by Steph Davis
Even harder for me to understand were the red-tinted ski goggles that Mario had started to wear for flying in the last year—not just in his wingsuit, but also paragliding and speed flying, sometimes even for regular base jumps in order to keep the wind out of his eyes. I’d tried the red lenses, and I found them terrible. The tint changed my depth perception, especially in the shade or in sun-to-shade conditions, and it even made me nervous about gauging my height for landing the parachute. I insisted on using only clear lenses in my goggles because I couldn’t tolerate anything distorting my view at all. But Mario didn’t seem to mind the red goggles; he used them for everything. I chalked it up to his greater experience and better understanding of his altitude and depth perception. Obviously he knew whether or not he was comfortable and seeing right, and he always seemed absolutely at ease in the air, even when testing out some sort of strange gear or modification.
Yesterday afternoon I had taken the goggles from him. “Well, if your contact’s out, you won’t be able to find it. Let me look.”
There was nothing in the goggles.
“Maybe check my eye?” he said, “Maybe it slid around, or it’s folded?”
I looked at his left eye, at the blue iris, and there was the contact sitting flat over it, perfectly positioned. “Honey,” I said, rather shocked, “it’s right there on your eye.”
“Wow,” he said, “it must be changing really fast now. I guess I’ll have to get new glasses again when we get back.”
It rained and rained, slamming the roof, streaming down the dark window glass. Why didn’t I insist we stop jumping, why didn’t I say, “Mario, if you think your contact fell out and it’s there on your eye, we shouldn’t be flying anymore!” How could I not have realized? And the red lenses. I didn’t have any vision problems, and I couldn’t see right in those things. Why didn’t I put all of this together and tell Mario I didn’t like it, tell him he shouldn’t be using those red goggles, he shouldn’t jump anymore if he thought his contact was out and it was sitting right on his eye?
At high speeds, while flying close to things, depth perception is important. Vitally important, no matter how good you are, no matter how much you understand the visuals. And to have those visuals change suddenly, when you’re not even aware they’re changing—it’s a hidden trap lying in wait. Your brain only knows what your eyes tell it. Now it all seemed so terribly clear. I could never know for sure what happened, but it was the only thing that made sense, at all. And it was too late for me to see it, to stop it somehow. Such a small thing, such a small flaw. A tiny plastic disc, and everything was lost.
The helicopter medic had taken my hands that afternoon and said gently, “it was instant. He didn’t suffer.” I sat alone in the dark thinking that the luckiest people in the world aren’t the ones who are the healthiest or the richest or the smartest or the most beautiful … it’s those very, very few who get to leave together.
The next day Matt took over. I stared numbly at the walls of the town hall. Matt’s equally efficient fiancée, Megan, was on the phone back in the States, coordinating flight changes, invoking Matt’s Diamond status to get instant results, and googling airport hotels, while Matt called the rental car company headquarters to arrange a return in Italy instead of in Zurich.
“You’ll follow me to the rental return place, we’ll drop your car, and then I’ll drive you to Zurich. You can fly out tomorrow morning. Look. I know you want to wait for the cremation, but in Italy that can take weeks. They have this crazy situation where there are more people than crematories, and there’s a waiting list. You can’t stay here that long; you need to go home.”
I protested weakly that Mario wouldn’t leave me in Italy, that I should wait for him, that I couldn’t leave him here alone.
“I understand, Steph, but you can’t stay here. It could be weeks. You need to get home, and there’s a direct flight from Paris to Salt Lake tomorrow morning that we can get you on.”
Not having to make decisions was what I really needed. I got into the rental car, clutching the papers I’d been given, and blindly followed Matt’s BMW up and down the curving passes. We were going to drive right past the high meadow where they had set Mario’s body on the grass before they took him away again. I turned on the blinker, and Matt slid over ahead of me. I walked to the meadow, into the unreal panorama of 360-degree beauty. The last place Mario lay on the ground. The last place I sat beside him. The last place I saw him on earth. I couldn’t move. How wrenching to leave this place, to start going toward the time when it was all gone. Matt let me look, held me briefly, and then nudged me toward the cars. We drove over the pass.
The flight home was interminable, a torture. I was trapped in a box of metal and plastic, surrounded by strangers, with no way out, no way to do anything but think, and no way to stop thinking. My brother and several friends had offered to fly over and fly back home with me. But why should anyone fly all the way to Switzerland, just to turn around and fly back again? It made no sense. I told them all not to come. Now, sitting on the plane alone, I understood that I’d made a huge mistake in refusing company. I sat in the uncomfortable seat, twisting and turning, trying to keep control. Slow tears started and couldn’t be stopped, and gradually I dissolved into heaving sobs with my head in my lap for most of that eternal flight, not caring what the other passengers thought, unable to get control of my grief. In the Salt Lake City airport, my brother was waiting at the door. Chris, who’d been there for my crash at the Roan and had become Mario’s closest friend in the last few years, had driven up from Moab with his wife, Eula, and Cajun. I looked at Cajun’s expectant little face and collapsed on the floor.
