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SIBU, MALAYSIA
Lonnie Bissonnette is on the roof of a 33-storey building in a wheelchair, with a parachute strapped to his back.
The only thing between him and the edge is a makeshift plywood ramp held together with nails and black tape.
He’s flown 15,000 kilometres from his home in St. Catharines, Ont., to fling himself off an office tower here. No one has ever attempted to parachute off a building in a wheelchair before. No one will let him do anything this dangerous in North America.
His right leg is in spasm, popping up and down like a jackhammer, held in place only by his shoes, which are bolted to the footplate of his chair.
It’s 9 in the morning but already 30 degrees. The humidity is oppressive. He’s sweating. So are the 19 other jumpers gathered on the roof waiting for history to be made.
Thirty-four people have jumped off this ramp in the past two days. Thirty-three landed safely, more or less. One was rushed to hospital in critical condition.
No one is thinking of that now. Everyone just wants to see Bissonnette. As he rolls over the edge he hopes he can get enough momentum to put some distance between himself and the building. Without that, he could crash into it as his parachute opens and kill himself.
He’s come close to that already. His 1,100th jump, nearly a decade ago, is the one that put him in a wheelchair.
He’s the quietest person on the roof. At 48, he’s older and more experienced than most jumpers here. With laser-like intensity, he’s staring ahead to where the ramp ends and the sky begins.
He takes a few deep breaths and starts his countdown: 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
Bissonnette is a BASE jumper, a revered member of a close-knit community of thrill-seekers who think skydiving is just a little too dull.
Instead of jumping out of airplanes with thousands of feet and a minute or more to sort themselves out for a safe landing, they leap off structures, from bridges to buildings. There is no backup parachute. With just seconds between the start of the jump and the ground, there’s no time to use one.
Carl Boenish, a California cinematographer, is considered the father of the sport. He organized and filmed a series of jumps in Yosemite National Park in 1978, using parachutes designed to open more quickly.
Boenish came up with the term BASE, an acronym for four structures — buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs) — and, in 1981, started keeping records of those who jumped from all four.
In over 30 years, only 1,758 people have been issued with a BASE number, making them a more rarified group than people who have climbed to the top of Mt. Everest, which is roughly double. It’s estimated there could be another 1,200 or so jumping who have never registered.
Ashes.jpg
Bertrand Cloutier and Lonnie Bissonnette spread the ashes of their two friends on a BASE jump from the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia. Bertrand released the ashes of Mario Richard who died wingsuit jumping and Lonnie released the ashes of his jumping friend Scott Halliday.
The sport is much better at keeping track of who dies. And, those numbers are rising dramatically. Before 2000, it was unusual to have more than a couple of recorded deaths a year. In each of the past five years, there has been at least 15. This year is set to be the worst year ever, with 22 so far.
Boenish himself died in 1984 jumping off a cliff in Norway. And this summer, the sport lost two more of its star jumpers: British stuntman Mark Sutton, who — dressed as James Bond — had jumped from a helicopter with a stunt-double Queen at the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics, and Quebec native Mario Richard, known for pushing the boundaries of the sport.
“When you see the ground coming up very fast — it’s more like a suicide than a sport,” Hervé Le Gallou, a near mythical figure in BASE, told The New York Times before he died jumping in 2012.
If BASE jumping is hard to celebrate because of the risks, the idea of a man doing it in a wheelchair seems insane. Especially when that man, a father of two, is paralyzed because of the sport.
Yet to many, Bissonnette is an inspiration. Despite his paralysis, despite the danger, he continues to pursue his passion.
His dream, after all, has always been to fly, not to fall.
Bissonnette was born the second of five children in a volatile home in St. Catharines, Ont. His father left when he was 10, and his mother spent long stretches working as a cook on freighters. By 14, tired of keeping his younger brothers out of trouble, he started finding his own.
“He used to jump off roofs and crazy stuff growing up,” says Dan Bissonnette, his younger brother. “He’d be playing where you’re not supposed to be playing. It was kind of an adrenaline thing.”
By 17, he was in jail for stealing cars. “I made a decision, I’m never going back, I’m going to do something about my life,” Bissonnette says.
So he went to work. By the time he was 22, he had his own tile installation business. Physical labour and craftsmanship appealed to him.
His future wife Kim was finishing high school when she met the man who’d become her husband. She knew he had turned his life around. He had a job with a good future.
For a time, Bissonnette was happy, too. He had a fulfilling job and a wife and baby boy he loved. Soon there would be another son.
But he just couldn’t sit still. In 1990, he was driving home from work when a 1-800-DO-1-JUMP skydiving ad came on the radio. Something clicked, and Bissonnette was determined to do it.
Bissonnette was hooked before he even hit the ground on his first jump. Within two years he was working as a part-time instructor so he could afford to jump more often.
