Learning to Fly

by Steph Davis

  I roamed around and found shelter in a small circle of stones by a small cave, enough to keep the slight breeze off me. In the back, a set of plastic-coated rain pants and a jacket sat folded neatly under a helmet. It was unbelievable. I put on the rain gear and perched on the helmet to insulate my legs from the rock. I knew if I got chilled to the core, it would make the climbing harder, unsafe. I wondered who had stashed this gear here, in the middle of a massive granite wall, just what I needed to stay warm. The darkness went on and on. I was getting cold. I paced back and forth on the ledge, staring out to the east, willing the sun to come. I could see the first traces, the dark orange glow on the horizon, the changing tones of black to gray in the sky. I concentrated on feeling warm and open, accepting the cold instead of tensing against it. The sun would come. It always did.

  Finally the bright rays broke from the east. I folded the clothes back under the helmet, sending fervent thanks to whoever had left them there for whatever reason, and climbed over the final broken rock bands to the start of Pervertical Sanctuary. I stood on a small ledge of granite. Steeply angled terrain dropped below me to the glacier; the vertical wall shot off a thousand feet above. I stared into the clean line cracking the wall in front of my face. There was nothing left to do but climb.

  So many times in the mountains, I’ve locked my brain onto one thought or phrase, twining it into a soothing circle to ward off exhaustion, fear, and despair, even just the simple mechanics of counting sets of ten while kicking up snow in the dark. Right now, I felt my entire reality could be reduced into one simplistic mantra—“Be relaxed. Have good feelings.” If I could force my brain to stay in that loop for as long as it took to climb this wall, everything would go right. I looked up at the crack and smiled. “Be relaxed. Have good feelings,” I said out loud. I breathed deep, all the way into my stomach, and breathed out all the way. I reached out, took the sharp granite edges, and stepped onto the rock. Time dropped away.

  The granite felt coarse under my hands and feet. The chilled air surrounded me without penetrating. It was the coldest day I’d had so far this season, but I seemed to be generating heat from the center, keeping my fingers and feet warm against the cold stone. “Be relaxed. Have good feelings” looped over and over in my mind. I smiled, savoring each edge I grabbed, pressing the shoe rubber onto the cold granite. Every movement felt precise and secure, my limbs loose yet fully engaged. I focused my emotions completely on the positive granite, the confidence in my shoe rubber, and the joy of climbing light, with nothing to carry.

  Pervertical Sanctuary, Longs Peak Diamond Brian Kimball

  From nowhere, a Velvet Underground song I hadn’t heard in years started playing in my head, in a duet beside the repeating words of my own voice. I smiled. It was good. I let it stay there and play on, accompanying me up the wall. I reached the first belay ledge, with loops of faded nylon slings tied around a rock flake. I stepped past them and kept going, savoring my freedom. I had no rope, no gear, no partner to wait for. All I had to do was climb. It was the simplest thing in the world. I climbed gently through the loose-rock section, making myself light and delicate, never pulling or pushing too hard. I was at thirteen thousand feet now. I breathed deeply and rhythmically. The cold air felt clean in my lungs, giving me energy. It seemed like no time had passed since I’d stepped off Broadway.

  Fifteen hundred feet above the glacier, I reached a tiny ledge below the steep finger crack, the crux of the route. I balanced over my feet, resting, making sure my arms weren’t tired. I gazed up at the crack. I knew beyond a doubt I could climb it without falling. There was nothing to fear. I closed my eyes and felt my breaths cycling up and down through my body. I envisioned the moves I would make to climb the next thirty feet. I watched myself climbing perfectly, easily. I smiled. It was time. I raised my hands and twisted my fingers into the rough granite and stepped high with my feet against the wall.

