Learning to Fly

by Steph Davis

  Chapter Two

  Going Up

  First AFF skydive with Brendan and a second jump master

  As Yosemite Valley receded behind my blue Ford Ranger, I leaked a steady flow of tears through all of California and most of Nevada. Fletcher leaned her head on the armrest, under the cloud of my sadness. I was desperately thankful to have her back. I didn’t know where to go or what to do.

  Usually there was no decision to be made—since the age of eighteen, I was either going climbing or getting other things done so I could go climbing. But for the last few months, climbing had become hard. I was lackluster, dull. I tried to force myself to get out, thinking the joy would come, but I had no energy and it was hard to join in with friends. I’d found myself walking to the cliffs alone, free soloing up the rock without a rope, climbing with death consequence. In those moments of climbing up with no safety systems, no equipment, no partner, nothing between me and the earth if I let go, I felt a kind of peace. On the ground, I returned to miserable—hopeless and anxious until the next time I mustered the energy to step alone into the vertical, with nothing but the soothing, simplistic sensation of rock in my hands and under my feet.

  Moab home

  My mind traveled through memories as Nevada receded in the rearview mirror. My home in the quirky desert town of Moab, Utah, was my haven, a paradise of red cliffs, green river water, and white mountain peaks. Finally craving a home base more solid than my truckbed, I’d slowly renovated a 1968 doublewide in a quiet neighborhood just off Main Street, transforming it into a place to relax and recharge between trips, with the simple luxuries of a bed, a shower, and a garden. I loved my home. But right now going there seemed unspeakably desolate.

  I passed Green River, Utah, and watched the signs come up for Crescent Junction, the Moab exit. I kept driving, letting them slip into the rearview mirror. Suddenly nothing was clear. I had no idea where we were going.

  Rifle, Colorado, just east of Moab, was also a refuge. I liked life there, camping in the aspen groves and climbing the steep, well-protected limestone routes in the cool, creekside canyon, enjoying the extreme physical effort and the relaxing safety of the sport climbing, as well as the community of inspiringly fit friends who were guaranteed to be there during the summer season. Rifle was the first place I’d ended up after dropping out of Boulder Law School, the climbing area where I had decided once and for all to become a climbing bum. But climbing strenuous, gymnastic routes seemed like too much effort now. Even just thinking about it drained me.

  I watched the exit sign come up for West Rifle, the sign that usually sent a shiver of anticipation through me, knowing I was only a half hour away from Rifle Canyon. I kept my foot on the gas pedal, truly without a plan now.

  The truck was pointed east toward the Colorado Rockies, where I had first learned how to live in the mountains and where I had climbed long granite faces so many times in my early years of climbing. I’d spent two blissful years in Fort Collins, teaching writing to college freshmen, writing a master’s thesis on mountaineering literature, and climbing as much as possible. When the degree was finished, I waited tables and climbed in Estes Park, Colorado, for the summer, made a five-day attempt to be a law student in Boulder, and decisively moved into my car to become an itinerant climber. Later on, I made a base in the Utah desert, then got pulled even farther west to Yosemite by El Cap and marriage. But the front range of Colorado was my first adopted home, the first place I chose on my own.

  I reached for my cell phone and dialed. In the whirlwind of the book tour and all of the drama and trauma of my failing marriage, as well as the normal flow of long-term friendships in the climbing and jumping communities, months had slipped by since I’d spoken to my friend Brendan. He had barely got out his happy hellos when I burst out, “Brendan, I want to learn to skydive. Can you teach me if I come to Boulder? Tomorrow?”

  Like many jumpers, Brendan had made a nomadic career in skydiving. For decades he had been working as a tandem master, taking thousands of people out of planes at drop zones around the world, depending on where he felt like living, which was currently Boulder. He was a seasoned and early convert to base jumping, the more extreme version of jumping from fixed objects, which grew from skydiving in the late seventies. Originally dubbed B.A.S.E. jumping, for “building, antenna, span, earth,” the objects that can provide enough altitude for flight without the aid of an aircraft, the acronym is now often depunctuated and lowercased to make it easier on the eyes. Brendan had made hundreds of base jumps from cliffs, antennae, bridges, and buildings. And, having worked in every aspect of the industry for decades, he was also a certified skydiving instructor.

