One for the Road
Catching air on the cheese wedge of life
By ANDY ENRIGHT

I was too scared to move. Not just the healthy nerves of self preservation, this was a paralysis that started in my tightening chest and grimly locked jaw. My hair itched under my helmet as prickly heat spread down my neck, sweat beading up in the small of my back. The more I looked at it, the less likely I was to pull the trigger. This feeling had never been in the project plan.

I'm good at planning. The search for the perfect road jump had been meticulously researched over the past five years. The criteria for perfection had been argued and debated in countless bars across the Alps, Rockies, Sierra Nevada, Pyrenees, and Caucasus. Being the guy tasked with recording the event, Simon concentrated on the aesthetics. I wondered how big I could go without ending up looking like a bucket of smashed crabs.

Several contenders came and went, dismissed for any one of a hundred reasons. The rock near Caples Lake over Highway 88 was rejected due to boulders in the landing area. The diving board near the summit of Teton Pass was nixed because the backdrop wasn't pretty enough. The Mont Blanc tunnel road? North-facing, always in the shade. And so it went but we never gave up looking. The solution came from an unexpected source.

Paul is a fat, lazy bastard. His idea of adventure is to leave a junk yard with his underwear full of spark plugs. But I've known him since school and his idiosyncrasies don't grate on me as they do on everybody else I introduce him to. He'd been trying to make some headway with Internet dating and had managed to persuade some hapless female to send a picture of herself. Using the Web address of the picture she'd sent, he was now browsing through the rest of her albums looking for bikini shots.

Filtering out most of his mumblings to a vague background murmur of "sweet," "t-shirts," and "cold mountain air," I turned around and saw it. It couldn't have been more perfect. Paul was ogling the stiff-nippled chica in the foreground, but behind her I saw a huge, picture-perfect mountain framed by the steep walls of a twin lane road. One side was probably 30 feet higher than the other, both sides appearing to be angled at about 20 degrees or so and, this being a summer shot, covered in a smooth layering of shale.

That was last May. Now I'm standing on that 20-degree slope, a groomed in-run leading to a lip beyond which I can see part of western Switzerland. I'm currently standing in France. I know as soon as this cloud clears I've got to go. I watch the shadow's edge creep lazily across the hill towards me. The radio crackles. Simon is hunched over a tripod on the central reservation below. "OK, dropping." My voice is so tight I sound prepubescent.

I have no clue how fast to go, only that too much speed is going to be happier than not enough. With that in mind I tuck from the top of the track and watch the edge come smashing into focus. Not too much of a kicker on the cheese wedge. I'd rehearsed what I was going to do next a thousand times—knees up, roll to one side, twist the right foot for a cross, reach back with the right hand and make the tail grab. Still the most photogenic move in the book.

My book must have blown to a different page. As I pop for take-off, the entire leading edge of the jump collapses, sending me spearing out into the void. I look down and see the road, making eye contact with the unyielding gaze of Simon's Canon. Realizing that this was going to end suboptimally, I brace for impact and wait. Getting bored with bracing I open one eye, see blue and the next thing I recall is getting a shovel blade to the bridge of the nose as I'm dug out.

Concussed but otherwise intact, we retired to the car to check the shots. Five frames per second for the four seconds I was visible yielded plenty of flailing and various sundry faces of death, but frame 12 was, by sheer dumb luck, a facsimile of a perfect Lincoln. It was five years in the making, but we'd scored.

Paul, on the other hand, never got lucky.


 Discuss this story in our Workshop forum