  Every lock felt solid, every foot perfectly frictioned. My arms felt nothing, no trace of fatigue, the air flowing in and out more intensely. Lou Reed’s voice and my own words played on through my head, my vision filled with the granite before me and all around me. The crack widened, the angle eased. Hands and feet buried in the crack, I stood in relaxed tension and waited until my breathing slowed again. I was safe. I looked down at the exposure. Empty space dropped down for over a thousand feet, snow, boulders, and granite walls spreading all around the floor beneath me. I observed it dispassionately. I looked up at the deep gash above, the final difficulty of the route, and wriggled up into it gladly. Granite pressed around me, holding me safe.

  Pervertical Sanctuary, Longs Peak Diamond Brian Kimball

  I still had another two hundred feet of climbing. But the real difficulty was now behind me. I kept my mind smooth as I moved up. It was before nine when I reached up to grab the flat edge at the top of the wall and pulled myself onto Table Ledge. I’d been on the vertical face for almost two hours.

  I sat on top of the Diamond, watching the gleaming blue-green colors of Chasm Lake surrounded by gray talus and snowfields way down below. I could make out my little rock cave, the dark dot of my food sack hanging from the top, out of reach of marmots and pikas. I felt washed clean, stripped to an elemental state, hanging between tears and bliss, raw and vulnerable, but bursting with life. I let go, letting the powerful feelings wash through me with full intensity like rushing water, surrendering to them. I had done it. I was alive.

  I found the hiking shoes and socks I’d hidden in a crevice and hung my rock shoes off the belt of my chalk bag. Carrying essentially nothing, I scrambled around the south shoulder of the mountain, up the stony ledges to the top of the Diamond and across the shifting boulders to the North Face. The extra-early start turned out to be a blessing, as clouds had been building and darkening all morning. A few big raindrops hit me as I scrambled down the granite slabs.

  I reached the lookout notch at Chasm View and looked across the sheer face of the Diamond. The two climbers I’d passed in the dark were up on the face, partway up Pervertical. The Diamond looked big and exposed. I shivered with delight and started down the boulders toward the long gully above my bivy cave, climbing shoes and chalk bag bobbing gently around my hip. Everything looked so beautiful—the knobby granite boulders, the dainty flower patches hidden in the springy peat, the sweep of the cirque spreading out below me. I felt kind of shell-shocked, almost high, supernaturally vital. I felt light. I felt new.

  The top of the Diamond

  A week later, I went back and free soloed Pervertical Sanctuary again, absolutely in control, even more than the first time. It was like the spell had been broken, and I could do it whenever I wanted to. I trusted myself completely. I would never let myself down.

  September was the end of the climbing season on the Diamond. I was ready to leave it. Maybe even for another ten years. The relentless drive that had been burning in me for weeks was calmed. I felt smoothed down inside, cleansed. And climbing felt right again. I’d taken it back. I knew from experience that nothing was ever finished. The way I felt now would definitely not last. It wasn’t as simple as reaching an enlightened state and moving ever higher. Another time would definitely come when I became attached or lost, when the tendrils would begin to emerge and wrap around me, blooming with the possibility of loss and fear. But I had walked this path, and I might know how to find it again.

  Chapter Eight

  Home

  Flying into the sunset with Chris and Alan Alan Martinez

  On September 24, I’d been skydiving for exactly three months and I’d made exactly 113 jumps, which I knew because I’d filled out all the boxes marked Date, Jump Number, Place, Aircraft, Gear, Altitude, and Freefall Time in my logbook. I found it unnatural and even a little distasteful to turn wild moments of flying through the sky into cramped numbers in an account book. But the numbers clearly meant a lot here, and I would even be prevented from doing things I wanted to do if I didn’t have enough jumps logged in my book. And
my friends Jimmy and Marta had told me I had to do at least a hundred skydives before they would teach me to base jump.

