by Steph Davis
I stepped into my rig, cinched the leg straps and buckled the chest strap, then zipped my climbing shoes and chalk bag into the front of my windbreaker. Dean coiled the thin tagline into long loops and fed it into his pants before stepping into his rig. I was glad I didn’t have to jump with the extra bulk of the rope running down inside my pant legs.
We hadn’t brought helmets or knee pads, wanting the bag to be as light as possible when we hauled it. I felt unusually light and exposed as I walked toward the pointed edge of the tower. A lot of gravel and dirt sloped toward the clean edge of rock, where there was just enough room to stand.
“Take your heading toward that big round mesa out ahead,” Dean said. “It’s a two-second delay, just like Tombstone. Just fly out and line it up over the runway. Eyes on the horizon and arch.”
I reached back and touched my pilot chute for about the fiftieth time. I looked at the islandlike mesa to the southwest, then lifted my gaze higher to the rim that ran beyond it. I bent my knees slightly, preparing to push off hard from the edge. I needed to hear a voice counting to get me moving. “Three, two, one!” I yelled, and pushed forward, throwing my arms up overhead as I shoved off the edge.
I counted out the seconds for myself out loud in free fall so there would be no mistake—“One thousand one, one thousand two”—then reached back with my right hand and yanked the pilot chute out of my container. Time slowed as it inflated and pulled the canopy into the air. I watched the big boulders at the base growing larger, then my legs rag-dolled up in front of me as the canopy opened with a bang and I was floating high over the talus slope.
I headed straight out, toward the dirt road, and the air became bumpy. My canopy bounced around, and I pulled on the brake lines, trying to quiet it. Since we’d started climbing in midday, the change in temperature between the sunbaked, south facing hillside and the air was creating turbulence, which happens regularly at Castleton, a basic behavior of air that I wouldn’t learn about for some time. Right now, I knew only that my parachute was bouncing around and refusing to stay in a smooth line of flight as I got closer to the dirt trail perpendicular to my flight path.
I turned right and let the parachute fly as I descended closer to the earth. The wind pushed me from right to left, and I felt alarmed as the ground started to rush up. In skydiving, it had been drilled into me never to make any turns low to the ground, which in the world of skydiving means less than a couple of hundred feet. As I started to flare the canopy, about ten feet above the ground, a strong puff of wind pushed me a few feet to the left. I was already bringing both of my hands down to make my flare and didn’t know what to do. A juniper tree appeared right in front of me, with gnarled, iron-hard broken branches sticking up like spikes among the scrubby evergreen clumps of growth. Marta had gone over tree landings in the first jump course. I squeezed my legs together as hard as I could and finished the flare, just as I drove straight into the juniper branches. A spearlike limb hit my right hip and then drove into my inner thigh. My feet were just touching the ground, the canopy draped over the small tree with the lines tangled in the tough, spiky branches. I felt the numb, emotionless dread you feel when you’ve been hit hard and aren’t sure if you’re actually injured, when it’s too soon to feel pain. I looked down and saw my pants completely torn apart at the crotch, dark blood soaking the light fabric and dripping onto the red dirt. I stepped up on my tiptoes and lifted myself off the jagged spear of the broken juniper branch. The blood flowed faster. I didn’t know exactly where it was coming from, but it was making me nervous. I wasn’t feeling sharp pain, just a sense of hollow dismay. I’d messed up. I lay down on the ground and pressed my hands hard into my crotch. There was so much blood.
Dean walked up the road with his parachute over his shoulder, then saw me on the ground with my canopy tangled in the juniper.
“Are you hurt?”
“I think I’m okay. I got blown left. I landed on the juniper. I think I’m okay. I just need to lie down for a minute.”
He stepped forward fast. His eyes widened when he saw the torn fabric of my pants, the blood staining my legs and the ground.
“Can you walk?”
“I think so. I just need a minute. It’s a lot of blood.”
He untangled my lines from the tree and stuffed my gear into the stash bag. I sat up, feeling light-headed, and reached up for his arm to climb to my feet. As I stood, I felt a sharp pain in my left groin muscle and another sharp pain in the front of my hip. I looked down at the bloody shreds of my pants. It looked bad. The descent through the small canyon normally took only five or ten minutes, scrambling down rock gullies and small ledges to reach the parking lot. I needed to get out to the car and get home quickly before the adrenaline wore off and the pain really kicked in. I took a step and sucked in my breath hard at the sharp pain. It was going to be a long way. Holding myself up on Dean’s arm, I hobbled slowly to the top of the canyon. I started to feel more pain as we made our way out, step by slow step. I was past the numbness window, and the blood wouldn’t stop flowing down my right leg. As the nerve endings started to go off, I could tell that the blood wasn’t coming from my femoral artery, which was good. I’d literally impaled myself on the branch I’d landed on, high up inside my inner thigh. It didn’t seem to have hit anything major, though it certainly could have with just an inch of difference in any direction, but there was a lot of blood. All the other pain was probably just from slamming the juniper so hard. Like all desert plants, junipers are deceptively compact and incredibly tough. I knew someone who’d driven too close to a dried juniper limb and had to replace the entire front panel of his car. The jagged, dead branches are stronger than metal.
