Learning to Fly

by Steph Davis

  The van ride up to the trail felt even longer than before, but I felt my energy return as I hiked up through the quiet forest. At the top I quickly stepped into the leg wings and leg straps and shimmied my shoulders into the arm wings and shoulder straps. Everything felt easier, more relaxed, because this time I knew what to expect. I shuffled down to the exit point, almost eager to get into the air. Balancing on the tip of the small point, with open air before me, I felt only a touch of fear, overridden by anticipation. I launched more consciously with my back arched hard, determined to get it right this time, and I felt the air lift me as I flattened out into real flight. Much later I would learn that to avoid falling head down, I should actually dive off the cliff into flight, rather than exiting head high, beginner style. But it worked. I shot forward, watching the trees pass below me as I flew straight toward the meadow. The forest rose slightly at the end of the slope, appearing to come up at me, and I pulled my parachute well before the rise, floating gently over the last stretch of trees and then down to the grass. I stood there alone, feeling almost tearful. I watched Dean drop out of the sky, and I thought about everything that had just happened. In the moment your feet leave the cliff, there’s no going back. The past is simply finished. And it’s you who must fly forward.

  Never one to figure things out quickly, apparently I had to come all the way to Italy to understand the difference between forgiveness and trust. Trust, once lost, can’t be found again easily, or maybe not even at all. I couldn’t live without it, and I couldn’t seem to get it back.

  When Dean had first come back, I’d been paralyzed by indecision and tired of trying to control things. I’d given in to the simplicity of not making choices, trying diligently to let things flow. It was crazy to have him come back so abruptly, just when I’d gotten over his being gone. And it was hard to imagine life without him floating in and out of my orbit. We’d grown up together, shared more adventures than most people will ever dream of; we’d struggled with and then against each other. I loved him almost more than myself, so much it hurt even to think about not having him in my life. Our time together had been tempestuous and often divided, but had also felt enduring, inevitable, with a sense of unbreakable connection. I loved him elementally, without needing to know why, and without expecting it to ever end. That would never change, I understood. But I saw myself with clarity at last. The trust was broken and had been since the day I drove out of Yosemite with my world shredded around me. Marriage is trust, and in this one it had been lost. My whole life I’d been strong enough to handle anything. The first time I wasn’t, I’d found myself alone. And I almost hadn’t survived it. I might be incurably independent, but I would never be abandoned again. I wasn’t willing to take that risk. As much as this trip had been a beginning for me, it was also an end of the journey I had shared with this incorrigible, untamable person who was lodged firmly into my soul and into my history. For once and for all, though it seemed impossible to imagine, it was over, though it would take months to figure out how to work it out on paper, how to become officially not married. Paperwork is one thing. Stopping love is actually not possible. I didn’t expect that pain to ease ever, and as time went by, it proved to be an invisible thread that would never break. But I also saw the choice had been made long before I knew it. I didn’t know what the future looked like, but I knew it looked nothing like the past.

  I couldn’t go back. I would go forward.

  In the Munich airport, I texted Robi to thank him for all the encouragement, and to let him know everything had gone well. Bravo! :), he answered back, right away.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Ceiling Lifts

  Climbing is an exceedingly high-maintenance pursuit. If you’re not climbing, you’re coming back from climbing, getting ready to go climbing, training for climbing, stretching for climbing, eating for climbing, organizing for climbing, reading about climbing, writing about climbing, talking about climbing, thinking about climbing, or earning money for climbing. I’d found it hard to juggle the requirements of climbing even with my simple love for trail running with Fletch (though technically that could be categorized as training for climbing) and the basics of life. Now I’d added base jumping and skydiving into the mix, with all the attendant needs for gear maintenance, packing, hiking, airplane riding, and learning. New base jumpers are like drug addicts, and I was no different. But if I didn’t climb constantly, I suffered racking climbing withdrawals and, even worse, loss of painfully earned climbing fitness. So every day was a desperate attempt to satisfy my vertical cravings. Fletch couldn’t run anymore and was moving sedately, happiest with short walks. I tried running without Fletch or with borrowed dogs, but that proved to be depressing, and before long something I’d loved to no end became no fun and fizzled out. So that helped the schedule a little.

