If he emerged at feet, he would still have time to deploy his chute but a minuscule margin for error when steering toward his landing zone—a six-foot-wide platform surrounded by concrete barriers and perched on a cliff. He expected to fall into a stand of trees if anything went wrong, but upon closer inspection, he found that the trees were riddled with dead branches that could impale him.
The bad weather lingered into the event day. It was raining, the mountain was socked in, and the helicopters were grounded. More than 2, crew members, including 90 search and rescue staffers, waited alongside thousands of spectators. The event was being broadcast to an estimated million viewers in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
With less than a half-hour to go until jump time, the military started to shut down the production. Then, inexplicably, the clouds parted and the wind died. The jump was on.
But by then Corliss was flashing back to Table Mountain and having second thoughts. He started crying in the helicopter. The turbulence from his wingsuit bounced off the narrow walls for a bumpy flight, but Corliss threaded the needle as planned, hitting mph through the crack. He deployed his chute and landed safely.
Decide for yourself whether the stunt is a victorious comeback or the type of relentlessly deadly risk-taking that increasingly haunts the sport. Underwater, turbulence thrashed his body, then released him to the surface, where he drifted into the shallows. Corliss recounted all this to me last winter while steering his big Winnebago RV northbound on Interstate 15, toward a skydiving center east of Los Angeles. Dressed entirely in his trademark black, with a gleaming bald head and a toothy, square-jawed snarl, he spoke in a measured but relentless torrent of dramatic anecdotes and self-analysis.
Corliss can talk for hours without a break, as if storytelling is at once his deepest compulsion and crucial to the performance art that has become his life. They were attracted by the blood and were eating the open wound.
I would say, if you can, avoid that at all costs. His face stiffened, as if the world should have known that any pain medication would undermine the central project of his time on earth.
Your hips look broken. Your legs look broken. Everything looks broken. You need pain medication. So Corliss lay in elective agony for hours while the dumbfounded rescue workers rigged a cable across the Umgeni River and hauled him up and out, and then to the trauma unit of a nearby hospital. There, even as doctors stitched his wounds, he continued to refuse pain medication. Corliss pulled off the freeway into the windy desert town of Perris, then took a wide, quiet country road past sun-parched grass below the San Bernardino Mountains.
Turning into the palm-lined driveway of Skydive Perris , he rolled to a stop in the big asphalt lot and finished the waterfall story with one of his standard narrative moves: an abrupt shift from horror to reassurance that all was for the best. I would have had to continue being a graphic artist. And I really do think that one saved my life. Weeks earlier, by phone, Corliss told me that his grandfather always wanted to write an autobiography but died before getting around to it.
Corliss, at age 44, was trying to avoid this outcome by writing his own eventful story before it was too late. Wind socks were taut, tumbleweeds flew past, and small aircraft sat grounded near the runway. On one level, it was a bleak scene: the pro psycho in his lonely Winnebago, parking lot empty because everybody with a normal life and a job is off doing something meaningful.
But Skydive Perris is a second home for Corliss. Perfectly content to be there even without a jump on the horizon, Corliss, walking with a slight limp, led me outside, past shade shelters and a swimming pool absent of any swimmers, and into the Bombshelter Bar and Grill.
The tables were empty, but staff members smiled at him like country-club workers greeting the golf pro on a rainy day—or, more accurately, employees at a strip-mall climbing gym nodding to Alex Honnold. By age seven, Corliss had been around the world three times and spent a year between rural India and a community of Tibetan Buddhist exiles in Nepal. Corliss enjoyed hiking with his mother in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains while she foraged for mushrooms and berries to sell in town.
He struggled in school—less with academics, which came easily, than with bullying. In sixth grade, Corliss fought back against a pack of boys with such unrestrained savagery that his parents decided to homeschool him. He liked to take psychedelics and everything else you can think of, and it was more important to him than his family was. It eventually destroyed his mind and our relationship, along with any bond he had with the children.
Over lunch at the Bombshelter, he described his father as verbally abusive, prone to vicious tirades. Dulling or distorting that perception in any way, as Corliss sees it, is worse than foolish. Corliss, meanwhile, became suicidally depressed. At 14, he began playing Russian roulette with loaded handguns.
Corliss was 15 when Gigi asked his father to leave for good. Soon after, while she was out of town for a few days, Corliss says his father moved back into the house.
Corliss demanded that he leave. You decide. Deeply unhappy, unable to find any meaning in his own existence, Corliss was flipping channels on TV one day when he came across footage of a BASE jumper leaping from a cliff.
And if I die doing it, I get what I want. It was an incredibly twisted thought process. Corliss was too young to act on his inclination; BASE jumping takes money, a car, and a lot of freedom.
But, he told me, just the idea of it was good for him. Anyone can shoot themselves. And that is what helped me hold on for the next three years.
The acronym BASE refers to the four categories of fixed objects from which jumpers hurl themselves : buildings, antennae as in radio towers , spans bridges , and earth cliffs. Early stirrings of the modern sport came in , when filmmaker Carl Boenish shot footage of himself parachuting off El Capitan in Yosemite. Very few people even knew what BASE jumping was.
Corliss was 18 when his grandparents paid for skydiving lessons, and 21 when he bought a BASE-jumping parachute and drove with a friend to a small town in the Sierra foothills. There, on a moonless night, he jumped off a road bridge into a mountain canyon.
In inky darkness, Corliss botched the landing and was dragged across gravel hard enough to shred flesh. I had only done about five skydives with it when I decided to take it with me on a trip I was doing to Africa. On that trip we found this massive cliff with a 1,foot main wall, with a massive ledge and then another foot cliff. I was with a Russian friend of mine who had a lot more experience. He did the jump first, and completed it. There was a point in which I saw a crack in the rock, and instead of deploying my parachute I decided to glide through that space in the rock and then release my parachute after clearing the obstacle.
I probably only had about 20 feet of clearance, going over miles per hour. In essence, I did one of the first proximity wingsuit flights without even considering it. Looking back I absolutely should have never be there or trying that. How I survived through that early period of my career is beyond me.
I wish I only had one story like this, because it is so irresponsible, but that is not the case at all. That is why I got so injured so much in the early part of my career. It is located in the town of Walenstadt, just about an hour and a half north of Zurich.
You can actually see Austria from the top. You get that true sensation of flying. Of course technically you are falling towards the ground, going very, very fast, but it gives you that feeling of being a bird. This location gives a true sense of what wingsuit flying is all about. The cliff itself is over 5, feet high, so just about a mile or so. It is absolutely gigantic. There is a cable car that takes you up to the top. Of course when I was there filming the wingsuit sequence for Point Break we were using helicopters to get up and down, but using the cable cars is usually the way we commute to it.
The cable car allows a wingsuit flyer to be able to do multiple jumps through the course of a day, because it is so easy to get back up. The Crack is interesting as a wingsuit flyer because not only is it just a huge cliff, but it also has all of these really interesting terrain features.
Between the cliff you jump off of, and where you pull your parachute, there is a great diversity of ground. The difference between doing a jump off a cliff like that and jumping out of a plane is reference points.
Going through the Crack you are whipping past the ground, between trees, and over rocks, making the imagery way more impactful. The visuals really hit. You almost feel like Luke Skywalker going through the tunnel to take out the Death Star.
0コメント