I collapsed into the front seat of his car, on a folded fleece blanket to keep from soaking the upholstery.
“I should probably go the hospital,” I said reluctantly. Since my insurance policy was mostly for catastrophes, I assumed the costs would be staggering if I ever walked into a medical facility. I almost never went to the doctor for anything. I either got better eventually or asked my brother for advice or a prescription. “Just because of where it is.” I didn’t want to say it, but I was kind of afraid of how bad it might be.
“Do you want to go home first and take a shower?” Dean asked.
“I don’t seem to stop bleeding. I think we should probably just go straight there,” I said tonelessly.
I hobbled into the emergency room and stood in front of the admission desk.
“I fell and landed on a juniper branch. I’m bleeding, and I might be bruised,” I said quietly to the receptionist. She placed a clipboard on the counter with several forms to fill out. I took the pen and leaned against the counter. It was hard to stand, and the blood started flowing, dripping onto the floor and making a small pool around my feet on the white floor. I saw her face turn from professionally polite to startled as I folded down to the floor, and two nurses rushed over to lift me into a wheelchair.
It would take seven stitches to close the wound, the nurse informed me as she sewed. A year later an X-ray in another hospital would reveal that I’d also fractured the front of my pelvis on the branch. But I didn’t get X-rays because I was afraid it would cost too much. They gave me a prescription for ibuprofen and Vicodin and sent me home. By the next morning I was swollen downstairs to the point that I was afraid to look. Blood leaked continuously from the stitches, which were stretched almost to the point of tearing. I tried not to feel as horrified as I was and stayed in bed for two days, packed in ice and towels, keeping the Vicodin levels steady. Fletch stayed on the floor beside the bed, quietly waiting with me. I was scheduled to fly to Canada in six days to speak at a film festival before an audience of a thousand. Aside from my fundamental inability to bail on a commitment, my career felt so tenuous that I didn’t even entertain the option of canceling my appearance and letting down the festival organizers who’d invited me. If I could walk with my legs close enough together to look normal, I’d be there.
Lying in bed, I willed myself to heal quickly. I believed I was lucky to have got hurt in a somewhat trivial way, just as I was starting to charge forward too fast. In the quiet days in my bedroom, I tried to step back a little, look at myself with some perspective. I could see I was obsessed and a little strung out, like any new base jumper. Maybe a little more than most. In only five weeks, I’d be leaving for Europe, where I could finally make legal jumps from a tall, “safe” cliff. Dean thought we should go together, so he could continue to mentor me. We both seemed to feel the crash was entirely my fault, but I did ask myself why he’d considered it a good beginner jump for me when it clearly took some skill to avoid obstacles there. This was just the kind of complication I’d been worried about, and it made me wonder yet again if it was too risky to be mixing a tangled personal dynamic with a start in such a judgment-dependent sport. Somehow I couldn’t take a firm stand about this remnant of a relationship. I didn’t have the energy to make a decision about it. I watched myself keep going forward without actually choosing a direction. I was trying to make intelligent decisions, but above all I believed that I had to let events unfold as they would. The one thing that had been pounded into me over the last year was the certainty that I could not force outcomes, at least not ones that involved other people. I was well cured of even trying. This time I was just letting the threads spool out, not running around trying to wind them up or crochet potentially useful things out of them. What I could control was myself, and never more than when I stood alone at the edge.
Chapter Eleven
Leaving the Nest
First wingsuit base jump, Monte Brento, Italy
Monte Brento is a grand wall of limestone, at least three thousand feet from top to bottom. A long expanse of sloping forest leads to the landing field, conveniently located across the road from the Zebrata espresso bar. Driving a few kilometers farther will take you to Arco, a village renowned for sunny limestone cliffs, and for the annual RockMaster’s challenge, where top competition climbers gather to vie for the champion title on an artificial climbing wall in the town center.
I’d driven past Brento several times before, to climb in Arco when the weather was too stormy and cold for long routes in the Dolomites. Now I stood below the limestone massif, looking up at it as a jumper, not just as a climber. The pale-gray-and-beige headwall curved into slabs about halfway down like a petrified wave, meeting a talus slope at the base. The sheer size of the stone from left to right made it difficult for me to gauge the vertical rise, and the long stretch of trees made it seem far away. Just then, a canopy popped open in the air, and a tiny blue rectangle floated out. The wall was big, nothing like the small Moab cliffs I’d jumped, and I shivered as I thought of standing up on the top. I eyed the sweep of forest. There weren’t any junipers. The spacious grass meadow I was standing in was as friendly as a landing area at a skydiving drop zone. The canopy floated forward, still high above the trees. I watched for a long time as the jumper grew from bug size to doll size to human size, seeming to pick up speed as he flew in from the edge of the forest for a landing. He ran a few steps while the parachute delicately wafted down to the grass and stood still with the thin lines stretched out in front of him, unbuckling the chin strap of his helmet, his face glowing. It was beautiful.
