Prologue: From Ashes to Antennas

A Broken Compass, a Sky-Bound Sinner, and His Guardian Dog

BASE jumping saved my life. Go ahead, roll your eyes. It's a cliché, I know, and to no one's chagrin more than mine: a self-proclaimed wordsmith, aficionado of fine Literature. A sucker for lyricism and literary bravado. So why open my book with platitude instead of some neo-biblical prose and poetic pretension? Two reasons:

1. It really did. BASE jumping saved my life, and I'll get into that in a moment.
2. Cliché or not, let's examine what a statement like that actually means:

When someone says "X saved my life,"—and they mean it, not as hyperbole but as an appeal to verisimilitude—they're really saying two things:

First: that the thing in question gave them purpose. Real purpose. The kind that pulses marrow-deep, sharpens the senses, and makes waking up feel like something more than an obligation.

Second: they've been to the fucking edge. Maybe they crawled there. Maybe they were dragged. But they found themselves staring into the void, the abyss, breath caught between panic and surrender, jaw clenched, daring it to throw the first punch. And somehow, they didn't succumb. I respect people who've been to the edge.

In my case, it was both. Between 2015 and 2017, I found myself wading through the dregs of another existential crisis, desperate for some sensation that wasn't torturous, some capacity for quotidian existence that might placate me back into believing there's meaning in this melodrama—this melody of human characters all swapping gossip in whatever language, out of touch and out of tune in some dissonant symphony of someone else's composition.

Meaning is such a human thing to ask for, isn't it? Of all the creatures of the animal kingdom, Man is the only one foolish enough to insist on meaning—as we all waltz languidly atop this spinning frenzy of rock, alone in lightyears of vacuous black, moving ever outward, onward, away, away, away from the very things that provide us light, warmth, and energy.

In those days, my world was a fleeting fever-dream. I didn't always know what was "real" and what was just a construct of my insidious thought patterns. "Reality" would come and go like some ephemeral concept invented to sell Hallmark cards or justify the nine-to-five, and I wasn't buying it. I was so depressed I began hallucinating. I wasn't well.

It wasn't just sadness. It was emptiness. Indifference. Dissonance—a decapitated driveshaft sapping me of any motivation or ambition. Like reality itself had lost focus, tuned to a temperament that eluded me. Some days, I wasn't sure if I was hallucinating or just finally seeing things clearly. And that's a fucked-up question to ask yourself over breakfast—yet nevertheless valid.

During those years, I drifted in and out of suicidal ideations. And I learned something curious: being "suicidal" and being "depressed" are not synonymous—a persistent misconception routinely harbored by those fortuned with healthy brains and ambitions. The two conditions are comorbid, to be sure. But they're two distinct states, and they're not mutually exclusive.

Depression is the fog that settles in and sucks the color out of everything. Being suicidal? That's standing in a field on a clear day with a loaded gun and no fog in sight. It's lucid. It's calm. That's what scared me most.

My depression would wax and wane with the moon, or with the drugs, or with the medications, or with whatever life circumstances had me capitulating to the notion that to be alive is better than the alternative on any given day. But being suicidal—that was forever. It was a logical conclusion of a mind too sick to enjoy the blissful benefits of ignorance. Or so it seemed at the time. There were moments of reprieve from the agonizing dread of depression, yet I would remain suicidal.

And then I jumped.

Not metaphorically. I mean I walked to the edge of an abandoned antenna, confronted my mortality, and I jumped.

And then I did it again, again, again—off cliffs, antennas, bridges, dams, buildings. I spent the next decade launching myself into the void—deploying, landing, packing, repeating—with a magic backpack and an unescaping prayer in my throat. And somehow, through all of that chaos—between the parties and the funerals, the friendships and the fractures, the equations and the ecstasy—I found something resembling clarity.

It's important to insist that my journey into BASE jumping is my own: we jumpers don't all share the same story. But we do share the thrill together, and it evokes a certain camaraderie that each of us feels is missing in our "normal" lives.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention at the start that my foray into BASE jumping was not spontaneous. My full commitment to becoming a BASE jumper began in January 2017. By June, I had spent the months prior packing my rig under the meticulous guidance of a certified parachute rigger. I read Matt Gerdes' The Great Book of BASE twice. I had taken up skydiving and earned my license, though it's worth noting that I still wasn't quite as experienced in skydiving as is recommended before making your first BASE jumps. And I didn't climb that rusty antenna without first understanding the profundity of the wager I was about to place: the consequences of miscalculation include but are not limited to… death. Read the small print. Sign below on the dotted line.

