"Embracing Insanity" - Alpinist

ULDI A P S DEAN ER POTT

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Y T I N A S N I G EMBRACIN

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My earliest childhood memory became this recurring dream. When I was still lying in a crib, birdsong filtered into my sleep. I dreamed of feathers sprouting on my arms, fields rolling far below in waves of cloud-streaked green, distorting into burnt wastelands of faint sand dunes and dust storms. Other winged humans flocked toward me. They were gesturing, making high-pitched squeaks. They arched their backs and brought their arms down to their sides, shifted slightly to control their flight and looked at me, encouraging.

The sky cracked open. Underneath me a blurred tunnel formed. I began plummeting, out of control. A dead tree spiked up, its branches like the

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hand of a corpse. My heart was beating, growing louder, bigger, as if it might detonate. I woke to its pounding and to the fading songs of birds.

All my life, I wanted to make the first part of this dream real, but find a way to decipher the ending. Like many teenagers, I didn’t like being dominated by anything. To combat my fear, I’d run down the road, then hop over the fence to Joe English ledges, a small, forbidden outcrop near our home in New Boston, New Hampshire. There, in my sneakers, I’d shuffle up and down any route that looked doable until I could find the weakness. Above the treetops and my uncertainties, I’d bask in the sun and the light breeze.

Each time I saw a cliff, I wondered whether I could free solo it. My life shaped itself around the understanding that falling means I die.

To break this paradigm I had to empty out my essence, rummaging for fundamentals I thought were gone forever.

June 24, 2008, the sixth anniversary of my marriage. I pace through the Fresno, California airport in a stupor. Pictures flash through my head, without thoughts: my close friend and climbing partner just ditched me; my wife left, taking our aging dog, Fletcher. Now she wants a divorce. My dad, Tony, recently died. I’m on my way to release his ashes in his favorite fishing hole, where the fresh water of the Moussam River runs into the Atlantic.

On the flight to Maine, I sit by the window, fixating on the airflow around the wing, trying to imprint my mind with its exact contour. The right kind of shape, an airfoil, causes the air that’s moving over the top of an object to go faster than the air that flows beneath it. As a result, the

[Facing Page, Left] “I dreamed of feathers sprouting on my arms, fields rolling far below in waves of cloud-streaked green, distorting into burnt wastelands of faint sand dunes and dust storms.

Other winged humans flocked toward me. They arched their backs and brought their arms down to their sides, shifted slightly to control their flight and looked at me, encouraging.” Group flight in the Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. Brendan Cork | [Sequence] Potter BASE jumping in Rätikon, Switzerland. Beat Kammerlander

pressure above decreases, and the object begins to rise.

But the strength-to-weight ratio of human beings is flawed for this equation. We’re too heavy and weak to soar on our own like birds. At the same time, we’re doomed to long for that freedom. Ancient Chinese stories claim Taoist Immortals found a way to achieve such a harmony with the universe that they could fly and live forever. Western schoolchildren learn about Icarus, the mythic Greek hero, who flew too high with the wings his father made. When the sun melted the wax, the feathers fell away, and he drowned in the waves.

“Beverage?” The stewardess’s voice snaps me toward her. I see the wing’s camber in her glossed red lips, individual eyelashes, even the edge of her teeth as she smirks. Since my first skydive over five years ago, I’ve been practicing that shape, hoping to feel a transformation.

of his fate. Two days after his death, his last letter arrived. Though I knew he was once in the Army Airborne Division, we never talked about my flight obsession. I didn’t want him to be afraid for me or to think I was crazy.

After I read his letter, I realized he’d tapped into all my feelings. Moreover, he, too, was intrigued by the idea of true, unaided body flying. He finished the letter with the last words he ever said to me, “The landing problem can be solved.”

I know it’s whacked to look at the human form and imagine it moving free through the air without dying.

