Dean Potter’s extreme exploits showed us the beauty of life on the edge

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/19/dean-potter-extreme-beauty-died-yosemite

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From time to time over the last four years, I’ve tapped Dean Potter’s name into Google just to check that he was still alive. On Monday, the terrible news broke that he was not. I spent a remarkable day with Potter in Yosemite in the spring of 2011, part of the research for a book I was writing about what it means to be brave. And Dean was brave, I was in no doubt about that.

Related: In pictures: Dean Potter in Channel 4's The Sky Walker

Famous for his exploits in some of the toughest vertical landscapes in the natural world – ropeless ascents of sheer rock faces, slacklining across canyons, base jumping from unthinkable heights – this was a man with a formidable reputation as one of the most audacious daredevils of his generation. His stunts – although, as I would discover, Dean hated them to be called that – were highly marketable. It’s certainly not hard to find videos of him in apparently thrill-seeking mode, all whoops to the camera. Maybe that is the reputation that will survive him, but that would be wrong.

Over the course of the day we spent together, the image of the daredevil, crazed adrenaline junkie with a death wish was the very one Dean went out of his way to dispel. Looking back, I guess that was the reason he agreed to talk to me in the first place. Sitting in one of his favourite places, a broad rock platform at the foot of El Capitan, Dean said: “It’s funny because it all started with a boy that didn’t quite fit in. I had trouble focusing as a child and I still sort of do, but when you climb and you’re going to die if you fall, you have 100% focus. That’s a rarity in life and a gift to have something that brings you that clarity.”

The pursuit of clarity of mind, he told me again and again, was his raison d’etre. He described how adrenaline didn’t make him “rush”, so much as feel “hyper-alert”, the gateway to a state of mind that he believed was meaningful in and of itself.

“I can calm myself by an intense will,” he said, “and also by the simple ability to focus in the most dangerous situation on breath and nothing else. And then you’re not scared any more. You perceive life in slow motion, that’s the most beautiful part, that heightened awareness. There are a few ways you can get that feeling, but the easiest way is to do something with a death consequence.” And he shrugged.

He talked of 'rationing' his risks, as a way to play and win the odds, while continuing to live this life he’d chosen

I asked whether the point was that life was at its sweetest when it hung in the balance, but he said, “No. That’s a little too complicated. It’s that if you mess up, you die – you focus. It’s that simple. And this lifestyle that’s on the edge, it makes me live well.”

In latter years, Potter’s almost shamanic philosophy homed in on a dream of flight that he said had preoccupied him since childhood. To you and I, it’s called base jumping, and, in truth, even with the wingsuit that Potter favoured, it’s as much about falling as it is about flying. But to Dean even the term base jumping was one he disliked, instead referring to it as “human body flying”, saying “the desire for human flight goes back forever and for me, it’s such a metaphor for freedom.”

It would be tempting to think that Potter was in denial about how badly wrong this could go, but he told me how when his friend and pioneering base jumper Dan Osman had fallen and died in Yosemite in 1998, it had been he who’d gone to find the body and sit with it until it could be recovered by the park authorities. All night he sat there. “I idolised the guy and there he was, dead among the boulders… no matter how strong you are, you can die.”

The problem, according to Dean, was that Osman had “needed it” too much and Dean swore he would never let himself make that mistake, never “need it” like that. He talked of “rationing” his risks, as a way to play and win the odds, while continuing to live this life he’d chosen with all its moments of euphoric enlightenment.

Towards the end of the afternoon, as the sun began to turn the grey cliffs of Yosemite amber, I’d asked Dean if he thought something might happen to him too.

“I hope not,” he replied. “I know I’m just as mortal as everybody else and I think about that quite a bit, but I really do feel like everyone lives with this – they’re just not aware of it. They walk down into the traffic, all the different ways where you could die suddenly or make a mistake. Often it’s not a physical thing, it’s just a bad decision that messes up your life. And we all live with that – mine is just very easy to see.”

As the climbing world mourns one of its brightest and bravest, it seems that this may be a fitting epitaph, not to a daredevil for whom life was cheap, but to one who had decided what, for him, made life worth living and then lived it. And there’s a lesson in that for us all.