New Nonfiction by R.B. Moreno
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 7:00 AM Don’t Jump Off This Thing, You Don’t Have Wings
As I approach the bridge’s guardrail, there is a hush. I catch sight of a helmeted man poised on a wooden plank that extends into nothingness. This man is about 30, with curly dark hair, mirrored sunglasses and a fierce smile, and he’s staring at a patch of air in the middle distance between his leather boots and the roughness of granite walls extending a thousand feet below. Without warning he executes a quick hop: an understated motion, but enough to send his body into a tight, silent spin. Now he’s falling away from the stanchions beneath my feet at a left angle, accelerating so fast that within three seconds his body is halfway to terminal velocity, the point when the downward force of gravity on an object yields to the upward force of drag. Suddenly the toy man comes out of his spin. I can just make out a hand grasping for the small pilot chute that will save him, that will send up the only thing now preventing his gut from coming apart—in a few more seconds—like a piece of fruit against the rocks. The tourists around me groan, as if watching a sprinter weave through traffic, as if watching a kind of audacity that feels both gorgeous and impossible.
§
To understand what it means to jump from the world’s highest suspension bridge, to watch the Arkansas River snarl up at a body falling twice the speed of a car on the interstate, drive about an hour south of Colorado Springs, then west on U.S. Route 50. This is God’s country, an expanse of grassland split by a two-lane stretch of asphalt Life magazine has called The Loneliest Road in America. It aims straight for the continental divide. At night, cement factories studded with what might be amber Christmas lights loom on the horizon. Graveled turnoffs for state and federal penitentiaries flash by at long intervals, each marking a new checkerboard of razor wire bathed in halogen. Away to the north lie the studios of evangelical associations that invest heavily in FM radio—Focus on the Family and others. My receiver’s seek function has just paused in the low 90s, and what sounds like a phonograph recording of angels suddenly fills the cabin of my Ford Escort.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
The hymn rumbles to a close and the radio spits white noise for a moment. I’ve been on the road for hours. As midnight approaches, the near-blackness of the terrain and the void left by the chorus has me clenching the nubs of my steering wheel. I pass another prison on the left, this one for women only. The speed limit drops sharply; I am reaching my destination. I switch off the radio and dim my headlights.
§
Cañon City, Colorado is a town of some 16,000 founded during the Civil War and built up by barons who came to mine silver, and later, struck gold. They wanted a place to raise families away from the fires, brothels and gambling halls of their mountain camps, and construction of the downtown district took only a decade. Gravity and water have been at work in this region somewhat longer. Shortly before, in evolutionary terms, our ancestors appeared in Africa, the Arkansas River began gathering strength high in the Rockies and sluicing toward the Great Plains in a torrent that gnaws at miles of towering, rusted granite. What remains, three million years later, is a rift in the earth called the Royal Gorge.
In the predawn hours of a Saturday in September, Royal Gorge Boulevard is desolate. The paneled windows of box stores illuminate parking lots and souvenir shops. Coal, marble and limestone still flow from the hills surrounding this community, but the precious metals ran out decades ago. Cañon City has become a peculiar place in the intervening years. The roadway becomes festooned with signs: theme parks, liquor, leather, antiques, jewelry, rocks and woodwork. On the outskirts of town I pass a Catholic winery and also a model rocket factory advertising models “Der Red Max” and “Interceptor E.” Along with trinkets and rockets came the penitentiaries, which employ hundreds of security guards, nurses and other personnel in nine complexes that surround Cañon City like internment camps. Later came the realization that the Royal Gorge—Grand Canyon of the Arkansas, as locals like to call the chasm west of town—just might bring a new kind of money.
The world’s highest suspension bridge is the granddaddy of Cañon City souvenirs, something left by the excess of the barons that couldn’t be ignored. For about 15 million in today’s dollars, those men erected a breathtaking, thousand-ton span of steel longer than the Gorge is deep, held aloft by galvanized wires capable of supporting loads equal to the bridge’s weight. It was built even faster than Cañon City’s downtown and finished in November of 1929, amidst the greatest stock market crash in history. Half a century later, after the first BASE (Buildings, Antennas, Spans, Earth) jumps from towers of rock in California’s Yosemite National Park had begun to lose their novelty, the minds of a peculiar new breed of parachutist began to fixate on Cañon City.
§
Saturday dawns with a stiff breeze pushing scattered clouds. The bridge lies several miles from town, and in order to get a look at the place before crowds descend to watch today’s hijinks, I’ve spent the night in a rented cabin on the lip of the Gorge. (“I can’t read that, honey,” says Jane, the KOA woman in a flowered nightgown, who grabs my arm when I show her my receipt. She says two BASE jumpers pitched a tent here last night, and that I might find breakfast down at the bridge.) By 9:00 AM the road is already busy with Subarus covered in stickers I don’t recognize, and the pavement winds through green scrub brush and hairpin turns until I reach an overlook paved in gravel—with a panoramic view of the Royal Gorge.