For weeks I stayed in bed with Mao curled in a ball by my hip, getting up only to take Cajun on ten-minute walks. Friends called, emailed, texted, wrote. My parents drove ten hours from Arizona. My brother stayed for the first week, fielding visitors. It was too many people. Sleeping was the only relief. There I could see Mario in my dreams, but it was always followed by the misery of waking to this empty place. Cajun moved uncomfortably between the bed and the floor, unwilling to settle into Mario’s spot.
I’d been through a marriage that had left me almost broken. Things had happened that I would never tell anyone, that had left scars so deep they would never disappear. I’d lost my confidence in almost everything. And then I’d found Mario, a love I trusted completely. And now he was gone. I couldn’t see the point. I thought constantly about going to a cliff and jumping off without deploying my parachute. That would seem to have been an accident, easier for my friends and my parents to accept. Friends who’d lived through this kind of loss promised me that time would help, take the searing edges off the pain; that they were happy now. I didn’t even have the energy to hike up to a cliff with the rig on my back. But I visualized it constantly, from the moment of pushing off the edge through the second I kept control and didn’t reach back to pull. If this crushing hopelessness never ended, I had a way out. There were plenty of cliffs around. Eventually I’d have the energy to walk to the top of one. I wasn’t trapped. Chris quietly moved into the guest room after whispered discussions with Virgil and Lisa.
Realizing I wasn’t committed to go on living allowed me to endure the grief day by day, to see what would happen. I asked myself what Mario would do. I started sanding and painting the siding of the house, a task he had planned to do when we got home from Europe. When the house was painted, I painted the window trim and window frames. I tiled the insides of the bathroom cabinets. My parents plunged vigorously into the extraneous home improvements. They drove back and forth from Arizona to reengineer my heating ducts and install a new furnace. They replaced the washer and dryer, built a counter over them and then did laundry with them. Friends tore down the old back deck and rebuilt it, another project on Mario’s house list.
I started to go climbing with Lisa, managing one or two pitches before I had to leave. Once I was actually touching rock and moving up I felt okay, but fell back
into a silent lethargy on the ground. It was hard for me to be away from home for more than a couple of hours at a time, to be apart from Mao.
Eventually I gained the energy to walk uphill. Cajun and I walked to the tops of cliffs. I jumped with pinches of Mario’s ashes tucked into my parachute, waiting at the bottom for Cajun to run down to meet me. I didn’t care if the winds were bad. If I wanted to jump, I jumped. I was sick of the unfairness of it all. I was seeing people who jumped recklessly, in poor conditions, who did sloppy, ridiculous stunts or made careless mistakes with gear or execution, and then who walked away without a scratch, while Mario—who’d worked endlessly to be as safe as possible, who was more skilled and experienced than anyone I knew, who was quite simply a better human than anyone I knew—was dead. It was a stupid bullshit activity, because it wasn’t fair at all. It was a stupid bullshit life because it wasn’t fair at all. I couldn’t stand to be around jumpers whom I considered reckless. It was too hard to be around people who had the gall to be alive when Mario was dead. And then of course I felt guilty for being angry that people were alive. It was easier to be alone.
Over time the sharp longing for Mario turned into an ache. Cajun got used to sleeping in bed. I got used to waking up pressed between a dog and a small cat instead of my husband. I thought about all the ways people can die, some of them so terrible. I thought of the possibility of Mario ending his days alone, sick, in a bed, hurting. And I realized that he had had a very good death. He was healthy, vital, and strong. He was happier than he’d ever been, as he told me every day in those last weeks, and he was looking forward to so many things. The upcoming months were to be packed with new adventures that were coming as a result of all the foundations we’d built. He was flying in a place he loved, with me in front of him. It was instant, with no anticipation. This was a nearly perfect way to die, for Mario. Sooner than he would have chosen, much sooner than I would have chosen. But it was an effortless death, in a moment of joy, in a time filled with both fruition and anticipation. And in a vast sea of unfairness, this one thing was fair. I could accept this. In time I would even be grateful for it.
One day, going through Mario’s old photos and logbooks, I found a square printed card with thumbtack holes in the corners. I read what was written on it:
For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life but there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see that there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one. Happiness is a journey, not a destination. —Souza
Mario had never shown this to me, but it seemed as if this idea had directed his life. He appreciated everything, even things that were hard, painful, or tedious. Simply by living, he’d shown me how to choose a life of happiness and how to soar through the sky. This message was a gift he’d left for me to find—the instruction manual he hoped I’d read, since I no longer had him here to do boring things, like reading directions, for me. If I was going to stay alive, I was going to LIVE, and I was going to be happy. Otherwise there was really no point in being here at all. It was time to stop enduring and time to start living. It was time to see if I still wanted to fly.
Just before Christmas, I drove to Skydive Arizona in Eloy, where Mario and I had skydived together every winter. I had a new wingsuit Matt had given me after he’d gotten me home from Italy. Matt, one of the best pilots out there, had an additional passion: modifying and engineering the best possible wingsuits for himself, and he had ultimately started a company called Squirrel to produce his designs. Matt firmly believed his suits to be the best-performing and safest suits to fly, and he wanted me to try one, if I decided to fly again. I told him I might, eventually, but it would have to be white. In just a few weeks, a top-of-the-line white Squirrel Aura, custom-made for me, arrived at my door. I didn’t know what it would feel like to fly. What it would feel like to fly without Mario. I didn’t know if the joy would be there.
