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Outside Magazine, June 2004
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1 2 3 4 

Crazy Mofos
Without a Barrel
Surviving Niagara? No sweat. The real challenge is figuring out what drove Kirk Jones over the edge.

By Jake Halpern

ON A CRISP AFTERNOON last October, Kirk Jones climbed over the steel safety rail at the top of Niagara Falls and contemplated the troubled direction of his life. From his perch, Jones had a clear view of the Niagara River, where a frothing torrent of Class VI rapids roiled for several hundred feet before reaching the precipice beyond. A heavy mist swirled around him, and a dull roar filled his ears.

"I just couldn't let go of that railing," he recalls. "As much as I wanted to, a part of me said, No. No human being has ever done this and lived."

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It was, oddly enough, a situation Jones had imagined many times before. "Ever since I was six, I've been fascinated by Niagara Falls," he says. "I wondered whether a human being could go over, without a barrel or a life jacket, and live. I've always thought there must be a way."

Jones had visited the falls a handful of times since childhood; now he was rapidly approaching middle age, without a job, a wife, or a home to call his own. As he puts it, "I was a 40-year-old man with no purpose." This grim realization prompted Jones to round up $300 and convince a friend, 52-year-old Bob Krueger, to make the five-hour drive from Detroit to Niagara Falls, New York. They arrived on October 19 and spent most of Kirk's money at local bars and a strip club before crashing at a cheap motel. The next day, as a skeptical Krueger stood by pointing a video camera, Jones vacillated above the water.

It was a stranger's voice that finally convinced him to go for it, that of an unidentified woman who happened to be taking in the view. "So, what are you going to do—jump?" she called out sarcastically.

"Yes, ma'am, I think I will," Jones replied. Right then, he let go of the railing, dashed down an embankment, and leaped into the current. Moments later, he flew feet first over the brink of Horseshoe Falls (the Canadian side of Niagara), plunging 170 feet into the water below.

"It felt like I was being swallowed by a living organism," says Jones. "I was flying straight down at a tremendous speed. The force was so great, I thought it would rip my head off.

"Then it became dark. My ears popped and I was trapped under 40 feet of water. The water was beating the living hell out of me, and I couldn't get to the surface. I even remember thinking, Well, Niagara, I think you've beaten me. Then I was pushed upward, and the sun hit my face."

The odds of surviving a trip over Niagara Falls are insanely slim. More than 3.6 million gallons of water pours over the falls every minute, flowing at an average rate of 100,000 cubic feet per second—five times the average flow of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Jones probably hit the Maid of the Mist pool, a 150-foot-deep cauldron of undercurrents and eddies, at 25 miles per hour.

"The fall alone could have killed him," says Paul Gromosiak, 61, a New York-based historian who's written eight books about the falls. "It's a small miracle that his body wasn't sucked under the water for several days. Many bodies are in pieces when authorities finally locate them."

Yet Jones emerged at the base of the falls with only two fractured ribs and a couple of bruised vertebrae. He managed to swim to the Canadian shore and stand up before the Niagara Parks Police arrived, demanding to know why he'd jumped. Jones explained his act as a dramatic remedy for boredom and chronic depression. It was a life-or-death test in which he tempted fate: If he died, his unhappiness would be over; if he lived, his life was bound to be charged with new meaning.


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JAKE HALPERN's first book, Braving Home, will come out in paperback in June 2004.
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