mind was shock. I was shocked because I didn’t see it coming,
I thought I was good.
“I realized instantly what had happened. ‘How am I not
dead?’ My thought process has always been if you ever impact at
terminal velocity, you die instantly. Many of my friends had died
that way, I watched people die like that.”
He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that he was still
alive. “Then my brain did this strange separation. One part of my
brain was pure math. Pure science. Just technical: ‘You’re tumbling,
recover.’ I’m judging altitude and angles and everything I need to do
to open a parachute and survive.”
The second part of his brain was much more philosophical.
He thought to himself, “Well you’re dead. There is zero chance of
survival. You have just impacted into flat, solid, granite at 120 miles
an hour. You are going to die. So, how do you want to die? You can
pull your parachute and maybe get 30 more seconds, maybe
a minute, maybe ten minutes. And then heli-rescues take around
2 to 3 hours.” He knew what was ahead. “So, you have a choice.” He
tells himself, “You can pull and have a slow, agonizing, painful, just
suffering death. Or don’t pull and just let it be over. I was struggling,
I was struggling with it. I mean if you know death is coming, are you
going to take the suffering?”
But the mathematical part of his brain and his high sensa-
tion-seeking personality was calculating and in survival mode. “Pull
now or you die. This is it. This is the moment. Right now.
I remember consciously thinking, ‘Ah, good thing you like pain.
Let’s see how much time I can get. That’s it. Good thing, you like
pain.’”
And he pulled his parachute.
He hit a second cliff and then things got fuzzy. “I remember
being in extreme pain. Extreme. And then it was 120 degrees,
record-breaking temperature. I’m all in black, I was getting cooked
alive.”
“I’ve died a few times in the past so I know what it feels like
when your body starts just shutting down on you and I was dying
for sure. And all of a sudden, the helicopter comes. I remember
being pulled into the emergency room and I remember hearing
them say this is going to be a double amputation. They were talking
about my legs. And I think, ‘Oh, that’s great.’ Then I realized what
that meant. If they cut my legs off, that means there’s a chance
I won’t die.”85 / Sports and Adventure in High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge