There is only one photo, Granosa, Malferma, daughter of another time. High altitude roller, stuff for hands that don’t tremble. You can see the shadow of a man, alone, standing on the top of the world. Shortly after, the void. And then he who flies. Yes, literally: Jean-Marc Boivin throws down from Everestin paragliding, with the air that looks around and the heart beating at the rhythm of a sequence of drums.
It wasn’t a madman, Boivin. Or rather: not only. It was one of those for which normality becomes a prison: it is better to affect the comfort zone, run all the risks that the blood pumped into the veins claims, even when they can get out of human transition, derail in the possibility of dying. An alchemist of verticality Jean Marc. A poet of extreme companies, one of those who go where nobody dares to think, let alone walk. Boivin, born in ’51, French of Digionein his own way the grammar of extreme companies on the most impervious mountain crests. Climber, extreme skier, speleologist, jumper base, paratrooper, and above all, visionary.
The September 26, 1988at an altitude of 8,848 meters, while the rest of the world Dream the Everest With his gaze, he is right at the top. Up there, at the top, he certainly did not go to plant a flag. Climb the most iconic of the mountains, for Boivin, is not enough. He intends to fly down. On the shoulders – during a climbing climb damn demanding – he brought to cumbersome burden. A paragliding: 6 kilos of canvas and threads, folded in the backpack, like a secret. His drawing is lucid, and follows with entire preparation months. Jean Marc exercised himself everywhere, in the world, but throwing himself from Mount Everest is absolutely another thing.
However, he does not let himself be dissuaded by those who tell him that the company risks being fatal. Just a stronger current than expected or a movement that does not come as you have planned it, to go shattering. Boivin shrugs. Starts from the top and lets herself fall, gliding for over 3,000 meters up to Campo II, In less than 12 minutes. The highest and most crazy flight ever attempted by a human being. Low visibility and surgical maneuvers to get by. Jean Marc survives. It reaches the ground intact.
There was a lot of preparation, but nothing guaranteed. The rarefied air, the unpredictable winds, the slightest possibility of error. A wrong knot was enough, a gauge lops, and the story ended up in tragedy. Instead it was epic. “I dreamed of getting out of every mountain flying,” he writes later. The Everest was only the peak – in every sense – of a path that began as a boy, when he climbed on the limestone walls of Burgundy imagining distant worlds.
Because Boivin did not just go up. He had to amaze. Even before the “Enchaînements” became fashion among the French mountaineers, he concatenated walls in series with skis, paragliding and deltaplano. In 1986 he completed the north walls of Aiguille Verte, Droites, Courtes and Grandes Jorasses in one day: 17 hours of mountaineering, flights and madness. Nobody had ever tried. Nobody, except him.
And then again: The descent into Deltaplano from K2 In 1979, the top of Gasherbrum II in ’81, and pioneering flights from the Alps, where each top was a trampoline. He had a gift: reading the mountain not as an obstacle, but as an invitation. Where the others saw a wall, he saw a take -off. He was also a lover of beauty. He wrote, filmed, documented everything. It was not trivial narcissism. Rather, it was thirsty to leave trace, to inspire. And he succeeded. Even today, thirty -five years after the flight from Everest, nobody forgot that crazy French who flew where no one had ever dared.
He died two years laterin 1990, attempting a jumping base from the top of the jump Ángel, in Venezuela. The parachute did not open well. The last flight was also the last breath.
But perhaps, for someone like him, there was no other exit. Normal men go downstream. Special ones go further. “I want to live, to live to die,” he said. Boivin did not look for glory, but freedom. And he found it in the purest way there is: flying.