  Winter in Moab is the quiet season, the best season. If I had someone else to jump with, we often went to spots I didn’t know, but for the most part every morning I drove the three miles from my house to the Tombstone. It took less than a half hour to hike to the top, and the daily jump of the same cliff was the best possible way for someone like me to learn the nuances of body position and canopy control. With the wide dirt road below it, and a soft, sandy clearing below the road near the creek, I had two good landing areas to choose from. I felt all right jumping it alone, though I knew that wasn’t the best policy for a new base jumper. Since mountain bikers or hikers were almost always in the parking lot, I figured I had somewhat of an unsuspecting ground crew in case I crashed or hit the wall.

  I craved the feeling of the free fall, my body dropping through the air, and I woke up every morning and looked out the window to see if there was any wind. Going out to the Tombstone every day became almost a need rather than a habit, somewhat like climbing. Every jump was different, even from the same cliff. Registering everything that my eyes were seeing in those two seconds of free fall was strangely mercurial. Sometimes I had flashes later of the rocks growing larger, the road rising up, things I’d seen without being aware of them, like snippets of dreams. My brain couldn’t seem to handle everything all at once and let the images come out later. As always, reality felt shifting, variable.

  Fletch liked sitting in the dirt parking lot next to my truck, watching for my parachute. She got to her feet, her smile wide, as I landed and ran to greet her, and as we drove home along the river, she rested her head on my leg so I could stroke her ears. Our daily run was a thing of the past, but now we had our Tombstone mornings.

  I began to feel aware of the smallest nuances of my exits. I had frequently seen that one could leap off a cliff with arms akimbo and legs flailing, yet still get a parachute out and down to a landing area. But I was discovering that with a perfect body position, the parachute could be almost guaranteed to come out flying straight and without a whiplash-inducing force. An interesting balance existed between the momentum needed to get as much distance as possible from the cliff and the control needed to hit the perfect body angle in the air.

  Before each jump, I ran through the first few seconds in my mind, over and over and over, often even during random times when I was not jumping. I imagined standing back from the edge, arching my shoulders back and giving them a little shake, taking a deep breath. I imagined running the few steps to the edge, pushing off and out with my right foot, as I arched my back and threw my hands up in the air.

  I counted in my mind, “One thousand one, one thousand two,” then felt my right hand reaching back to my pilot chute, grabbing the nylon top and throwing it out in the air. Almost simultaneously, I pulled my legs back and reached back with both hands to my risers as they unfolded from my rig, the canopy exploding into the air.

  It was as compelling as trying a climb over and over, looking for the right sequence and economy of movement to perfect the crux moves. I didn’t want to just survive my base jumps; I wanted to do them perfectly.

  The Tombstone in winter, Moab, Utah

  Harder to nail
down was the canopy flight. I knew how to work on perfecting the free fall—the same way I worked on climbing body positions—but once the parachute was out, things always changed and moved fast. The slightest fluctuations in wind, air temperature, and height made each canopy ride something new to be handled, literally on the fly. And unlike in climbing, you couldn’t just stop, stand on your feet, and think about it for a while. It was all happening fast, and the ground was coming up with no escape from gravity. You had to do it right and deal with anything that happened, or you were going to pound in or land in an injurious place. And unlike in climbing, with every jump you were guaranteed to meet the ground—it was up to you as to how soft the impact would be. Practice was the only way to gain experience, and I was determined to get it. Every day I did one and usually two jumps from the red cliffs. The numbers added up fast—or would have if I hadn’t adamantly refused to count my base jumps, almost as a matter of principle.

