The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (38 page)

About a year into his BASE-j umping career Potter nearly killed himself. He was in Mexico being filmed highlining across one of the country's deepest open-air pits, known as Cellar of the Swallows: 1,200 feet deep, 170 to 300 feet across at the top.

"Every morning 50,000 swallows would fly out of the hole, then return in the evening," Potter told me. "It was raining, so the high-line broke as we stretched it. Meanwhile I was making as many BASE jumps into the pit as I could, and when we finally gave up on walking the line, I decided to make one more jump. I'd been rigging and jumping, rigging and jumping, and I was frantic, trying to do too much."

His parachute had been in the rain and was half wet, making it asymmetrical.

"I knew it wasn't safe, but I ignored it and rushed—another mistake. I was breaking too many rules. I took off, held the free fall for five or six seconds, threw my pilot chute to deploy my main and immediately started spinning out of control. The parachute wrapped around my head, and I knew I was dead. We'd fixed a static line from the top to the bottom for rigging and ascending, and at about 300 feet from the ground—two seconds—the parachute lifted from my face and I grabbed the rope. At first I couldn't hold tight enough to stop the fall, then I used every muscle in my body and stopped myself for just a second. My hands were shredded, and I couldn't hold it. I heard a friend yell that I was near the ground. I slid the last six feet and collapsed, safe, on the bottom. It was some time before I could use my hands, and I'd torn a lot of muscles in my body."

Before we left, Potter used his cell phone to check the weather at the Parachute Center, a skydiving training center in the central valley outside Lodi where he often practiced jumping from planes in his wingsuit. "Rain tomorrow," he said, "just like here."

 

We hooked up that afternoon in the boulders around Camp Four: a field of house-size rocks containing short, difficult routes that need no protection, where climbers test themselves and polish their moves. There is a boulder here called Midnight Lightning that went unclimbed for years of trying until valley legend Ron Kauk was able to string 12 moves together and reach the 25-foot summit.

Kauk, a 40-year valley resident and an old friend of mine, was there that afternoon, sticking to the side of a 30-foot boulder.

"Yeah," he said as we talked about Potter's accomplishments and ambitions, "there's just something about this valley that makes people want to do extraordinary things."

Potter was on a rock of his own. "What we do bouldering is not that different from what I'm doing on my way to landing without a wingsuit and parachute. No matter how impossible the route looks, you just take it one step at a time, fall off, get back on. These days I'm bouldering toward my ultimate flight."

As the sun set, smutty clouds were lowering over the valley.

 

Potter saw his first wingsuit flight in Yosemite while he and his then-wife, Steph Davis, a renowned climber herself, were climbing Half Dome. The two were married for more than seven years. Their divorce became final the week we met.

"That day we were near the top of the route on the northwest face. It was sunset, and there was a beautiful red light. Two guys came to the edge, looking really calm. They jumped, opened their wings, and it was magical. They were in the air 60 seconds or so, long enough that Steph started crying because she thought they were falling to their deaths. That's what crystallized it for me. I knew I had to do it to fulfill a dream I had when I was five years old."

Potter gestured with his gnarled hands as he described the dream he had had many times since childhood.

"It's one of my earliest memories. I was probably about four or five, maybe younger. I was falling out of control and some beings were flying next to me. They were human. They didn't have any wings, but there was a bright light around them, and they were smiling and gesturing but not speaking. I was freaking out, really scared, and they showed me how to arch my back. When I did it I felt the sensation of flyi ng, as if I was being grabbed by the back and pulled up. When I did my first skydives they were again teaching me how to get forward movement, showing me where to put my hands and hunch my back. And when I did it right I could feel the vacuum form on my back like someone was grabbing my shirt and pulling me up. That's when I really started believing I was meant to fly. It was too powerful to have had this dream since I was a baby and then to feel it in reality."

 

The next morning we sat out a heavy rainstorm in a small valley café. Several locals stopped by to congratulate Potter on his record flight.

"You know that stuff is insane," said one of them. Potter smiled, shrugged, and nodded yes.

