Logging a Life: Remembering Eric “tonto” Stephenson, D515
3 March 1962 – 28 October 2007
By Taya Weiss D27874

Soon after we first met in 2002, Eric explained that he had four personalities. I must have really liked him, because it seemed reasonable that he had named them all as well: tonto was the skydiver. Shadrack was friendly and social. Dominic was the muscle, the one who used to carry the gun but was now on permanent holiday in the Himalayas finding himself. Eric was the man I fell in love with and the adoring father of his two daughters, Caleigh and Shanna. When he asked me to marry him, hanging off the top of a multi-pitch climb in Harrismith at Easter four years later, I said yes to all of them.

Eric touched many people’s lives on his journey, and skydiving was the path that led him to those he felt he was meant to teach and learn from. I get messages from people all over the world who learned from him, miss him, and wonder how to cope with the empty space where he used to be, in the sport of skydiving and the broader universe.

He taught a fire safety course for crèche teachers in Kliptown.
Not many people knew this side of him.

In trying to answer them, and to soothe the longing that still tears at my heart, I go back to the man who was, above all, my best friend. On October 23rd, 2007, he wrote to me about Jabu (a packer at JSC): “Hi Love, You probably heard that Jabu's wife was killed in a Taxi accident on Saturday. I deposited R500 from the 2 of us into the JSC funeral account. I'll give him a little cash next time I see him too. I'm always amazed at how few people realise what a meaningful contribution they make to our sport. Death visits all of us. We're all equal in the end. I love you. t”. He gave of himself generously to those he cared for and to those who needed him the most, valuing relationships over material things right up until the very end.

Few, if any, skydivers at Eric’s level of the sport keep a logbook as diligently as he did. He logged love, relationships, Formula 1 seasons, and bottles of wine in the same place he kept a record of his jumps. When he made a small but fatal swooping mistake five days after writing his eloquent last lines on death, there were only four jumps missing. It was a heavy but loving task to fill them in, and I did. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

This is part of his story, and the path we walked together.

Jump 1
2 February 1985
Location: Citrusdal
Aircraft: Cessna 206
Type Jump: Static Line
Altitude: 2500
Target Dist: ZAP
Ground wind: 8
Main Chute: L9
Aux. Chute: 26 Lopo
Air work: Static Line
Parachutist or Pilot’s Signature: A. Scalabrino D278
Remarks: “Look up more and count. Welcome to the sky!”
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Jump 140

Date: 14 February 1987
Location: Dorset, England
Aircraft: C172
Type Jump: Hop & Pop
Altitude: 5500
Delay: 20 seconds
Target Dist.: 15
Sur. Wind: 15
Main Chute Type: Unit One!
Aux. Chute: Lopo 26
Air Work: No one keen for RW, pissed off
Parachutist or Pilot’s Signature: Billy Goat Gruff
Remarks: “Exit ok, bad spot, spiralled and had canopy collapse. Shattered femur.”

________________________________________________

Jump 1000
Date: 12 April 1992
Location: Perris Valley
Aircraft: Twin Otter
Type Jump: 10 way
Altitude: 12500
Delay: 65 seconds
Target Dist: 16:10
Sur. Wind: 3-5
Main Chute Type: Peregrine
Aux. Chute: 150R
Remarks: “One Thousand Dives. Wow.”
________________________________________________

Jump 2000
Date: 1 April 1995
Location: Carletonville
Aircraft: C-182
Equipment: AR-7
Altitude: 6000
Delay: 5 seconds
“Team dive with Ricky and Tony. Ricky in good Base-pin. Tony very slow and not very aware on the catch. Cam got me a killer pic!!!”
________________________________________________

Jump 3000
Date: 11 March 2000
Location: JSC
Aircraft: C-206
Equipment: Jonathan
Altitude: 10000
Delay: 51 seconds
“AFF LVI with Marius. Exciting stuff!!”
________________________________________________

Jump 3322

Date: 13 January 2002
Location: JSC
Aircraft: C-210
Equipment: Tandem
Altitude: 10000
Delay: 30 seconds
“Tandem with Caleigh. Very brave girl!! Skydiver Cay!”

Eric loved his daughters with everything he had to give.
Sharing the sky with his family – Caleigh twice; Shanna when she turned 9;
and me – was like getting to heaven early.
________________________________________________

Jump 3336

Date: 20 January 2002
Location: JSC
Aircraft: C-210
Equipment: Jonathan
Altitude: 10000
Delay: 51 seconds
AFF L5R [repeat] with Anne. No release.

