Heroes
Chuck
berry
His rocks are the cliffs he jumps from, his
rolls the moves he pulls in freefall. Meet the
laid-back BASE-jumper who’s done it all
Words: Robert Tighe Photography: Graeme Murray
“Madness, madness, they call it madness… Madness,
Name madness, I call it gladness. And if this is madness,
John ‘Chuck’ Berry man I know I’m filled with gladness.”
Born The cook at Joe’s Garage, a café in downtown
October 31, 1966, Queenstown, is frying mushrooms on the hotplate
New Zealand and singing along to a killer tune by ska legend
Turning Japanese Prince Buster. Later that afternoon, sitting
In 2006, Berry pulled under a tree at Chuck Berry’s house, supping on
off a wingsuit skydive
a Speight’s, it becomes apparent that the song
over the harbour in
Yokohama, Japan could be requisitioned as a theme tune most apt.
“I get called crazy a lot,” says Berry, “and
Pitch Perfect
Using a specially written off, because I’m known as ‘that crazy
adapted tent as guy’. The other thing that people say to me a lot
a parachute, Berry is, ‘You’re so lucky’. Luck has nothing to do with
became, in 2007, the it. All of the stuff I’m doing now, I designed it.
first person to ‘paratent’ I wanted it to happen. I made it happen.”
Luckiest Escape Berry’s design for life is simple: he lives for
On New Year’s Day adventure. The 43-year-old has worked as a
2007, Berry was doing
professional skydiver, heliski guide, motivational
aerobatics in a glider
when both wings broke speaker, juggler, freefall cameraman and video
off and the cockpit cage producer. He has made about 6000 skydives and
broke. He had to freefall hundreds of BASE-jumps, and last year led two
alongside the falling other world-leading BASE-jumpers to Terror Peak
aircraft, attached by at Milford Sound for the Red Bull Uncharted
a bridle, but managed
to clamber back in and
project. (BASE-jumpers leap, with parachute,
deploy his parachute from buildings, antennas, spans (bridges), and
earth (cliffs), hence their name.)
Berry has also climbed mountains in Nepal
and Tibet, cracked whips and unicycled. There
was the time he broke his neck in a motorcycle
accident and that other time he watched his friend
jump off a cliff and fall to his death. For the last two
years he’s been building a microlight plane that he
will use to explore the back country of the South
Island, his very own adventure playground.
The Palace is Berry’s name for the place where he
schemes and dreams. The rough-and-ready farmer’s
cottage, at the end of a shingle track a couple of
kilometres off the main road between Queenstown
and Wanaka, with spectacular views of the Crown
Ranges, looks like something out of Little House on
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the Prairie. It is the most unpalatial bachelor pad
imaginable. Rotting plywood does a poor imitation
of decking on the back porch. Inside the house,
faded photos, prints and postcards, invariably
of someone jumping off something or freefalling
through the air, decorate the walls along with maps
and inspirational quotes. A cast-iron stove with
missing doors makes a unique entertainment unit
in the living room. The carpet is threadbare. The
furniture is functional and the draughts must be
savage in winter. But, ah, the serenity…
“It’s brilliant, eh?” beams Berry, hands clasped
contentedly behind his head. “It is absolutely
beautiful. I can hear the birds singing all day long.
I can land a hang glider on the lawn. I’ve had mates
land helicopters in front of the house and I can
land a plane on the other side of those trees. It is
my haven, where I sit and think about things.”
The Palace is a 30-minute drive from
Queenstown, but before he moved to the country,
Berry lived the party lifestyle in town. His hard-
drinking days are responsible for his nickname.
After tackling the top shelf at a pub one night, he
then spent the whole night heaving his guts out
at a nearby party. John Berry, or JB as he was
known, became Chuck Berry.
“It wasn’t until I stopped spending time at
the pub and in cafes that I actually put time and
energy into doing the things I love to do. When
you are sitting in a cafe you hear people talking all
the time about what they want to do. You can talk
about shit as much as you like, but talk is just talk.
The difference between talking and doing is doing.”
Berry peppers his conversation with soundbites,
but his philosophising never comes across as
preachy. He seems genuinely bemused as to why
more people don’t live like he does.
The first book he read was a biography of
Evel Knievel. His favourite TV programme as
a kid, The Six Million Dollar Man, gave him his
first sight of a parachute jump and prompted him
Action hero: Skydiver,
BASE-jumper, juggler
and heliski guide are
just a few of the jobs
Chuck Berry has done
 Heroes
Uncharted territory: In his quest to explore new locations on the South Island,
Berry led a team of BASE-jumpers to Milford Sound for Red Bull Uncharted in 2009
to make a far-reaching to-do list that included rock
climbing, hang gliding and skydiving. His first
skydive came at the age of 17, and Berry has been
repeating that high now for a quarter of a century.
