Chasing Thrills at 1,400 Feet

DeLAND, Fla. — Usually she begins at night or dawn: hopping barbed-wire fences, creeping where she can up stairwells, climbing high ladders and girders.

Her goal is elevation, the height she can reach by sneaking onto the roof of a skyscraper or the top of a radio tower. The practice is known as “stealing altitude”: risking arrest to reach a precipice. For a moment she is still, and then she leaps off, free falling through space and parachuting down--a kind of Russian roulette played with shadows and distance and time.

The plunge often approaches 100 mph, creating a dose of terror far more intense than she can get by skydiving. The earth is not distant and abstract; it is right there--cars, fences, trees, all flying toward her. Her margin for error shrinks to two or three seconds. In that hyper-reality, she receives a jolt of adrenaline so intoxicating that she must have it over and over again.

“I couldn’t live without it. I would die inside,” Marta Empinotti says, the words streaming out in rapid Portuguese cadences. “In a way it’s not a choice . . . like you don’t choose to eat. I need it for my soul, to keep me balanced, to keep happy. . . . Everything is so alive when you jump. Every single hair of my body is alive.”

Adrenaline junkies heavily populate the world of alternative sports; they include extreme skiers and white-water rafters, downhill mountain bikers and street-luge racers, aerial surfers who dance with the clouds, and ocean surfers who skim the faces of 60-foot waves. Marta is a member of an especially hard-core breed: BASE jumpers, a narrow underground subculture as elusive as moonshiners.

BASE jumpers are the fringe of the fringe. In the 17 years since the sport was invented by four friends in a Texas living room, only 480 men and women have been awarded an official BASE number, signifying a leap from all four types of objects that constitute the acronym: Buildings, Antennas, Spans (bridges) and Earth (cliffs). That the jumps are often illegal has kept the society clandestine and elite.

Marta is BASE No. 206, a 32-year-old Brazilian with quick brown eyes and a penchant for one-liners. For more than a decade the rush has been the dominant force in her life--a singing electrical charge that has spun her halfway across the globe: to high-rises in Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago, bridges in West Virginia and Northern California, cliffs in Norway, radio antennas across the South.

Three mornings a week she rises at 5 a.m. to satisfy her craving. Most of the time she jumps with friends from a 1,400-foot FM radio tower well outside this quaint college town near Daytona Beach. On nights of the full moon, she pursues the obsession to even greater extremes, driving for hours to reach a 1,250-foot antenna that affords the luxury of an elevator. Freed from the rigors of climbing, she can jump from dusk to daybreak.

Within the thinly scattered network of BASE jumpers, Marta is known worldwide, and her status is important to her. She loves the camaraderie. Most of her friends are jumpers. Her small company, Vertigo, manufactures the specialized, fast-opening rigs that BASE jumpers use. Marta spends most of her days in a narrow cinder-block room lined with sewing machines, where she works irregular hours, taking orders, stitching harnesses.

There is an easy-going charm about her. Her hair is long and honey blond, tied back in a ponytail. She wears faded jeans or combat fatigues. Her eyes crinkle with laughter as she tells stories about her jumps: the day she went topless and her canopy malfunctioned. “We call it the ‘topless malfunction.’ ”

*

Being a Sagittarius, she says, she enjoys the outdoors at odd hours: the foggy dawns when the landing area is blanketed in white. The dewdrops bejeweling the spider webs. The nights when the sky is a glittery black slate.

Although Marta admits that the subterfuge of the sport can be exciting--her eyes light up as she recalls a night she was chased by a police helicopter--she has been busted three times. The fine for jumping cliffs at Zion National Park was more than $1,000. She would love the chance to leap from the 1,454-foot Sears Tower in Chicago--so far an unconquered object--or the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the world’s tallest buildings, but the chances of going to jail, or being roughed up by foreign police, are just too daunting. “It’s not worth it,” she says. “I’m just having fun. Now you’re going to put me in jail, mistreat me? I’m not a terrorist. I’m not used to roughness, with people being impolite.”

She is gracious, sensitive, but also a woman of contradictions. Her breeziness masks an acute mind that knows the velocity of a falling body at any designated second and the heights of buildings, antennas and bridges all over the nation.

She loves her sport, though close friends have died doing it. She shrugs and downplays the dangers--”We know we’re going to live”--but before every BASE jumping trip she phones her parents in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in case final words from her might be a comfort.

