Life On The Edge

Is everyday life too dull? Why else would
Americans seek risk as never before?

"Five... four... three... two... one... see ya!" And Chance McGuire, 25, is airborne off a 650-ft. concrete dam in Northern California. In one second he falls 16 ft., in two seconds 63 ft., and after three seconds and 137 ft. he is flying at 65 m.p.h. He prays that his parachute will open facing away from the dam, that his canopy won't collapse, that his toggles will be handy and that no ill wind will slam him back into the cold concrete. The chute snaps open, the sound ricocheting through the gorge like a gunshot, and McGuire is soaring, carving S turns into the air, swooping over a winding creek. When he lands, he is a speck on a path along the creek. He hurriedly packs his chute and then, clearly audible above the rushing water, lets out a war whoop that rises past those mortals still perched on the dam, past the commuters puttering by on the roadway, past even the hawks who circle the ravine. It is a cry of defiance, thanks and victory; he has survived another BASE jump. McGuire is a practitioner of what he calls the king of all extreme sports. BASE--an acronym for building, antenna, span (bridge) and earth (cliffs)--jumping has one of the sporting world's highest fatality rates: in its 18-year history, 46 participants have been killed. Yet the sport has never been more popular, with more than a thousand jumpers in the U.S. and more seeking to get into it every day. It is an activity without margin for error. If your chute malfunctions, don't bother reaching for a reserve--there isn't time. There are no second chances.

Still, the sport's stark metaphor--a human leaving safety behind to leap into the void--may be a perfect fit with our times. As extreme a risk taker as McGuire seems, we may all have more in common with him than we know or care to admit. Heading into the millennium, America has embarked on a national orgy of thrill and risk taking. The rise of adventure and extreme sports like BASE jumping, snowboarding, ice climbing, skateboarding and paragliding is merely the most vivid manifestation of this new national behavior. Investors once content to buy stocks and hold them quit their day jobs to become day traders, making volatile careers of risk taking. Even our social behavior has tilted toward the treacherous, with unprotected sex on the upswing and hard drugs like heroin the choice of the chic as well as the junkies. In ways many of us take for granted, we engage in risks our parents would have shunned and our grandparents would have dismissed as just plain stupid.

More than 30% of U.S. households own stocks of some form or another, whether in investment accounts, mutual funds or retirement plans, up from 12% just 10 years ago. While an ongoing bull market has lulled us into a sense of security about investing, the reality is we are taking greater risks with our money than any other generation in American history. Many of us even take this a step further, buying "speculative growth," i.e., highly risky Internet and technology stocks, breezily ignoring the potentially precipitous downside. We change jobs, leaping into the employment void, imagining rich opportunities everywhere. The quit rate, a measure of those who voluntarily left their most recent job, is at 14.5%, the highest in a decade. Even among those schooled in risk management, hotshot M.B.A.s who previously would have headed to Wall Street or Main Street, there is a predilection to spurn Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble in order to take a flyer on striking it rich quickly in dot.com land. "I didn't want someone in 20 years to ask me where I was when the Internet took off," says Greg Schoeny, a recent University of Denver M.B.A. who passed up opportunities with established technology firms like Lucent to work at an Internet start-up called STS Communications. Schoeny is a double-dare sort who also likes to ski in the Rockies' dangerous, unpatrolled backcountry.

A full 30% of this year's Harvard Business School graduates are joining venture-capital or high-tech firms, up from 12% just four years ago. "The extended period of prosperity has encouraged people to behave in ways they didn't behave in other times--the way people spend money, change jobs, the quit rate, day trading, and people really thinking they know more about the market than anyone else," says Peter Bernstein, an economic consultant and author of the best-selling Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. "It takes a particular kind of environment for all these things to happen." That environment--unprecedented prosperity and almost a decade without a major ground war--may be what causes Americans to express some inveterate need to take risks.

There is a certain logic to it: at the end of a decade of American triumphalism abroad and prosperity at home, we could be seeking to upsize our personalities, our sense of ourselves. Perhaps we as a people are acting out our success as a nation, in a manner unfelt since the postwar era.