“It was absolutely everything I had ever dreamed about my whole life times 10, times 100,” he says. “It was so amazing, that feeling of flying and, yes, the adrenaline rush from it.
“I was so happy, everything in life was better, my business, my friendships, the sun was brighter, the grass was greener. It was crazy.”
Four years later, he discovered something that concentrates the thrill of skydiving into just a few seconds. He walked into the office at the skydive centre and saw three senior jumpers huddled around the 14-inch television set and watching a videotape.
“When I opened the door I caught a flash of this parachute in downtown Toronto,” Bissonnette says. “It was the TD building.”
That jump had been done in secret at night. This was long before YouTube videos brought BASE jumping to public attention. To have seen the sport or even to have known about it then meant knowing someone already on the inside.
“It was like a light switch. I thought skydiving was this thing that I had always dreamed about. But no, this is what I’ve always been dreaming about. And now I need to try it.”
A couple of weeks later, in the middle of an October night, Bissonnette climbed his first radio antenna. On his back was his skydiving rig, which he’d packed to open quickly, he hoped.
The wind was strong and shifting. The experienced BASE jumpers with him weren’t sure a jump would be a good idea.
Bissonnette climbed the tower anyway, saying he’d see how the wind felt farther up. He had doubts. “What are you doing?” he asked himself.
But he didn’t climb down.
He jumped. He was hooked, again. The first few seconds, before the parachute opens, are the most exhilarating part of a BASE jump. There’s nothing but silence as the body falls relatively slowly, roughly 35 km/h in the first second. “It’s like you’re flying.”
Then, as gravity speeds up a jumper’s descent, the sound of the wind becomes noticeable. By the third second of freefall, speed has picked up to nearly 100 km/h.
That’s when Bissonnette opened his parachute. And for the next 15 seconds he sailed down, looking at the lights of Hamilton in the distance, before landing in a field.
“I was now more jacked-up than I’d ever been,” he says of the memory.
It was a feeling he would try to replicate again and again. By the time he had his accident almost a decade later, Bissonnette had racked up more jumps than just about anybody else in the world.
The routines of married life were never easy for Kim or Lonnie. He went for runs at 2 a.m. to burn off enough energy so that he could sleep. He would climb a 120-metre-high tower, jump and immediately go back up with another packed rig to do it again.
Climb. Jump. Repeat.
“It was a lot of sleepless nights,” says Kim. “You didn’t know if a cop was going to be at your door or who was going to be at the door or on the news.”
The thrill was never enough. As soon as Lonnie succeeded at one thing, he was looking for the next.
If one flip was good, two was better. If someone said a building wasn’t jumpable, he looked for a way to do it. He jumped as low as Ball’s Falls, a 27-metre jump in the Niagara area, and as high as Angel Falls, a famous, 979-metre jump in Venezuela.
BASE jumping changed who he was, Kim says.
“He just pushed it and pushed it and pushed it.”
But she never tried to convince him to quit jumping. There was no point, she says.
“It’s his drug, it literally is.”
In 2000, they separated and in 2009, they divorced.
Kim tried to shelter their children, Kristopher and younger son Michael, from the dangers of the sport. Kristopher, now 23, was born a month after Bissonnette started skydiving and Michael, now 18, was born a year after his father graduated to BASE jumping.
“He’d brag about it, the jumps and stuff,” Kim says. “So they saw that and just thought dad was having fun.”
Sometimes, he would take them to his jumps and they’d fight over who got to hold the two-way radio in the landing area. Today, both aspire to follow their father while their mother prays that never happens.
“I don’t think it’s nearly as dangerous as people think it is,” says Kristopher. “The odds of getting hurt are really very slim as long as you’re safe and you don’t take stupid risks.”
For now, Kim’s hopes are winning out. The price of skydiving has risen to the point where the Bissonnette boys can’t afford it.
Kristopher thinks he might like to be an electrician, but right now he works in maintenance at a mall. Michael is a dishwasher in a restaurant while he upgrades his high school credits.
Bissonnette has said it’s up to them if they want to BASE jump — he won’t encourage or discourage it — but they need at least 200 skydives first.
“That’s my dad’s rule,” Michael says. “I don’t have rules.”
His father’s accident has changed his view of BASE jumping, though.
“There’s more to it than just jumping off buildings and throwing your parachute,” he says. “It’s very advanced and dangerous. I never thought of it that way.
“It makes it more exciting.”
On July 19, 2004, Bissonnette strapped his parachute to his back and climbed over the railing of the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho.
The four-lane bridge stands 150 metres above Snake River Canyon. It’s the only man-made structure in North America where BASE jumpers are welcome year-round.
It was a perfect day for jumping — the sun was shining and the wind was light. It was just the day to attempt a Canadian record.