But I long to feel equally comfortable untethered on the rock or free-falling in the air—to change the meaning of a slip with an idea. My entire existence has locked on the notion of combining free-solo climbing and BASE jumping. With a parachute on my back, a soloing mistake might not mean certain death; that is, if I could recover perfect control quickly enough midair, deploy the chute, and float away, without crashing back into the rock.

My addiction to the design is stronger than anything I’ve ever felt. Because of my family’s history of heart failure, I’ve never smoked cocaine. But I named the concept FreeBASE, for the obvious pun of free soloing and BASE jumping and for the massive high I crave.

Once I commited to the plan, the terror of uncontrolled falling began to seep back into my dreams. The reverberation of my body hammering into the ground percussion-booms in my skull. Maybe I’d push things too far, but I’ve always followed my passion and don’t know how else to live.

My two sisters and I wade into the cold rush of the outgoing tide.

“We love you, Dad. You’ll always be with us,” we say. The frigid water swells over our chests, splashing in my mouth with the brusque taste of salt. We reach into an intricately painted urn to scoop out coarse ash with hard bits of bone and teeth slivers—all that remains of our dad’s body. I hold my hand closed and submerge myself completely, floating limp as if I’m also dead. The ashes loosen from my grip and filter through my fingers into the tidal pool. I clench, not wanting to let go.

I always assumed my dad would drown here. I warned him many times, but even in his seventies, he’d wade past acceptable limits to cast for the biggest striped bass or bluefish, finessing his fly-fishing line in airy, graceful arcs. Now the pool swirls and clouds with ash. And then my dad is inside me, all around me, floating farther and farther out. I imagine myself flying with him, feeling the air support my entire weight like salt water.

Most of the men in my family died early from heart attacks. My dad passed away in his sleep with a smile on his face, but I’m scared

“First you have the vision; then you make it happen. It’s that simple.”

Summer 2007, my close friend Beat Kammerlander leaned his strong arms on the wooden table. His blue eyes stared into mine with a cloudburst focus. It was raining in the Alps, and I didn’t know what to do. So I stormed his house in Feldkirch, Austria, and we got drunk.

I gazed at the table’s polished surface, imagining all the artists, scientists, thinkers and climbers who’d sat there with him over the years, hammering out ideas that helped develop modern climbing. Maybe FreeBASE could be the next big shift.

Beat had been listening to my ramblings about my hometown, Yosemite Valley. El Cap and Half Dome are some of the world’s safest cliffs for practicing BASE jumping, because of their height, continuous steepness and huge, soft landing areas. The only problem is the Park rules. “I’m sick of playing cops and robbers with the law-enforcement rangers,” I said. “I can’t get over how it’s illegal to BASE jump in our ‘Land of the Free.’ I want to be free.”

I’d never felt so comfortable anywhere as I did in Beat’s house. My head spun with beer and red wine. Before I knew it, I’d confided all my secret thoughts of FreeBASE to him.

The next morning we were back at his table sipping espresso.

“I have an idea for you,” Beat said. The rain traced silvery lines

[This Page] Potter on his first skydive with Brendan McHugh (left), at “Mile High drop zone” in Longmont, Colorado, in 2003. Chris Pope | [Facing Page] “They’d just jumped

safely from my favorite climb.” Potter on his FreeBASE ascent of the Rostrum in November 2008. Nick Rosen/Senderfilms.com

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I stayed for an entire month in Lauterbrunnen to pursue FreeBASE, but it poured rain every day. No climbing meant I had to devote myself to jumping. For the first time, I became relaxed enough in the air to feel its subtleties as it flowed around my body. For fleeting moments, intuition took over and I leaned forward to glide faster. When I dove, the speed created weightlessness in my belly. Suction formed on my arched back: the same lift as in my dream. Somehow I’d sensed this phenomenon lying in my crib.