The rising popularity of extreme sports bespeaks an eagerness on the part of millions of Americans to participate in activities closer to the metaphorical edge, where danger, skill and fear combine to give weekend warriors and professional athletes alike a sense of pushing out personal boundaries. According to American Sports Data Inc., a consulting firm, participation in so-called extreme sports is way up. Snowboarding has grown 113% in five years and now boasts nearly 5.5 million participants. Mountain biking, skateboarding, scuba diving, you name the adventure sport--the growth curves reveal a nation that loves to play with danger. Contrast that with activities like baseball, touch football and aerobics, all of which have been in steady decline throughout the '90s.The pursuits that are becoming more popular have one thing in common: the perception that they are somehow more challenging than a game of touch football. "Every human being with two legs, two arms is going to wonder how fast, how strong, how enduring he or she is," says Eric Perlman, a mountaineer and filmmaker specializing in extreme sports. "We are designed to experiment or die."

And to get hurt. More Americans than ever are injuring themselves while pushing their personal limits. In 1997 the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission reported that 48,000 Americans were admitted to hospital emergency rooms with skateboarding-related injuries. That's 33% more than the previous year. Snowboarding E.R. visits were up 31%; mountain climbing up 20%. By every statistical measure available, Americans are participating in and injuring themselves through adventure sports at an unprecedented rate.

Consider Mike Carr, an environmental engineer and paraglider pilot from Denver who last year survived a bad landing that smashed 10 ribs and collapsed his lung. Paraglider pilots use feathery nylon wings to take off from mountaintops and float on thermal wind currents--a completely unpredictable ride. Carr also mountain bikes and climbs rock faces. He walked away from a 1,500-ft. fall in Peru in 1988. After his recovery, he returned to paragliding. "This has taken over many of our lives," he explains. "You float like a bird out there. You can go as high as 18,000 ft. and go for 200 miles. That's magic."

America has always been defined by risk; it may be our predominant national characteristic. It's a country founded by risk takers fed up with the English Crown and expanded by pioneers--a word that seems utterly American. Our heritage throws up heroes--Lewis and Clark, Thomas Edison, Frederick Douglass, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart--who bucked the odds, taking perilous chances.

Previous generations didn't need to seek out risk; it showed up uninvited and regularly: global wars, childbirth complications, diseases and pandemics from the flu to polio, dangerous products and even the omnipresent cold war threat of mutually assured destruction. "I just don't think extreme sports would have been popular in a ground-war era," says Dan Cady, professor of popular culture at California State University at Fullerton. "Coming back from a war and getting onto a skateboard would not seem so extreme."

But for recent generations, many of those traditional risks have been reduced by science, government or legions of personal-injury lawyers, leaving boomers and Generations X and Y to face less real risk. Life expectancy has increased. Violent crime is down. You are 57% less likely to die of heart disease than your parents; smallpox, measles and polio have virtually been eradicated.

Combat survivors speak of the terror and the excitement of playing in a death match. Are we somehow incomplete as people if we do not taste that terror and excitement on the brink? "People are [taking risks] because everyday risk is minimized and people want to be challenged," says Joy Marr, 43, an adventure racer who was the only woman member of a five-person team that finished the 1998 Raid Gauloises, the granddaddy of all adventure races. This is a sport that requires several days of nonstop slogging, climbing, rappelling, rafting and surviving through some of the roughest terrain in the world. Says fellow adventure racer and former Army Ranger Jonathan Senk, 35: "Our society is so surgically sterile. It's almost like our socialization just desensitizes us. Every time I'm out doing this I'm searching my soul. It's the Lewis and Clark gene, to venture out, to find what your limitations are."

That idea of feeling bracingly alive through high-risk endeavor is commonly echoed by athletes, day traders and other risk takers. Indeed, many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are extreme-sports junkies. Mike McCue, 32, CEO and chairman of Tellme Networks, walked away from millions of dollars at his previous job to get his new company off the ground. It's his third start-up, and each time he has risked everything. In his spare time, McCue gets himself off the ground. He's also an avid rock climber. "I like to feel self-reliant and independent," he says. "And when I'm up there, I know if I make a knot wrong, I die."

Even at ground level, the Valley is a preserve of fearless entrepreneurs. Nirav Tolia passed up $10 million in Yahoo stock options to start http://epinions.com, a shopping-guide website. "I don't know if I would call it living dangerously," he says. "At Yahoo I realized that money was not the driver for me. It's the sense of adventure."