There were seven on the bridge that day, one more than the existing record of six simultaneous jumpers from Canada.
A seven-way is a complicated jump, with each person required to open their parachute at just the right time and place to avoid mid-air collisions.
Bissonnette knew this jump would be his 1,100th, and he had decided to add one more element, one that would boost the danger level.
That element was a quadruple “gainer” — four back flips — before he pulled the cord that would open his parachute.
To stand on the edge of a bridge or a building, and then to jump, is to force one’s body to do something it instinctively knows makes no sense.
“You can start to lean forward and say, ‘Wait, wait, I’m not ready,’ ” Bissonnette explains. “But once you’ve gone past that point you can not stop until the parachute actually opens.
“Every one of your senses is heightened, smell, hearing, touch. Everything is just at its max.”
That’s how Bissonnette knew that something was wrong the moment he jumped: “I knew that I had screwed the exit.”
Bissonnette was the most experienced person on the bridge. The others were all his current or former students, and he was responsible for making sure everyone knew what to do. That meant he was the last person to climb over the railing.
Six other people were waiting for him. No one was complaining, but he felt rushed. He didn’t do his usual routine of visualizing the jump and taking a few deep breaths before he started the countdown, 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
The trick with a gainer is to fight the urge to launch away from the bridge on the first back flip. That protects a jumper’s head from hitting the bridge. But it kills momentum, and so the rotations are slower.
That was Bissonnette’s mistake — he went out too far. It took just five more seconds for him to find out just how much it would cost him:
One: “Oh, shit. Screwed up. Not flipping fast enough.”
Two: “Maybe I should just do two. No, I have to do all four.”
Three: He knows he should give up on the quad now and pull his chute. But he doesn’t. It isn’t just his life on the line. If he opens too early, he could sail into someone else’s billowing parachute and cause it to collapse, putting that jumper in danger.
Four: Any hope of success is completely gone. He pulls his chute before he finishes the fourth rotation. The nylon wraps around his right foot instead of opening into the billowing canopy that is supposed to save his life. The last thing he will ever use the full power of his leg for is to try to kick his foot free of the canopy.
Five: “It felt like forever. I just got my foot out as I was impacting.”
Bissonnette couldn’t tell the difference between hitting the surface of the water and the river bed 15-feet below. To him, it was just one massive, 115 km/h impact.
“I looked up and thought, ‘Wow. I just survived that.’ ”
Bissonnette’s surprise that he was still alive despite being completely submerged was instantly overtaken by horrendous pain.
His neck and back were broken in four places, two of his lower ribs were broken, his left shoulder blade was smashed into three pieces, his left femur was crushed and his spleen was compressed.
“I heard him hit the water,” recalls Brad Vale, a fellow jumper who was safely making his way to the river side. “It’s a very distinctive slapping sound when someone hits the water.”
He landed as fast as he could, tore off his gear and dove into the water towards Bissonnette’s floating red-and-white canopy. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to see,” he says.
“Lonnie was always pushing limits, but he always did it safely. He taught me how to do it safely.
“Looking back on it, I wish I had said something. But if you say something every time someone tries something new, nobody goes anywhere.”
For Bissonnette, one urgent thought broke through the pain: “I have to get out of the water. My kids. I can’t drown.”
He couldn’t move his arms or legs. He could see the sunshine coming through the water. It was still a beautiful day, and the surface was so close.
His lungs were in agony. He couldn’t believe that this was how his life was going to end.
At that moment, the image of a dolphin’s graceful movement popped into his head. “It doesn’t have arms and legs, and it can swim.”
He started to move his head — the only part of his body he could still control — back and forth to lift himself, like a dolphin, to the surface.
“My body started going into convulsions trying to take a breath. I kept telling myself, ‘Don’t. If you breathe, you’re dead.’ ”
He got closer to the surface with his ungainly movement. Finally, he managed one breath, half air, half water.
Gagging, he sunk down into the river again, this time about three feet from the surface.
He got himself back up, coughed up the water and grabbed another half lungful of precious air before sinking back down.
This time he was even closer — just six inches below the surface.
“I was so exhausted at that point. I can’t do this anymore. There is nothing left. Looking up at the sun coming down through the water, I can’t believe I just survived all of that and I’m going to drown, six inches from life.
“It wasn’t calming. It wasn’t panic. It was disbelief. Disbelief that I didn’t have anything left in me. I was that close to life and I was going to die.”
That’s when Don Mays, the pontoon boat driver on hand in case anyone missed the shoreline landing, reached in and pulled Bissonnette’s head above water.
Once Bissonnette had been dragged into the boat, he saw his legs “flop and move in ways that your legs shouldn’t move.”
And, for the second time that day, he thought, “That’s not good.”
Then he blacked out.