  Now I was calling him out of the blue, telling him I wanted to go through Accelerated Free Fall training, to become a skydiver.

  Brendan at the G Spot exit, Moab, Utah

  After an impressively shocked silence for a couple of seconds, Brendan immediately recovered his bearings and asked only one thing: What time could I be there? I gave him a brief overview of where I was, in every sense, and he insisted that I not worry about anything. He would be delighted to train me to skydive, we could start tomorrow, and we would meet in the morning at his local coffee shop, Vic’s.

  I’d met Brendan a few years before while a group of base jumpers from Utah, Colorado, and California were mentoring a handful of climbers who had become interested in base jumping. Brendan was a good friend of my husband’s, and the two of us hit it off immediately. He was a wiry, athletic, kidlike jumper in his early fifties who tended to dash rather than walk, when going anywhere. We were of similar size and build and recognized in each other an intensity of focus mixed with tenderheartedness. Brendan was also an avid trail runner, which is a little unusual in jumpers, who are typically more hungry for adrenaline than for exercise, and we had done one memorable and fast-paced twelve-mile run together in the Moab desert.

  Around that time, I had gone on a tandem jump in Moab, my first experience of skydiving. I didn’t know a thing about what was going on. I was simply strapped to the front of a friend who owned the local skydiving operation, with several of my jumper friends crammed along for the occasion in the tiny plane. I didn’t know what to expect, but quickly found everything about it deeply unpleasant, starting from the moment the door of the little Cessna opened ten thousand feet above the desert earth. The sound and the blast of cold wind vividly threw me into the sensations of fighting through Patagonian storms, shouting words that got ripped away by wind, sleet, and snow while rappelling on soaked, tangling ropes that blew sideways and wrapped heart-stoppingly around snag points on sheer granite faces.

  My friends appeared to be sucked out the door, one by one, with huge grins on their faces, giving me a thumbs-up as they dropped out. I found it terrifying to watch them fall out and down. When they were all gone, I was facing the open door of the plane, the cold air screaming past. I grabbed the doorframe, instinctively trying to save myself from falling out, like a cat with its feet braced and sliding on the sides of a bathtub. The large tandem master on my back felt heavy, pushing me out the door of the plane. My hands broke free from the metal frame with the hopeless feeling of fingers peeling off rock, and then I was freefalling, speeding face to the earth with the added weight of a heavy person on my back. As a free solo climber who often ascends vertical rock faces without a rope, the feeling of free fall was the stuff of my worst nightmares—physically, a sensation I equated with death.

  When the canopy finally opened, everything slowed to a sedate, floating pace in the suddenly quiet air. I felt first relieved and then quickly bored, since I saw this sort of bird’s-eye view all the time from the tops of cliffs and mountains without being strapped to the front of someone like a sack of potatoes. As we came in to land, the ground rushed up fast. All I could think about was breaking an ankle and being unable to climb or run or do yoga or house projects for months. The slight wind died just as the parachute came to the ground, and we landed on hard-packed dirt with
a strong thump, giving me a good whack on the butt as we dropped hard. Shaken and overwhelmingly glad it was over with nothing broken, I swore to everyone present that I would never jump again.

  I very much respected my new friends, whose base-jumping and skydiving obsessions both baffled and impressed me. As the years went by, it became something of a joke for us that jumping was far too scary and I would never do it, because they found climbing to be hard and scary.

  Despite all this, Brendan, a highly experienced tandem master with an unusually considerate and reassuring personality, took it almost as a personal mission to get me to try another jump, and to like it. Being the only person on the planet who had completely hated a tandem skydive experience, I was apparently an irresistible challenge. Brendan was convinced that the feeling of trust I would have with him would make everything different, since skydiving is almost all about mental state. After pondering my extreme aversion to the experience, I had developed a theory. When it comes to life and death, I’m used to relying on myself. Aside from the fully reasonable climber’s fear of falling, I suspected that my main fear had come not so much from lack of trust of the particular tandem master I was jumping with, but from knowing I was not in control of the situation. Falling out of a plane was a potentially life-threatening situation where I was an incompetent passenger with no chance of saving myself if I had to. Those were the elements of my ultimate nightmare, and in retrospect I realized I could never have liked it.

