Free Falling
One of the bucket list items from The Bucket List was skydiving. That’s not terribly original, but I assure you, it will never appear on any bucket list I produce. I like to say that I avoid activities that involve a lot of gravity. I know that Newton proved 300 years ago that gravity has the same impact on a falling object regardless of mass. I don’t believe it. When a toddler falls he gets up. When a young athlete falls, he gets up, shakes it off and carries on. When a guy my age and weight falls, he is likely to never get up again. Something tells me that this has more to do with mass than age. I am clearly no physicist, but I, like everybody in their own way, probably likes the sensation of free-falling if they feel they will not land with a thud.
I love watching those guys in the flying squirrel suits that jump off mountains and zoom down along ridge lines and cliffs, kept up only by their slight airfoil and controlled by minute movements of their arms or legs. What a crazy rush that looks like. Don’t count on me jumping off a mountain any more than I would jump out of an airplane.
This morning I experienced the truest form of free-falling that I have felt since I gave up skiing a decade ago. I was a good skier, having done it since youth. I owned ski houses (five actually) in Park City, Utah and skied between thirty and forty days a year, mostly at Deer Valley. My fortieth birthday was celebrated with ten guys in a snowcat going into the High Uinta mountains for untracked powder skiing. Taking off over a cornice at the top of a black diamond run and feeling that rush of weightlessness as you sail across the snow is certainly a free-falling event.
But as good as I was at skiing, I decided I had had enough and gotten away I injured, so when it was time to stop I stopped. Since then, the only activity I do that could give me a free-fall is motorcycling, but that’s more of an acceleration thrill rather than dropping into a free-fall. But today was different and no, I did not do the Thelma and Louise that my wife and I have pledged to do when our time is up. Today we were coming out of the western end of Death Valley on Rt. 190. I’ve done that several times before, but they have done something very sweet to that road since I last took it westward.
To begin with it was a perfect morning with sun and very pleasant temperatures at 8am of about 85 degrees. At that temperature, traveling at 75 mph on an uncrowded and smooth road surface is heavenly. The road gradually inclines from -200 feet at Furnace Creek to about 5,000 feet in the mountains after the sand dunes. Then the road starts dropping. It takes your breath away in spots, but without traffic to battle, we were able to travel at our own pace, which was faster than anything else on the road on this Monday morning, but not exactly knee-scraping speed. A controlled but aggressive descent is what I would call it and it’s about as much fun as you can have on a motorcycle.
Most mountain climbs and descents are switchbacks that hug the mountainside, but for some reason, these road engineers put these roads out there away from the sides for the most part, sometimes on their own berms with fall-away cliffs on both sides in some places. It is a strange and exhilarating feeling I have only ever felt on a small stretch of Rt. 12 through the Escalante Staircase.
I immediately thought of Arthur, who is prone to acrophobia. Lucky for him, he chose to be in a car this morning and I presume that was easier for him than riding through this high pass. At 86 Arthur has earned the right to any fears and any avoidance strategies he wants.
I once went on a trip with Edelweiss, the Austrian motorcycle tour company to the Dolomites. One day I had the pleasure of following an Austrian instructor through all twenty-three Dolomite passes. With an average of ten switchbacks up and down, that meant I probably did over 450 mountain switchback turns that day. It’s not a Gladwell 10,000 hours, but it comes close. What amazed me was that I never once saw the instructor’s brake light go on during the switchbacks. He used the gearbox and throttle to do all his control moves, never the brakes. Follow that all day and you get better at not using your brakes. Imagine the fun of descending a series of sweeping turns in mid air, trying hard to control your speed with just the gearbox and throttle. It takes lots of concentration and intensity, a tad of guts, when you see the 1,000 foot drops and paucity of railings.
So, you see, I really did jump off a mountain today after all. I didn’t do it in a flying squirrel suit, but I did have on ballistic nylon and Kevlar. In many ways, riding down that hill on what amounts to perhaps ten square inches of rubber and a 175 horsepower engine with wheels turning at over 30 times per second (at 70 mph) is its own amazing thrill. I’m not a go-pro kind of guy, but I bet it would have made a helluva video. I’ve seen one of a mountain biker going down an extreme slick-rock trail and I almost wet my pants.
When we got to the bottom, the fun was not over because we were staring up at a wall of white-capped Sierra Mountains heading off as far north as we could see. It was the perfect backdrop to end the story because we could see a switchback trail carved into the side of one mountain and Jeanne said, “we’re not going up there are we?” Mark and I shrugged, but had had our fill of free-falling for the day.