The first plane ride to altitude was wrenching without Mario across from me, his blue eyes sparkling. I cried as I flew over the familiar Arizona desert without him. But I also felt he was there in the air, the place he’d been most at home. I’d already lost so much. If I stopped flying, it needed to be on my own terms, not because I was running away from pain or trying to hide. I stayed in Eloy, buying jump tickets one at a time, every day wondering if I’d leave the next morning for home. Friends arrived, and now I was flying among them in a flock, not alone anymore.
On Christmas day I woke in the desert in the dark, in the back of my Honda Fit, with Cajun curled up next to me. It was much too early for the jump planes to fly. The first load wouldn’t go up for hours. I stuffed away my sleeping bag, rolled up the air mattress, and drove to nearby Picacho Peak, a small rock mountain perched on a saguaro-studded hill and surrounded by open desert. A dirt trail led up through the cacti and thorny bushes, and I followed it slowly, Cajun bounding off ahead. Dawn came as I reached the shoulder and wrapped around the back of the peak, passing king saguaros standing tall beside the steep trail. What a beautiful life to live, peaceful and silent, keeping watch over the desert. The sun rising and setting, the days rolling by like waves, one after another.
We climbed the steep rock sections to the top just as the sun rose and made a heart out of small rocks, for Mario. Cajun lay quietly beside me like a grown-up dog, looking out over the desert. We watched the shadows change and shift over the earth. A bird circled above, close at first, then spiraling higher and higher until he flew off to the east and disappeared into the sky. I felt my heart rise. We walked down the mountain, into another day.
—
It’s 2015. It’s been two years since Mario died. I’ve fallen in love again with a kind and beautiful man named Ian, a respectful and talented wingsuit pilot, a friend of Mario’s and mine. An industrial engineer turned skydiving tandem instructor, Ian now lives in Moab with me, Cajun, and Mao. Ian was behind me on my first wingsuit base jump without Mario, and he was with me when I landed. We understand what it means, perhaps more than most.
I’m happier than I’ve ever been, something I would have thought beyond impossible two years ago. I love Ian more every day, and so I can’t wish for anything different on the long and curving path that brought us to now. I also wish every day that Mario was still here. Ian understands this paradox, because he feels the same way. We both miss Mario. We wish more than anything that he were here. We feel thankful to be together and to share a growing love. From this I’ve learned that things don’t have to make sense.
Things will not stop changing. You never know what’s going to happen, even in the next second. The truth is, we don’t decide anything. But we can decide how we feel. That’s the meaning of life.
I think we all have a different degree of spiritual development, just as we’re all born with a certain amount of intelligence, athleticism, or beauty. Mario was the most spiritually evolved human I’ve ever known, but he certainly didn’t see himself that way. He considered himself a very simple person. He saw magic in everything and good in everyone, and he brought out the best in people. He lived in the air.
I came across something Mario said while I was watching old video clips of him, on a day when I was feeling strong. He was talking about the pull of flying, but to me, hearing him now, he was really talking about the ephemeral nature of life. About my good fortune in having known him.
“It’s there, but only in your thoughts, like a souvenir. It lingers, and you’re like, oh wow, but it’s not there anymore. And I think that what keeps you going back is you can’t stay in that state very long, you can’t be in the air forever basically, you’re always coming back down. And I think what makes it a little bit magical too is you’ll go through great lengths to go back and get that couple seconds, couple minutes,
couple hours feeling through different ways, because as soon as you step on the ground, it’s gone.”
When Mario died, a few months after this book was first published, it felt to me at first like a cruel joke. I hated that book. Its fairy-tale happy ending was nothing but a fantasy turned to ash. But now I love the book because it’s about Mario. It’s the story of someone almost too pure to be real, too good to stay on this earth, and it’s the story of how I fell in love with him. Mario tamed me with love and patience just as the Little Prince did with his fox. Mario made me precious through the time he spent on me, and he became part of me forever. He taught me how to fly. He still teaches me. And as long as I’m here, the story doesn’t end.
The climbing life with Fletch, Hueco Tanks, Texas
Freeing the Tombstone, Moab, Utah Jimmy Chin
Outer Limits free solo, Yosemite, California Dean Fidelman
El Capitan free in a day, Free Rider Heinz Zak
Salathe Wall free, El Capitan Jimmy Chin
The Salathe headwall, El Capitan Jimmy Chin
Tracking with Jay above Mile-Hi Jay Epstein
At Skydive Moab
The gray sparrow wingsuit
Riding up beside Mario in the Cessna at Skydive Moab
Hanging on to the strut with Brendan in Moab Mario Richard
Taking a dock with Mario Mario Richard
Learning to base jump at the Perrine Bridge
Pervertical Sanctuary free solo, Longs Peak Diamond Brian Kimball
“Span,” Twin Falls, Idaho
First wingsuit base jump, Monte Brento, Italy
Monte Brento, Italy