  I never wanted to skydive again, but if I somehow did, I decided I would not do another tandem jump. Instead, I would enroll in an Accelerated Free Fall course where I would train to become a skydiver on my own. As an AFF student, I would skydive by myself, wearing my own parachute, deploying it, flying it, and landing it on my own. I would learn how things worked and what to do. Not that I would ever want to.

  But now, with one phone call to Brendan, everything had just changed. More important, this dramatic, completely unanticipated change had come from me, from my own decision. That hadn’t happened in a long time. In a few hours I would be in Boulder, and I would be falling through the air. For the first time in a long while, I was looking forward to tomorrow.

  Now, from a safer place, I can see the edge I was standing on then. It’s not so surprising that on the day of my fifth wedding anniversary I would be crouched in the open door of an airplane, thirteen thousand feet above the Colorado plains, about to jump out. That coincidence of timing really wasn’t. I was fortunate to have a true friend in Brendan, who would do everything in his power to keep me safe and make the experience purely symbolic. Like every longtime jumper, he’d seen too many tragedies where emotion-fueled impulses became final on impact.

  I met Brendan at Vic’s Coffee in the morning, where he tactfully asked only a few questions about my last few months and what my plans were for the summer, and we drove to the drop zone with Fletcher squeezed between us in the front of my truck, looking slightly affronted that Brendan was sitting in her spot. He was scheduled with a tandem customer first thing in the morning, but I was kept busy in the office filling out stacks of papers and release forms and making the first of the hefty AFF course payments.

  The Mile-Hi Skydiving Center is quartered in three lofty airplane hangars, side by side, just outside Boulder. The drop zone boasts a fleet of jump planes ranging in size from a Cessna to a King Air to a twin-engine Otter, all painted white with the purple and yellow Mile-Hi stripes and furnished with long benches instead of seats and roll-up Plexiglas doors mounted into the wall of the body. The oval runway, surrounded by open farm fields, leads toward the Longs Peak Diamond, a sheer granite rock face on the most famous fourteener of the Rocky Mountain range. Every summer day, the jump planes carry skydivers on a twenty-minute ride to thirteen thousand feet above the ground and come back down empty, while parachutes fly from the sky toward the windsocks planted in football-field-size landing areas. I had been to two other skydiving operations, in California and Utah. When I walked in the door of my third, I could see that all drop zones are in some ways alike, a familiar haven for skydivers, no matter where in the world they might be.

  Straight across from the front door, the entire side of the hangar was open to the tarmac, where a few small planes were parked in front of a facing hangar. The high-arching walls inside were decorated with skydiving posters, pennants, and video screens. Flat, office-grade carpets covered the cement floor, where bright parachutes were laid out in rows, the lines stretching out behind them to open backpack-like containers. Some people stood with canopies over their shoulders, arms buried in the nylon, expertly folding and smoothing the panels. Others were lying flat on top of parachutes, tucking their arms down the sides of the fabric, pressing the air out to get them small enough to fit back into the containers.

  Skydivers packing at Mile-Hi drop zone

  Student jumpers, suited up in purple-and-yellow Mile-Hi jumpsuits with huge round altimeters on their wrists, watched the skydiving instructors explain how they should fall through the air and steer the parachute. Tandem customers, there for a onetime taste of free fall, sat in chairs with nylon body harnesses buckled over their shorts and T-shirts, while the tandem masters walked over with huge, doublesize parachute rigs on their backs, like turtles.