It’s hard to look away. Pine trees and scrub extend right up to where the ground evaporates, where pitted walls frame a yawning hole whose bottom, from a distance, becomes lost in shadow. The place looks utterly wild and exposed—perhaps it’s why artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude want to suspend six miles of fabric over the Arkansas, beginning in 2013—except for the bridge. Blistering white stanchions rooted to slabs of concrete guard each side of the Gorge, tapering as they rise to meet thick cables that float across the expanse in low arcs. The behemoth appears freshly painted, delicate as lattice and severely out of place, as if set down here by a giant at play. A curtain of smaller wires runs vertically from the cables to the bridge’s deck, which is paved in wooden timbers that rattle with the friction of ATVs motoring to and from the cliff side. Their path runs only a few hundred feet. That dimension complicates swinging through the Gorge’s midsection on a bungee cord, or landing a parachute at its base, which narrows like a funnel. A cluster of BASE and bungee fans have gathered around the center of the span in the manner of goslings, necks craned forward. They’re peering at a black elastic line drifting lazily in midair. Someone is about to jump.
Down at the bridge’s entrance, instead of breakfast, I find cherry-red energy drinks—dozens of cases of them stacked outside a semi-truck emblazoned with decals of the same color. The thing looks more suited to moving a presidential candidate than an extreme sports organizer. Today’s commotion is the brainchild of a Denver company called Go Fast Sports & Beverage—sponsor of everything from skydiving and BASE jumping to jet skiers and motorcycle riders—and the staff aboard the truck serves a different kind of president. Troy Widgery, a former competitive skydiver, is best known for having survived a grisly plane crash at a small airport in Riverside County, California in 1992. That spring day, 20 elite divers clustered in the rear of a De Havilland Twin Otter appeared to have ignored their seatbelts, reported The New York Times, and when the plane slammed to the ground after takeoff, 16 people died. “The limbs were all bent and twisted,” an eyewitness told the newspaper. “There was blood everywhere. I heard sounds like you don’t want to hear.”
Widgery was one of a few survivors, and the carnage seemed to fuel his dedication to all things extreme. By the mid-1990s he had launched Go Fast, and in 2003 the company made good on an extraordinary deal with Cañon City, whose operating budget depends on leasing 5,000 acres of parkland surrounding its namesake. The city allowed Widgery to launch a BASE jumping invitational that ranks as one of the nation’s only legal venues for the sport—and one of the most dangerous. “Go Fast remains dedicated to supporting people around the world who have a passion for living life a little on the edge,” says the company’s website. It’s a passion that grosses multiple millions of dollars annually, Widgery told me in an interview, and the recession has had little impact on his business. September’s Royal Gorge Games have expanded beyond BASE and bungee jumping to include parkour (think young people vaulting staircases on YouTube), slacklining (think young people tightrope walking over a precipice), three metal bands, and a contraption that finally seems to defy logic: “JET PACK FLIGHTS DAILY,” screams a Go Fast advertisement.
At the truck, behind a counter framed with monitors looping images of Go Fast-sponsored stunts, I meet Kelly McLear, the tall, ponytailed guru of the Games and head of publicity. She came to Go Fast after years of producing Stunt Junkies for the Discovery Channel. Today McLear wears a utility belt on her hip with a handset that spurts radio traffic. It’s from the crew rigging the bungee jump, for which Go Fast is charging $400 per person, and from the high-angle rescue team whose SUVs and coils of speckled climbing rope sit ready to strike at the bridge’s entrance. McLear is supposed to introduce me to a couple of Colorado men with decades of experience as BASE jumpers, but her mind is elsewhere. Tanned people with frayed hair and bulging backpacks keep sidling up to the truck, exchanging bear hugs and cracking open cans of Go Fast. Everyone seems to know McLear, who is pawing through a filing box and looking keenly nervous.
In 2003, at the company’s inaugural event, Dwain Weston, a renowned Australian-born BASE jumper with years of experience parachuting from cliffs and towers around the globe, attempted something extra risky on behalf of Go Fast. He and a partner leapt from a plane circling high above the Royal Gorge and were to descend on either side of the bridge, where some 200 people had gathered. Approaching the span at close to 100 miles per hour, Weston misjudged the wind, struck a railing, and sank into the canyon. His body came to rest on a ledge a few hundred feet above the river. Jumping halted for about 20 minutes as Weston’s remains were recovered, and news of the death soon circulated in newspapers. “I really couldn’t believe it,” said Heather Hill, a vice president for Go Fast at the time. “All I ever heard was he was the best in the world, and he had skill to do it,” Hill told an Australian reporter. Local business leaders moved to shut down the invitational altogether. But like the company’s owner, Go Fast’s determination to sponsor BASE jumping endured.
