Blog

Sometimes There is No Reason

• September 2009
• Climb Fly

120 from steph davis on Vimeo.

Make a tiny little box with your fingertips, and look through it. This little frame creates a reality. Now pick up a camera, and look through the viewfinder. Art is created through framing–through narrowing down the vast flow of occurrence into a single, comprehensible piece. What is cut away from the frame is as important as what is put into it, in creating this little chunk of reality. Now close your eyes and then open them, and notice the borders of your field of vision. Consider this: an oval slice of material world that you can grasp with one single sense is the primary influence of what you call “reality.” Your eyes are frames.
So.
Where does the immaterial realm fit in?
Where does the world you’ll never see fit in?
Where do other people’s worlds fit in?
What if you don’t see? What is your reality then?
What if you had no frame? How would you process the massive universe?
Would you actually see anything at all?

Climbing is one frame that has served me well. I don’t see climbing as a “metaphor for life,” but rather as a camera viewfinder to narrow down the endless sea of my universe, to allow me to actually see some part of it. I have other frames too–running, loving, cooking, skate skiing, yoga, skydiving, BASE jumping. The more frames I use, the more I see the importance of them all, and appreciate the value of having many frames and understanding them for what they are.

All the things we can do as humans are beautiful and glorious–but ultimately, they are just different avenues for understanding, or possibly creating, our own reality.

Like climbing, base jumping is a very compelling frame. Because the element of risk is strong, a powerful sense of urgency and importance is inherent. Although I am willing to accept anything mystical and intangible in my thinking, I have always struggled with a pretty naive expectation of justice and fairness in the material world. I find it impossible to accept intentional human cruelty. I cannot tolerate manmade situations which are irrational, illogical, hurtful or unfair (which is why I am so outspoken against the NPS policies and enforcements that discriminate against climbers and base jumpers–the most recent and mind-boggling, a court ruling in which a judge required a photographer to “denounce base jumping” in order to reduce his sentence for filming a base jump on NPS land. This is the USA, 2009, not Communist China. Or so we say. For some reason).

I annoy people a lot by always asking “why,” because I really don’t understand, and I really want to know. I have a very hard time with things that just don’t make sense, and apparently I am also abnormally literal. Basically, I believe exactly what people say, even if that’s not what they actually meant, which pretty much results in me being confused a lot. So I often need to have jokes explained to me. In many ways, and this in particular, I am pretty immature.

One reason base jumping is an excellent frame for someone like me is it highlights the fact that sometimes there is no reason why.

There are a few ways to get hurt base jumping, and one of them is to hit the object. That’s why jumpers spend up to an hour packing their parachutes, in order to ensure a perfectly opened canopy, one which comes out of the base rig straight and flying away from the wall. It’s also why jumpers try to refine their body position when jumping off. When you jump off a cliff, or whatever, into dead air, there are a lot of things you can do with your body. If you do the wrong things (kicking, pointing too straight down or up, balling up, being assymetrical), you can throw yourself into an off-heading opening–meaning, the parachute can be heading somewhere other than straight away from the object when it opens. If you do the right things, you up the chances of an on-heading opening–having the parachute open up perfectly, flying straight away from the object. This is what you want.

This stuff is especially important when you are jumping a low object, like the cliffs in Moab. The less time you have to fall through the air, the less distance you get from the cliff when you open your parachute. So if the parachute opens off-heading, you don’t have much time to turn it around before it flies straight into the cliff. Which is really bad.

It’s good to practice split-second reactions for these situations, and be ready to use them at any moment. But when I first started base jumping, like many new jumpers, I was fixated on how to avoid off-heading openings. Being extremely logical and analytical, I was bothered by experienced jumpers’ comments that off-heading openings sometimes “just happen.” I felt that didn’t make sense. As far as I could see, many jumpers had poor body position when they left the cliff. And people use countless unique packing techniques, to put it mildly. So I figured off-heading openings have no mystery whatsover. An off-heading must be a result of poor body position or a packing problem. Or maybe even having the wrong mindset, and actually thinking it into happening.

Being a climber, I obsess over the most subtle nuances of my body position as I jump off the cliff. And I also obsess over my packing technique, which is perfect, I think, and exactly the same every time. So at first, I was hopeful I would never have an off-heading opening, though I trained for them, just in case, and was taught to always rehearse the procedures before every jump.

I’d probably done three hundred base jumps or more, when I had my first 180 (where you are pointing 180 degrees from the direction you want to be in when your parachute opens–i.e., at the cliff). It wasn’t very scary, and didn’t even seem like that big of a deal. As the parachute came off my back, I felt I was spinning left, and I grabbed the lines of the parachute and turned myself around right away, when I was still a good thirty feet away from the wall. It was actually pretty undramatic. Since I was alone, and didn’t yet wear a camera on my helmet, I couldn’t really know why it happened. I figured it had to be my body position, or maybe I had thrown out my pilot chute too aggressively, and the momentum threw my entire body around to the left as my parachute was coming out. So I started throwing my pilot chute less aggressively after that.

It did bother me a lot when experienced jumpers whom I respected would comment that sometimes 180s “just happen.” Because that just made no sense. As far as I could reason, an off-heading couldn’t “just happen.” There had to be a reason, which meant it could always be prevented. Right?

A few days ago, I went to jump with my friend. He left the cliff and landed safely, and as I stood on top organizing my mind, I suddenly had a strong premonition that I would have an off-heading opening. One thing I have learned with base jumping is to listen to weird feelings. But I also have a conflicting belief that one’s thoughts can influence reality, and this has been a tricky conundrum. I was ready to jump and couldn’t see any reason not to (like bad winds, feeling rushed or subpar physically or mentally, etc.). I decided to push the off-heading thoughts away, in order to avoid causing it through my own mental power and focus extra hard on doing everything right instead. Funny enough, my parachute had been packed by someone else, a jumper with decades of experience who is also a highly respected parachute rigger and packer, so I was a thousand percent sure I had a perfect pack job.

I ran off the cliff, put my arms back, hit the right angle with my body, relaxed my legs, waited a solid two seconds, and threw out my pilot chute. In my mind was the good feeling that I had achieved a perfect body position and fall time. My parachute opened with a bang, and my body instantly spun towards the wall. Since I had fallen through the air for a good two seconds, I was far enough away to pull on the lines, turn the parachute around, and steer away from the cliff with no immediate danger of hitting it with my canopy in the second it took to do that, so I wasn’t terribly scared. But I touched down and felt completely baffled. I was sure I had had a perfect body position, and I was more sure of a perfect pack job than if I had done it myself. My friend told me everything had looked exactly right in my free fall, but the canopy just opened turned around nearly backwards. I was wearing a video camera on my helmet, pointed down towards my body, and this time I could inspect it to see if I had somehow done something really strange that I wasn’t aware of.

I hadn’t. I watched it over and over again, and saw my body falling straight and symmetrical, and then an inexplicable turn to the right as the canopy opened pointing almost completely towards the wall. More like a 120 than a 180. Since I had creepily expected this to happen before I even left the cliff, it actually wasn’t a big surprise.

The thing is, like I’ve been told so many times, sometimes 180s just happen. Sometimes there is no reason. This is good to understand. I see that it’s true. My literal, childlike brain always has a very hard time accepting things that don’t make sense.

Like climbing, base jumping is a good frame for me.