Although I left Switzerland with FreeBASE unattained, the concept grew more alive in me than ever. I saw the airfoil arc everywhere in nature. Water forms the perfect curve naturally. I fascinated on droplets falling through air as rain or forming as beads of sweat. And I remembered: human beings consist mostly of water.

down the windows. “On the Eiger, there’s this long, alpine sport route called Deep Blue Sea.” I’d never even considered the Eiger for FreeBASE. I’d always heard that most of its North Face was low-angle choss. I didn’t know a line of perfect blue limestone sliced the northern buttress.

A few days later, the sun returned; Beat, his girlfriend Christina Ganahl and I headed for the Eiger. Beat moved aggressively up the steep, bare limestone with no sign of places to rest. Christina and I followed, slowly, each on a single 7.5-mil rope. “Take tighter,” we chorused, as the angel-hair cords sawed on prickly rock.

Even though Beat had chalked them for us, the holds were invisible.

I’d lock off and sweep my hand high above my head, feeling for incuts like a blind man. I was used to granite and sandstone. Limestone threw off my whole equilibrium, putting too much strain on my pencil-thick arms and my crack-climbing sausage fingers. I looked up: nothing but overhanging waves of molten stone merging into cobalt air.

Without saying a word of the encroaching clouds, Beat hoisted us patiently, until his hands almost bled. Soon a thick white mist engulfed us. Spatters of rain transformed the blue-gray rock to black. Beat called, unseen, from above. “I see a traverse. Let’s get out of here.” The rope accelerated then tugged upward. Simultaneously he yelled, “Off belay.

Climb.” I sensed urgency in his voice.

We followed the ropes into the fog. I could barely second this thing.

There was no way I could solo it.

“This is it!” Beat said as Christina and I neared. I didn’t understand.

He beamed. His skin flushed from cold; his long strawberry-blond hair floated in the updrafts. “It’s the perfect passage. If we can traverse off, you can traverse on.” I felt my eyes were going to pop out. High on the Eiger, stranded in a rainstorm, Beat had turned our epic into a breakthrough. The intensity I’d heard had been exuberance.

“Deep Blue Sea” means so much more since Dad died. I picture myself swimming in the ocean with his DNA. It enters into my open mouth and absorbs through my skin, burning my eyeballs.

Soon after his funeral, I return to Europe. As I step onto the Swiss train that runs from Lauterbrunnen to the Eigergletscher, voices loop through my skull: First you have the vision. It can be solved. Through the window, the landscape flows behind my reflection, while the train passes through tunnels, back into thick trees, then out across immaculate jade hillsides. I stare back at my blank gaze, hoping to have a conversation and figure out what is going on in my head. Streaks of movement refract the image—much as airflow distorts vision or as time bends with memory.

It wasn’t until I dropped out of college and started drifting from crag to crag that I found more fringe-type people I could hang out with— even though I didn’t fit in perfectly with them. My second season in Yosemite, spring 1994, I had my own car, a beat-up, Bondoed-out 1984 VW Jetta. This prize possession altered my status among the other

[Photos, Left to Right] “I’d never felt so comfortable anywhere as I did in Beat’s house.” Kammerlander’s kitchen in Feldkirch, Austria; Potter and Kammerlander, plan-

ning the Eiger FreeBASE climb over espresso; bivy near the start of Deep Blue Sea. Beat Kammerlander

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grovelers. Suddenly there was lots of “Yo, feel like cruising to the Cookie?” or “Dude, we need to hook up down in El Portal.”

My parents had bought the car for me, but just filling the tank left me broke. So, for fifty bucks, I agreed to guide two unknown guys up the Rostrum. They introduced themselves in the parking lot as “Uh, photographers”: Frank Gambalie and “Randy Ride.” I glanced at Randy’s belly, then turned to rummage in my trunk, hoping I had an XL harness. At once, I felt the energy switch, as if I was about to be mugged.

I whirled, ready to fight.

Frank put up his hands and stepped in front of Randy. His dark, intense eyes turned gentle. “Hey, man, we’re not photographers. We’re here to huck this thing.”

I crinkled my brow.

“We’re BASE-jumpers, dude. Will you still help us?”