  Usually after a morning jump or two, I rushed out to climb some desert cracks or trained on my backyard wall. My psyche for hard climbing had suddenly returned in full force. I didn’t question it, I simply ran with it. I’d missed it. I set myself the goal of free climbing one of the hardest cracks in Moab, the two-hundred-foot Concepción, which was off by itself in a beautiful, isolated canyon. I went out alone the first day and aid climbed up it to fix a rope on it, then a few times a week I used a rope solo system to work on the free climbing from bottom to top, puzzling out the hard sections. It would be difficult for me to complete the climb from ground to top with no falls, placing my protection gear in the crack, but as I got stronger and more familiar with the difficulties, I began to think it would eventually be possible.

  I loved walking through the desert canyon alone, spotting the striking crack from the trail, and spending time with it uncovering its secrets. I preferred my solo system to the more standard way of climbing with a partner holding the rope. My system was not nearly as efficient if my goal was to finish the climb as soon as possible. It took longer for me to figure out the hard sections because my rope solo device didn’t allow me to go down easily. Rather than going up and down to learn the cruxes, I climbed the whole crack from bottom to top each time I went to it. But my goal wasn’t to finish Concepción as soon as possible. Mostly I liked being out in the canyon by myself, climbing on this awe-inspiring crack that motivated me so much, enjoying solving its puzzle and becoming stronger doing so. When I thought I had a chance at climbing it from bottom to top without falling, I would ask someone to come out and belay me. But not before. For now, it was my special place, and I loved it.

  I was climbing every day and could finally jump as much as I wanted from the Moab cliffs with nothing to hold me back—no need to pay for a plane ride or to hang around at a drop zone. But I soon started to miss the feeling of flying with the air under my wings. I was addicted to wingsuit flying, which can’t be done from the low Moab cliffs. I yearned for flight, even while I was base jumping or climbing, like a libertine craving three different lovers.

  A town of five thousand residents, Moab is sustained by tourism. Clint, the child of two devoted skydivers, had grown up on drop zones with his parents and brother and had started jumping himself at the age of twelve. From excelling in skydiving, he moved to base jumping and naturally ended up in Moab. Looking for a way to stay in the base jumper’s paradise, he decided to open a skydiving center to offer tandem jumps to vacationing visitors.

  Clint had built his drop zone around a Cessna 182 with a high-powered engine, a top-hinged side door, and no seats, a perfect jump plane for a small-town tandem operation. He also had rental space in a hangar at the Moab airport, a pilot, and two tandem instructors. Two customers at a time could ride up in the plane, crammed together with the tandem masters and the pilot in a space the size of a compact station wagon. The pilot had the only seat, wedged between the instructors and their large, two-person rigs. The customers sat between the tandem masters’ legs, all of them facing the tail of the plane. The first time I’d climbed into the Cessna, pressing up against everyone’s legs and shoulders, it had reminded me of clowns piling into one of those tiny cars at a circus. Clint himself had taken me on my ill-fated tandem jump years before and was chagrined about my dramatic dislike of the experience, so he was shocked when I showed up at the hangar with my wingsuit and skydiving gear, asking if I could somehow squeeze into the Cessna. Apparently I didn’t dislike jumping so much after all.

  Fun jumpers alone could never keep planes in the air, and without tandem jumpers the sport would never survive. Skydiving is expensive purely because putting a plane in the air is expensive. The cost of fuel is calculated by the minute, when an engine is running. Jump planes cost anywhere from $50,000 to $2 million, and tandem rigs are upward of $15,000. Insurance, airplane, fuel, and gear maintenance are fixed costs, and then you have all the costs of any business, such as staff, rental space, and advertisement. Tandem customers pay about $200 for a jump. Fun jumpers pay about $25. Only the tandems can keep the planes flying. At a big drop zone like Mile-Hi, the Otter can carry twenty passengers. Four tandems still leaves enough room for twelve fun jumpers on a load, so it’s an excellent symbiotic relationship between them. And it’s the tradition and the ethic in the skydiving world to make some space for fun jumpers, who keep the sport evolving. Without fun jumpers there would be no pool of future tandem masters and camera fliers to keep the industry supplied with a labor force. But two tandem customers create the same revenue as twenty fun jumpers, and twenty regular jump tickets is still just barely enough to cover the cost of fuel to send the plane up to altitude. So without the tandems there wouldn’t be any fun jumpers. At least not in most places.

