get about 60 seconds of life-choice-questioning free fall before you
deploy your parachute and start to slow down. BASE jumping is
a little different. Most BASE jumpers leap from altitudes of less than
2,000 feet. Because they are jumping from a lower height, BASE
jumpers don’t have as much falling time. Jumping from say, 500
feet will only give you around 5.6 seconds from the building to the
ground, which means you have to make your choices pretty decisi-
vely and pretty quickly.
My curiosity about The Bridge and BASE jumping got the
best of me. On my way back to the hotel, I leaned forward and asked
my cab driver to “take me to The Bridge.” I didn’t have to explain
further; she knew exactly what I meant. Ten minutes later, we were
there. As we approached, I saw only what looked like any other
span of highway, with four lanes of traffic zooming by. Not a big
deal. We pulled over to a viewing area, and once I had a moment to
take in the stately truss and arch structure spanning the Snake
River Canyon, I was awestruck. The Bridge soars some 486 feet
above the Snake River. Imagine standing at the top of a 45-story
building and looking down – way down.
I hopped out of the cab to look around. In a small clearing
nearby, I found four people adjusting what looked like large kites
on the ground. “They’re jumpers,” the cab driver rasped in a cloud
of cigarette smoke.
One of the jumpers was Nick, a 22-year-old business owner
in Twin Falls. He earns his living making custom parachute contain-
ers and other air sports accessories, and he moved to Twin Falls to
be closer to The Bridge.
Nick said he’d been a thrill-seeker ever since he was a kid. “I
started flying paragliders when I was almost 16. So I’ve been flying
for a while. I started skydiving as soon as I turned 18, because you
have to be 18 to skydive,” he said, as if he still resented it.
“As far as building gear and stuff, I’ve just always done that –
everything from go-karts to sailboats. I used to build ramps to jump
my bike and skateboard. Anything to get me into the air. It was just
a natural progression when I started jumping out of airplanes and
BASE jumping that I would build things for that too,” Nick shared.
Jumping bikes turned into jumping out of planes. Jumping out of
planes turned into jumping from bridges. “It’s kind of cliche ́. You
hear it from everybody...jumping forces you to be in the now, like
nothing else matters, and you’re just focusing on what you’re doing
and enjoying it.”28 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:20:40, subject to the Cambridge