Pecked to death by ducks (41 page)

"We discussed it, yes."

Kirke, forty-four, was a burly, pleasantly articulate man with graying hair and protuberant blue eyes full of intelligence and the sort of brilliant innocence inherent only to honest scoundrels. David Kirke, I knew, had once jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, on bungee cords. That was back in 1979, when I was living there, and I recall the pictures in the papers, along with the rather classic note distributed on site. "We would ask you not to be alarmed. With the possible exception of the jumpers, nobody is subject to danger or inconvenience and there is no reason why one should not proceed about one's business mildly encouraged that it is no longer necessary to get one's feet wet as circumstances force one to jump off a bridge. Bungee jumping (sometimes known as the failure's failure) is merely another attempt to celebrate the strain and tensions of urban life in a suitably dignified manner."

Having disseminated this message, Kirke, smoking a pipe and dressed in a top hat and morning coat, stepped nonchalantly off the 24 5-foot-high span, plummeted toward certain death, then snapped back to about the 120-foot level and bounced there. He was accompanied by three other men and one woman.

The five jumpers were fined ten dollars apiece for trespassing, and the great columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle Herb Caen celebrated the leap in his column. He found front-page pictures of these goofballs hanging off the bridge a fine change from

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a usual urban front page, fraught, as it is, with death and kidnapping and corruption.

A decade later I ran into David Kirke in the north of England, at an inn near the border of Scotland. Over a light lunch of finely sliced goose breast and horseradish followed by poached salmon in dill sauce—Kirke enjoys fine dining—we talked a bit about how a man comes to make his living inventing and participating in extremely silly but nonetheless life-threatening sports.

As a boy, Kirke explained, he had read Jack Kerouac's work, especially On the Road, and found it full of sensible ideas about "mobility and the reasonable pursuit of sensation," all of which seemed to combine nicely with Kerouac's "healthy distrust of bureaucratic authority." Kirke had attended Oxford and studied English. He was especially fond of Proust and Faulkner and went on to lecture at Oxford, though some of his opinions were considered a bit odd. "Freud," Kirke avers, "is best read as a romantic novelist." When such opinions are the stuff of dangerous controversy, some men feel there is not enough dangerous controversy in their lives.

At Oxford in 1976 Kirke teamed with Edward Hulton in an effort to produce a little real danger in his life. They would try out some traditional sports. Supposedly dangerous ones. Life-threatening ones.

With one day's practice they ran the Muattetal, the Olympic Whitewater canoeing course in Switzerland. And survived. They raced ice boats. They tried out the Cresta run, a tiny toboggan a man rides on his stomach, like a sled. They climbed the Matter-horn.

"We discovered," Kirke told me over the salmon, "that a lot of sports were invented a hundred years ago and that they have become formalized. They are not nearly so dangerous as practitioners would have us believe. You can learn them rapidly enough using the deep-immersion principle. It becomes an almost philosophical point: Sport today is bedeviled by neosubprofessionals. You cannot just go and learn to scuba-dive anymore. You have to take a forty-hour course over the period of eight weeks and pay someone to tell you things that are available to you in hundreds

of books. We found, in Switzerland, that we could save various fees, learn to do things faster, and learn better, because we put our faith in ourselves."

Kirke and Hulton, reacting to the mere whiff of bureaucratic authority in traditional sports, began to invent their own. They built a biplane that should have flown like a hang glider. It stalled and crashed from seventy feet, but Kirke emerged unscathed. "It was the beginning of a delusion," Kirke said, "that my luck would hold in nasty situations."

About that time, Kirke heard about a man named Chris Baker who had one of the new regallo-wing hang gliders that were built to prevent stalls. After a suitable amount of lying about his expertise, Kirke was allowed to fly the glider and—since it was a new sport with no regulation and no bureaucracy—became enamored. The three men—Kirke, Hulton, Baker—expanded on their philosophy at local pubs and lighted on the idea of a club for those who might like to engage in dangerous sports. It could be called, yes, the Dangerous Sports Club. "Precisely," Hulton said. "And our symbol should be a black wheelchair on a sea of blood."

Pub talk.