  Walking back from the landing area with Fletch at Skydive Moab

  Skydive Moab’s Cessna 182 could carry only four passengers, so Clint’s goal was to book pairs of tandem passengers to make every load profitable. Still, sometimes people showed up alone or in a group of three, and then the plane had to go up with two empty spaces. From a business perspective, it had to happen, but it was less than ideal. Desperate to fly, I asked Clint if I could get on the plane when there were single customers. He agreed to let me pay as a regular fun jumper, barely covering the cost of the extra fuel that my weight added on the load, and get on with singles. This was easier in theory than in practice. If fun jumpers at big drop zones are second-class customers, I was a third-class customer at this tiny operation, just because of economics. If another person suddenly showed up at the airport wanting to make a tandem jump, I would get bumped from the single load I’d driven out there for. If someone unexpectedly didn’t show up, changing the group from odd to even numbers, I would get bumped. If I was late, the plane would go without me. If I was on time, I might have to wait around for an hour because the tandem customers wanted to go up in groups of two and then one, instead of the other way around. And my wingsuit flights were much shorter here than at a big drop zone flying an Otter. The smaller engine of the Cessna took us up to ten thousand feet rather than thirteen thousand.

  But if I was willing to accept all those minor deterrents and stay in constant contact with Clint or the pilot, ready to drop whatever I was doing at any moment, I could skydive several times a week in Moab. Since the jumps were few and far between, maybe four a week if I was lucky, they weren’t a real drain on my pocketbook. I’d come to need the feel of air under my wings almost as much as I needed the feel of rock under my hands. I’d put up with almost any inconveniences to ride to altitude in the Cessna.

  The pilot, a Quebecois jumper named Mario, was quiet but hard not to notice with his chiseled face and gentle, clear gray eyes. I’d heard the name many times from the Moab jumpers and had assumed that Mario would be Italian. Sandy-haired, he had just the remnants of a French Canadian accent, none of which matched his name at all. He laughed when I finally asked about it and told me that Mario was a common name in Quebec, making me realize that I knew almost nothing whatsoever about Can
ada and its French-speaking province, though it was just a few hundred miles north of where I’d grown up in New Jersey and Maryland, studying French all through grade school, high school, and university.

  Mario had been base jumping exactly as long as I had been climbing and had spent his life skydiving and base jumping, working in every aspect of the sport to the point of owning a drop zone in Quebec and learning to fly the jump planes. But he obviously had a special love for the desert, exploring the canyons and discovering new jumps. He had spent chunks of time in Moab over the years, working with Marta on building base rigs for Vertigo, testing and modifying skydiving gear for base use, and jumping his experiments off the cliffs out of sheer, insatiable curiosity. The desert was in his blood, as much as flying was. Flying Clint’s jump plane was a good way to build hours in his pilot’s logbook while spending more time in Moab.

  Mario exuded an air of utter competence without a trace of arrogance, an unusual trait I’d never encountered in a person. In just a few conversations with him, I was struck by his courteous and respectful nature. Mario seemed to have a friendly or positive word about everything, and though he observed more than he spoke, he gave his opinions simply and directly when asked, with no agenda or hyperbole. He seemed like the most straightforward, well-adjusted person I’d ever met. I wondered if that was a Quebecois quality.

  On my first day at the drop zone, I’d climbed up onto the step of the parked Cessna, wondering how I would get out the cramped door in my wingsuit. It was about half as tall and half as wide as the large doorway of the Otter, and the airplane wheel stuck out below the door with a flexing metal step shielding the tire. I wondered how I would get out the door in a stable position without whacking my face on the step as I flew out. Mario walked up to the plane as I pondered the small opening. “If you use the doorframe to climb out, you can stand on the step and grab the strut, and then just let go,” he said.