“You’ll need one of these too,” says McLear. She shakes hands quickly and plucks a thick, ready-made packet of legalese from the filing box. I realize each of these waiver forms has been individually addressed to every athlete who plans to jump this weekend. I’m a novice with dozens of skydives ahead of me before I would qualify for BASE, but because I’ll be walking the thin strip of peat gravel alongside the Arkansas where jumpers attempt to land, I must fill out the same paperwork. I hand my packet back to McLear and she motions toward a guy with a ball cap, several piercings, and a digital camcorder. “Follow him, hon.”
We walk around the truck, out of sight of the teenagers and grandparents trooping past, and I’m handed what looks like news copy printed in a bold typeface. It has me swearing I am jumping into the Royal Gorge of my own accord, that I will hold Go Fast and its partners harmless for any injury I might incur, and that I will refrain from suing the company no matter how reckless its actions. “You read every word of that like it says,” says the man with the camcorder. “You stare right in here, got it?” A little red light clicks on. I begin to read.
§
The bridge goes quiet once again. On deck now is another young man, this one with cargo shorts and a glossy helmet labeled Helly Hansen, the same company that outfits professional sailors. This jumper leans precariously off the wooden plank, at home here on the edge of the sky. His right hand is reaching for a camera rigged to his helmet, checking again its focus on the strips of nylon marking the landing zone in the shadows below. Clack! The shutter on my own camera freezes the moment. Even now I can sense this man’s brain telling him not to do this. Training has taught him otherwise—to overcome instinct, to rear back and shout “Ready. Set. See ya!”
These are the last words many BASE jumpers utter. Not a prayer, not “I love you,” just “See ya!” The man’s body leaves the platform in a kind of forward-rotating cannonball. His fingers grip the exposed skin of his shins, concentrating enough centrifugal force around his midsection to become an Olympic high diver, a human flywheel turning once, almost twice. Clack! Already he’s coming out of the rotation, becoming a distant fleck of color against the south wall of the canyon. I can see his skinny legs flair wide—just a body now falling to earth. Clack! He’s too small to pick out with my lens. It’s not clear he’ll survive this. The bridge crowd leans forward. Pop! An oblong shape erupts against the granite, slowing the jumper’s fall just before impact. He’s already whipping his canopy back toward the river, sailing for the shoreline in an arc that draws cheers.
§
Jay Epstein is a slight, compact man with eyes that dance. He and his jumping partner, Damian Doucette, have just arrived at the Gorge after driving straight from a big skydiving meet in Moab, Utah. I’m seated in the middle bench of Epstein’s beat-up van, which matches the dull blue of a dumpster left under the sun. Behind me, plastic water tanks, enormous black duffel bags, dirty laundry, and a dozen parachutes in various states of packing lie strewn across the rear of the van. Epstein apologizes for the mess with a flick of his wrist as he steers us toward the Royal Gorge Bridge. “It looks like a bombshell went off in here,” he says, chortling. Poised on my lap, meanwhile, is Epstein’s Norwegian Elkhound, Manny, whose grey-black fur and stubby tail resemble an overgrown rabbit. The animal goes everywhere with these jumpers. “He’s German-kennel trained,” his owner assures me. Manny begins licking at kernels of dog food trapped in the bench’s upholstery.
Epstein’s family owns a Mexican restaurant in Boulder (he has dual citizenship), while sandy-haired Doucette, who looks like he might work undercover, lives in Denver. Now in their late 30s, both men began jumping the Gorge before it became legal, and they were among the first to qualify for the 2003 invitational. Epstein has jumped every year since. He also runs a small guide service, Adrenaline Exploits, which shuttles BASE clients throughout Mexico, often by helicopter. One destination, the sacred Cave of the Swallows, recently closed after local residents protested the presence of jumpers.
“This is definitely the Super Bowl of our sport,” says Epstein of the Games. “This is like pure play for us. Sometimes you’re lucky if you get paid, but mostly it’s for fun.” Another kind of payoff, explains Doucette, comes in the form of gear from companies looking to field test new parachute canopies, or jumpsuits that allow athletes to slow their fall and even glide horizontally along the ground. This explains the Candy Land of gear in the van. There is also sponsorship money from companies like Go Fast, but even for elite jumpers such as these, sponsorships don’t always pay the bills.
For real money, sandy-haired Doucette actually specializes in “aerial rigging,” a kind of videography of the sky that has him piloting cameras along guywires during filmmaking and sports broadcasting, and then for his own sport, strapping lenses to helmets on skydives and BASE jumps. The Internet Movie Database lists Doucette as having shot several episodes of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. “I guess you could say that when I’m not flying cameras, I’m flying cameras,” he says, without breaking a smile.