In fact, he often muses on the sanity of his ambition to ultimately fly and land without wingsuit or parachute. He wrote about it in the "Embracing Insanity" essay. It's a long story, well written, that talks about the death of his father some years earlier, about his time waiting out summer rainstorms in a cave on the Eiger between jumps, about exactly how to put his body into the perfect wing shape to solve what he calls "the landing problem."

"My brain is flawed," he writes.

I have compulsions I cannot control ... Defects veil creativity. Minute glitches displace us from the norm. Innovation or insanity, blue sky or buoyant liquid, infinitesimal changes in the [body] curve turn impossible to reality ... Maybe I'd watched too many cartoons, but ever since I saw Randy and Frank on the Rostrum, I truly believed I would one day fly like Superman.

Writing about the landing, he remembered his two dead friends.

Frank also believed the landing problem could be solved. He named it the ultimate stunt. He dreamed about controlling his rate of descent by tracking, subtly re-forming his mass and modifying his angle of attack and body position in the air until he could slow enough to glide down on the perfect slope, without ever deploying his parachute. Our mutual friend Dano Osman laughed and called it "wicked rocket scientry." Neither of them ever got a chance to try.

Six months after Potter started BASE jumping he bought his first wingsuit, for $1,200. He made his first flights out of an airplane at the Parachute Center outside Lodi.

His first BASE jump in the wingsuit was off an illegal cliff.

"I remember being at the top sweating profusely, barely able to get into my suit, but when I got into the air this calm feeling took over. That's true to this day. I almost crashed into a hillside on one of my first jumps. I was barely 100 feet above the ground when I pulled my chute."

He returned to Lodi and the airplane wingsuit flights, then went back to jumping off cliffs. "For that first year I sucked at it. I was dropping like a rock. I could never reach what I was shooting for. I kept landing in trees. I needed to push my head down to increase my angle. It's counterintuitive, but if you want to fly forward farther, you have to point your head toward the ground. It took hundreds of flights, but I eventually got better and better, improved my technique. And the wingsuits got better when I started working with designer Tony Uragallo. We designed the one I have now, and it's radical."

"I'm his tailor," said Uragallo when we talked. He's a transplanted cockney whose company, Tony Suits, has been making about 300 wingsuits a year for four years. They cost from $650 to $1,500.

Uragallo flies wingsuits himself, including in European competitions. "Wingsuit flying is very popular in Europe," he said. "For the competitions you jump from an airplane carrying a GPS and are judged on distance, time, and speed over the ground. I placed first in a distance competition last year with a glide ratio of 3.588 meters forward for every one meter I dropped."

He estimates there are 3,000 to 4,000 wingsuiters flying today.

"Dean's a delightful guy, full of ideas," Uragallo said when we talked about Potter. "I'm going out west to fly a big cliff with him next month."

When I asked about Potter's ultimate goal of flyfng without a wingsuit or parachute he said, "No, you mean with a wingsuit and without a chute."

"No wingsuit," I said.

"Really? I'd get confirmation on that. What if he misses the landing? I've never seen him fly except on Internet video, but he's still alive after doing all that crazy stuff, so somewhere in among the madness he must be careful."

An almost biblical rain was still coming down as we finished lunch, and I was trying to accept the probability that I would have to settle for watching Potter fly on video. He checked a connection to the weather in Lodi that he had programmed into his phone. It was storming there too and was forecast to be storming the next day as well.

He left to spend the afternoon at what he calls his "ups." To keep his body grisly and his mind sharp he does a total of 700 sit-ups, chin-ups, push-ups, crunches, and back arches. That afternoon he ran seven miles down a hill and seven miles back up. In the rain.

 

My last morning in Yosemite I woke to the sound of frogs. I heard the croaking as the final song of despair for any chance of seeing Potter fly. In person, anyway.

His videos are all over the Internet: climbing, highlining 3,200 feet up with no tether or parachute, and wingsuit flying, including his record-setting flight.