The antenna was an hour away from where I was living at the time, sharing a bachelor pad with my best friend, Mills, whom I met during my time at the United States Military Academy at West Point from 2008-2010. Mills and I were on the wrestling team together and became fast friends over a shared proclivity for debauchery and dark humor.

After my first two years at the Academy, I decided a military career wasn't for me. So I did what any confused, restless twenty-year-old might do—I ran. I headed west toward the setting sun, a desperado anti-hero from the kinds of stories we read as kids. Along the way, I found a mangy little mutt-puppy from West Virginia. It was love at first lick. Thunder the Wonder Dog and I became drifters together, living off scraps and spirit, half-mad with wanderlust and occasionally fleas.

I became a working cowboy, chasing dust and solitude across the cattle ranches of Arizona, Wyoming, and Colorado, breaking wild mustangs by day and corralling savage thoughts by night. I picked up Spanish in Mexico with the vaqueros, slept rough in Nicaragua, crossed jungles in Colombia, and surfed the wake of heartache into the sacred chaos of Peru, always with Thunder by my side.

Eventually, the love failed, the money ran out, and the jungle spit me back into the States—broke but not broken. Just directionless. Penniless. So I did what the downtrodden always do: I went home. And in that moment, home was Mills. I re-united with my favorite miscreant and set my sights on becoming a fabled wingsuit BASE jumper.

But before we fly, first we must walk. And before we walk, first we must crawl. So I became a baby skydiver pursuing my A license. From January 2017 to June 2017, I devoted all my free time to skydiving and studying for BASE jumping—there's a surprising amount to learn for BASE, at least if you intend to jump a second time.

Mills was not a skydiver, but he was an Airborne Ranger and officer in the US Army. He knew his shit, and he also possessed what might be the most important soft-skill to have in BASE jumping: the ability to switch into what I call "operational mode." That is: when shit hits the fan, can you operate under pressure? Many people freeze in that moment, which is fine, but if that's you, maybe sports like BASE jumping aren't your thing. It's a good thing to know about yourself before you're in the heat of it. Mills was an operator.

On the morning of June 30th, I felt ready to make my first BASE jump. I was the sole jumper, but Mills, like always, had my back. He would provide ground crew, getaway, and emergency services should they be needed.

We awoke at 3 am and made the hour-long drive to the abandoned longline antenna. It stood a menacing 300 feet, and I was scared of heights.

Just before first-light, I hopped the decrepit barbed wire fence bordering the tower and began to climb. With each step higher, I increasingly wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. Just one more step…just one more step…just one more step… a mantra played on repeat as I inched myself, trembling, to the platform on top.

First-light began to creep across the quiet farm fields 300 feet below. I removed my packed BASE rig from my stash bag, double-checked the pins and bridle routing, stepped into the leg straps, buckled the chest strap, and was technically ready to go.

But what about mentally? I was solo atop an abandoned antenna, knees chattering and hands shaking as I folded my bridle and pilot chute into my sweating palm to go "hand-held" for a go-n'-throw freefall jump.

First-light, when it's just enough to make out the distant shapes on the horizon, doesn't last very long. By the time I was ready to jump, dawn was already beginning to peek.

I guess I better get off this thing… I mused.

It's a foreign feeling to confront uncertainty so head-on.

Six months of dedicated preparation, of packing and re-packing, of studying pilot chute dimensions and wing loading and weather as if all that would prepare me mentally for the proposition I now stood face to face with. I knew my rig was properly packed, I knew the rates of acceleration in the first seconds of freefall, I knew the number charts that indicate how far a body in freefall can expect to descend in x seconds, and I knew the math worked out cleanly for a 1 second delay from a 300 foot tower.

But throughout all that preparation, I had never actually experienced what the moment before that first jump would feel like. And I was fucking terrified.

What am I even doing up here? Maybe BASE is not for me. I could just go down, safe and sound back to the car, forget any of this ever happened. Curl up on a couch with Thunder in a warm apartment and go about my life.

My life—that thing I had been so ready to dispatch with in the preceding months now felt valuable to me again.

No. This is where you want to be. This is your dream. This is what saves you, and you know that. You can't turn back now.

Dawn was on full display by now. Soon the early-morning farmers would be out and about, hear the crack of my parachute open, call the police, and my life might take a very different turn than I intended.

It was now or never.

Fuck it.

3…2…1…

Wait, let me back up. What exactly was it that inspired me to accept this endeavor of brave foolishness in the first place? This quixotic escapade into BASE as though it might offer some sense of salvation? To answer that, I have to take you back.

I made The Promise in December 2016, in a lonely room within walking distance of oblivion, nothing left but a dog, an empty bottle, and the weight of my own maniacal mind.