Psychologist Frank Farley of Temple University believes that taking conscious risk involves overcoming our instincts. He points out that no other animal intentionally puts itself in peril. "The human race is particularly risk taking compared with other species," he says. He describes risk takers as the Type T personality, and the U.S. as a Type T nation, as opposed to what Farley considers more risk-averse nations like Japan. He breaks it down further, into Type T physical (extreme athletes) and Type T intellectual (Albert Einstein, Galileo). He warns there is also Type T negative, that is, those who are drawn to delinquency, crime, experimentation with drugs, unprotected sex and a whole litany of destructive behaviors.

All these Type Ts are related, and perhaps even different aspects of the same character trait. There is, says Farley, a direct link between Einstein and BASE jumper Chance McGuire. They are different manifestations of the thrill-seeking component of our characters: Einstein was thrilled by his mental life, and McGuire--well, Chance jumps off buildings.

McGuire, at the moment, is driving from Hollister to another California town, Auburn, where he is planning another BASE jump from a bridge. Riding with him is Adam Fillipino, president of Consolidated Rigging, a company that manufactures parachutes and gear for BASE jumpers. McGuire talks about the leap ahead, about his feelings when he is at the exit point, and how at that moment, looking down at the ground, what goes through his mind is that this is not something a human being should be doing. But that's exactly what makes him take that leap: that sense of overcoming his inhibitions and winning what he calls the gravity game. "Football is for pansies," says McGuire. "What do you need all those pads for? This sport [BASE jumping] is pushing all the limits. I have a friend who calls it suicide with a kick."

When a BASE jumper dies, other BASE jumpers say he has "gone in," as in gone into the ground or gone into a wall. "I'm sick of people going in," says Fillipino. "In the past year, a friend went in on a skydive, another drowned as a result of a BASE jump, another friend went in on a jump, another died in a skydiving-plane crash. You can't escape death, but you don't want to flirt with it either." It may be the need to flirt with death, or at least take extreme chances, that has his business growing at a rate of 50% a year.

The jump today from the Auburn bridge, which Fillipino has done dozens of times, is about as routine as BASE jumping can be. But Fillipino is a veteran with 450 BASE jumps to his credit. For McGuire, who has just 45, every jump is still a challenge. And at dawn, as he gets his gear ready, stuffing his chute and rig into a backpack so it won't be conspicuous as he climbs the trestles beneath the bridge (jumping from this bridge, as from many other public and private structures, is illegal) he has entered into a tranquil state, as if he were silently preparing himself for the upcoming risk.

When our Type T traits turn negative, though, there is a disturbing, less serene element to America's being the risk nation. One chilling development is the trend of "barebacking," a practice in which gay men have unprotected sex with multiple partners. Jack, an avid proponent of barebacking, argues that the risk of becoming HIV positive is outweighed by the rush of latex-free passion--especially in an era when, in his view, protease inhibitors are on the verge of turning AIDS from a fatal disease into a chronic illness. "It's the bad boy in me getting off," he admits. "One thing that barebacking allows is a certain amount of control over the risk. In sex, we have the ability to face the risk and look it in the eye."

The Stop AIDS Foundation surveyed some 22,000 gay men in San Francisco between 1994 and 1997, and during this period, the number of men who reported they always used condoms fell from 70% to 61%. "For some gay men, there is a sense of inevitability of becoming infected," says Michael Scarce, 29, a doctoral student in medical sociology who has been researching the barebacking phenomenon for the past two years. Scarce says that rather than living in fear and wondering when their next HIV test is going to return positive, some men create an infection ritual. "It really is a lifestyle choice," he says. "It comes down to quality of life vs. quantity of life."

This consequences-be-damned attitude may also be behind some disquieting trends that surfaced in a report issued last week by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration stating that the number of Americans entering treatment centers for heroin surged 29% between 1992 and 1997. "I'm seeking the widest possible range of human experience," says a recent Ivy League graduate about his heroin use.

The most notorious example of negative thrill seeking may have been when the Risk Taker in Chief, Bill Clinton, engaged in unprotected sex in the Oval Office. Experts point out that many people were forgiving of Clinton in part because they could identify with his impulsiveness. "Risky behavior has been elevated to new heights," argues Cal State's Cady. "There was never so much value put upon risk as there is now."

The question is, How much is enough? Without some expression of risk, we may never know our limits and therefore who we are as individuals. "If you don't assume a certain amount of risk," says paraglider pilot Wade Ellet, 51, "you're missing a certain amount of life." And it is by taking risks that we may flirt with greatness. "We create technologies, we make new discoveries, but in order to do that, we have to push beyond the set of rules that are governing us at that time," says psychologist Farley.

