Risking It All

(9 of 10)

Boenish, 42, is a California parachutist who finds a surprisingly lyrical kind of satisfaction in jumping off of buildings, bridges and cliffs. He and his friends are shunned by the conventional skydiving establishment, which regards them as airborne Hell's Angels, mostly because the trespassing often involved in fixed-object jumping (but not the leaps themselves, Boenish quickly points out) is illegal. One of the great early jumps, from which springs the present fad of BASE (for Buildings, Antenna towers, Spans and Earth) jumping was made in 1970 by Rick Sylvester. He skied off of Yosemite's 7,569-ft. El Capitan, popped a chute and floated down to the meadow below. Some 120 bandit jumps followed, and finally, in 1980, the park grudgingly began handing out permits, a futile and short-lived exercise in imposing bureaucracy on a sport that is inherently anarchic. Boenish, said to be among the more responsible BASE jumpers, seems to hunger for respectability when he says, "We have been trying to educate the public as to why we do it." This is a difficult educational problem, as he admits, because it involves, for one thing, explaining to an uncaring world why he on one occasion jumped off of El Cap on a pogo stick.

At times it seems that almost everyone who has laced on climbing boots or set a spinnaker has written a book about the experience. Although reading such stuff can be fun, the armchair adventurer feels a certain guilty unease. At this very moment, for instance, while the reader's arteries are slowly clogging, alarmingly energetic people like David Horning are out there somewhere, training for races like the Alcatraz Challenge. This is a particularly gruesome example of the newly popular self-torture called the triathlon: a 1.5-mile swim in cold and swirling water from San Francisco's Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park, a 20-mile bicycle trek that crosses the Golden Gate Bridge, and finally a 14.5-mile run from Mill Valley to Stinson Beach across Mount Tamalpais.

"A real challenge," says Horning, 35, a Berkeley sports entrepreneur and marketing consultant who is one of the country's top triathletes. (This week he is off to China to promote the first triathlon in the People's Republic.) Horning has broken his back and both legs in separate skiing accidents, and he was born an epileptic, but he discounts these liabilities. The biggest barriers are self-created and psychological, he tells people whom he is trying to hook on the triathlon. "People are always saying 'I can't.' Well, if you say that, you probably won't."

And if you won't, you will never find Waring's bear. He is out there somewhere, that bear, but you have to go looking for him. George Waring, 42, is an ophthalmic surgeon from Atlanta who does a lot of big-water expedition kayaking. Once in Alaska he and a friend were sluicing at high speed along Prairie Creek, in the neighborhood of Mount McKinley. The creek was 30 ft. wide, and it was fast and rocky. Salmon slapped the bottom of their kayak. Abruptly they came upon a grizzly in the water, fishing for salmon. There was no way to stop or get out of the creek, so Waring and his friend went on paddling. They passed 20 ft. from the grizzly, which ignored them and perhaps did not see them.

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