  The experienced “fun jumpers” were easy to pick out in formfitting jumpsuits in bold colors that would make most rock climbers cringe, and slick, wraparound sunglasses. They wore compact, sleek skydiving rigs and had an air of relaxation wound with excitement. Most had small digital instruments on their helmets or wrists and expensive-looking video cameras attached to their carbon fiber helmets. Overall, the fun jumpers and professional skydivers were a pretty flamboyant bunch, with their big, tinted skydiving goggles or sunglasses, multiple piercings, tattoos, dyed hair, shiny helmets, and snug, embroidered jumpsuits. These “up jumpers” moved in and out of the hangar constantly, watching videos of their last jumps, packing their tiny parachutes, seemingly conditioned to finish just in time to catch the next planeload. Inside, the hangar buzzed with energy, wildness, and adrenaline. Watching, I understood immediately that this world was a distant cousin of the climbing world. An expensive, octane-fueled cousin, but certainly a relation. Just like a climber, a jumper could go anywhere, find a drop zone, slip into the community, and be at home. These skydivers looked a little more wild-eyed and, at least fashion-wise, far less inhibited than climbers, but they all clearly had the wild spirit that I valued.

  With so much to look at, I was surprised when Brendan dashed over to me, having already landed with his tandem customer. He grabbed the AFF checklists and the Skydiver’s Information Manual (SIM), which he’d insisted on buying for me, and led me off to a small room in the hangar. As soon as the door closed, I was transported from the bustling energy of a vibrant drop zone to the flat, white silence of a tiny classroom. We sat at a desk, going through page after page of the SIM, the 229-page bible of skydiving. After decades in the sport, Brendan knew such abstruse facts as “pilot of an unpressurized aircraft is required to breathe supplemental oxygen above 14,000 feet MSL” as automatically as he knew his own name. For a nonjumper (or whuffo, the skydiver’s shorthand for nonjumpers, thanks to the stereotypical, rather unanswerable “What do you do that for?”), it is a truly overwhelming pile of information. This thick book represents a large chunk of the knowledge in an experienced skydiver’s brain, and at the moment the only thing in it I knew was that you need a parachute. And an airplane.

  Being understandably concerned about my current state of mind, and having a vast, multidecade knowledge of every possible nuance or potentiality in the sport of skydiving, Brendan was unable to gloss over anything during our one-on-one AFF ground school. I also tend to ask for further explanation of any detail that confuses or interests me, especially when it seems extra-important, like when learning how to fall out of an airplane. Most people find this annoying, but Brendan ever patiently digressed into lengthy detours from the basic points to answer all of
my questions, most of which led to more digressions. So instead of the standard four hours of ground school leading immediately into the airplane for the first jump, our session ended up lasting the whole day at the drop zone, continuing on the drive back to Boulder, through the evening with Thai food at Brendan’s house, over coffee at Vic’s the next morning, and then most of the next day at the drop zone. At this point in my two-day, full-immersion AFF ground school, my brain was starting to overload. Finally I said, “Brendan, I’m losing my mind, we just need to jump.” Brendan was starting to look almost as nervous as me, obviously starting to picture all of the same worst-case scenarios I was, as well as a few more.

  Brendan got me equipped with a huge student parachute, altimeter, jumpsuit, and helmet, then began going through the more pragmatic questions of how to jump out of the plane, get my parachute out, and steer it to the earth. Basically, to pass my first AFF level, I needed to get in the open door of the moving Otter with Brendan and a second AFF instructor, then jump out while arching my back as much as possible, the most stable position for the human body in free fall. I needed to check the huge altimeter dial on my wrist to keep track of how close I was getting to the ground and to check the horizon to make sure I wasn’t upside down or something. I would also need to reach back to the right, back corner of my skydiving rig and touch the small ball on top of the pilot chute that was folded in there and make sure I felt it—practice touches for when it was actually time to toss out the pilot chute and let it fly out into the air and yank out my parachute.

  At fifty-five hundred feet above the earth, I would wave my arms to signal Brendan and my other instructor to let go of me and move away. Then I would reach back for real this time to pull the pilot chute out of its sleeve and throw it out into the air. All of that would take about fifty seconds. I would then be on my own, hoping the canopy opened correctly and without any problems. If there was a malfunction, heaven forbid, I would need to figure out what it was and how to fix it—or decide to pull the cutaway handle to chop it away and pull the other handle that would deploy my reserve parachute.