Re: [maretus] What is your level of involvement in BASE with respect to your career and other life activities?
Maretus, thank you for sharing your sentiment and asking some obvious but very important questions, I would rather discuss all this over a bottle of beer with you cause I am afraid it's difficult to explain by simply typing my answer here, but since I started it, I will try to the best of my ability to give you a perspective of just one noob and sum it up with a very important point (I think) for you old timers to understand. So go ahead, get yourself a warm cappuccino, get that fireplace and warm blanket going (I heard summer nights in Swiss Aples can be cold) and read the following.
First off, please note that "haha" that follows my statement hinting that it is kind of a half-joke because wouldn't everyone here would love to have a side passive income that pays for all their jumping and life expenses? However, this is only a half-joke.
maretus wrote:
If you´re a skydiver and never BASE jumped, what makes you say you hope to be #9 at some point
What makes me say this is that this statement is TRUE for NOW. I truly hope NOW that at some point I will be able to do it full time while being able to provide a good life for my family (“other source of income”). Yes, you are right, of course my perspective might change once I actually start practicing the sport (although I don’t like a word “sport” here and prefer word “lifestyle”), but then this statement will not be true anymore and I will not say it, but for now that’s how I feel. You see, I did not choose the last option for this very reason. I am not sure if I would want to be a professional BASE athlete because this comes with the whole new set of responsibilities, headaches and limitations. Also, I think there is a problem with longevity in professional BASE. What if you achieved all the goals you had for the sport and conquered all the lines you have ever dreamed about and at some point you just don’t feel like pushing it anymore? If all you do is BASE, you have a dilemma – you kind of have to find the way to keep making a living in the area you are not so passionate about anymore and/or forced to do something that you wouldn’t do otherwise (even if it’s still a good “career” but that’s just not what you would want to do at that point).
My current dream is to fully experience the sport and everything that it brings (good and probably bad), but hopefully someday to be able to hang that wingsuit (or whatever super-duper-rocket-propelled-self-landing-mini-wing it’s gonna be 20-30 years from now) on the wall and have some great life stories to tell to my grandchildren. However, I know that given a timeline above, I have more likelihood of having a BFL# for myself by that time (which honestly would be #1 choice to go if not for the impact on my family).. So yes, if at some point (even after the very first jump) I decide that it’s not for me – I still “have other income that would enable me to BASE full time” (see what I did there? :), I’d just go on with my life and just do something else. My strong feeling is that a) this will not happen; or b) this will happen but that “something else” will be something connected with a concept of human flight.
See, I am a genuine human flight enthusiast. My eyes were glued to the skies since I can remember myself. I made my first skydive (well, it was a static line on a round military-style parachute) when I just turned 13. I needed a waiver signed by my parents to do that and my mom said no but my dad signed it and said “go ahead boy”. Although due to other life circumstances I have been averaging just over 10 jumps a year since then (I am 36 now), I am still planning on getting deeply involved with the sport and making active steps toward that goal. I did not even know what BASE jumping was the first time I thought about a “device” you can jump off a building with and push “the button” that would quickly release a “parachute device” to safely land at the bottom. There is a reason my mom has always said “I wish you just played chess” with my response being “mom, chess is pretty dangerous – you can fall asleep and bust your eye out with a queen”. I have also been a pretty active paragliding pilot before I decided to go back to school to pursue a career that hopefully will give me enough income and time to finally start doing things I love much more often.
Despite being a “noob” I am no stranger to the other side of the sport. I know BASE is not all “fuck yeah dude, that line was siiiiiiiiick!..”. I have read the BFL multiple times by now and not for curiosity but to learn the lessons and stay in touch with the reality amidst all the awesome YouTube videos being released. I have witnessed families being devastated by tragic losses both in skydiving and speed flying. For the ones who are driven by the cool YouTube videos and looking into “how to become a proximity wingsuit flyer” even before their first skydive I always recommend a 2-part documentary by Anton Kalyuzhnyi “Ups and Downs: Part 1 “A Story of One BASE jumper” and Part 2 “The Bridge to Nowhere”. It’s on YouTube too, but it’s in Russian and I am not sure if it has subtitles, but it’s an awesome narrative of “the other side” of BASE jumping that is not so glamourous and the film is very sobering.