There was a hang-glider club at Oxford—the Poisonous Butterflies—and the two clubs evolved together to the point that a philosophy jelled: "picnic, drink, run, glide, crash." The colleges of Oxford, many of them founded in the mid-twelfth century, are architecturally magnificent, and Oxford is often called the "city of dreaming spires." By the late seventies, men and women in odd costumes—gorilla suits, for instance—were flying off the dreaming spires, buzzing over garden parties, irritating scowling dons, stampeding the string quartets. Poisonous Butterflies. Dangerous Sports. An arrest here and there.

After an especially formal wedding, the club flew directly to Greece, climbed Mount Olympus, and, still dressed in their wedding finery, launched hang gliders from the summit. (It was David Kirke's fifth flight.) The formal attire felt right. Dangerous stunts should be performed calmly, with dignity and reserve. No gratuitous chest thumping. Formal attire became the club's trade-

mark. People who value decorum and tradition, of course, cringe at the sight. The formalwear tweaks their noses.

"It's a private joke," Kirke said.

Because stunts are performed in the garb of the upper class, the Dangerous Sports Club is thought to be composed entirely of upper-class twits. The press is partially to blame: Sons and daughters of tycoons or members of Parliament get more ink when arrested. Motorcycle mechanics are seldom mentioned. In point of fact the club—which has a shifting membership of perhaps thirty to forty at any one time—encompasses all classes of British society. The only requirements seem to be a certain amount of brain-damaged courage combined with a sense of humor and a flair for the preposterous.

For instance, Chris Baker had always wanted to go to New Guinea and do some vine jumping, that rite of manhood in which young men leap from high towers with springy vines tied to an ankle and are brought up short inches of the forest floor. A quick check with the airlines indicated that the trip was entirely too expensive. What's more, there were probably some rules about jumping. Like maybe you had to be from New Guinea.

Chris wouldn't let go of the idea, however. Perhaps there were similar vines in England. Or ... or how about a technological solution? And it occurred to David Kirke, who had always loved airplanes, who had built model planes as a child, that the elastic bungee cords used to hold his glider to the roof of a car for transportation were very like the heavy-duty cords used on large aircraft carriers to stop landing supersonic jets. Yes. Surely, such cords could be substituted for jungle vines.

"As far as I know," David Kirke said, "we were the first people to do bungee-cord jumping."

In newspaper articles about the club it is often said that stunts are undertaken with no training and no knowledge of possible outcomes. "Not true," Kirke says. "In point of fact we did computer models for our first jump. One of the people working on it later shared a Nobel Prize, and one is now working on advanced laser technology. The numbers said we wouldn't die."

Rather than build a proper tower for the jump, however, the

boys chose the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the highest bridge in all of England. They jumped. They survived. They were arrested.

The Clifton Suspension Bridge by some quirk of coincidence was precisely as high as the Golden Gate Bridge—245 feet to the water in each case. It seemed only appropriate. . . .

"So you met this fellow in a pub and he said what?" the courteous officer wanted to know.

"He said 'a few of the lads were going to have a go at one of the bridges.' "

"It is time," David Kirke had said soon after I met him, "to let a few of the younger members organize a jump. I suspect they will all be arrested."

We were standing in Kirke's office, a large airplane hangar of a building in an industrial park in the north of England. A section of the hangar had been partitioned off to create an office containing the inevitable fax machine, copier, phone, and computer. A sign on the inside of the door read, you've had your break, it is not five o'clock. Off in a corner was another small room containing a bed and a pile of books perhaps three feet high. There were books by Graham Greene and Proust; there were biographies and reference books; there were cookbooks and thrillers: It was the helter-skelter collection of a man in love with words. The rest of the place was strewn with coiled bungee cords, more stacks of books, a broken biplane hanging from the ceiling, a huge wooden horse on skis, something that looked like a mummified human being or a cartoon accident victim in bandages—"That's Eric, the club mascot," Kirke explained—and several immense deflated inflatable devices.

