The Whole World Is Jumpable

Not everything crazy that a lot of people do can be called a trend; it may simply be a crazy thing that a lot of people do. But it’s worth noticing when an increasing number of youngish folks, more than 400 worldwide, seek to get their kicks from jumping off bridges and roofs. If this is how they behave in flush times, imagine what they would do in a depression.

Their extreme sport is called BASE jumping, whose acronymic name derives from the four types of structures that its unusual athletes leap from–buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). Equipped with rectangular canopy chutes, toggles for steering, a knowledge of which way the wind is blowing, no reserve chutes (as compared with skydivers) and a special arrangement of brain cells, participants jump to conclusions from great and forbidden heights, or from little ones where a chute has little time to open. Until they release their chutes, they fall at 60 m.p.h. The end is often unsatisfactory.

So it was last week when Thor Axel Kappfjell, 32, known by the oxymoron Human Fly, leaped from a 3,300-ft. cliff in his native Norway in a fog, was flung back by an ill wind onto the cliff’s face and was killed. His death came 15 years after that of Carl Boenish, one of four people who invented BASE jumping in 1980; Boenish also died in a leap from a Norwegian cliff. Before one begins to hatch a Scandinavian-unhappiness theory to explain all this, it should be pointed out that BASE jumpers have died all over the world.

On June 9, Frank Gamballi, a friend of Kappfjell’s, was killed in a jump from El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Marta Empinotti, a Californian jumper whose boyfriend Steve Gyrsting crashed into a river at 100 m.p.h. when his chute failed, says that nonetheless she “couldn’t live without” the sport: “I would die inside.” To date 39 people have died outside.

It is not that this strange enthusiasm goes unappreciated by the gaping public. Kappfjell, New Yorkers may recall, accomplished the sport’s trifecta by jumping off the Empire State and Chrysler buildings last October, and he achieved a personal high last March when he jumped 110 floors from the top of the World Trade Center. (The unlawful leap irritated New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and for that alone was deemed worthwhile by the citizens.) People seem to take pleasure in BASE jumping in the same way, I suppose, that Romans liked watching gladiators. The potential opportunity to observe a fellow human die at a moment of wild exhilaration, or live through such a moment, brings one back to a kind of basics.

So part of the explanation of the appeal of this madness may be that it returns our soft, comfy civilization to an ancient roughness–man vs. nature, life or death, that sort of thing. The recent successes of stories like The Perfect Storm, Into Thin Air and The Endurance would suggest that the E-ZPass, “we deliver” world is yearning–if only in its dreams–for situations of hardship and danger. Death doesn’t even seem to attend war anymore; Kosovo showed that a push-button war could be casualty-free, at least for those who pushed the buttons. Routine phrases today such as “living on the edge” and “pushing the envelope” only indicate how smooth most surfaces are, and how snug most envelopes.

Maybe BASE jumpers take to the idea of near-death experiences and feel that unless everything is risked at once, life is unconfirmed. Maybe some people, once afraid of mentioning the word, are developing an affection for death. Foraging for cultural antecedents, I recall The Running Man, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of a few years back about a sportlike game show in which the main contestant was hunted down like a dog, to the death; the audience cheered; death was like a sexual encounter. In Meet Joe Black, a bad remake of Death Takes a Holiday, a beautiful young woman is so in love with the figure of Death that she would follow him to his dark kingdom.

Romantic individuality may have something to do with the sport’s popularity–the fact that one undertakes a kind of Byronic solo adventure when one jumps. But the jumpers also do their thing in groups and form little outlaw societies in which they approve of and cheer on one another. In fact, it could be the illegality of the sport that pumps them up. In an interview last April, Kappfjell said he delighted in playing outlaw and “fooling the authorities” as he gained access to his perches.

Yet none of this adequately explains why an apparently sane, if overexcited, young man or woman would willingly, eagerly step to the edge of an abyss and do or die. In founding the sport, Boenish exulted that “the whole world is jumpable,” his way of saying, “Because it is there.” It may be that in claiming the possibility of the impossible, he was touching a responsive chord in all those who, from time to time, want to take the leap. As poor Kappfjell proved, however, some times are better than others.