The depression had hollowed me out. I wasn't sad. I was done. Spent. Emptied of will. People think suicidal people hate themselves, or that they've got nothing going for them. It's true for some, but that wasn't my condition. I had everything going for me. I was athletic, charismatic, talented, and my mom even tells me I'm handsome and can read good.

I'd lived the kind of life other people fantasize about: a Division I wrestler at West Point, a vagabond cowboy riding mustangs west with the wind, a rodeo bull rider, a cage fighter in Latin America, a wandering outlaw poet with a dog named Thunder and a tattered passport full of bad decisions.

I bartended in a brothel run by connected guys pushing powder pure as the driven snow in Bogotá, climbed peaks in the Huayhuash of Peru, and drank ayahuasca with shamans in the Amazon. I'd been drunk on euphoria with a beauty queen on my arm, shouting our ambitions from rooftops like the cliché of younger years, waving dopamine and wild sex at the night as if nothing that could make us feel so high could ever again make us feel so low. Yet here it was: the rebuttal to euphoria. I had a good run. I was tired. I wanted to die. That's how I knew it was real.

So that night, I gave myself permission. Not a cry for help. A clear, cold decision. "Okay," I told myself. "If you can't take one more fucking day, then you don't have to." I even bought what I needed to make it happen. And I still have the letters.

But when I sat down that night to take inventory of my life, something strange happened. I realized that I had crossed off every bucket-list dream I'd ever had—except one.

Wingsuit BASE jumping.

I had always known that one day I would be flying terrain lines like those cape-less heroes on Youtube.

I saw BASE jumping for the first time in the late 90s, probably on some grainy TV special highlighting the loose morals and objectionable choices of "adrenaline junkies." I didn't just want to do it. I knew it was me. I identified with it. As if it had been coded into my bones long before I ever touched a parachute.

I sat there in my room, quiet in my misery as my head screamed with desperation like I had done so many nights prior, swirling a final dram of whiskey in an almost-empty bottle. I looked at Thunder, lying there on the floor, and I realized I couldn't do it. I couldn't do that to him. I just couldn't. And I couldn't do that to my mom either.

"One more day," I told myself. "If it's still too much tomorrow, you have permission to end it. But you will give Thunder at least one more day."

But if I was really ready to give up everything—my life, my future, my belongings, my money—then why not instead throw everything I got at this final dream of mine? Wingsuit BASE jumping wasn't just another item on the list. It was the endgame. The final frontier. Maybe, in chasing it, I'd find a reason to stick around a little longer.

So I started with The Promise. One more day. And I told myself that starting tomorrow, I would begin the long and patient path required to finally start wingsuit BASE jumping. The next night came and went. Then another. And another. I studied. Trained. Jumped. Survived.

And now, a decade later, I'm still here.

Not dead. Not broken. A little bruised but…

Still alive. Still flying.

Where were we?

Ah, right. 300 feet up, clinging to a rusty antenna, heartbeat in my throat and cops probably on their way.

I'd made The Promise. I'd done the training. Now came the proof.

A shaking inhale. A focused exhale…

3…2…1…

See ya.

Two running steps. Strong push. Gone.

I launched into the void, a swan dive into uncertainty, gravity swallowing me whole—my first taste of a drug I'd spend the next decade chasing. Clean, fast, addictive. A full-body symphony of chaos and clarity.

One second in, I pitched my pilot chute into the clean air rushing around me as I continued to accelerate past the event horizon of the Abyss—faster, faster, faster...

And then something unnerving happened.

Nothing.

The parachute didn't open.

Still falling. Accelerating. The ground rushing up at me, 9.8 meters per second per second—the unflinching Earth staring me dead in the eyes, belting its hypnotic siren's call, the hooded Reaper propped casually in the shadows, counting down the ticks on his open timepiece.

Your first BASE jump is a mainline tapped directly into flow state—like jamming a needle of epinephrine intravenously through the brainstem. And flow state? It's a glitch in the matrix. Your mind becomes a supercomputer, processing time like some atomic shuffling machine. One second becomes five. A microsecond becomes a monologue. And full conversations happen between heartbeats.

In the microseconds after I pitched, I had an entire internal dialogue:

CRACK!

The canopy snapped open above me, on heading, slamming me deep into the seat of the harness like a car crash in reverse. Lines taught. Wings square. Air suddenly sonorous with the songs of early-worm birds.

I was flying. Still had altitude. Still had time. I couldn't believe how much thinking had happened in that single second between pitch and opening. It was like time got drunk and forgot how clocks work.

Flow state is real. Time dilation is real. Einstein was onto something.

And I was just getting started.