Prologue
From Ashes to Antennas:
A Broken Compass, A Sky-Bound Sinner, & His Guardian Dog
"We are the restless and wayward. Hear our humdrum souls sailing at midnight, ailing by morning. Sick with short tongue and overactive brain. Mute our minds, sever our sorrows. We are the musings of madmen… the prodigal progeny."
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? Because it's true. And it's a cliché for a reason.
When someone says "X saved my life," and they mean it, it's a kind of confession: they found something that makes waking up feel like more than mere obligation. Something that pulses bone-deep in their marrow, sharpens the senses, and gives them purpose.
The part they don't say is that they've been to the fucking edge. Maybe they crawled there. Maybe they were dragged. But they gazed into 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.
I knew that place.
Between 2015 and 2017, I waded through the dregs of another existential crisis, desperate for some sensation that wasn't torturous, some capacity for quotidian existence to placate me back into believing there's meaning in this melodrama—this orchestra of human characters all swapping gossip, out of touch and poorly tuned 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 in the animal kingdom, Man is the only one foolish enough to insist on meaning. It is our tragedy, it is our beauty, it is our gorgeous burden 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 thing that provides us light, warmth, and energy.
In those days, my world was a 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.
I wasn't just sad. I was empty. Indifferent. Dissonant. Later, I'd learn that my brain was probably running on empty—dopamine uptake shot, serotonin in the gutter. It wasn't just a bad mood. It was neurochemical poverty. 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.
Cliff Jumping in Idaho
Not metaphorically. I mean I walked to the edge of an abandoned antenna with a parachute, 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.
My journey into BASE is my own. We jumpers don't all share the same story, but we do share the thrill together, and it evokes a camaraderie that many of us feel is missing in our "normal" lives. And I didn't just wake up one day and huck myself off a cliff. My commitment began in January 2017: six months of packing my rig under a certified rigger's watch, reading Matt Gerdes's The Great Book of BASE twice, earning my skydiving license—though I was still greener than recommended. I climbed that rusty antenna fully aware of the wager I was placing: 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 the West, 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.
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? 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 a.m. 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 will descend in x seconds, and I knew the math was clean for a one second delay from a 300-foot tower.
But through 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 inspired this quixotic dream of mine? 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 spiraling 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—my mom even tells me I'm handsome and can read real good.
I'd lived the kind of life I'd fantasized about: West Point wrestler turned vagabond cowboy, bull riding and cage fighting my way across borders with a tattered passport and Thunder at my side. I'd bartended in Colombian brothels, climbed sacred peaks in Peru, sipped ayahuasca with shamans in the Amazon. I'd been drunk on euphoria with a beauty queen on my arm, shouting our ambitions from the 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'd 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 day, then you don't have to." I even bought what I needed to make it happen. And I still have the goodbye letters.
But when I sat down that night, something strange happened. I realized I had chased every dream I'd ever had—except one.
Wingsuit BASE jumping.
I'd always felt the pull of flight—something between haunted and compelled. One day, I would fly.
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. Not to my mom either.
"One more day," I bargained with myself. "If it's still too much tomorrow, you have permission to end it. But not tonight. Not to Thunder. You will give him one more day."
But if I was ready to give up everything—my life, my future, my money—then why not throw everything I had at one last dream? 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 a promise to Thunder: one more day. And I told myself that starting tomorrow, I would begin the long and patient path required to 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 shaky 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 into flow state—like jamming a needle of epinephrine 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:
Huh, I guess I must have packed wrong.
No—no, I triple-checked it. The pack job was clean.
Then why the hell hasn't it opened? Fuck, I can't believe I'm gonna be a goddamn Facebook post on the BASE Fatality List tonight…
Have you considered that, with this being your first BASE jump, perhaps you're simply not used to the timing sequence?
Yes, a valid point, to which I would concede; however, if that were the case, then the parachute should have opened abou—
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 taut. 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.