That's certainly what's driving McGuire and Fillipino as they position themselves on the Auburn bridge. It's dawn again, barely light, and they appear as shadows moving on the catwalk beneath the roadway. As they survey the drop zone, they compute a series of risk assessments. "It's a matter of weighing the variables," Fillipino says, pointing out that the wind, about 15 m.p.h. out of the northwest, has picked up a little more than he would like. Still, it's a clear morning, and they've climbed all the way up here. McGuire is eager to jump. But Fillipino continues to scan the valley below them, the Sacramento River rushing through the gorge.

Then a white parks-department SUV pulls up on an access road that winds alongside the river. Park Rangers are a notorious scourge of BASE jumpers, confiscating equipment and prosecuting for trespassing. Fillipino contemplates what would happen if the president of a BASE rig company were busted for an illegal jump. He foresees trouble with his bankers, he imagines the bad publicity his business would garner, and he says he's not going. There are some risks he is simply not willing to take.

MARK WELLMAN, 39
MOUNTAINEER
I don't remember much about the night I spent alone at Seven Gables in the John Muir Wilderness after falling 100 ft. I was hungry and cold. And I had no feeling in my legs. Since then I've been in this wheelchair, for 17 years. At first I lay in the hospital for seven months, feeling sorry for myself. I couldn't see anything positive. Then I began climbing again with customized gear. I'm the first disabled person to climb the 3,000-ft. face of Yosemite's El Capitan and the first paraplegic to ski across the Sierra Nevada.

WENDY FISHER, 28
EXTREME SKIER
I constantly have death in the back of my mind. We were filming this spring in the Chugach range in Alaska; I had just finished a run when I looked up and thought, "I'm dead." Avalanche. But I was really calm. I kept fighting. I tried to grab onto anything and cover my mouth. I finally stopped, 800 ft. from where the avalanche struck me. I was lucky nothing bad happened. But the film crew were all a little worked up from seeing me taken out. To chill out, they convinced me that the time was right to learn how to do a backflip on skis. So I did.

JONATHAN HOENIG, 23
OPTIONS TRADER
I grew up outside Chicago and was always interested in the Board of Trade. I'd watch the floor locals and decided futures are the real game. All these buy-and-hold guys--futures traders eat them for lunch. My addiction--options and futures--is in the nosebleed section of our Mount McKinley of money.

ALEXA CANADY, M.D., 48
NEUROSURGEON
If you dwell on the risk, it paralyzes your ability to act. Say a patient comes into the E.R. with an epidural hematoma, a blood clot on the outside of the brain. Often you have to operate without a picture. If you wait to know everything, you may make the perfect diagnosis--but the patient may be dead.

CAPTAIN PAT BROWN, 46
FIRE FIGHTER
I was in the Marines in Vietnam, and fire fighting is like war. If a life is in there, you go in, you get 'em out--even when it's black and smoky, your body's burning up and you're fighting the natural urge to run. The F.D.N.Y. trains you to be aggressive and hypervigilant, not to take stupid risks. We don't do this for sport or for thrills or money. You're risking your life to save somebody. That's what makes this job special. We take risks for a greater good.

JIM RIPPEY, 28
PRO SNOW-BOARDER
Every day I get to do something bigger and better than I've ever done. Like taking a trick and going an extra 15 ft. bigger. Of course I'm scared. I don't want to rag-doll and hurt myself--that's where I have to conquer my fear. And kids totally respond to that risk taking as part of the appeal. When you go out and try something that's a little bit sketchy, you feel great about yourself at the end of the day. Because if you're a pro snowboarder and you don't get hurt, then you're not trying hard enough. I've had two knee surgeries, my latest three months ago. Check out these scars. But I do what I do because I want to enjoy life to the max.

JIMMY VASSER, 33
RACE-CAR DRIVER
We don't get time-outs or halftime, so you've got to keep the level of concentration up. It's the most tiring aspect: how mentally tired you can get. I don't have any tricks on concentration--the car keeps you focused. At 230 m.p.h., a race car has your undivided attention. Instincts tell you when to back off. You take it to the edge, and you flirt with the edge. And the car will tell you. If you ignore it and try to take it to another level, that's when you're more likely to crash.