While I keep watch on Manny, Doucette parks the van and Epstein sets up a portable kennel with steel pans of food and water. Other jumpers are dumping their gear on a blue tarpaulin as wide as a basketball court, which is anchored to the ground with more cases of Go Fast’s energy drink. Big, happy Indian and Latin American families with all-terrain strollers drift past, eager to watch the action from the bridge. The BASE crowd is enjoying the attention. “Get your parachutes!” calls one jumper. “Parachutes! Don’t jump without a parachute!”
I hand back Manny’s leash. Epstein wants to take the dog on a ride to the bottom of the Gorge, where all 54 authorized jumpers must personally observe conditions at the landing zone, no matter how well they know the terrain. Doucette thinks they should leave Manny behind. A brunette woman with springboard thighs intervenes, hugging both men. She offers to watch the dog. Epstein nods. We head for the tram that will take us to the canyon floor, stopping along the way for hand shaking and back slapping. Much of the BASE jumping that occurs in the United States breaks a law of some kind and often involves a getaway car, and so a gathering of dozens of jumpers such as this bears some resemblance to a meeting of the mafia. Hotshots offer tales of fresh exploits—jumps from remote cliffs, skydives into deserts—but it’s hard to impress Epstein and Doucette. One of the rescue crew members, himself an accomplished jumper, brags of his new girlfriend becoming addicted to the sport.
“I try to tell her, man. You don’t have to do this!” The sun has baked the crown of this man’s scalp a deep crimson, and his eyes widen in excitement. “She won’t listen,” he continues. “Got four jumps under her belt already. Loves it.” Doucette nods, his lips forcing a thin smile. We keep walking.
“Obviously people are into this for different reasons,” he says quietly.
§
“Just give me an a-okay when you guys are ready for me to shut the doors. A-okay?” The tram operator, who might be a camp counselor in her taut jeans and oversized t-shirt, flips a switch. “Doors are closing, watch those hands!”
Like a number of things built along the Royal Gorge, the barn-red contraption that shuttles jumpers and tourists from sun country to the bottom of the canyon also claims a world record—“steepest incline railway.” Up close it looks less like a railway and more like a string of telephone booths braced against a spine of granite shooting downward at 45 degrees. It was soldered together by the same construction crews that erected the bridge almost a century ago, and “is still considered one of the most difficult structures ever built,” says a brochure from the local park. The description continues: “Looking up, the Bridge appears as a delicate ribbon.”
The 1,500-foot ride to the bottom takes five minutes, and as the doors slam tight with a pneumatic hiss I begin asking Epstein and Doucette about the surrounding community’s feelings toward the Games.
“It certainly has had a positive impact,” offers Doucette. “Year one there was a fatality here, and that could have certainly put the kibosh on it for years to come. But the sum total of the event was positive enough that they wanted to bring it back. It brings people through the gate.”
I ask if they saw Weston’s fatal skydive themselves. Both men look away. “What went through your minds?”
“I don’t know,” Doucette says. “If you kind of knew what you were looking at you could tell ahead of time what was about to happen. I was intentionally not standing right there on the bridge. I took my girlfriend and my dad off to the side. We were shooting video from kind of a safe distance.”
“Did it just look something you wouldn’t do yourself?”
The lines around Doucette’s eyes grow sharp. “I wouldn’t fly into a bridge like that, no.” There’s an awkward pause. Neither jumper is very comfortable with this topic, especially Epstein. He breaks the mood with another big laugh.
“Pretty unique canyon, huh? This little notch we’re coming through.” The bubbles of his sunglasses scan the vaulted, scarred walls slipping past our tram car.
“This really looks like granite right in here, the pink stuff for sure,” adds Doucette. “And as you can see the whole canyon is just really featured, we’re not talking really smooth walls. So in general, it’s really unforgiving terrain if you come too close to it with a parachute. You know, you can snag up on it, all of this stuff...some of these places would be time consuming to get to for a rescue.”
“At that point, does the jumping shut down, in the midst of rescue?”
Doucette nods. “Yeah, that becomes the priority. Those guys that we talked to are standing by,” he says. “The profile of the canyon is really wide at the top so there’s this kind of illusion of room to work with. But the deeper you take your delay before you open, it just starts to get tight really quick and you run out of options. So if you start having...issues with your parachute after deployment, you don’t have much time to deal with it.”
I ask if that means chutes open earlier here in the Gorge, as compared to other “exit points”—the last point of solid ground BASE jumpers touch before stepping into oblivion.