She climbs antenna girders at 1,000 feet, despite recurring bouts of dizziness. Years ago she passed out during a climb; two other jumpers had to pin her to a ladder several hundred feet up, supporting her weight until she regained consciousness.

Harsh sun weakens her. Every two hours she must eat. Requiring eight hours of sleep, she is often too busy working, traveling and jumping, and settles for six or seven.

*

Marta talks about slowing down--”just a little bit”--but has difficulty doing that. Not feeling quite right, she will affix a carabiner--a metal ring--to her vest and create a tether to secure herself while climbing, rather than miss the action.

If she started out with nine lives, surely she has expended a few. How many might she have left?

Marta laughs. “I owe a couple.”

*

Rising in the Florida dusk, the 1,250-foot antenna is a ladder to the stars: a skinny, three-sided spike of crisscrossing girders nearly as tall as the Empire State Building. Steel guy wires hold it upright; at various elevations strobe lights flash a warning to aircraft--a slow arterial pulse.

Marta and her friends roll along a weedy dirt road and hide their van deep in a tangle of shrubs and trees. With her are Mario Richard, 31, who came down from Quebec to find and jump this tower, and Kiddi Palsson, 30, a jumper from Iceland.

Like a guerrilla soldier, white-haired Bob Neely emerges from the shrubs to greet them. By far the oldest, at 48, he is a local who often jumps here alone, gaining access through the antenna’s protective fence by knowing the combination to the padlock. An affable, cocksure professional skydiver, he made his first BASE jump in Louisiana from a 1,800-foot microwave tower, one of the most perilous types of antennas. On a microwave tower, your dental fillings may heat up like kernels of popcorn.

Radio engineers warn against climbing on any type of TV or radio antenna. An AM tower is so charged from top to bottom with electrical current that it can sear the flesh if you touch it while standing on the ground. Even an FM antenna like this one packs a heavy punch of non-ionizing radiation whose health effects are uncertain--thus a posted sign: “Caution! High Level Radio Frequency Energy Area. Keep Out.”

Marta passes the sign without a glance, wearing military-style camouflage pants she has owned 11 years. Arc lights affixed to a low equipment building throw harsh shadows across her face. The setting is surreal: boxy machinery of indistinguishable purpose thrashing and booming like an old washing machine, hundreds of spiders overrunning the steep metal stairs and high catwalk that lead to the base of the tower. The tower itself, perhaps a dozen feet in diameter, unimaginably tall and forbidding, nothing but forged steel.

*

The elevator is a perforated metal box no larger than a phone booth. The contraption is slow--12 minutes, one way--so everyone will ride at once: Marta and Bob inside, Mario and Kiddi on the roof, up in the cables and passing girders. A jarring metal screech and it begins to climb, the ground receding outside the collapsible metal door.

At 500 or 600 feet up, something goes wrong--the overloaded elevator starts slipping: rising a few feet, dropping back, rising, slowing, dropping. The lurching progress is accompanied by grating and grinding noises, bringing a dark look to Marta’s face.

“Bob, shouldn’t we stop?”

He shakes his head. “As long as it’s going. . . .”

The elevator continues to lurch, speeding up, slipping, rising again. They fret over the likelihood of a free fall, or the motor burning out. Near 700 feet Marta suggests that maybe they should stop and get out and climb. Bob watches the girders moving by. “Come oonnnnn, little choo-choo.”

*

Jean and Carl Boenish, two skydiving photographers from Hawthorne, were half of the foursome who sat in Phil Mayfield’s living room in Houston in the fall of 1980 and devised a name for their sport. Jean, BASE No. 3, a dark-haired, bespectacled woman who admits she looks like a librarian, still maintains The Book--the blue three-ring ledger that records the sport’s milestones. Its pages are filled with the names of all 480 jumpers who have completed the BASE jumping cycle, as well as the 39 who have died in accidents. Jean’s husband, Carl, BASE No. 4, appears in both columns; he was killed jumping a cliff in Norway in 1984.

Long before the sport was given a name, people were parachuting from tall objects. Someone had leaped from the Statue of Liberty around 1920. Yosemite’s El Capitan had been jumped from a number of times in the 1960s and 1970s. New York’s World Trade Center had been leaped from in 1975.

What the founders did was create a framework for an underground society that was waiting to emerge. Phil Smith, BASE No. 1, planned the first jumps from radio antennas. He devoted weeks to spying on security guards and doing trials with weights and parachutes. Phil liked to experiment, conceiving challenges befitting a high school physics book; in 1983, he hurled himself from a train as it rolled across a 300-foot-high bridge above the Pecos River.