Less than a week after this jump, I met Eric. I had just arrived in Johannesburg, a refugee from my Harvard-graduate life San Francisco, looking to use my education to make the world a better place. I had 138 skydives. He arrived on a street corner in Yeoville at dawn to give an American stranger a lift to the dropzone after reading about my move to South Africa on dropzone.com. I was sitting outside in the gray morning stillness with my gear bag when he pulled up in his Mazda Sting and got out. Caleigh and Shanna were asleep in the back seat; I was reassured that he wasn’t an axe murderer. Anyone actually willing to drive into Yeoville in January 2002, with its frequent shootings, carjackings, and thriving drug scene, might have been. I was surviving there for the affordable rent.

We drove on the M1 South passing the city on the left as the sun rose. Mist hung over the downtown skyline, the kids slept quietly in the back, and we started a conversation that lasted for the five years and eight months we shared. That morning, we talked about apartheid, about war, social justice, truth and reconciliation. He was not your average white South African male. Eric cared about these things, and his place in his country’s history, more than tonto or Shadrack would ever let on.

My first jump in Africa was a two-way with Clyde Holland out of the C-210 at JSC. It was the only jump I did that weekend and I landed off. Clyde came to pick me up after a bit of a hike, and I got plenty of funny comments about looking out for the lions in the veldt. I was still quite American then, with an obviousness that faded as South Africa became home. Eric looked on with amusement.
________________________________________________

Jump 3345

Date: 2 February 2002
Location: JSC
Aircraft: C-210
Equipment: Jonathan
Altitude: 10000
Delay: 51 seconds
“Freefly with Taya. Nice head-down launch. Answer to [a question he asked himself on jump] 3075: Not Long.”

On the way up to altitude on our first two-way jump, Eric sat behind me. Around 5000 feet he reached over and ran his finger lightly along the edge of my right ear; it was an odd thing to do but very tender, and we joked about it for years afterwards. He said the light was shining through my ear and he wasn’t thinking straight. We exited head-down and he grinned at me the whole way.

At the end of that weekend I turned 25. We had dinner at Café Espresso in Parkhurst (two plates of cubed fillet, rare, candlelight). We didn’t know each other that well, but for some reason the conversation felt intimate. We talked about writing letters to dead people, something we discovered we both did. He told me about being at Perris when the Otter crashed in 1992. I told him about my childhood friend who died of cancer when I was 12. More than anyone I had ever met, he embraced the impermanence of time instead of running from it. I saw someone who had seen as much, if not more, death than I had, and was still in love with life.
________________________________________________

Jumps 3360 and 3362

Date: 10 February 2002
Location: JSC
Aircraft: C-210
Equipment: Jonathan
Altitude: 10000
Delay: 46 seconds each
“Fun sit with Taya. Really very nice, but I’m still sitting on my back.” Then, “Sit headown with Taya. Hard! But went onto my head at the end. Pretty girl.” And above both entries, “Taya Begins”.

He invited me over for dinner on Valentine’s Day.

We fell in love.
________________________________________________

Jump 3516

Date: 8 June 2002
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Porter
Equipment: Jonathan
Altitude: 11000
Delay: 57 seconds
“AFF Level I with Elna. Very slow start.”

Elna (Elle to her friends), despite the slow start at AFF, quickly became my best friend in Joburg. She had a beautiful house in Melville, a deck of Tarot cards, two dogs that she only spoke to in Afrikaans, and a refrigerator magnet that said, “Faith is the daring of the soul to go further than it can see.” She loved to cook dinner, even if it was just Woolie’s lasagne, and was looking for a deeper purpose to her life. She also understood why and how I loved Eric, a man 15 years older than me, at a time when some were sceptical that we could build something lasting. She crawled right into my heart and stayed there.
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Jumps 3885 and 3886

Date: 22 June 2003
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Porter
Equipment: Stiletto
Altitude: 11000
Delay: 52 seconds each
Eric did two AFF dives that day with someone else, then wrote: “ELLE GOES IN”.

He was the Chief Instructor when the fatality at JSC occurred. Elle had 66 jumps that Sunday afternoon and no AAD or RSL; she cut away and then struggled with her reserve handle, pulling it eventually but too late. He walked out to the site of impact alone, and I saw him stand there from a distance. He looked down, and then he sank behind the high grass. I watched him and then I couldn’t let him be alone, so I started walking out across the dirt road. Deon came too.

What I witnessed was the naked truth of human fragility, and the truth of that particular time and place belongs only to the three of us who were there. Late afternoon sun glowed through opaque clouds on the horizon. The wind had died and the air was still. The ground was as solid as it has always been: without remorse, uncaring, beyond moralizing.