Doucette glances overhead at the bridge, which has very quickly become that ribbon in the sky. “The proven way to do it is to take shorter delays and ease into longer stuff so that you can kind of calibrate for yourself what you’re personally comfortable with. And of course, the organizers keep an eye on everybody.” Doucette pauses. “This is kind of a spectator thing and so we all are supposed to be kind of putting our ‘A’ game on.”
Epstein grins. “Yeah, you’re just taking a step back from the edge and not pushing it as hard as you totally could go.”
Doucette looks me in the eye. “There are very few events in the country where it’s legal and it’s sanctioned, and so we have to respect that and try to take care of it.”
§
The bowels of the Royal Gorge measure just 50 feet. A few steps across a train track that snakes along the canyon floor brings us to the Arkansas River, and the din of the torrent quickly drowns out small talk. The water here is charged with gravity, and as the river digests chunks of stone excreted by the Rockies, it regularly throws up class V rapids—some of the most challenging kind of whitewater the boats that ply the Arkansas can overcome.
It’s strange to watch two kinds of extremity in tight quarters. The river jogs east at this bend along its southeasterly route. On the south bank, paddlers toting yellow rafts piled with life jackets have taken a break from the onrush, maybe hoping to catch sight of a jumper. Meanwhile, on the north bank, a collection of red and black “wind blades” driven into a bed of peat gravel mark the BASE landing zone. These are the same nylon pennants one is accustomed to seeing advertise condominiums or Army recruiters. Doucette explains that the blades tell the spotter—a stocky, veteran parachutist holding a bottle of Gatorade at the far end of the gravel strip—whether or not conditions permit jumping to continue. It’s his call.
“You see the sun baking that rock?” says Doucette, gesturing at the north wall of the Gorge, bathed in bright ocher. “As it gets later in the day, all the heat from that sunshine mixes with cooler air and creates wind currents that come ripping through here. It makes things real dangerous.” The opposite wall is muted dark brown with shadow. It’s past noon, and already I can feel gusts pushing against my forehead. They come in fits and starts, making the line of blades grow taut, then slack, then taut again at odd angles. “That’s a bad sign—shifting wind,” says Doucette. We take a seat alongside the landing zone and wait for the all clear. The spotter shakes his head and looks skyward, his curse lost in the wind. In the quiet tone of a church deacon Doucette tells me that when a jumper finally does launch from the bridge and careen toward the gravel at our feet, we will stay put. Moving to avoid a parachute coming in for landing will only confuse the jumper; it’s better to give him a static picture of the ground, up until the last second before bodies collide. I nod.
§
Not everyone hits the landing zone. Walking along the shore of the river, we come upon a sight that seems at first absurd. It’s a bearded BASE jumper with a spent parachute stuffed into his backpack. He’s picking his way down the train track with two metal crutches—but only one leg. A dark-haired, willowy woman walks beside him. Doucette and Epstein shake hands and the man introduces himself as Steve Kinnett, a physician from Pueblo. Dr. Kinnett is wearing a blue jumpsuit similar to others I’ve seen at the bridge, but his looks somewhat looser. There’s something else different, too. At his right hip, just above a seam of nylon marking the man’s missing femur, the fabric is smudged hard with dirt, almost torn. Glancing down, Dr. Kinnett tells us he botched his landing just minutes earlier. He chuckles and shrugs. “It’s a good thing he doesn’t have the other leg, because he hit right on that side,” teases his wife.
We wave goodbye and Doucette waits until the pair is out of earshot to tell me that we’ve just met a kind of legend. BASE jumpers assign themselves numbers in something like an ancestral registry, and Dr. Kinnett is number two on the list of disabled jumpers. The man listed as number one, Dr. Kinnett later tells me, is an Israeli who lost his hand in a bomb blast. Doucette and Epstein once jumped with the one-legged man in Mexico, off a big slab of rock and into a gorge whose proportions rival the one here. Dr. Kinnett had another hard landing that day, enough to shatter bones and compress his spine. (“I’m probably a couple of inches shorter now,” he jokes.) Instead of heading for a local hospital, the doctor chose to medicate himself and ride back to the U.S. border—only to have his car break down en route.
I track down Dr. Kinnett at the bridge and ask him about today’s jump.
“The wind picked up under canopy and I got blown down the tracks,” he says. I picture this middle-aged man strapped to a parachute, skimming the bottom of the shaded Gorge, one leg dangling forward.
“Were you nervous?”
“Oh yeah,” Dr. Kinnett says with a knitted brow. “When I’m about five feet above the tracks coming in hot, then you feel it. But I pulled out the landing pretty good.”
I still can’t understand how an amputee has managed to become a professional parachutist. Dr. Kinnett is quick to fill in the story.
“I started skydiving in 1979 on the old round T-10 parachutes,” he says with nonchalance. “They come down hard. And you had one parachute on your back and then a big one on your front in case you had a malfunction.” He hesitates. “I was a lot younger. And it’s just evolved. I’ve been skydiving off and on over those many years.”
