Float with the Tide, Swim for a Goal: Chongo, Dean Potter and a Free Life

‘When I was 29 I climbed a building at San Luis Obispo College and broke both my arms. I was showing off for a girl.’

‘If life didn’t have risk, life wouldn’t be very real at all.’

Charles Victor Tucker III. Chongo – Chuck if you meet him and get on. He is a little bit stoned and little bit eccentric. He was a damn good and pioneering rock climber and slackliner (tightrope walking on a line that’s not taut – slack, in fact). A lifer. Big wall climbing when it was rock; not a rubberized indoor scout trip. He spent his 30s in Mexico learning how to re-sole climbing shoes.

He lived in Yosemite Park for about 25 years – not particularly legally. When he wasn’t dodging the park authorities he’d spend days tethered to El Capitan. The climbers dug him (he mended their shoes). He was a guru when it came to all things climbing and highlining (slacklining when it’s an eagle soar/nosebleed high rope you’re walking across twixt the rock faces).

“Darren Carter and I started off this whole slack-lining craze in the early 90s. We used to practice between trees, and then we took it high up...like across Lost Arrow Spire. I was the third guy across Lost Arrow Spire. First Dean Potter, then Darren Carter, and then me.”

He was eventually taken to court and removed from Yosemite. He now lives in Sacramento under a lorry. Or something like that.  He sits outside on a laptop running his website and writing about physics, selling self-printed 700-page books like The Homeless Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. These were penned back in the days when he could write in the Yosemite cafeteria and on people’s sofas. 

"When I walked across that thing [the slackline across Lost Arrow], it outmatched any 60 seconds in my life, and I've had some great 60-second increments," he said. But the same feeling lasted for days when he studied science, "and that's why I got into quantum mechanics. It was better than rock climbing."

He is the best kind of guru, because his climbing advice includes this:

How bitchin you might be (or better stated, how bitchin you might imagine yourself being, however accurate or inaccurate your conclusion) has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you will be the unfortunate fool who dies, or spends the rest of his life in a wheelchair, or worst, simply ends up ‘existing’, drooling in a bed all day long, staring blankly into space (or into wherever).  

Nature does not care in the least whether you are bitchin or you are not, any more than it cares if you or anyone else lives or dies, or is maimed for the rest of their life (because the bitchin die and get maimed, no less than the unbitchin do – nature is absolutely fair in questions of death and maiming). 

Understand this: it’s hard to be bitchin when you’re dead, permanently crippled, or hopelessly trapped, lying in a bed drooling, staring blankly into space (or again, into wherever), which are all very, very real possibilities, when you choose to climb anything, but especially if you choose to climb rock, tightrope walk (slackline or highline) on a nylon strap, or simply find yourself in the company of others who fool-heartedly entertain ideas of actually doing any of these very things [http://chongonation.com/warning.htm].

View image | gettyimages.com

But then there’s how it looks. That hair-thin bolt of colour across the canyon. A slackline surrounded by miles of gargantuan nature, so high up and climate extreme that the ant-sized trees in the distance are neck deep in mist or cloud or whatever. Springing on the line is some barefoot dude, all-American skinny with never-been-indoors flesh and old man-thinning yet young boy-styled hair. His movements on the slackline constantly channel hop between childlike joy and inhuman discipline, focus. Feeling everything coming from years of practice. Feeling everything, period.

 “When there’s a death consequence, when you are doing things that if you mess up you die, I like the way it causes my senses to peak”

Dean Potter there.

Potter and Hunt’s bodies were discovered on the wall of rock along Yosemite Valley. The men, who jumped at the same time, both landed on the rock outcropping below their jump-off location on Taft Point. It is thought that the men may have been trying to clear a “notch” on the mountain and ended up slamming into it instead, according to the L.A. Times.

A witness who saw them jump heard a ‘pop-pop’ shortly after. She hoped it was their parachutes deploying.

Saturday 16^th May this year. Potter 42. Hunt 29.

You BASE (building, antenna, span, or Earth) jump. You launch yourself off the rock in a wingsuit that makes you look like a flying squirrel – with all that flesh joining the limbs and catching the air. Sometimes Dean did it with his dog Whisper on his back.

The appeal of the wingsuit was that it was flying – what Dean really wanted to do. "I know it's kind of a strange thing I'm talking about, but another part of me truly believes I can fly, like somehow my mind can figure it out." More practice, more studying. Eventually you could perfect a descent and land – no parachute.

Kid. 13/16 (depending on the interview) he starts climbing with a friend on military land. No ropes. Grabbing each other’s hands and feet to get higher. Staying silent to avoid scaring the shit out of their parents. By 19 Dean’s scuzzy and penniless and living on a sofa to be near the rocks. Salt sandwiches for Christmas (yup, literally – the white stuff in bread).

Chongo gets him slacklining in the 1990s. It’s an odd combination of breaking some of Yosemite’s rules (they’re not wild about BASE jumping) yet also being a member of the park’s Search and Rescue.

Turn of the millennium it was all speed rock climbing – with and without ropes, with and without water (you drink your own). 16 hour climbs were record broken down to 4 – Dean’d be up at the top having a fit trying to breathe and throw up at the same time.