Losing Elle forced us to consider why we jumped, and how to love each other in a sport where any day could end this way. We talked about what it meant. We held each other. He got out Elle’s written A-license test later that week – he saved all of his students’ tests and I still have this one. She had done well. Still, he was tortured by his inability to have changed the outcome. Every day we took another step towards acceptance, slowly, out of necessity, and together. We loved each other. We were still here. The course of someone’s life is beyond any human understanding or control.
________________________________________________

Jump 3946

Date: 13 September 2003
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Porter
Equipment: Stiletto
Altitude: 11000
Delay: 48 seconds
“Sitfly with Taya! Very nice! My love can catch me!”

Within a few months we were smiling again in the sky.
________________________________________________

Jump 4000

Date: 16 November 2003
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Porter
Equipment: Heatwave
Altitude: 11000
Delay: 60 seconds
“Birdman Rodeo dive with Taya! Cool! Busy on the exit, then perfect heading control. Good turn after she left.”
________________________________________________

Jump 4316

Date: 14 August 2004
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Porter
Equipment: Hornet
Altitude: 11000
Delay: 60 seconds
“Taya’s 1st Birdman dive!”

A year later in 2004, I did my first wingsuit jump (he had 39 by then, according to his logbook)
and our flocking adventures began.
________________________________________________

Jump 4453

Date: 30 December 2004
Location: Eloy, AZ
Aircraft: King Air
Altitude: 20600
Equipment: Safire 119
Delay: 234 seconds
“High altitude dive with Taya – wings. 12k: 91 – 9k: 76 – 6k:64 – 3k: 53. Good speed – lost T on bottom half.”

We went to Eloy and Perris at the end of 2004 to get our Birdman Instructor Ratings.
He said this jump made him feel like he was truly flying for the first time.
I was hypoxic and didn’t have his energy at the end, but I loved the glow he had for the rest of the week.
________________________________________________

Jump 5000

Date: 31 October 2006
Location: Cross Keys, NJ
Aircraft: PAC 750XL
Altitude: 13000
Equipment: Safire
Delay: 97 seconds
“Very nice to share.”

Soon after I went back to the US for the academic year to start my Master’s degree at Princeton University, Eric came to visit. It had only been a few months, but it felt like an eternity. Getting into the sky together was like stumbling into a cold lake after a Saharan marathon. It was getting cold on the east coast towards winter time, and it was a Tuesday so there weren’t many people at the DZ, but we had a perfect day. I wrote next to his logbook entry: “5000 over New Jersey. I’m so proud of you. I love your smile in the sky. Thank you for sharing this special jump with me, and a neighbouring Boeing! LOVE. –T BMI SA003”.

That’s right- if you signed his logbook, you had to put a license or instructional rating of some kind. Even after he had 5000 jumps.
________________________________________________

Jump 5032

Date: 9 December 2006
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Balloon!
Altitude: 5400
Equipment: Safire
Delay: 29 seconds
“Very windy. Dragged on take-off: Fast climb to altitude, at 600fpm. Felt heart beating after exit. Good flight. Landed at the Zenex 7km away, Johan broke fib. Dian hooked in at the pond L”

We spent what seemed like endless time after Dian’s accident following his progress, hoping and praying that he would be okay. And…

He was.
________________________________________________

Jump 5038

Date: 30 December 2006
Location: Citrusdal
Aircraft: Porter
Altitude: 12400
Equipment: Safire
Delay: 107 seconds
“Last dive at Citrusdal. Beautiful. 2 way wingsuit with Sam (980). Very cool day.”

Saying goodbye to the place where he did his first jump was bittersweet; as usual, he was very practical about impermanence, but it was important to be there at the end.
________________________________________________

Jump 5209

Date: 16 June 2007
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Porter
Altitude: 10700
Equipment: Velo 84
Delay: 40 seconds
“Tandem with Shanna for her 9th birthday. Wonderful!”

I was in Belgium on Shanna’s birthday, so we exchanged emails and pictures on the 17th and 18th of June. I wrote:

“I loved my CRW jump. I’ve always loved it I think--but it's a lot easier with 4kg of weight and a 126 than under the 143 with twenty weight belts!! I was still too light to do a proper dock so there was some serious human/canopy thrashing about-type interaction. Which of course I enjoyed. You taught me so much about being brave. I missed you this weekend, and I miss you now. The pics of Shanna’s dive are amazing. There is so much love in all of them, and so much sharing of joy--I had to fight back some tears. We get these moments of extreme humanity, and so often for us they happen in the sky. Being able to truly share that with your daughter is just beautiful. She clearly got it, with her eyes and her heart wide open. That look in the door as she sees open door, blue sky for the first time--powerful stuff. I love you. -T”

He wrote back:

“Ah, my love, I never taught you anything about being brave. I think I was just there some of the time when you discovered it within yourself. Remember the 1st dive we did at Eloy and how nervous I was? You helped me through that. We can help each other be brave. I called Shanna today and sang her happy birthday and she cried. I think she has an adrenaline hangover. I know she’ll get over it though, and the experience was an overwhelmingly positive one. The vibe on the ground after the landing was amazing… I do wish you could have been there though, but I have that feeling whenever I experience anything really special. Somehow, I feel if it were shared with you, it would be even MORE special. I love you. I’ll be home all night, so if you get a chance to Skype me, I'll be there. t”.
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Jump 5283

Date: 6 July 2007
Location: Cochstedt
Aircraft: AN2
Equipment: Safire
Altitude: 8000
Delay: 64 seconds
He was too busy for eloquence during our trip to Germany, so he let me write this one: “I love you. Thanks for entangling with me on the ground, in that wind, and in life! Yours always. –T D27874”.