“Were you in the service?”
“No, never.”
“Did you have an accident?”
Dr. Kinnett shakes his head. “I lost my leg when I was 14 years old,” he says. “I had something called synovial sarcoma. It usually spreads, so I was lucky. They cut off my leg and I didn’t have to have chemo or radiation therapy. I’m 37 and a half years out and still kicking, so to speak.”
I have to laugh. “Do you know any other parachutists that go down without a limb?”
“Absolutely,” he says. “There’s about 25 or 30 and probably soon to be a lot more with the military coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. When we get together there’s guys missing arms or two legs or blind in an eye, missing an arm and a leg. And they all fly very well.”
I ask him whether free falling might feel different for an amputee.
“I’ve always had one leg,” Dr. Kinnett says. “People say, you know, I wouldn’t do that with two legs and I’m like, I wouldn’t either.” His eyes begin to sparkle. “I did have to compensate, since I don’t have the surface area of one of the legs. I’ve had to build my jumpsuits so they’re larger. It’s called a balloon suit.” He raises an arm and tugs on his sleeve. “It has a vent and air goes in there and inflates it. Gives me twice the surface area.” Dr. Kinnett pauses, his grin spreading. “Basically I can fly just as well as anybody with all their limbs.”
§
Closer to the van, Doucette and Epstein are still waiting on a first jump. They’ve lunched on fries and burgers from a stand grilling locally-grown buffalo. They’ve checked and re-checked their gear. Doucette seems unperturbed by the delay—almost meditative. I ask him what it will feel like once he does leave the bridge.
“You can often start with kind of a noisy brain,” he says. “A lot of things are going through your head, and then it all kind of quiets down, at least for me it does, right before I go. You try to just focus and get rid of everything else. It can be akin to sort of a Zen state.”
The description sounds strangely calm and routine. I ask what it feels like to go over the edge for the first time. Doucette wets his lips.
“You’re scared out of your mind, and it’s all you can do to just will your body to step off.” Then he adds this: “It’s interesting to watch people who are in that place, because you can totally relate to that. You see them lock up. They’re just going through the motions...in survival mode. You know, if you believe in evolution you’ve got a couple million years...saying hey, don’t jump off this thing, you don’t have wings!”
Just now, one of the Games’ guest bands has launched into an opening set, making it hard to hear anything but the cadence of a bass drum. I lean in close. “Do you remember where your first jump was?”
“Off an antennae, a thousand foot antennae. It was at night, which for me was a good thing,” says Doucette. “At night—a lot of people think that sounds scary, but if you really think about it, it’s kind of distilling it down and taking out some of the overly visual aspects of it that I’ve had to come to terms with.”
Doucette tells me that once he did start jumping in broad daylight, he grew to like the feeling of the ground passing underneath him—almost as if he were becoming a winged animal. What was so appealing about that sensation?
“The more time you spend in free fall, the closer it comes to flying,” he says. “In my opinion, that’s why we all try to do this. Once you reach terminal velocity—which is the fastest you can go, if you understand basic body flight principles, and a lot of that comes from skydiving—you can generate a lot of forward movement.” He motions toward the gear spread out on the blue tarpaulin. “You’ve seen those wing suits, those flying squirrel suits. It allows travel across the ground, and that’s a really powerful feeling. You take that acceleration, that downward acceleration and translate that into horizontal movement and then that opens up the ability to not just step off an object and fly away from it, but to turn back towards it and do what we call terrain flying, or proximity flying, where you fly with the contours of the earth. And that’s really seductive. You know, it’s asking, it’s beckoning you to come and play with the wall. It has teeth, and if you don’t respect it, you know, you’re dead in a second.”
“Do you tense up at all as you start to pack your gear and put on a suit?”
“It actually goes the other way,” Doucette says. “It helps me clear my head. It distills things down to what’s really important in that moment, so it can clear out some of the clutter that you have in your life. Occasionally I feel a little bit of a buzz from it, but you know, especially after a jump I’m usually in a real serene kind of state.” His expression goes soft. “I spent my youth as a rock climber. From the time I could walk, my parents were climbers, so I have actually a pretty negative connotation with the adrenaline rush. Because when I was a kid, whenever I’d get an adrenaline rush it was because I genuinely thought I was about to die.”
§
Not everyone who jumps intends to live. On an August afternoon in 2007 a Georgia man, feeling despondent and alone, drove to the parking lot ringed with pine trees outside the Royal Gorge Bridge. The 55-year-old left a suicide note in his vehicle, walked onto the bridge, and leapt from a guardrail, managing to make landfall in the Arkansas River. The previous June visitors to the bridge spotted another man attempt the same death. Searchers combed the river for two days but found nothing—until a nude body surfaced some 40 miles downstream, near the county line.