I broke out laughing. Until then, I’d only seen BASE jumping on the tube. “I knew something was sketch. You should’ve just told me. I almost thrashed ya.”

The edge of Randy’s lips curved upward. Some years later I found out he fought for fun and could have easily fucked me up.

“Where is it steepest?” he asked on the summit, gesturing with his chin toward the edge.

I crawled to the topout of the Alien Roof. “Here.” Eight-hundred feet below, the wall disappeared into massive sugar pines. A dead tree gnarled up, forcing me to look away.

Frank rocked forward in his rig, “Three,” then back, “Two,” then forward, “One,” and he was running. “See ya.”

The wind roared in my ears. Randy’s foot brushed me and he was off. Two giant wings arced the same pattern, swooping toward the white pickup truck. Following the BASE law of elusiveness, they landed and quickly vanished. They’d just jumped safely from my favorite climb. I shook my head. A current fired: the concept of FreeBASE began.

Off the Swiss train, I head to the soda machine. “No way, beer!”

I say out loud. Heineken cans wink at me, with a shimmer of green.

Unbelievable: my dad’s favorite. Tallboys tumble and clang against each other as I keep stuffing in more coins until the machine runs empty. I fill my wedged pack, careful to keep the cans away from anything that might pierce them.

Blood surges from my heart while my legs pound up the west ridge of the Eiger. Internet calls for rain and I want to feel the holds before they’re soaked. I dump my camping gear at an overhang where mountaineers have bivouacked for decades, take the remaining thousand feet of static line, Grigri, quickdraws and the Mini Traxion and head for the topout. I throw the rope into emptiness. Whip cracking, it doesn’t touch the rock the entire drop.

Clouds drift from the northwest. I rap into the familiar scent of rain.

Within minutes the sky morphs from deep blue to downpour. Only a slight barometric shift transforms air to water. Maniacal cackling resounds in my head. As I burst into laughter, my breath whirls in the cold, humid air.

My brain is flawed. I have compulsions I cannot control. FreeBASE is better than rape or mass murder, but it’s undoubtedly an imperfection.

Defects veil creativity. Minute glitches displace us from the norm.

Innovation or insanity, blue sky or buoyant liquid, infinitesimal changes in the curve turn impossible to reality.

In 1686 Isaac Newton discovered his famous Third Law of Motion— every action has an equal and opposite reaction—and predicted that one day it would allow people to fly. Gravity drags you down; but with the right wing shape, lift pulls you back up.

Maybe I’d watched too many cartoons, but ever since I saw Randy and Frank on the Rostrum, I truly believed I would one day fly like Superman. Occasionally I’d learn of someone launching the Captain and hoped to meet up with those guys again, but I couldn’t find them.

Still, I kept hearing stories about Frank, even seeing bumper stickers about his worldwide exploits: “The Gambler would huck it!”

Frank also believed the landing problem could be solved. He named it “the ultimate stunt.” He dreamed about controlling his rate of descent by “tracking,” subtly re-forming his mass and modifying his angle of

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attack and body position in the air—until he could slow enough to glide down on the perfect slope, without ever deploying his parachute.

Our mutual friend, Dano Osman, laughed and called the idea, “wicked rocket scientry.” Neither of them ever got a chance to try.

Dano used to leap down hundreds of feet from rock walls, trees and bridges, with just a single climbing rope to catch him. November 23, 1998, the rangers had just released him from solitary confinement in Yosemite jail, when he left in the night to jump from Leaning Tower.

This time, his rope broke. I was working for Search and Rescue, and my pager went off. Without hearing a single word, I knew my friend was dead. A rain-chilled wind shivered through me like the echo of his twelve-hundred-foot fall. I ran for a hundred feet in the darkness, then looked down: illuminated by my headlamp, Dano’s body curled in a peaceful form—beautiful, almost untouched, his long arms bent like those of a great, dark bird. He had almost landed it.