The winds were howling by the time we got out after a half-hour climb to 8000 feet for a wingsuit jump. We both landed backwards. I was getting dragged with my eye on my cutaway handle, desperately trying to reel in my break line. He came in right next to me, both of us laughing. Our canopies entangled on the ground and collapsed: no cutaways necessary. It was our last two-way.

________________________________________________

Jump 5312 and 5313

Date: Saturday, 27 October 2008
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Porter
Equipment: Safire
Altitude: 11000
Delay: 88 seconds
Wingsuit jumps with Matteo, testing student Firebirds. Matteo told me, and I wrote in Eric’s logbook, “It was one of my proudest days. I got to jump with him as a mentor and teacher, but I got to jump with him as a friend and an equal. I will never forget the happiness those jumps brought me.”
________________________________________________

Jump 5314

Date: Sunday, 28 October 2008
Location: JSC
Aircraft: Porter
Equipment: Velo
Altitude: 11000
Delay: 48 seconds

AFF L5 with Agnieszka. Eric begins the Long Flight.
________________________________________________

Jump ASH DIVE

Date: 28 June 2008
Location: JSC
Aircraft: PAC 750XL
Equipment: Safire 99
Altitude: 11500
Delay: 96 seconds
“2 way Taya and tonto. You were my soulmate and best friend, life partner, fiancé, my heart. This last time, soft landings for you. You said: ‘In the end, the feeling I’m left with is only love. Love for you. Love for us. Love for the world that streams below us as we fly together.’ (June 2007). Fly on, my love. I will always love you. Till next time. Your -T D27874”.

On the eight month anniversary of his death, Eric’s mother Edith and I went to JSC with a small portion of his ashes. Familiar faces on a sunny day: Charis, Stuart, Ma, the riggers, DJ Ed, PJ, Pears, Pottie, Marius, Dian. I saw more than one friend whose survival after skydiving accidents we had prayed for together, and who had made it back to the dropzone in one piece. It was so hard to know that all I had left was what I had to let go.

Edith is one of the strongest women in the history of the world. She gave me a picture of Eric as a young boy to carry with me in my wingsuit pocket. She put her hands on my shoulders and her forehead against mine (I was thinking: just like he used to do) and she said, “He was my son. He came from my womb. His life started with me, and it ends with you.” I missed Caleigh and Shanna. My heart shattered from missing them, as it often does now, and I did what I have to: sweep up the pieces and hope for a day when they come looking for me.

I walked to the plane with a red pouch strapped to my left wrist. I sat at the back of the PAC with Raymond in front of me, and I closed my eyes, and breathed, and focused. I felt Eric’s presence. I was in the Porter. He was smiling, with a student. He was kissing me in the door. I was in the AN2 and our eyes were closed, curtains on the plane windows. He laughed when I kissed the pilot’s hand before exit. I saw him behind my closed eyes. I felt him.

Tears streamed down my face, and Raymond took my hand, and prayed. Millions of years later, we got to altitude.

After everyone else was out, I flew. The air felt dense, and everything was slow. He was off my left wingtip, he was underneath me, he was the air and the sky and my beating heart and the planet below me.

I pulled, open above 5000. I looked up at the sky and down at JSC. Home. I opened up the pouch, took out the plastic bag, and said goodbye. He – pieces of him – streamed out of the bag to my left side. Going home, softly. A last jump, a last chance to fly. He went back to where we all come from. Raymond flew on my right, an honour guard. I landed softly in the place where he had left us. I felt like I was made out of lead: very, very heavy. Edith and Ma held me as I sobbed. The sun bright, the earth red, the breeze soft, the sky brilliant blue, the birds alive, the grass still growing. Everything in vivid colour. Everything heavy and bright, almost bleeding with the memory of him. 

The Red Hot Chili Peppers were on the speakers as I walked in to the clubhouse. His favourite band. I put down my kit. Slowly, the world started turning again, and I got lighter.

I ate a banana, got packed up, gave packer Justice a hug, and then I did what felt right.

I kitted up for the next jump. 

-T D2787