On the third Saturday of October, I rose with a friend on one of the coldest mornings of the season to watch people jump — and catapult — off a bridge higher than the Empire State Building. We drove to a Walmart parking lot, waited in line behind vloggers with Appalachian accents, and crammed into a school bus that shuttled us to U.S. Route 19, which had a higher military presence than Area-51. On the interstate, we walked a mile stretch past signs like “CRYPTIDS SIGHTING THIS WAY (Beware! Local Yokels)” to watch ravenous adrenaline junkies BASE jump into the New River Gorge.
This is Bridge Day (fueled by Monster™).
For the past 46 years, jumpers have come to Fayette County, West Virginia, to test their fayet, so to speak, and fly into the “New,” one of the oldest rivers in the world. It is advertised as “West Virginia’s largest single-day festival” and “one of the largest extreme sports events in the world.”
I’ll do the search for you: three people have died during Bridge Day. One drowned in ’83 after his parachute gear got caught in the river, another died in ’87 after a parachute failure, and another in ’06 after his parachute opened too late.
The three deaths haven’t deterred the 400 jumpers who traveled to West Virginia from 39 states and four countries. Neither did it turn away the 120,000 people who came to watch the jumps this year. So maybe it’s not just an Appalachian thing.
If you’re worried about the jumpers, here’s a snippet off the official Bridge Day website called “White Water Rafting, or White Water Swimming?”
Basically, jumpers have to choose between landing in the landing zone or landing in the river. Wait. Actually, they have to choose between landing in the landing zone and landing in the river and landing in the rocks and landing in the trees and landing in the railroad tracks. Life is full of choices.
There’s a whole lot that can go on between the time that the chute opens and the time a jumper comes in to land. And that, my friends, in addition to a whole load of other wonderful stuff, is what makes Bridge Day awesome.
Life is full of choices, and I chose to squeeze my way through a couple hundred people on the third highest bridge in America, nuzzled in the gap between the catapult barrier gate and the cement wall between me — an 876-foot plummet — and the gorge.
Welcome to life at the edge.