  To be allowed to skydive at all, I now held a membership card from the USPA, the United States Parachute Association. A beginning jumper like me could get an A license after twenty-five skydives. It took fifty skydives to get a B license, two hundred for a C, and five hundred for a D. Then a jumper might want to get lots of other qualifications for all the other licenses or ratings. For insurance reasons drop zones had to comply with USPA guidelines, and some recreational jumpers themselves were noticeably eager to help apply the guidelines to their fellow skydivers, perhaps out of the desire to keep things safe for everyone.

  As a climber, accustomed to complete independence and self-direction, all the tallying and licensing wrapped into jumping was hard to get my head around. There’s no governing body issuing climbing licenses. You don’t need a minimum number of climbs or a United States Climbing Association license to go up Everest—in fact, there’s no such thing as a United States Climbing Association. If you want to climb, you find a rock and go up. I couldn’t see why I would ever bother to get all these different jumping licenses. My A license seemed like plenty to me, allowing me to show up at any drop zone and board a jump plane.

  But I noticed that most skydivers seemed to take the licenses and logging more seriously. Many conversations at the drop zone started off with how many jumps one “had.” Always overly literal and sensitive to semantics, I was bothered by the concept of having skydives. As far as I could see, a skydive was an event or an action, something that happened in a moment of time, not an object. It was an experience to be lived, fleeting and finite. As a climber, it would never occur to me to count each climb I did, or even the number of days I’d climbed. It would be like counting up sunsets or kisses—a sweet idea perhaps, but not something I’d actually do or bring up in daily conversation. When a jump was finished, it was gone, and the idea of notching it on my bedpost or considering it a possession was somehow disquieting. Certain elements of the jumping world would most likely always mystify me.

  Having spent most of my adult life climbing and critically gauging my ability versus risk, I also found it slightly ridiculous to have outsiders judging my readiness to handle new experiences. I wasn’t sure how to feel about regulations that seemed designed to save me from myself. The rules I was used to obeying were those set by the mountains and by my own intelligence and skill.

  As I sat on the trailer at Mile-Hi, waiting for the Otter, I eyed the wingsuiters enviously. They wore gown-length, brightly colored suits, their arms unzipped and the wings draping behind. Few wingsuit fliers were ever at the drop zone, and when there was more than one, they wanted to fly together. The wingsuiters could turn, float up, dive down, do barrel rolls, get side by side and fly in formation, essentially maneuvering like tiny jet fighters in the sky as they raced forward at ninety miles per hour. With a wingsuit, a jumper could fly through the air for more than two minutes. With the most advanced big suits and refined body position, wingsuit pilots could decrease their fall rate into the 30 miles per hour range. When I landed and gathered up my parachute, the wingsuiters were just beginning to come down from the sky like colorful angels floating under their canopies.

  Though I now had at least a rudimentary knowledge of all the different types of skydiving, all I wanted to do was track, speeding through the air like Superman, staying airborne as long as possible. But with a wingsuit, I would actually be able to fly. It had got so I couldn’t see the point of skydiving without a wingsuit, except to learn to fly one.

  My mounting desire to start jumping a wingsuit had been met with varying degrees of temperature by my friends at the DZ. I had been skydiving for only three months, virtually the blink of an eye, and I was a complete beginner. But about a hundred of my skydives were tracking jumps. I seriously doubted that many other jumpers had become so single-mindedly focused on tracking in their first few months of skydiving, mainly because everyone else at the drop zone found it a little weird. While I didn’t think my climbing expertise made me somehow inherently special or better than other new jumpers, I was objective enough to see that my years of extreme climbing had given me an above-average ability to deal with risk, pressure, body awareness, and gear. I couldn’t see how the wingsuit could be that much different from simple tracking, aside from the obvious complications of being zipped into arm and leg wings and not having freedom of movement to grab the steering toggles or to deal with any potential parachute malfunctions until my arms were unzipped from the wings. Of course, I’d been warned many times that new wingsuit pilots were at higher risk of getting unstable in the air and tumbling into an accelerating, uncontrolled spin.