“I get a thrill being in high places because you
get a completely different view of the world when
you are looking down on it. From that perspective,
you realise how insignificant you are in the big
scheme of things, so I figured you might as well
be having fun while you’re here.”
Berry worked as an aircraft engineer after he
left school, but every weekend and every cent he
earned was spent skydiving. In 1994, after nine
years of the nine-to-five, he packed it in to move to
Queenstown. He earned a living taking tourists on
tandem skydives, but his real passion was for BASE-
jumping. It grew after his first jump, a 5am leap
from the Channel 6 television antenna in Milwaukee
during the 1990 World Freefall Convention.
“I couldn’t sleep for about three weeks afterwards.
Every time I tried to sleep I’d replay these images in
my head, of these girders flying past my legs. It was
outrageous. Every time I thought of it, my heart
would start racing and I’d get short of breath.”
As well as the huge adrenaline rush, BASE-
jumping also gave Berry a new outlook on life.
“When I discovered I was capable of something
as incredible as BASE-jumping, everything else
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in my life became simple and easy, a no-brainer.
I believe I can do anything. To be a BASE-jumper
you have to be an optimist, you must believe that
everything is going to be OK.”
Everything, of course, is not OK. The BASE
Fatality List, published on the insensitively titled
but BASE-community-sanctioned website www.
splatula.com, had 144 names as of the end of
January. Number 38 is Gary Dawson, who died
in December 1996 at Fox Glacier on the west coast
of the South Island. Berry was with him that day
and jumped first. He got into difficulty and crash-
landed on a ledge halfway down, dislocating his
shoulder. Dawson followed, his parachute snagging
on the same ledge, but he fell to his death. His
girlfriend was watching at the foot of the cliff.
It was a traumatic time for Berry, and he
needed to get away from Queenstown. He headed
north on his motorbike, to Nelson, to share his
grief with his closest skydiving friends. For the
first time in his life, instead of thrashing his bike
like a maniac, he made the conscious decision to
rein it in, to be safe. It almost cost him his life.
“I was going too slow. I used to spend
my time on my bike going as fast as I could:
180, 200, 220, 240kph. I was doing 140kph
when I came off, but that was like going
backwards compared to how I used to ride.”
 “If there’s no risk,
there’s no reward”
Chuck Berry
explains his
philosophy on life
Wing man: Berry became the first man to fly unassisted from coast to coast on the North
Island in 2003. The 6.5km journey from was Cape Maria Van Diemen to Tapotupotu Bay
As his bike was about to leave the road, Berry
managed to jump off and tumbled along a grassy
ditch, ending up in the middle of the road in his
socks, chunks of motorbike and dirt all over him.
A couple of gold miners came to his aid, and helped
him to Nelson. He woke up the next day with a sore
neck and, after a couple of days’ camping, he was
convinced there was something seriously wrong
with him. It took five days and a few doctors
before anyone took him seriously.
“They told me I had a muscle spasm in my neck
and to take it easy. They finally agreed to X-ray me,
and next thing I knew I was being rugby-tackled by
Additional Photography: Sol Vallis/red bull photofiles (1)
a team of people trying to put a neck brace on me.”
He spent three months flat on his back and ended
up with four pins and a plate in his neck. It meant
that Berry had to come up with a new career, because
jumping out of a plane every day as a tandem skydive
instructor was no longer an option for him.
“I think the motorbike accident was the catalyst
for thinking, ‘What else is there?’ That could have
been it for me after I broke my neck, but I decided
that I didn’t want a job to pay for my adventure.
I wanted my adventure to pay for itself.”
One of Berry’s self-financing operations is
motivational speaking.
“I get paid to show people my holiday snaps,”
he laughs. “But I also talk about the positive
side of risk. Most people only think about the
negative consequences, but there are a lot of
positives too. It could be a risk in business or
a risk in love. If there’s no risk, there’s no reward.”
The risk-versus-reward debate is an ongoing
one in BASE-jumping and similar pursuits, and
the death in March last year of Berry’s close
friend, extreme sports legend Shane McConkey,
brought the issue right to his door step. McConkey
died attempting a ski BASE-jump and, in an
interview he gave not long before his death,
he said that, in BASE-jumping, “You step off the
edge, and everything goes away.” Might Berry, as
happy and sorted as he appears, be looking for
the same nothingness?
“I don’t do what I do as an escape,” he insists,
“but special things happen when you’re focused
totally and utterly and completely on what you’re
doing. Life is pretty easy today and we don’t have
to fight for our survival, but when you intentionally
put yourself in a position where you have to perform
for the sake of your survival, when something is
truly at stake; that changes everything and puts
some excitement into your day.”
They may call it madness, but it has never
made so much sense.
Watch videos and read the latest news of Berry’s
remarkable feats at www.chuckberry.co.nz
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