Seven months later, Frank made one of his secret BASE jumps from the top of El Cap. This time a climber ratted him out. The rangers chased him from the Meadow to the Merced River, its waters swollen in the heavy spring rain. Frank tried to swim away through the rapids. His body was found, about a month later, trapped and water-beaten under a rock.

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Lauterbrunnen means ‘many waters.’ The White Lütschine River rumbles loud and cold with snowmelt from the heights, reminding me of Yosemite Valley in the spring. For weeks the rain won’t stop. I retreat back to the Horner Pub, the refuge for BASE jumpers from around the world, our equivalent of Yosemite’s Camp 4.

In the real Yosemite, I’m a criminal like Dano and Frank. The rangers trail me in their cop cars. I wake up from a nap in El Cap Meadow, and they’re standing over me, their hands on their guns and batons. In their frightened eyes, I see myself reflected: I’m a monster.

At the Horner, however, I sit with rangers, police, rescue teams, farmers and business owners most every night. Although the farmers don’t like us landing in their fields, trampling the grass and scaring their livestock, we plan ways to coexist. We agree to pay them and only land in designated areas.

Each day I ride the cable cars up the 1800-foot walls that enclose the Swiss Valley. Without the fear of being busted, I jump six times per day, practicing again and again every two hours.

When I step off the edge, dozens of thoughts come together for the perfect wing shape. Eyes on the horizon, arms to the side, chin down, head poking forward, angle of attack, concave the chest, arch the back, feel the air, listen for the wind speed, point the toes, concentrate on the suction lifting off my back and reach for the pilot chute before impact. I haven’t attained the point yet where it’s completely innate. Forward speed arises from a position on the edge of control, where I skim across the air much like a rock skipping over water.

Though BASE can be safe, there is always risk. Over and over, I’m just a second or two from dying. Wiesebier fills my need for calories while subduing my electric nerves. Beat calls this much drinking “negative training.” When you want to send your climbing project, you just lay off the booze, feeling your full strength return.

Although I want to escape the limits of the human body, I also want to live. When Randy shows up in Lauterbrunnen, I plead with him to teach me the way he’d once taught Frank. He hesitates. I sense the memory of

all the BASE friends he has lost. So I drink with Randy at the Horner until he relaxes and says yes.

Mid-flight he turns and exaggerates his movements with a big smile, gesturing for me to imitate him. I flash to my childhood dream. Below us streaks of green valleys speed by, tree branches reach up like spiny fingers.

Back in the Horner, I think about one of my favorite poets, Charles Bukowski, a dropout who’d spent his life stumbling from bar to bar. People thought he was a derelict; the FBI compiled files on him. But out of those depths he’d plunged himself into, words would lift and burst like exploding stars: “There are countless substrata of rising surprise from the human firmament.”

Maybe I’ve finally sunk low enough, I thought. I might be able to rise.

I go to live in the Eiger cave for days, even though it mostly storms. I drink water fresh off the mountain and sleep with the north buttress as my pillow. For almost a month and a half, I only get to work the moves on Deep Blue Sea for three days. In between, I go over and over the movements in my mind. The overhanging wall, the sloped and minuscule holds, all mean that if I enter into certain sequences wrong I’m put in a straitjacket, unable to climb up or down, screaming until I pump off.

At night, the rain lulls me to sleep like the sound of waves during family beach vacations. Sometimes I sleep for sixteen hours, dreaming of loved ones. As a military family we moved every year or so and often didn’t fit into the community. A lot of the time we’d just hang out at the house mesmerized by too much television. Watching Tarzan swing on vines and climb with Cheetah, Dad and I howled his war cry, “Ah ah ahah ahhhhhh.…”

My dad also dug James Bond. He’d crack open a Heineken for himself and a root beer for me and start up the popcorn machine. I’d marvel at the puffed corn floating in the noisy air. Whenever he left the room, I’d sneak sips off the green can.