The Zebrata bar bustled with locals at opening time. Drivers and workmen crowded around the small bar flirting with the two slim, dark-eyed baristas and knocking back cups of espresso and jam pastries. The café was also a destination and meeting point for base jumpers, the walls covered with framed photos of people leaping off the top of Monte Brento. A digital anemometer on the wall showed the current conditions, and the locals called to ask the girls how the wind looked before driving there. Outside on the patio, the Italian sun took the bite out of the late-December air. Parachutes were spread on tarps in the flat, grassy area across from the tables. A crew of Austrian, Slovenian, and Croatian jumpers wandered in and out with coffee, mineral water, beer, and panini, packing their rigs and counting heads. Twelve could fit into the local taxi van that would drive jumpers up the winding mountain road to the start of the trail.
Being here at Brento with Dean had a strange dynamic, though I had agreed to the plan. I was reluctant to accept him as a base mentor, especially given our unsettled situation. I didn’t have the mental energy to figure out what our relationship now was, and I wasn’t even sure we should be here together. I had started jumping on my own, seeking out knowledge and instruction from friends, and my deep instinct was that it should stay mine, free of the complication of our dynamic. After getting hurt on my last jump at Castleton, I also realized that even at this early stage I couldn’t rely on the judgment of others, no matter who they might be. Just doing what someone else told me to do was not an option, even if I didn’t know what I was doing. No one was going to keep me safe or help me once I stepped off the edge. Now I’d experienced opposing, and equally problematic, scenarios of being discouraged from progressions when I was more than ready, and being encouraged when I wasn’t ready. Though as a beginner in this sport it would seem reasonable to listen to others with more experience, I realized that, as in climbing, all of my decisions needed to come from me—even if I was in most ways the least qualified person to make them right now. And I was starting to understand that this was all a lot more complicated than simply jumping off a cliff.
Terminal base jumping was an entirely different animal from the subterminal jumping I’d been introduced to at the bridge and on the Moab cliffs. Though I’d been told over and over that terminal jumps were more suitable for a beginner, they presented a lot more to deal with. Jumping from a height of four hundred feet, I could see everything from the top of the cliff. I could count out loud—“One thousand one, one thousand two”—and toss out my pilot chute. My body position had little time to go wrong in those two seconds, as long as I kept my eyes on the horizon and arched, which had been well drilled into me. When the parachute snapped open, the landing area was right in front of me. I just had to steer a little bit and get ready to land. In less than a minute, it was all over, and in sequence, it was exactly like the Perrine. On this high cliff, my body would continue falling until I reached terminal speed, 120 miles per hour. After I left the edge and started to accelerate, transitioning from dead air into the lift of airspeed, I’d need to get into a tracking position, fly forward, and decide when it was time to throw out my pilot chute. I didn’t understand this part. Since I’d never done a terminal jump from a cliff before, how would I know when it was time to deploy?
When I was skydiving, I had an altimeter—two, actually, thanks to my brother—which told me exactly how high above the ground I was until the moment my feet touched it. Looking at trees and buildings on the ground, both riding up in the plane and riding down under canopy, I couldn’t tell if I was one thousand or two thousand feet above them, much less eight hundred versus six hundred. This was definitely something you didn’t want
to mess up. Waiting a second too long could mean hitting the ground or a rock slab instead of opening in the air, or landing in the trees instead of the grassy meadow.
Just before leaving Moab, I’d talked to Marta about how I would know when it was time to deploy. She understood that I wasn’t asking for a vague suggestion to just look at the wall and go by “visuals.”
At Brento, Marta told me, the height of the wall allowed for a conservative free fall of ten seconds. With a good track, it could be all right to go for eleven or even twelve seconds, but if I threw my pilot chute out at ten seconds, I would run no risk of falling too low and impacting the slabby section of the wall, and my canopy would be open high enough that I could certainly make it all the way down to the landing area even if I had any kind of trouble on opening or an unexpected headwind. I hadn’t yet encountered wind on a base jump because you don’t jump off low objects if it is windy. There was a lot to know.
“How can you tell if it’s ten seconds, or eleven or twelve?” I asked Marta.
“Just count, like you do at the bridge,” she suggested. “Then after a while you will start to understand the visuals. But if you count during your entire track on the first jumps, you will know you are taking the exact delay you want.”
Marta was the first person who’d answered this question with a concrete solution. I thought it was brilliant.
I’d had a long time to mull over my first terminal jump, from the days I’d spent in bed healing from my Castleton crash and the long travel from Utah to Poland to Italy. The final pieces of the jump blended into each other—piling into a van at the bar to ride up winding switchbacks, hiking over wet leaves through the forest on a gradually rising trail, sitting on a limestone step at the top of Monte Brento while people shrugged into rigs and adjusted shoelaces and helmet straps. My base rig felt much tighter than usual as I cinched down the straps because I was thoroughly bundled up, both against the cold and against any trees or sticks I might land on. I had a new pair of military cargo pants with a Kevlar-lined crotch, which after my recent impalement I’d decided was more relevant body armor for me than the motocross kneepads most everyone else wore. I had two fleece layers under a soft-shell alpine jacket, and a hat and gloves. Still, even in the late-morning sun, my hands were on the edge of numb up here, several thousand feet higher than the grassy meadow at the Zebrata bar.