Can Those Who Dare Death Teach Us Something? Joe O'Connor - National Post
go to original February 2, 2015

The ultimate full moon shot. Dean Potter walks a highline at Cathedral Peak as the sun sets and the moon rises. (Reel Water Productions)

Dean S. Potter was plummeting toward certain death, a malfunctioning parachute fluttering above his head in a tangle of useless nylon.

It would be an extra shame for Mr. Potter, since surely his obituary would be about yet another extreme sports dude, with an extreme proclivity for taking extraordinary risks, dying because of it. He would be dismissed as a dolt with a death wish, and that would totally suck and, wait, what was that, wondered poor Mr. Potter, as he fell. There, hanging in the darkness, a camera operator’s rope — since the elite dolts make money filming their acts of derring-do.

Before it went wrong, Mr. Potter’s mission in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, was to highline (think: tightrope walk) across the mouth of the Cave of the Swallows with a BASE jumping parachute on his back. He was testing the rig when the chute malfunctioned.

“I was going at near free fall speed [200 km/h],” he says on the phone from Santa Barbara, Calif. “But I saw this skinny little wet rope.’”

He grabbed it, halting his fall six feet from the ground, tearing every muscle in his abdomen and “blowing out [his] ass” – but surviving.

What didn’t survive was his sponsorship by Clif Bar, which was so alarmed by his more recent free climbing adventures — that’s rock climbing without ropes to assist in the ascent — that they fired him and four other professional climbers in mid-November.

“We no longer feel good about benefitting from the amount of risk certain athletes are taking in areas of the sport where there is no margin for error; where there is no safety net,” the energy bar company explained in a letter posted on its website.

But what if the (metaphorical) safety nets are the real danger? What if we’ve been wrong about the Dean S. Potters of the world, and they are not necessarily pushing towards a youthful date with a newspaper obituary but a truer expression of what it actually means to be human?

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