BASE jumping in Australia

- Pulp Magazine- New Zealand

"The initial second is just weird, you are in free space, the wind starts to pick up, your speed starts to pick up and the noise starts hitting your ears and you just get an intense churning feeling in your gut…throw the pilot chute and that's the most intense few seconds and, I think, that is the most intense feeling that you can ever experience, just waiting for the pilot chute to catch to pull the canopy off your back."

Freedom isn't 'nothing left to lose'. Freedom is not being afraid to lose everything. It is two in the morning. We are breaking trail down a steep face, looking for the exit point. Driving all night, we have not slept, and in another hour or so, some of us may be jumping off a barren cliff into the abyss below. This is four o'clock in the morning courage. This is BASE-jumping. I've come along with a prolific jumper, Heath Baird, to take some photos and try to understand this sport from the inside out after reading so many indictments of the crazy folk who jump off buildings. I'm learning very quickly that these guys are some of the most clear-headed, driven people I've ever met. Coming from every walk of life, these kindred spirits share a heady title, that of the most extreme extremists alive. We are about to spend a week travelling around Australia like junkie playboys, looking for the next high.

As the sun begins to rise, so do our spirits. The wind is dying, and the first light makes it possible to see the landing site, small, tight and impossible looking. Heath is rigging up, checking his pack, zipping up his jump suit and breathing deeply.
"Alright, let's do this," he says.

I nod and climb over some rocks to set up for a photo of the take-off. I always get a vicarious high watching someone jump off an object. That instant where they start to lean over the edge, committing themselves; you are there with them for a moment sharing that surge of fear as they begin to fall, until it becomes abstract and then you are just a photographer again, and you begin to hear the motor-wind again, stumbling out of the enveloping silence of adrenalin.

Heath walks warily up to the edge and throws a few pebbles over to check the wind. I watch as he closes his eyes. The Edge. Hunter S. Thompson said, "There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." He looks at me and tells me ten seconds.

Three seconds later, he jumps.

Arched, he falls close to the rock, sliding down the face at somewhere around 32 ft (9.8m) per second per second. Gaining speed, he starts to track away from the cliff just faster than the cliff rises out to meet him. It is a long 8 seconds of freefall, bringing his speed up to more than 150km/h before he pitches his pilot chute. A resounding 'whoomp' can be heard as the main chute is dragged from his back and fills with air. A second later he is gliding down to the landing zone in long, slow arches under a cloud-blue canopy. Now it is a harrowing wait at the car as he makes the two-hour long hike out. I go over the story in my head in case a ranger should appear. We're lucky this time. We fishtail down the gravel road smiling, both still buzzing from the jump, and I was sitting at the top the whole while.

After many miles, we talk to ease the burden of the road.
"Why do you do BASE, Heath?"
"I just went from one thing to another, and this is just eventually where I've gotten to. I used to do crazy stuff like jumping off bridges into water and stuff like that. I started skateboarding and did a lot of motorbike riding when I was younger. I always wanted to jump off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I finally went, fuck it; I'm going to do something about it. I started skydiving to get into BASE, it's just a killer rush."
"Yeah, I can understand the rush. I get a rush just watching. But what kind of person does this sport. I mean, in the end, it is jumping off buildings. That has to automatically put a lot of people out of the running."
"They are either an idiot, or someone looking for more within themselves. Some other way to challenge themselves…to see how they can hold up and how they can perform under tough circumstances."

Tough circumstances. BASE stands for Building, Antenna, Span & Earth. The four elements in a twisted periodic table of fear, denial and fastidious parachute packers. Heath has jumped all four elements of BASE, and more. Whenever a person does all four, he is granted a BASE number. There are around 700 in the US and 76 in Australia. It is not a sport for the masses.
Paul Brauer, another Melbourne-based jumper, explains the BASE rig. "BASE is as simple as possible, which allows for the least amount of risk. It's just a flat container with 4 flaps that Velcro together. You pack the canopy nice and symmetrical and the canopy is a basic canopy, it's not a high performance canopy by any means. It's big and it's slow. The canopy I skydive with is 79 square feet. The canopy I BASE-jump with is 260 square feet."

Another few hundred kilometres and we arrive at our destination….an out-of-the-way bridge with just enough clearance to jump and live. Again, Heath checks over his gear as one should when it is all that is separating you from a 100% certain death. He climbs the railing precariously and jumps without looking back. I stay long enough to watch his chute unfurl majestically before turning to run away from the scene of this decadent crime scene. As we meet at the car, a local pulls up in his ute. He hangs his sunburned head out of the window long enough to let us know that a commuter just called in a bridge suicide on the police radio.
"You jumpin' off that bridge? Somebody just called the cops, sayin' there was a 'soo-i-side' on the bridge. I reckon you best get down the road before the police get here."
"Thanks, man!" we yelled back as the tires rolled forward in the dirt.
Now, you can't help but wonder what goes through a driver's mind when they see a body run out onto a tall bridge, hoist on to the railing and pitch over. They can't see the chute.

BASE is about pushing your own envelope. It is about making life exciting, living in that atmosphere where every second, every decision is life and death. "You decide what you want to jump," Heath explains, "You set your own limits. You don't have all the bullshit regulations that come with skydiving," and of course, you don't have any insurance either.

"Some people just are not mentally prepared for it. Even skydiving, which is like a walk in the park, its mundane compared to BASE-jumping; people get overwhelmed in that when they have line twists at two and a half thousand feet in the air."
"I have a motto, 'I'd rather be forgotten than remembered for giving in.'"