To Fly and Die
Not long ago, I stood with some friends at Taft Point, a promontory 900 meters above the floor of Yosemite Valley in California. It was a perfect morning, with nothing but fresh-scrubbed mountain air between us and the wind-polished face of the world’s largest granite monolith, El Capitan, in the distance. We edged close enough to the void to start trembling.
I felt a primal fear of death, and that fear kept me from taking another step.
The joy was in the perch, to be on a ledge fit for species that can fly under their own power.
On May 16, Dean Potter and a young acolyte, Graham Hunt, went to that same spot at sunset with a plan to jump. This wasn’t suicide, not by a conventional understanding of the act. Potter had done the jump many times before. It was sport — wingsuit BASE jumping.
No one in the world was better at trying to imitate a flying squirrel, at speeds in excess of 160 kilometers per hour, than Dean Potter. He spent 22 years defying the limits — and the law — of what is an acceptable way for a human being to interact with Yosemite’s towering granite.
On that Saturday evening, Potter and Hunt took a leap. They were in the air barely 40 seconds, trying to clear a notch, when they smashed into the rock wall and were killed on impact. Potter was 43. Hunt was 29. It was captured on a GoPro camera mounted on Potter’s helmet.
Potter’s nickname was the “Dark Wizard.” What he did — walking on slacklines over Yosemite’s waterfalls, climbing sheer vertical faces without rope, and jumping from cliffs, to be saved at the last minute by a parachute — would be called insane. Potter called them “the dangerous arts.”
He had a cult following, was named an “adventurer of the year” by National Geographic after a 2009 jump from the Eiger in Switzerland, and he constructed a whole philosophy around acrobatic forms of flirting with death. He even flew with his dog, Whisper, on his back.
“This concept of turning dying into flying is a metaphor for my basic life principle,” he said. And when questioned about BASE — an acronym for Building, Antenna, Span and Earth — he all but challenged the gods to burn his wings. “Man actually has the skills to pull it off.”
But man also has a brain. There is difference between using human ingenuity to have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” as the poet John Magee wrote, and stupidity.
The Wright brothers were meticulous, engineer- driven tinkerers who finally slipped the bonds with their flying machine for 12 seconds in 1903. They were not in it for the thrill, those modest men from the Midwestern United States, though the ancient desire of people to fly was a driving force.
“For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man,” Wilbur Wright wrote, three years before the brothers pulled it off. “My disease has increased in severity and I feel it will soon cost me an increased amount of money, if not my life.”
Later in the century, when Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, he carried with him a piece of the original Wright Flyer. What connects the Brothers W. to the American moonwalkers is imaginative planning, born of careful calculations, to reduce risk.
What Dean Potter did with his life, and what brought him to his death, was something different. Extreme sports, so called, have to get more extreme to stay interesting. As he approached middle age, and became famous, he went ever deeper into the dangerous arts.
He started to balance-walk on lines strung across deep chasms. He attracted corporate sponsors. He took up wingsuit flying, where a single miscalculation means death. His Eiger jump from a ledge above the clouds set a record for the longest flight in a wingsuit, nearly three minutes.
There was certainly a bit of stoner stunt ethos to what he did, the dare that follows a question, “Dude, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could fly from Half Dome?” But to Potter it was also spiritual. On his website, he talked about “playing in the void,” and overcoming the fear that keeps most of us grounded.
But inherently, he knew this game of risk with his life could not last.
“Wingsuit BASE-jumping feels safe to me, but 25 wingsuit fliers have lost their lives, this year alone,” he wrote on his blog last year, after the death of a friend. “There must be some flaw in our system, a lethal secret beyond my comprehension.”
No, the flaw was not in the system, but in the cultural celebration of sport-assisted suicide. I love Potter’s spirit, but not his actions. The kind of cliff- diving that Potter did is considered the riskiest sport in the world. But to call it a sport is charitable. It’s death- courting. Odds are with death.
Dean Potter thought he was flying. He was just falling. And on May 16, he fell to his death, his final act a cautionary tale as old as the one that the ancient Greeks told about Icarus.