For Our Ancestors, TakingRisks Was a Good Bet
There are no fossil remains of Stone Age hang gliders or trading records from pre-Columbian stock exchanges, but risk-taking behavior is as old as man vs. sabertooth. Yet what compels modern adventurers to do such foolhardy things as jumping off dizzying cliffs or speculating in Internet stocks? Amateur analysts once psychobabbled about a death wish--an old Freudian cliche that said risk takers were really driven by subconscious feelings of guilt. Nowadays scientists say the real roots of such behavior are as likely to be found in the convoluted chemistry of the genes as in the id or the superego.

Long before genes were discovered, Darwin suspected that behavior was at least partly inherited. But only recently have scientists working in the burgeoning field of behavioral genetics begun to link specific stretches of DNA with personality traits. Studying the DNA of subjects who were identified as curious and excitable--two of the common characteristics of those who look for novelty and thrills--Israeli scientists found that these people had longer versions of a gene known as D4DR than did subjects who were typed as laid back and reflective. It quickly became known as the novelty- or thrill-seeking gene. Shortly thereafter, an American team found a second gene, on a different chromosome, that appears to regulate anxiety.

Scientists have yet to figure out how such genes might work, other than to control the flow of certain chemicals in the brain. The thrill-seeking gene, for example, seems to facilitate absorption by nerve cells of dopamine, one of the brain's chemical messengers and a key modulator of pleasure and emotion. Similarly, the anxiety gene appears to work by affecting levels of serotonin, a mood chemical linked with feelings of satisfaction.

But can such genes actually determine behavior? More important, if we happen to possess them in our chromosomes, will we inevitably grow into high rollers or high divers? Not at all, says molecular biologist Dean Hamer, a pioneer in the new field of molecular psychology. Unlike the genes that control physical traits--the color of our eyes, say, or the shape of our nose--such DNA merely predisposes us to certain behaviors. "Genes are not switches that say 'shy' or 'outgoing' or 'happy' or 'sad,'" he and co-author Peter Copeland write in their book Living with Our Genes. "Genes are simply chemicals that direct the combination of more chemicals." But some chemicals, like dopamine, can have far-flung effects. Because dopamine creates sensations of pleasure, he says, those who inherit the thrill-seeking gene might want to stimulate dopamine production by pushing the danger button, whether with edgy sports or long days of e-trading.

Some scientists, however, aren't at all convinced of the existence of single personality genes. At best, they believe, many different genes are involved in shaping our psychological strengths and weaknesses, to say nothing of the powerful role of the environment in molding character. Still, assuming a thrill-seeking gene exists, says behavioral geneticist Irving Gottesman of the University of Virginia, someone who under one set of circumstances became a serial killer might under different circumstances have become a war hero or an astronaut.

An even more fundamental question is, Why should a thrill-seeking gene arise in the first place? Evolutionary psychologists, who seek explanations for the origins of human idiosyncrasies in our remote past, have some intriguing theories. John Tooby, who with his wife Leda Cosmides runs the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, evokes the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors tens of thousands of years ago. "Your world was risky then," he says. "You were confronted with constant crises--maybe an ambush by a lion or by a rival group of people, perhaps a natural disaster like an earthquake or volcanic eruption. To survive, all your physical and mental faculties had to operate correctly."

Some hunter-gatherers were obviously better at coping with that peril-filled environment than others--most likely, says Tooby, because they were more accomplished risk takers. "They had to seek out situations where they could practice the split-second decisions that would enable their bodies and brain circuits to respond," says Tooby. "And so people were forced into gambling all the time." Those who were good at such risk taking were not only better at dodging hungry lions but also more likely to attract mates (Who could say no to such a Hemingway-esque suitor?) and pass their highly desirable survival traits on to their offspring.

That would be, ultimately, us. Which is why, Tooby suspects, "we all more or less have an appetite for pushing the envelope, just as we still relish those sugars and fats needed by our ancestors in times of famine, even if they now come in the form of unnecessary ice-cream sundaes." So while risk taking may seem foolhardy in a world where the only lion we face is likely to be caged, in some of us, at least, it could still tingle an essential brain circuit developed by our ancestors eons ago.

--WITH REPORTING BY WILLIAM DOWELL AND JULIE RAWE/NEW YORK, GREG FULTON/ATLANTA, MICHAEL KRANTZ/AUBURN, JANICE MALONEY/SAN FRANCISCO, ELAINE MARSHALL/LAKE TAHOE, TIMOTHY ROCHE/CHICAGO AND RICHARD WOODBURY/JACKSON HOLE