In the summer of 2004 it was a middle-aged man from the Colorado Springs area, and in June 2003, Steven Prosser, a 42-year-old Englishman under investigation for sexual assault in Oklahoma, chose the center of the bridge’s deck as his exit point. Prosser, too, reached river, but most victims’ bodies do not. Altogether some two dozen people have committed suicide here since 1929, about one victim every three years, a frequency that warrants a section on how to handle death by jumping in the local park’s employee manual. Perhaps most disturbing, reported The Gazette of Colorado Springs at the time of Prosser’s death, is the story of a young Missouri man who agreed, with coaxing from a police officer, to climb off one of the white stanchions in 1998. He returned to the same spot a year later—but refused the same officer’s pleas.
In The Bridge, a 2006 documentary about the people who attempt suicide in a year at the Golden Gate Bridge, director Eric Steel talks with a methamphetamine addict. Pictures of a clear day in San Francisco show him bearded, erect, and resolute as a BASE jumper on the edge of the sky. But minutes later, when reminded of his son, the addict steps back. “The only thing I kept saying,” he later tells Steel, “was, you know, as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall not fear a thing. Because God is with me.”
§
It’s mid-afternoon and the wind that carried Dr. Kinnett down the tracks won’t let up, at least not enough for parachuting. Leaping into the valley of the shadow with ankles tethered to an elastic cord, however, is now fair game. Several members of the crowd ogling BASE stunts have been waiting their turn for the $400 plunge, and the bungee crew works at a breakneck pace to send them off the bridge before conditions change. A commanding, elflike woman wearing a Go Fast t-shirt passes out release forms and ushers people into a line. Another straps would-be jumpers into rock climbing harnesses.
Anticipation of this moment kept me up staring into the knotted slats of the KOA cabin last night. Go Fast is letting journalists try out the bungee cord free of charge. The exit platform sits tantalizingly close, just a few feet beyond my perch here at the guardrail. But I don’t yet know whether this is a good idea. What would I gain in taking the plunge? Respect from my peers—all those skiers, kayakers and climbers? A glimpse of suicide? I’d like to think it would help me describe what jumping from this structure means. Could I quiet my mind enough to experience the calm Doucette feels, or would adrenaline overtake my senses? Friends have assured me I can write this story without jumping. But wouldn’t you, the reader, enjoy it more if I did?
I’m still unsure of my own intentions, but I join the line of jumpers and listen to an orientation from one of the Go Fast women. We’re told to spread our arms in a swan dive as we leave the plank, keep them spread as the cord stretches and slows our momentum like a giant Slinky, then tuck into a ball as the body recoils toward the sky. By the time each jumper is hauled back to the bridge by the towing power of an ATV, fifteen minutes have passed.
I meet two men who have flown here from Miami for the ordeal. Christian Iorio, 25, has never done anything remotely this crazy, but Greg Beebe, 26, has skydived twice before and bungeed once in Costa Rica. I tell them about my own brush with skydiving in western Oregon, above a tranquil patchwork of farming fields.
“The craziest part is going out and just walking to the edge,” says Iorio, who might easily have been cast in The Sopranos. He claps a hairy pair of arms around Beebe, whose eyes are still bloodshot from the plunge. Then Iorio places his palms a couple of inches apart. “When you get closer—this close—to the edge, and you’re ready to jump and you look down, that’s insane.”
“Any thoughts of turning back at that point?”
“Yeah,” says Iorio. “Oh yeah. I knew I couldn’t get out of it but I was like, I wish didn’t do this.”
“I would compare it to what it would feel like if you were to kill yourself,” says Beebe, already calmer than his friend. “That’s the thought that goes through your head.”
“Almost like a car crash?” I ask. Iorio laughs.
“I just totaled my car like a month ago,” he says. “I almost got hit by a truck. This just blew that out of the water. This is a lot more intense.”
“What do you feel like, as you’re plummeting down there?”
“Complete uncontrollableness,” says Beebe. “But like, complete freedom—and nothing matters anymore,” he adds. “There’s no real thought.”
We watch a kid in blue jeans climb the bridge’s guardrail. Two men slip the bungee cord around his feet, while a third stares the jumper in the eye, motioning to the plank and telling him what the next few moments will entail. The kid wags his chin and is left alone. I can almost make out the throbbing of his ribcage. “Five...four!” shouts the lead crewman, a bald man with sunglasses. “Three...two...one!” The pair of blue jeans surges forward, travels two feet off the plank—and is yanked back, bodily, like a Labrador reaching the end of its leash. There is a collective gasp. No one quite realizes what has happened, but the crew’s reaction is spasmodic. Arms reach out to slam the jumper back against the guardrail, which shudders slightly beneath my fingertips. They have forgotten to unclip his safety tether.
