a short Moab cliff, you often have one second, maybe two, to free fall. When the parachute opens, you are still close to the cliff, maybe just twenty feet away from it, so you are much more likely to hit the wall if anything goes wrong or if your parachute comes out in the wrong direction. This is the big danger in base jumping, or at least one of the biggest.

  A lot of things that made sense at that time don’t look so clear from the now. What mattered most, I think, was to feel that I had direction. Jumping gave me that, was what kept me moving forward. Everything else was confused, at best. I’d felt a lot of doubt when I’d first left school to be a climber half a lifetime ago, but things had been simpler somehow. My passion for climbing and for adventure had been clear, simple to follow. I’d made it in that life, succeeding to the point of being able to support myself through climbing, but now it looked like there wasn’t a place for me anymore. I’d lost my job and my self-esteem, and I felt that I had nothing to offer. I wondered if it might be time to let go of the climbing life and look for a job doing something else. Take a new direction. I agonized over this idea for months, along with everything else. But somehow, just as I’d been driven to leave academia and become a climbing bum, I knew inside that I needed to hold on, though I didn’t know quite how to do it. The climbing life might be finished with me, but I wasn’t finished with it. Not yet. This feeling was based partly on instinct, partly on the same deep passion that had led me out of grad school and into my truck, and partly on the unexpected support I was getting from the climbing community of people I didn’t even know.