View image | gettyimages.com

Speed attained, he channelled extreme. He did free soloing (Nothing. Nadda. No ropes, no harness – you just don’t let fucken go of the rock). He did slacklining without the tether (you got like five seconds to pull the cord on your chute – and when there’s no chute you really must try to reach out and grab a hold of that blah-thousand feet-high slackline you’ve just slipped off).

He’d had close calls before ‘I grab the 10 mm cord with my bare hands. I'm 300 ft off the deck, [...] I hear the zipping noise of rapid rope through soft skin. I fight the immense pain...ripping my hands to the muscle...stopping myself.’

But he was safe. He had his dad’s military discipline. He calculated: enough drop to deploy a chute or angle a wingsuit away from the rocks. Studying air currents (Dean would stare out into that bodyshock-big landscape so long he could see them). The best quality lines, the material, the metal, the hardware. Maths and physics and spiritualism. Out there alone on the rocks climbing’s all meditating. It’s bigging up the exhaling because of Kung Fu – your opponent can only deliver a fatal blow when you’re Inhaling.

Above all it was the only thing he wanted. It was life – no matter how close to death it was. Because of how close to death it was.

You’re only alive when you’re doing it. Incidentally (and I guess it’s debateable whether it’s always incidental to a sportsman/climber/musician/artist…) this is what makes you so good and so apt for sponsors, deals, fame and coverage. But it is incidental on some levels – fame/finance have to be second to the drives for perfection and new extremes or the latter wouldn’t be strong enough to happen.

You’d do it for free. You’d… kill yourself to do it – cos not doing it is death anyway. You can’t get or hold down a job – not even to fund your passion, not really. You bum around on sofas and eat shit and share habits and smells and dialogue with teenagers (teens dig you too, natch). But you don’t give a shit (not about how you live; not about your kid-friendly counterculture kudos) – it’s just about doing the thing you love.

It’s 40-something Jay Adams getting up at 5:00/6:00 to skate – for the best light; not for the coverage (the journalist slept in, in fact). These people have leather skin and fucked skeletons and damage. Their relationships explode. They are in and out of court. They are incomprehensible to people (most people) who have equal or higher priorities than the climb/sport/art…  Writers, songsters and actors drink and syringe and waste away and never get any sun and blow their brains out with bullets or brute thought. They frazzle themselves in the chase for the best. Their best.

It all comes back to the same thought: tragic as it might be for these people to die trying – or to succeed but then never reach ‘old’ because of the misadventures they clocked up in the effort – giving it up to ‘live’ would be a greater tragedy. It seriously undervalues what living means – or means to them.

I’d be combative ­because I’d feel—and I still feel—that being free is the most important thing. But now the rangers just see this guy who has been here for 18 years, a guy who busts his ass every day practicing his art. And though I do some things that are illegal, if the rangers ask, I am honest. If I fly over their car and they have to chase me, they chase me. But if I don’t rub it in their face, they don’t go out of their way to hunt me.

The Final Encore of Adolescence

It’s a funny age—the age I am. Or perhaps it’s just that I’m a funny sort of man.

It’s a funny time at least, with everything paused, and possibly with good reason. It feels like taking a deep breath ready for the next rest of your life. Old hobbies are colliding with new hobbies, and with meeting people and lifestyles far removed from anything as quaint as a hobby. New friends collide with old friends, and sometimes they cancel each other out. That said, sometimes the new friends can help bring the older ones back close again. There’s a need to consume newspapers, books, television, film and music like some kind of second education. Other people’s lives become more interesting too, and trying to imagine living those lives is like trying on clothes in a shop where you like everything.

This funny time brings a renewed interest in old books, old haunts, old pubs and new pints. At the moment the one or two pints that accompany a conversation are the nicest they’ve ever been. Comedy is funnier, thoughtful films suddenly merit tears, and underneath the histrionics is a sense of learning how to move on from it all. The funny time brings a new haircut with a pleasant, blend-in anonymity when you want it. It also pushes history hard in your face, and greenery suddenly becomes more important to look at and walk through.

There is an ideal serenity to this funny age, and with no sense of it being wrong, or of it taking you in the wrong direction. There is no sense of it being particularly right, either, but rather that those polarised descriptions are wrong themselves. Barring lost weekends, your life and your brain are like the black box on a plane recording everything. Writing can really show how everything counts like that; how wasted time from about five years ago can have actually compiled thoughts in your head that will do something for you some day. It all comes back in some form.

People will generally say that your future lies in the particular skill that they know you for. There is only one person who really knows though, but for a while even they will forget it with this funny age relaxing them. With egalitarian options that could let you recklessly sign up for anything you happen to think of, this current pause is remedial. It says: let it all sink in, everything in you and everything in the world, all of it. Have faith in what you are good at…that particular thing that feels completely different to anything else in your life.

Perhaps it’s just a funny mood: wanderlust from watching DVDs again. A well-made film can inspire the best in the people watching it. Though if a film offers a revelation of your own destiny you should remember how carefully planned and filmed the message of that screen success story was.

If the post-movie feeling only lasts a few hours, this funny age is doing something more lifelong. It is acknowledging the final encore of adolescence perhaps, if we want something titular, or maybe it’s just setting you up with the best ideas you’ve got to go on with.