“We had to figure out how fast we were going on the bridge, how far we had to jump to clear the bridge and where to exit to clear the rocks down below,” Phil says. Now 45, with two teen daughters and retired from BASE jumping, he is proud of having been a pioneer. “There wasn’t reference material. There wasn’t someone to call.”

Slowly the network fanned out, a loose, far-flung affiliation of daredevils and mavericks. Marta’s friends are scattered to Hell and back--Hell being the name of a small town in the Cayman Islands, where Lee Marcoux claims to be the only BASE jumper in the West Indies. One of Marta’s favorite jumping partners is John Vincent, 29, of New Orleans, the fourth and most recent person to have leaped from the World Trade Center. That stunt, in 1991, was followed a year later by an even more audacious feat: John, wearing suction cups, scaled the 630-foot face of the St. Louis arch, a two-hour climb that ended in a short, breathtaking leap, several moments of TV air time and three months in federal prison.

Such spectacles have created tension within the world of BASE jumping. In another well known incident, years ago, John was caught leaping during the day from an unfinished high-rise in Atlanta, a blunder that ruined the object for the local jumpers. They were so infuriated they tracked him down in New Orleans; three men burst into his room, bound his wrists and ankles in duct tape, and administered that age-old ignominy: a tarring and feathering.

Times change--the principal assailant is now one of John’s best friends--but John is again at odds with the purists, joining a faction of BASE jumpers intent on making legal jumps for financial gain. He has appeared in TV commercials and magazine ads. He and Marta were scheduled to perform this year at the Super Bowl in New Orleans, until a bungee jumper was killed during rehearsals for a different act and their gig was canceled.

*

By obtaining permits and working with local authorities, BASE jumpers have organized a growing number of legal competitions. West Virginia is the site of one of the oldest: “Bridge Day,” the third Saturday in October, the one day of the year that jumps are allowed from the New River Gorge Bridge. Hundreds leap from the 876-foot-high span and land in the river rapids or on the rocky shoreline.

The attention appalls many purists. They fear more publicity will mean more jumpers and more security at prime objects that will never be legal no matter what. Silence and chicanery are the only way to protect their domain, they believe.

Jumpers have been known to finagle keys, to pick locks, to scam their way past lobby guards by wearing sports jackets and ties, carrying their parachute rigs in gift-wrapped boxes. Often they perch on rooftops like gargoyles, waiting hours for nightfall so they can take wing. As with illicit sex, the secrecy heightens the thrill, at least for some. “It brings out the James Bond in you,” as one jumper put it. “It has to stay hush-hush.”

Word of exceptional jumping spots filters through the network. Buildings under construction are often ideal; usually they have stairwells but no windows, multiple points of entry and minimal security. A new high-rise going up in, say, San Francisco, is likely to come to Marta’s attention in Florida.

Although she may or may not travel there, her circle of friends offers entree where she chooses. Local knowledge is important, especially around buildings, where landing areas are notoriously small and winds can play havoc. Even aside from the sport’s illegalities, many professional skydivers refuse to attempt a BASE jump because it is so much more dangerous.

*

“I would say it’s 10 times as risky,” says James Hayhurt, 44, a board member of the United States Parachuting Assn. and a veteran of more than 4,000 skydives. “I personally would never do it. I always open [the parachute] at 2,500 feet; that gives me 15 seconds of time to deal with an emergency.”

The parachuting group’s guidelines say a skydiver can be barred from drop zones if he opens below 2,000 feet. In BASE jumping, there are no rules; canopies pop between 1,000 and 200 feet, sometimes even lower. If this suggests that jumpers have a death wish, most deny it. “I’ve got 9,000 skydives,” one jumper says. “If I had a death wish, I would have failed one of them.”

Still, the need for an adrenaline hit causes some jumpers to keep raising the stakes, balancing their own skills and past successes against the perceived likelihood of death. Mike Muscat, 45, of Van Nuys nearly killed himself trying to earn his BASE number in Oakland, jumping at night from a 30-story building. His chute malfunctioned, opening in a direction that carried him straight backward. He sailed through an open window and crash-landed, breaking his ankle and lying semiconscious for hours before being discovered by a construction crew.

Bill Legg, best known for unscrewing window mounts and leaping from the top of Houston’s 570-foot San Jacinto Monument in 1989, figures he’s broken 30 bones during his 42 years on earth. To heighten his own flow of adrenaline, he ignores the advice of friends who urge him to wear a reserve chute.

At Bridge Day in 1987, Bill stood at the river’s edge and watched two accidents in a row. The first was relatively minor: Phil Smith’s lines became twisted, plunging him into a boulder that shattered his left foot and right kneecap.

Medics were loading him into an ambulance when a blond, Nordic-looking jumper named Steve Gyrsting, only 25, pulled the cord on a chute that failed to deploy, then yanked on a reserve that was too slow to open. He smashed into the river at more than 100 mph.

“You could tell he was fixin’ to die,” Bill remembers.

Marta was watching the same jump from up on the bridge. Steve was her boyfriend. They had been going together for two years.

*

From the exit point, 1,150 feet up the antenna, the flat Florida landscape stretches in all directions--rowed fields, dark clumps of trees, an inky depression that gives this object its nickname, the “Black Hole.” A stiff breeze shoves broken clouds across the moon.

The balky elevator has delivered the jumpers to a tiny platform contained within the tower. From there they will climb through the girders--any false step could mean a fall of several hundred feet--and fling themselves out into the night.

The direction of the breeze is critical. Mario sets adrift a scrap of tissue paper. It disappears into the darkness between the guy wires, a good sign; when the wind blows it directly toward the wires, the risk of the chutes getting caught there is too great to leap. Conditions now are ideal save for one last-minute problem: a single headlight suddenly visible far below, a one-eyed car creeping along a farm road. The jumpers must wait. Ten minutes go by before the car disappears and they edge into position, gloved hands gripping the tower.

Bob leaps first, then Marta. Fit and sinewy, she moves with sureness; the years have made her comfortable on a tower. Her hiking boots find balance on a girder and she springs out, her body disappearing into the blackness.

At 400 feet, a metal deck encircles the tower. This is the point where Marta pulls, dropping at nearly 100 mph after a six-second free fall. The canopy emerges with a sound like a crumpling paper cup, black and rectangular, a set of raven wings invisible against the sky. Gliding in long arcs, she swings below the moon and the guy wires before landing in the grass.

The jumpers stumble forward as they hit, grinning and laughing. Marta gives Kiddi a high-five as he swoops to the ground near her. The rigs are carried back to the tower and repacked under the arc lights.

The gear Marta manufactures--considered among the best in the sport--is reinforced to withstand the jolt of quick openings. The speed with which they deploy is regulated by the size of the pilot chute--a small round one that emerges first, dragging the larger canopy into the air--and by a mesh device called a “slider” that controls the separation of the chute lines. The canopies themselves are larger than those used in skydiving and are designed for a slower forward movement.

Repacking, the jumpers discuss the one-eyed car. Marta recalls a night when a tower worker showed up unexpectedly, forcing them to shut down the elevator and run. They left, grabbed a bite and came back, lurking out of sight until the worker finally left at 1:30 a.m., when they reclaimed the antenna.

“And this other jumper goes, ‘We’re like cockroaches,’ ” Marta says, her laughter filling the night. “That’s exactly how I felt, because as soon as he turned his back, man, we were in, and we jumped until sunrise.”

*

The sky became her escape. This was long ago, a young woman eager to see the world, a young man wanting her to stay and get married. Marta was just 20, one of four sisters from an upper-class family in Porto Alegre, contemplating a career as a psychiatrist. Her wanderings--to Europe, the United States--led to a split.

“He got tired of me always taking off, so he broke up with me,” she recalls. “I was very devastated. . . . And a friend of mine called me and said, ‘Guess what I did this weekend--I went skydiving.’ ”

She wanted to try it. Loved it. Putting off medical school for one long, last tour of the world, she ended up settling in Florida. At a drop zone there she met Steve, a tall, outgoing mechanical engineer who built jet engines. On weekends they jumped from planes. Steve admired her joyous spirit; he’d tell her, “I hope life is always pink for you.”

It was Marta’s idea to attempt a BASE jump--Bridge Day, October 1986. There were 15 mph winds, and Steve tried to discourage her. She did it anyway, deploying her chute so late that the jolt made her see stars. Two months later, she made her first jumping trip, a two-week sojourn to Los Angeles, forming quick friendships with those in the underground. She was hooked. Steve finally tried a jump in early 1987. That October, at Bridge Day, he died.

