Have you ever had a dream that you were flying? In your dream you are a falcon, say, gliding over the land, soaring on air currents, your wings scarcely moving. That would be magical, wouldn’t it?
Such dreams are said to represent freedom, that you are a breaker of rules that have been imposed on your life; or that you are a dreamer who doesn’t have your feet on the ground. Which might amount to the same thing. The dream of flight has always been elusively alluring. Or almost elusively. What would it be like to really fly?
Sequoia Schmidt might be the best person to ask. She flies. She does an insane thing called base jumping. She does parachuting. And a thing called wing-suiting, which might be the next best thing to really flying like a falcon. It also sounds terrifying.
Which might be a definition, or her definition, of freedom. It involves jumping out of a plane wearing a webbed suit. This is sometimes called a squirrel suit because when you are wearing it you look like a demented flying squirrel. She is learning to “twirl”, which is like dancing in the sky while looking like a demented, dancing, flying squirrel.
Here is what flying is like in a wing suit: “In my opinion, this is the absolute closest you’ll get to human flight; you actually have enough fabric to create a wing like a bird. You’re able to control your pattern of flight.
“It’s funny because most people assume you’re an adrenalin junkie who likes jumping out of planes. And it’s actually a really peaceful sensation.” If she says so.
Many people would call it – appropriately, given the squirrel-suit observation – plain nuts.
She might be a bit nuts. She wouldn’t mind that description. In her first book, Journey of Heart: A Sojourn to K2, published in 2015, she writes about what it might mean to be normal.
“The concept of normal was like a unicorn, beautiful in idea but never seen in reality.” I comment that she was never going to be whatever normal is. “I take that as a massive compliment,” she replies.
The 33-year-old New Zealander has lived in the US since she was 16. In 2013, her father, the mountain guide Marty Schmidt, and her 25-year-old brother, Denali, were killed in an avalanche at their camp on K2, the mountain that straddles Pakistan and China. K2 is the world’s second-highest mountain and the deadliest.
Journey of Heart chronicles her journey through Pakistan to the mountain that claimed their lives. It was a finalist in the 2016 International Book Awards.
Her second book, Changing Gears: Ups and Downs on the New Zealand Road, tells of her 28-day solo cycle across the North and South Islands in 2017.
She now runs her own LA-based independent publishing company, Di Angelo Publications. Its titles tend towards those pushing the limits – extreme sports, front-line survivors – and those chasing enlightenment or self-improvement. “Screw you, Amazon,” she writes on her Instagram page.
She is an adventurer. She’s visiting New Zealand to promote her latest book, Dream of Flight: From Fear to Fortitude.
She is the youngest person to have been accepted into Yale University’s Global Executive Leadership programme. She founded and runs the Denali Foundation, which provides free art supplies to “under-served” communities and offers residencies for artists in Nepal. It is a memorial to her brother, who, as well as being a mountaineer, was an artist.
She flips houses as a side hustle, just because she really doesn’t have enough going on. “[For] fun I jump off shit: bridges, mountains, buildings. It’s called base jumping.” Her definition of fun is not most people’s idea of fun. Her idea of relaxation is not most people’s idea of relaxation.
She could just go for a nice walk in the bush? “Absolutely. You could just go to a yoga class.”
She does go to a seven-day silent meditation retreat in a monastery in Thailand every year. Of course she does.
She is a chameleon. She grew up on the scruffier side of Hawke’s Bay. When, as a recalcitrant teen aged 16, she was sent to live with her grandfather in Texas, she quickly realised she had to adopt an American accent, chameleon-like. She is adaptable, to a point. She’s had to be.
Her childhood was fractured. Child, Youth and Family was involved. By the time she was 14, she had lived in four different countries and in 15 different cities.
She says she will always be a nomad. She spent some time in foster care before going to live with her father, whose job meant they were often on the road. Her father lived out of a van for many years.
Her mother, Joanne Schmidt-Patti, was a campaigner for indigenous communities in the US and Australia. “When I was a child, that wasn’t considered a norm.”
Her mother has been volunteering recently in Gaza. She is an advocate for Chinese medicine and “alternative therapies”.
Sequoia is named Sequoia, she thinks, because the name came to her mother in a dream. “They definitely went against the grain of society.”
Would she say her childhood was a happy one? “I guess it would depend on how you define happy.”
I asked because parts of her childhood were obviously not happy – and her relationship with her father was difficult. They had no contact for six years. They were nudging their way back to each other a few months before he died. She had rejected her family’s adventuring life. She smoked her head off and ate junk food.