I would say I am pretty “above average” for a noob in terms of theoretical knowledge of the subject. I actually first registered here in 2001, but have lost my former email and registered again last year with a new one. I contacted some of the high-profile base jumpers over Facebook to ask some possibly stupid questions and advice. One of the most aggressive ones, who is on BFL now, told me straight up “if I had a family like you, I would not BASE at all..”. And here’s where my dilemma is coming from. I have a 5-year old daughter and my parents are alive too, and the possibility of dying even “doing what I love” is something that bothers me a lot because:
1) I know no matter how current, careful and calculated you are in BASE, there is always a possibility that something else goes wrong that you have no control over. There is a number of entries in BFL by now saying “..he was the most conservative and risk-adverse jumper, it’s a shock to the community..”
2) Following that, I would hate to leave my family devastated like that if something happens to me. I agree with the saying that the jumper gets off easy in this case..
3) Following that, I should not do this.
4) But I cannot convince myself to simply drop the thought and say no to something that is a dream and I cannot go a week without thinking about.
5) So, I will actually do this, but will make sure I do everything in my capacity to be as safe, prepared, current, and conservative as I can be.
6) See #1
That’s a classic catch 22 if I am not mistaken and I don’t have an answer for that right now. My wife is always telling me “don’t you dare to get our daughter involved in your flying things in the future”. The crazy thing is I don’t want her to get involved in these things. As a parent, I want her to be safe and god forbid for her to become interested in BASE jumping… But, if at some point in her life this will be her choice, there is nothing I can do but to make sure she approaches it in a most prepared and thoughtful way. That’s the only way I know.
I’d like to think that I am a very calculated aspiring BASE-jumper who is approaching the issue “in a right way”. For that reason, I don’t just want to go and do a FJC and forget everything before I can afford to keep jumping consistently. I realize that being current is a very important thing in BASE and it is not for another couple of years (when I finish school) before I will be able to afford the time investment and travel required to be active. There is a local cliff that is 40 minutes drive away from my house that is very popular among local jumpers. It is a popular tourists and hikers destination as well, but I refuse to hike it because I made it a point (it’s a mental thing) that when I do – I will be carrying my rig with me. I know there is a high chance I will have to hike down that day, but at least when I hike up for the first time, I will be ready to live my dream and jump it. I even know who I will ask to be my mentor (although he doesn’t know haha), there is no point bothering him now, but there is no way he’s getting away with a “no” when I’m ready )) Back in my hometown in Russia where I was born there is a perfectly jumpable 250-m antenna that I used to climb a lot and that has never been jumped before since it’s in the middle of nowhere – I am also keeping a thought of opening that object at some point in my life (unless it gets torn down before then of course).
So, answering your original question, yes, I cannot be sure if I would actually want to BASE full time, but I guess I’ll just giv’er a try and see where it goes. The main point to me whatever you do is to enjoy the moment and not to think too much about “what will be” cause the road changes all the time.
This brings me to the main point I am trying to make here and it’s connected to your comment:
maretus wrote:
…you find out that it´s not the energy drink fueled rad and awesome lifestyle youtube is selling you all the time but something completely different...
I feel like you old-time mature BASE jumpers are too often committing the same fallacy of generalization the noobs are committing by thinking that BASE is “the energy drink fueled rad and awesome lifestyle youtube is selling” them. Except yours sounds like “every noob trying to get into BASE these days thinks it’s an energy drink fueled rad and awesome lifestyle” and is driven by the rad YouTube videos that picture the sport in that way. While you may be correct in 90% of cases, please keep in mind that there are still 10% of us who is simply born with that yet unknown “flying” gene in their blood and our passion doesn’t come from the YouTube (YouTube wasn’t even around when I caught the bug). How did you all end up there with thousands of jumps when you did not have YouTube back in the day? There are at least the same number of genuine enthusiasts now that are passionate about it in the same way you were back in the day, except now they are mixed in with all the YouTube-driven ones and are generally getting tossed in the same category..
I thank you for your input once again and wish we could jump together and share pitchers one day.