My favorite Bond flick is still The Spy Who Loved Me. There had been earlier parachute jumps from fixed structures and cliffs, but in 1977 when movie-goers saw Rick Sylvester ski-jump off Canada’s Mount Asgard, free fall with a perfect open gainer, and deploy a British flag chute, BASE jumping ignited worldwide.

A waft of warmer night air and my dream shifts: during the bearhunting season in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, my dad Tony and his brother Bob would post their land with No Hunting signs, then lure the bears into this safe haven with sunflower seeds. My dad would coo to them, combing his fingers through their coarse fur. The hunters called the cops, but he didn’t care. He was so happy talking about the bears going into hibernation, their bellies plump and warm with his food.

Beautiful yet disturbing thoughts rustle me awake. I sit in darkness looking at specks of stars between masses of clouds. Curves fade to shadows on the cave wall. At first my wife said she was afraid of BASE jumping.

Now she flies without me. A few days earlier, a friend called to tell me she’d broken her pelvis in a BASE accident. Perhaps I could have stopped this pain somehow, but I was too self-absorbed.

I fall back into fitful nightmares. A dark-haired man chuckles. When I first started BASE jumping, I asked my boss, whom I idolized, what he thought about me using the method to enchain peaks and big walls. He blurted out, “I think it’s cheating…. I was there in 1966 when the first jumpers came to Yosemite. They were crazed and jumped the Captain even though they knew they’d break their legs. They couldn’t steer their round canopies, and the wind took them into the talus.”

My own voice pierces the gloom of the cave. “No one understands you, bro.” I stir. “What is the meaning of insane? Do you know what’s real, Dean?” Another Bukowski line rasps: “They thought I had guts, but they had it all wrong. I was only frightened of more important things….”

I wake to wet dog licks from Fletcher then realize she isn’t with me anymore. Streams of water roll down my tent’s wall from the cave ceiling. Beat calls my cell phone. “There will be a weather window on Wednesday morning. I think the water streak will be dry. By early afternoon the rain will start again for another week. What do you think?”

“I’m on it,” I say, without even thinking.

“I’ll see you at the cave.”

“Thanks, brother.” We hang up. I start to shiver.

The send phase of “negative training” begins. Without alcohol, I drift half awake, still dreaming. Hollow tones turn to rushing wind speed. I’m falling! Kaboom echoes, sending waves through my flesh. I can’t move.

My dad felt the symptoms of his heart attack as he was heading up the driveway. Instead of calling for help, he walked ten times more quickly.

Like me, he had an all-or-nothing philosophy. He and his brother cut enough firewood to last them for decades, so they wouldn’t be dependent on others when they got old. In the year before his death, he’d become so strong from weight lifting and yard work that his muscles seemed to burst through his shirt.

I have only one memory of him flying. When I was in the first grade, my mom took my sisters and me to watch his division practice. Dozens of parachutes inflated, white like cumulus clouds before a storm. I was terrified for my dad and ran to find him.

Perhaps as a child I was eavesdropping on his dream.

[Sequence] “Mid-flight he turns and exaggerates his movements with a big smile, gesturing for me to imitate him. I flash to my childhood dream. Below us streaks of green

valleys speed by, tree branches reach up like spiny fingers.” FreeBASE practice in the Lauterbrunnen, September 2008. Beat Kammerlander

Wednesday morning. I dress in my tracking suit. The vents in the pants and jacket will fill with air if I fall, increasing my surface area and the curve I can make, allowing me to fly away from the cliff, where I can open my parachute in wide-open space, where there is nothing to collide with.

My stomach churns. Something seems wrong. I cycle through the yoga sun salutation over and over, trying to loosen the images in my brain: A boy rises with feathers on his arms. Ashes float on the surface of the waves. Love refracts to awe and fear. The landing problem can be solved. Not in the way that Frank or Dano or my dad envisioned it yet—but this is a step.

A blurry red-gold face and wild hair: Beat is staring at me, but I barely see him. “You OK?” he smiles. “Of course,” I mouth, not wanting

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him to worry. He glides up the ridge to his camera position, out of sight.

