The Crazy Cliff

B.A.S.E. jumping, also sometimes written as BASE jumping, is an activity that employs an initially packed parachute to jump from fixed objects (also see paragliding). "B.A.S.E." is an acronym that stands for four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: buildings, antennas, spans (bridge), and earth (cliff).

On Thursdays for the month of February, I had an astonishing two classes. Every other day, I draw the line in Bali at teaching one class. But for the taxing month of February, I had to cover for Shirley and Steve Oconnor, my yoga teacher friends at Desa Seni, while they travelled back to the States.

The 8:30 am crowd in Bali is already a select bunch. Seminyak is a place where, it seems,there is a high preference for going out into the wee morning hours and sleeping late in the air-con rooms with shades drawn while pembantus arrive early and begin the household chores.

So I’m always impressed when someone wakes up for 8:30 am class.

Equally impressive are those that venture to my 12:30-2:30pm practice style class. A popular, advanced class in the states- a total experiment in the heat of the day at an outdoor studio in Bali.

And someone who comes to both classes in one day is unprecedented.

Meet my friend Rudolph, base jumper, windsuit flyer, climber…general fearless dude from France.

His third and fourth yoga classes were these two Thursday classes. By the end of his fourth yoga class he was jumping into handstand. It took two days to find out he was a base jumper. It took two more days for me to understand what that was, it took approximately 15 seconds after I understood what that was to realize he was crazy. It took one dinner party to know that this was the funnest fact info I could possibly drop into a collective conversation.

There is nothing more fun than watching people size another up, “Oh he’s French, he looks conservative, he’s from the south, he’s travelling for four months…” The brain tries hard to get a fix on what is never fixed.

Especially when there were big guys around.

Me: “Rudy’s a base jumper…” beat, beat, beat

Eyes grow wide. You watch the interior brain disorient. In some I watched a slight bit of drool leak out the side of their mouths.

“No.”

“Yeah. He’s travelling around the world jumping off things.”

Rudy shoots me a look of admonishment. It’s not that he’s not obsessed with base jumping and wind suit flying (Yeah, the flying squirrel thing) it’s just that he’s had this conversation in already at least 5 countries over the last four months since he was lucky enough to be fired from his finance job and take two years at 70% of his normal pay. This is why it’s good to be French.

Rudy has a fancy camera where he’s recorded his base jumps, which almost always now include the wind suit flying component. He can’t find a good place to jump in Bali. Nothing is high enough. So instead he shows me videos of jumping, flying off the Blue Mountains in Australia with some characters Aussie twins referred to as the Mario Brothers. Apparently Mario brothers talk like this,

“Fuck, we gotta fuckin jump off the fuckin rock before the other fucking fuckers beat us to it…” and they mumble. Rudy couldn’t understand half of what they said. But he jumped with them in the Blue mountains for four days.

He shows me flights in Norway, and South of France. Usually it goes like this. Some French exchange, him and another guy, standing on the edge of the cliff, and then without much ado, they are falling, or flying.

When you see a video of wind suit flying it looks like the closest thing to ultimate freedom one could ever know. Rudy’s longest flight was almost two minutes. He says comparatively skydiving is boring.

Skydiving is boring.

While base jumping is categorized as an extreme fringe sport, its not easy to get into. A minimum 100 plane jumps are recommended, and according to the dialogue I heard at least ten or more times to the inevitable, “I want to base jump” from the drooling guys at dinner parties, there is a long vetting process. You have to offer to drive jumpers up the mountains. You have to earn the respect into this elite crowd by carrying gear, learning where the jumps are, learning the equipment, knowing how to rock climb. All of this for the two minute high.

And, someone you know will die. Rudy has at least four friends that have died.

As I’m riding on the back of the motorcycle while Rudy drives, I think about how not smart it is. I’m wearing a helmet with a broken strap that I have to hold on my small head so the wind doesn’t blow it off. I start to refer to it as my hat. The number of times I close my eyes and say a silent prayer to not die exceeds my ability to count them. Rudy tells me among his friends, he drives slow. “Your friends are base jumpers, I say.”

But he’s still inevitably a much better driver than me. My biggest injury to date is from hitting a rock on my scooter driving home from a two hour massage. Rudy was driving behind me on his motorcycle.

“What did you do?” he says, scooping me up. “I saw you, see the rock, go toward the rock and hit the rock, boom, “ he makes the motion of me falling on me side. I knew this is what I did. It was like time/space slowed down and I had a five minute dialogue about the rock, the construction that was not there yesterday, how I shouldn’t hit that rock, and then I hit the rock. Even in my slow cautious attempts at control, I’m a hazard to my own self.

I joke that the one thing Rudy has taught me, is that I’m not as fearless around death as I once thought. I thought with all my non-dual philosophy and liberated embodiment teaching and playing with handstands that I actually had a tiny little grasp on fear.

But I realize, I’m a total pussy.

100% afraid of my own death.

I think about the end of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, jumping off the cliff into the clouds, as a symbol of love, freedom, the impermanence of life and the transition/non-transition of death. I think about getting a better helmet. I think I will never base jump.

I find myself making arguments to myself about all the ways in life I am fearless and resolving to grow ever more so, fearless but not stupid.

I think about how Rudy almost died from an allergic reaction to Brazil nuts after eating a mixed nut bar I gave him.

I think about JD Salinger and “the crazy cliff”.

Bali is a place where you are constantly shown alternative ways people chose to live. Either as they are passing through here on vacation, or as they tell you their relocation stories from their varied and fascinating backgrounds and cultures. It’s this constant contemplation.

Knowing the inevitability of my own death, how live.