We met on the deck of my cabin during a brief letup in the rain. The view down the valley to El Cap was slowly getting lost in lowering clouds.

He was coming from the small rented house he calls a shack. He makes a good living from half a dozen equipment and clothing sponsors, including the Five Ten shoe company, which had just bought him a Mercedes van. Over the years he has made several hundred thousand dollars—extraordinary for a climber, high-liner, and BASE jumper. "I'm happy with what I make," he said. "I'm not superrich, but I have a lot of free time."

"Dean's not cheap, but he's well worth the money," said one of his sponsors.

Just before I left, I asked him, "How can you possibly imagine making a flight without a wingsuit or a parachute, in jeans and a shirt, and land without killing yourself?"

"It doesn't seem that big a leap to me," he said. "You have to remember that with the right body position you can not only fly fast, you can fly slow. I can fly with a 25-mile-an-hour down speed and a 60-mile-an-hour forward speed in a wingsuit. Then what you do is match the angle of the slope as you come in, and if I can find the perfect snow slope I can survive the hit. Speed skiers wipe out at over 100 miles an hour and are fine. It's just a matter of taking little steps forward and putting them together in a breakthrough. All the breakthroughs happen that way. It's just a matter of taking one thing at a time and creating a hybrid. I think it's the same with landing the human body. I'm not going to do anything where I think I'm going to die."

I sat trying to imagine him standing up unhurt out of a violent splash of snow somewhere on his perfect slope.

"Do you wonder why some people think you're crazy?" I asked.

"Insane or enlightened," he said, "it's all pretty close. But something in me has the will to stay alive, which is stronger than anything else."

FROM MEN'S JOURNAL

Twilight inks the hills of Vista, California. A murder of crows caw in the trees. Danny Way, arguably the world's greatest skateboarder, is trying to catch his breath atop the monolithic MegaRamp. The Mega stands taller than an eight-story building and stretches longer than a football field; it looks like a plywood ski jump, and after each run, Danny is driven back to the starting point in a golf cart. He's alone and battered, exhausted and punch-drunk and discouraged. His odds of riding away from the trick he's trying, a trick that's never been done, are, at best, equal to those of him slamming so hard he has to be rushed into his 14th surgery. That he's more afraid of not riding away than of getting hurt is unquestionable; Way has been appropriating what scares him since childhood, weaponizing it.

At 36, Way resembles Clint Eastwood—if Eastwood were young, blond, and dressed like a skate rat. He's wearing a Plan B Skateboards shirt, DC shoes and baggy shorts, and full protective gear: heavy plastic-capped knee and elbow pads, a helmet. On the Mega he looks like a gladiator—one who's losing.

Here at the world's only permanent MegaRamp, built on a 12-acre swath of land owned by fellow professional skateboarder Bob Burnquist, a film crew is shooting footage for an upcoming documentary about Danny's 20-plus-year career as a pro, and he's intent on finally landing a trick he's been attempting obsessively for months. We're going on eight hours, and for most of that time, Danny's been wrecking himself. Technically, what he's after is a switch backflip revert. In English,
switch
means he's doing it backward, with his right foot forward instead of his left (think switch-hitting in baseball);
backflip
means an honest-to-God backflip, grabbing his board with his left hand and soaring upside down over a gap the length of two school buses parked end to end; and
revert
(pronounced RE-vert) means that at the absolute last moment, he will twist himself around 180 degrees so that he lands riding forward. It's ridiculous.

Now, without looking at me, he says, "Sometimes it can just go sideways, you know?"

I think he's talking about his hopes for this filming session or maybe about how he's been landing, the revert not coming around a full 180 degrees. And maybe that's all he's saying, but maybe not. Earlier this morning, before giving a motivational talk at an elementary school, Way mentioned how there's no television in his house, how his two sons go to a Waldorf school, how his infant daughter will too, and how he and his wife allow very few plastic toys and maintain an all-organic diet. He described, in other words, the exact opposite of his own childhood. Tricks can go sideways, but so can childhoods, so can whole lives, unless you work tirelessly, ruthlessly, to keep them on track.