“Are you okay?”
“Let’s try that again.”
§
To the west, the blazing September sun sinks low against a horizon muddled with storm clouds. My own turn is approaching. Near the front of the bungee line, a towering man in a sleeveless shirt is reminiscing about a storied history of jumps. I say nothing about my doubts, but he smells fear. “You sure you’re ready for this, man?” He ogles me, shaking his head. “Your body’s not going to let you do it. Your feet will walk you halfway out to that edge, but then your instincts—they’ll kick in. They’ll be telling you don’t jump! Don’t do this!” He thumps his wide chest. “It’ll kick in, right here.”
I manage a grin and turn away, face toward the void, adjusting the harness now cinched like a vise around my pelvis. Gripping my ankles and shins is another set of straps, which the crew will clip to the big cord. Instead of fear, I feel the man’s prediction riling something like indignation in my chest. I will do this. I will defy death and leave that plank like a swan, in perfect form. I can almost taste the Miami boys’ euphoria, and I need neither reason nor serenity. Blood courses through my eardrums. I reach for the guardrail, my own jump finally happening.
All at once, a low, harmonic whistle pierces the air. “Thoooooot!” The sound is so unexpected, commotion on the bridge freezes momentarily. Heads turn, looking for the source, and palms rise up against the setting sun. A passenger train is rounding the bend in the canyon, snaking its way along the Arkansas River and down the single set of tracks that once carried lead and silver from the upper valley. In a few minutes the train’s open-air viewing cars will pass under the bridge. “Let’s give ‘em a show!” shouts one of the bungee crewmen, eager to send over the last of the jumpers before the light vanishes. The crowd cheers. The woman handling paperwork radios up to McLear, at Go Fast’s semi-truck, for direction. Everyone falls silent, waiting for word. The train grows larger, an orange snake weaving through the Gorge’s shadows. “Thoooooot!” The radio crackles. The elf shakes her head.
§
Word comes that BASE jumping has also been cancelled for the day—Dr. Kinnett becomes the last parachutist to step off the bridge—and as day turns to dusk even the jumpers’ dogs become edgy. Manny the Elkhound is chasing other animals around the gates of the bridge. He starts humping a small poodle. Epstein moves in to break up the fun.
Down along a nearby crevasse, three men who look like BASE jumpers on break have rigged a slackline across two rock faces. A figure with red hair and a button-down shirt is moving through the same fathoms the parachutists worship—except that this man’s balancing act appears more suited to Barnum and Bailey’s circus. “Honey, come and see this,” whispers a mustached tourist to his wife. He bellies up to the guardrail with three kids in tow, enthralled with the spectacle. The redhead finishes his traverse with a careful hop—the kind he might make in the other direction, with a parachute.
I ask Epstein and Doucette whether slacklining amounts to letting off steam. “Some people are just good at a lot of different sports,” says Epstein, a bit defensive. “Slacklining is just kind of an extension of climbing.”
“It’s really good for that focus, being centered,” adds Doucette. “Obviously the physical balance, but also the mental balance it takes. A lot of people will just do it in a backyard,” he says. “It all ties in.”
But when will the pros finally get to jump?
“Tomorrow,” says Epstein. “If not tomorrow, some other time.”
“If you want to look at it in terms of doing it over a long period of time,” says Doucette, “you’ve got to look at the big picture, and the waiting game is a big part of it. You get it when it’s good, and then you wait when it’s not.” (Troy Widgery would later cancel the 2009 Games—to prompt a “bigger event” next year, he explains.)
§
Driving back along Route 50, lightening begins to erupt against the Front Range—the first line of peaks guarding the continental divide. As the sun fades beneath a dip in the horizon that marks the Royal Gorge, some higher power seems angered by the jumpers who escaped death today. Phosphorescence crackles in wild streaks against a purple sky. I am sensing, too, my own anguish at having turned away from the seduction that pulls people like Doucette ever closer to this terrain. Perhaps you, the reader, can taste the same sensation. Like a geisha on stage, the Gorge dangles naked and elusive in the mind’s eye.
Thunder rattles my windshield now, and a shadow flits across the roadway. It is then that I remember some verses coming over the radio last night, after “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The voice had sounded pleased with its resonance—gentle, but tinged with prophecy. “Our reading comes from Revelation, chapter eight,” the voice began. A last glance toward the beckoning hills recalls the rest:
The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water...A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died...A third of the day was without light, and also a third of the night. As I watched, I heard an eagle that was flying in midair call out in a loud voice: “Woe! Woe!”
R.B. Moreno teaches writing at the Colorado State University English Department in Fort Collins. A former producer for National Public Radio's All Things Considered, his reporting most recently won honors at the 2009 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. It appears online, among other places, at RBMoreno.com.