Kirke gave me five large scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings about club activities, most of which made the paper due to subsequent arrests. I was sitting out under the biplane, next to Eric, the mummy, perusing the club's dozen years of inspired lunacy. Kirke had provided me with a glass of hundred-year-old sherry and a Havana cigar. "It was," Kirke said, "Oscar Wilde who pointed out that the necessities of life are a luxury; the luxuries

are a necessity. This is an epigram to cling to when you live in a tin shack several hundred miles north of London."

The sherry was dry and warm as the Iberian Desert, and the archives were remarkable. Here were men in tuxedos skiing down the green hills of Ireland on skis made of ice. There was a photo of the elegantly garbed gentlemen running with the bulls at the Feast of San Fermin, in Pamplona, Spain, where every year hundreds of young men run through the narrow cobblestone streets chased by at least six killer bulls. Every few years someone is gored to death. To say that Kirke and company ran with the bulls is not entirely accurate: They rolled out ahead of the bulls, on skateboards. Wearing morning coats and top hats.

As far as I could tell, it took two years for club members to squander any money they had, and by 1978 they were looking for sponsors. An independent producer for the BBC signed on to film a DSC (Dangerous Sports Club) gliding expedition off Mount Kilimanjaro. The proper permits were secured, but DSC members were required to climb the nineteen-thousand-foot peak in forty-eight hours. (The trip usually takes six days.) Kirke, a man who has difficulty distinguishing sporting activities from party time, who prides himself on his lack of physical fitness and training, left younger men gasping on the trek. Others suffered from altitude sickness and descended. Not Kirke. The two best hang gliders in the group crashed on takeoff. (No one was hurt.) Kirke launched perfectly. It was his thirteenth flight.

Unfortunately, he flew directly into a cloud, and the BBC got precisely twelve seconds of his backside disappearing into an impenetrable mist. Kirke flew blind, without compass or altimeter, made his way through the cloud, and landed in a coffee plantation twenty-five miles away. There was, of course, no film to defray the costs. Kirke and the club owed over ten thousand dollars in room-service charges alone.

Happily, the producers of the American TV show That's Incredible! paid the club eighteen thousand dollars to attempt a bungee-cord jump off the world's highest bridge, the 1,260-foot-high Royal Gorge Bridge spanning the Arkansas River just out-

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS i 360

side Canon City, Colorado. It was an entirely successful endeavor.

"If there is any terror that unites us," Kirke said of the members of the DSC, "it's the terror of having to take a conventional job." Hereafter, they would attempt to fill the club coffers with money from televised stunts or from advertisers clever enough to hire the club to promote their products.

In the early eighties, for three winters running, club members traveled to St. Moritz, in Switzerland, there to demonstrate, for an international TV audience, alternative skiing techniques. One madman took the ski jump in a lawn chair on skis. Others confined themselves to the slopes. People rode huge wooden horses over the moguls; they piloted biplanes, or stepladders, or bathtubs on skis. Two formally dressed gentlemen rocketed down an expert run at forty miles an hour sitting behind a grand piano.

"It was actually quite a technological challenge, fixing the skis to the grand piano," Kirke said.

"It was a hollowed-out piano, though," I said.

Kirke was offended. "It was a perfectly functional grand piano."

"They didn't actually play. . . ."

"Indeed they did," Kirke said, a bit huffily, I thought. "I believe it was Chopin's Polonaise in C Minor. A nobly tragic work, appropriate, I think, and very competently played, given the circumstances." Kirke paused and brightened considerably. "You know," he said, "television footage of our alternative ski devices has been shown all over the world. I have a friend who is a TV producer, and he was doing some documentary work in Africa, I don't know where, say the Kalahari Desert. Swaziland. He had some of these ski tapes and showed them to the people there. Understand, this was in a mud hut, with the electronics running off a gasoline generator, and the audience was composed of people who had never seen snow. And they were rolling on the ground laughing. They loved the spectacular crashes. Now I haven't cleaned up the pollution in our world, or halted the threat of nuclear war, and I would do that if I could, but I can

safely say that I have made perhaps half a billion people laugh in my life. There is some small importance to that."

"Did you realize," the police officer asked, "that people could be severely injured, indeed killed, jumping off the bridge like that?"