Some of my tension lifts.

I unzip my tracking pants to take a leak. The stream of urine makes a perfect wing-shaped arc. I giggle at my foolishness and exhale, realizing my error. I’m not flexible enough to solo in these bulky pants and jacket.

A wave of calmness flows over me. I completely unclothe.

My body is emaciated. I’ve dropped fifteen pounds in the past two months to make up for the extra weight of the parachute. I slip on the six-and-a-half-pound BASE rig that my friend Pete Swan customtailored for me. It feels like an extension of my body. Then I step into a pair of surf shorts. I check the knot of my rig’s chest strap and tiptoe across the talus to the starting holds.

One more step and five hundred feet of air opens below me. Loud whooshing breaths rush from my lungs. My sight vignettes to a bubble of safety while I tack up a thickly calcified water streak, feeling delicate and brutal as a praying mantis. Cowbells dong from thousands of feet below, pulsating through me. Sticky rubber squeaks as I grind onto footholds. Knuckles pop. Fingertips tap as I take the crimps.

I hear Tony’s voice: “It’s gonna hurt….” He used to prod me during our runs together when he’d pass me on the hills, telling me I’d be so much safer climbing if I’d only push my body the way I pushed my mind. Charged with sentiment, I chase behind him, now, embracing insanity. Positions that were once powerful happen free of strength.

Brain waves shoot to instant movement.

Two pitches up, I crawl into a small cave sunk into the overhang to get a breather. The buzzing sensation elevates until I feel giddy. I start panting breaths in rapid succession until my focus returns.

Tiny dimples on the polished stone stand out magnified. The air becomes slightly tangible. Discernable patterns form in the current. I

feel the ledges below me as mental shadows and calculate my potential track if I were to tumble.

This isn’t like a normal free solo, I realize: I’m safer the higher I lift off the ground. When I reach a ledge below the crux pitch, the translucent air becomes swirling, vaporous. I sit watching the clouds rotate, and I flash to my dad in the cool, ashen water. Had we both pushed things too far? I imagine he has some secret left to tell me, a solution to another paradox just as big: how to follow your passion completely, without losing your loved ones or your life.

Spatters of drizzle form circular droplets on the azure stone. Shivers streak from my head to toes. I wipe the lactic acid out of my forearms and roll my neck and head, rocking my shoulders to a rhythm that seems more powerful than anything but doesn’t even really exist.

“Bing bong,” I utter like Hairy, Curly and Moe. I’m whacked in the head. I step into the undercling, side-pull crux and press my entire weight on the edge of a quarter with my right toe tip, chanting a stupid rhyme inside my head: Never fear, trust the smear. “Whoop!” I shout, standing on slopes, squeezing side-pulls. “Yip!” Something in me knows I’m safe, but rationally I don’t understand. Lightness tugs on my back. I skim up the wall, now, as if over the surface of water or on the currents of the air.

Rain droplets become streaks while I pad through the final hundred and fifty feet of sweating vertical limestone. Somehow my skin grips the soaked rock.

At the top I shriek, “I’m safe! Safe!” In less than a minute, the gray and white clouds painting the sky turn to hard sheets of rain. Where once there was emptiness, now unfurls, in intricate and inexhaustible new forms, the frothing of an endless sea.

I hop barefoot over the summit slab and scree, leading to my protected cave, tent zipper and profound hibernation. ❚

[Sequence] “Something in me knows I’m safe but rationally I don’t understand. Lightness tugs on my back. I skim up the wall, now, as if over the surface of water or on the currents of the air.” The first FreeBASE ascent ever, Deep Blue Sea (7b+/5.12+, 300

meters, FA Rathmeir-Ruhstaller, 2001) on the north face of the Eiger, August 6, 2008.

Potter scaled the slightly overhanging limestone route sans rope but with a lightweight BASE parachute as protection against the consequences of a fall. Beat Kammerlander

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