Suss: another literary journal

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!”