Rebel, rebel
She was a wild child – she is still a wild child, at heart. She rebelled in the usual ways: fags, booze, drugs and boys. But, of course, if she was going to rebel, she was going to make a thorough job of it.
All of that physical moving about as a child, all of that emotional moving about as a child, all of her moving about emotionally as an adult. She doesn’t just have a nomadic spirit, she has a restless one. She says she will always be a New Zealander. Ha. She’s so LA.
“I know!” She writes about being a searcher. She is not sure what it is she is searching for. “Maybe I’m just searching to grow my soul … I believe that the search itself can be the ‘it’ that I am continually searching for.”
She tackles whatever she does as though standing on precipices. She is a natural leaper. She is also an accomplished stalker “in a polite way”. She stalks authors she wants to publish. She has a hit list on a whiteboard in her office. She tells me her husband, John McEvoy, says of their courtship that she hunted him. He didn’t stand a chance.
“I don’t really take my time with a lot of things in my life.” She asked him a series of questions: “How much money did he have in his bank account? How much debt did he have? Did he want children?” He does – she is “still negotiating” that one.
“I mean, like, for anybody who has known me for five minutes, you know, I’m not a coy person. I thought it was important to put all the cards on the table.”
She won’t tell me how much he, or she, have in their bank accounts. Okay, if his answer to how much debt he was in had been, say, a couple of million, would she still have wanted to marry him? “I think so. Definitely.”
In 2023, he underwent an operation for an aggressive brain tumour. He is now in remission. He has a tattoo on his wrist: “Be here now.”
Accidental adventurer
This might be an extreme form of rebellion: following the deaths of her father and brother, she trekked to the K2 base camp after coming across a shockingly insensitive Facebook post showed a skull that she thought might be her brother’s. She collected DNA. The skull did not belong to her brother but she had made the pilgrimage and along the way had become an adventurer.
And if she was going to take up adventuring, she was going to do that thoroughly, too. She has examined why this might be. She writes: “The way I see it, losing my father and brother was single-handedly the greatest tragedy of my life. But it also allowed me to become the person that I need to be. And because of that, it’s also one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.” Can she explain that?
“That particular line can get a very polarising reaction. And I think it’s very hard for people to understand how it can be tragic as well as a gift; to see those two sides of it. And if we’re talking about me living in two worlds in a physical sense, I would say that I attempt to live in those two worlds. And the way that I analyse situations as well, trying to look at them from multiple perspectives: if we take the purely physical element in a lineal vein, without my father and brother dying I would have never taken that trip to Pakistan.”
That trip to Pakistan. It’s complicated. Though she had rejected her father’s adventurous lifestyle, the deaths of half her family led to her embrace it. “That was the catalyst for me venturing into this space. And that’s both very sad and also a gift.”
The cover of Dream of Flight: From Fear to Fortitude shows her perched on the very edge of a vertigo-inducing cliff, about to leap. It is how she lives her life, on the edges of things.
When she was hunting her husband, who is also a base jumper – he runs a base-jumping school from their Idaho residence – she sent him a text, saying she thought base jumping might one day kill her. Of course, that wasn’t going to stop her. There is a terrifying list, called the BFL, which stands for the Base Fatality List, which is “in memory of our 509 fellow jumpers.” If that doesn’t put you off taking up what is called a sport, it would certainly give you pause. She doesn’t do pauses.
She says she lives in “two worlds”. She wears that weird squirrel suit, she rocks, somehow, Lycra, puffy jackets and trainers. She is not shy about posting hot pics of herself in bikinis on her social media pages. She can effortlessly pull off corporate chic – cool sunglasses and perky “old-lady-looking things”, boxy jackets. She paints her nails black or green or gold on glam occasions. She likes designer frocks as much as she likes Lycra and, annoyingly, manages to look equally chic in either get-up.
“Yeah, I think that’s an important element of life. I think that you should be able to live in multiple different worlds. I think it’s important to come out of your comfort zone and go into other worlds, in a way. Part of the human experience.”
It is hard to know whether to celebrate her embrace of freedom or to fear for her. She says: “We all do dangerous things.” No, I say, some of us actively avoid dangerous things. The wimp in me says: “Have you heard of Icarus?”
“Yes, I have,” she says. “I think I’m still a way from the sun.”
From outside my office window, as I write this, a golden falcon glides by and dips its wings. I swear this is true. The LA vibe thing must be catching.
Dream of Flight: From Fear to Fortitude by Sequoia Schmidt (Di Angelo Publications, $39.99) is out now.