  A few roadblocks were between me and a wingsuit. The USPA recommended a minimum of two hundred skydives before learning to fly one. More of a problem, though, was not actually having a suit to fly. Wingsuits were made to order by a few different companies, mostly Phoenix Fly from Slovenia, Birdman from Croatia, S-Fly from France, and Tony Suits from the United States. A wingsuit was pricey, usually costing from $1,000 to $2,000. Even more prohibitive than the expense was the wait to get one—a wingsuit could take up to six months to be sewn and shipped. With luck, a used suit might be found in the classified section of Dropzone.com or Basejumper.com, if the seller and buyer were of similar size.

  I was much smaller than most of the guys at the drop zone, and so far I hadn’t seen any women flying wingsuits there. Brendan had an old Birdman Classic suit of Jay’s that would be the perfect beginner suit for me, and we were close to the same size. But they were both significantly quiet on whether I should start flying a wingsuit, and Brendan had uncharacteristically made no offer to lend me the Classic. I couldn’t fly a wingsuit without a wingsuit, a situation that was all too clear.

  My friend Alan was one of the few jumpers who flew a wingsuit at Mile-Hi, though he did just about everything else too, including AFF instruction. Another of the climbing enthusiasts I kept discovering at the DZ, Alan was young, easygoing, and quick to smile, with dark eyebrows and a slight gap in his front teeth. Only his cropped hair and excellent manners gave a clue to his military job at the Air Force Academy, where he’d taken an administrative position after graduation. The first load of the morning had just gone up when Alan walked into the hangar with his gleaming Phoenix Fly Phantom wingsuit draped over his arm in black and blue folds.

  “Here, see if this fits you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think we should do wingsuit training today. I mean, if you want to,” Alan said teasingly. “You know I’m a wingsuit instructor, right?”

  “No, I had no idea,” I said, startled.

  “Well, I am, and that means I can give you wingsuit training. We just have to see if my suit will fit you.”

  “Wow. Let me see!”

  Alan was several inches taller than me and a little heavier. I put my feet into the booties and zipped up the two long zippers from knee to neck up the front of the suit, feeling like a kid in footee pajamas.

  “It’s really supposed to be tight from your shoulders to your feet. But as long as the feet stay on, you can probably wear it to learn on,” Alan said, examining me.

  “It does seem pretty big,” I said, looking down at the loose material, “but I can wear my mountain boots to make myself taller too.”

  “Okay, take it off, and I’ll show you how to hook it up to your rig and go through the basics with you, and then you can go do a jump.”

  I was speechless. This had become the thing I wanted more than anything. I had started to lose faith that it would happen in the week or two I had left in Colorado, and now suddenly I was about to get in a wingsuit and fly. Skydiving was so interesting; I always found myself doing something for the first time, with all the anticipation and uncertainty of the unknown. It seemed like life training for doing new things, and that alone explained the passion and energy that so many people devoted to this rather impract
ical sport.

  I followed Alan to the side of the packing carpet and watched him lay his wingsuit over my skydiving rig. He fed my leg straps into the body of the suit and passed the detached wings through my shoulder straps, using a long, yellow plastic cable to connect the rows of small sewn tabs between the arm wings and the body like a piano hinge. When he held it up, the rig was attached to the back of the wingsuit like a backpack affixed to a prom dress.

  “Okay, there are just a few things you need to know. You’ve been tracking a lot, so you know the body position, and you’re used to looking at your wrist altimeter with your arms back by your sides and reaching for the pilot chute from that position. But it’s really important to be stable and closed up when you exit the plane, and also after you throw the pilot chute.”

  “What do you mean ‘closed up’?” I asked.

  “Well, as soon as the wings catch air, they’re going to inflate. So you need to close the wings down when you leave the plane, because otherwise you could pop up and hit the tail. And if you don’t keep your wings and your body symmetrical, you’ll tumble and get into a spin right away. The best thing is to keep them completely closed, exit like you would for a track with your head up, and then slowly open up once you’re in the air.”