“I had this distorted idea that . . . life was very pretty. If you worked hard, you could get what you wanted. Bang, he disappeared, and every breath I took I was further away from him. When that happened, it hit me: It’s not like that. You can get a lot of things, but certain things you just can’t.”

She couldn’t jump for six months. She would climb a tower, look down and cry. Marta was confused, aching, almost ready to give up the sport. She finally made her return by jumping the 760-foot Auburn Bridge near Sacramento. In a bad frame of mind, she planned a three-second free fall and instead took five.

“I didn’t want to let go of my pilot chute. I shouldn’t have been jumping. It was like a fight with myself. I wanted to die. I wanted to be with Steve.”

Landing safely on the rocky river shore, she endured a reprimand from a friend. The enthusiasm began to return soon afterward during the frenzied nocturnal “campaigns” of L.A., when hundreds of covert jumps were carried out from the unfinished skeletons of office towers on Bunker Hill. She was drawn to a man from Redondo Beach named Mark Hewitt, BASE No. 46, a pioneer she much admired. Mark, Marta found out, was “naked BASE No. 1,” the first to jump all four types of objects in the nude. “And I go, ‘Who is naked BASE No. 2?’ ” Nobody, she was told. She couldn’t believe it. “It’s the coolest number. I’m not into numbers, but this number, this is a cool one. And I go, ‘I want to be naked BASE No. 2.’ ”

She accomplished that mission, wearing only a helmet, kneepads, shoes and her parachute, looking “like a character in a Monty Python movie.” Naked BASE Nos. 1 and 2 were married in 1989, a turbulent union that lasted four years. Jumping was what held them together. “Whenever we had problems,” Marta says, “we would plan a BASE jumping trip.”

Mark ended up in Hawaii, a professional skydiver with 720 BASE jumps now. Marta kept Vertigo, the firm they launched together. A modest operation--there are only two employees--it is the primary source of her income. Looking ahead, she has begun to study for her pilot’s license, hoping someday to fly commercial aircraft.

Over a beer she can talk for hours about the jumps that fill her logbook: her lines getting twisted in a leap off Half Dome, crashing into a narrow ledge that saved her. Seeing herself plunge down the side of a mirrored office building in Caracas, Venezuela, in a jump for a Ruffles potato chip commercial. Landing in the trees below 3,200-foot Angel Falls in Venezuela. Being hit by lightning in South Africa, just enough to cause a day of soreness. Cliff-jumping at dawn, the suspended rock climbers winking their flashlights at her, like so many wonderful fireflies.

“It’s a good life. I like my life a lot,” Marta says, beaming. Had she gone down a different road, become that psychiatrist she once planned to be, she would assess herself this way: “I think I’m more balanced than most people. I think I’m fortunate to know what my inner being and soul really loves.”

No regrets, no guilt--not even over Steve’s death. “It’s still very sad for me,” she says. “I’ll never get over it in a way. But I never feel guilty. Even when I take a student jumping, I always make sure the person knows the risks. Steve made his own decision.”

*

Her canopy, packed for a leap from 800 feet, opens too quickly for her when she jumps again from 1,150. Marta walks away with an aching neck. But by now it is time to rest for a while, and she naps in a sleeping bag in the high weeds. Mario and Kiddi lie in the van, Bob on the unprotected outdoor deck of the antenna, 400 feet up. “No mosquitoes,” he explains, “and you always wake up a half-hour before dawn.” Just don’t roll off the bed.

At dawn there is time for one last trip up the elevator. It will be a special jump--No. 500 for Marta and Bob both, a milestone they have decided to reach together. High over Florida, the two friends kiss, and then all four jumpers edge out onto the girders. In unison they leap, a rare four-way, the chutes popping open one by one on the way down. In the field they laugh, taking snapshots, relishing the glory of the rising Florida sun.

“That was primo!” Marta exults. By the look on her face, life has never been more pink.

*

Out of Bounds

Far from jam-packed stadiums and the media glare, they pursue sport with a zealous abandon. Some are adrenaline junkies, chasing thrills at breakneck speed; others are tough-as-nails masochists, enduring the torture of 100-mile footraces across the burning desert. They clash in bone-jarring physical combat, and they create harrowing wrecks from behind the wheels of souped-up machines of mayhem.

In this occasional series, The Times examines their world--the bold new frontier of extreme sports: the performers and the entrepreneurs, the social forces and market trends that have generated whole new pastimes, the way these sports of great pain and risk fit into the fabric of our culture.