Confessions of an Amateur Tightrope Walker

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/confessions-of-an-amateur-tightrope-walker.html

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I taught myself to walk a tightrope in high heels after seeing a middle-aged woman do it in a circus tent on the banks of the Thames. She wore a black cocktail dress and silver stilettos. She had tattoo sleeves and the kind of confidence you expect in army generals. She carried no pole.

It was not in her interest to make it look easy, and she made it look the ideal amount of difficult. The tent was dark and two circus hands, to manufacture tension, had scattered broken glass on the ground below the wire. But I hadn’t come for the danger; I’d come to see something impossible performed with insouciance by a beautiful woman. She was the epitome of glamour. I was bewitched.

I set up a low practice wire in my study, in the upper floor of an Oxford college, and began a process of falling off it every day. Since I didn’t know anyone I could ask for advice, I proceeded by trial and ungainly error. After three months I discovered it worked best if I rested very little weight on the heel, walking more on tiptoe than on the shoes themselves. Now I can walk in stilettos quite steadily; I can walk and talk at the same time.

I am sometimes asked, “Is it useful for anything?” It’s not, of course. It’s not even particularly good exercise. And in a world that so frequently reneges on its promises, the promise of gravity is constant. But for almost as long as there has been gravity, there has been the temptation to try, just for a moment, to get the better of it.

Charles Blondin, the greatest tightrope walker the world has ever seen, was born Jean-François Gravelet in France in 1824 and nicknamed “Blondin” for his fair hair. Blondin had the kind of extravagant courage that I have never come across in anyone I’ve met in life, but which I imagine might exist in free climbers and female presidential candidates. He began training himself at the age of 4, using his father’s fishing rod as a pole. At 35 he became the first person to cross the gorge below Niagara Falls, on a rope nearly a third of a mile long. He crossed the gorge 17 times, occasionally clad in pink tights.

Blondin had flair. He crossed blindfolded, he crossed on stilts and he crossed with his manager on his back. Once he carried a stove, stopped at the midpoint and cooked himself an omelette. (There is such an intricate braggadocio in that. It would have been so much simpler to have just fried an egg.)

The only woman who ever tried to cross the gorge at Niagara Falls was Maria Spelterini, an Italian, who was only 23 when she first walked it — in 1876, about 20 years before the authorities imposed a ban on all attempts. She had the grace of a dancer, it was said, and she was famous for her theatrical costumes and — journalistic values being constant — her bosom. She crossed blindfolded, and then with her ankles and wrists manacled. Once, she shuffled across with her feet strapped inside peach baskets. She made the rest of the world look stay-at-home and ungainly.

Today there is Aisikaier Wubulikaisimu, a Uighur who expresses through his performances the resilience of his people, one of China’s most marginalized ethnic groups. In July 2012, Wubulikaisimu fell while he was wire walking backward and blindfolded over a ravine, on a baking-hot day. He was caught by a tree, and, four days later, was on the wire again. A year later he set a world record for the fastest wire walk, traversing a 60-foot wire strung between two hot air balloons in 38.35 seconds. He’s still wire walking today.

For most of us, the James Marsh film “Man on Wire” is the closest we’ll come to saluting the world with our feet. When Philippe Petit walked the wire between the Twin Towers in 1974 he stopped halfway and, with 1,350 feet of nothing between him and the New York pavement, he knelt, balanced his pole on the wire, and dangled one leg. With his free hand he saluted the birds. The thought of that salute still makes me shake.

“It cannot be done all at once,” Petit writes in his memoir, “To Reach the Clouds.” “To overpower vertigo — the keeper of the abyss — one must tame it, cautiously.”

These recklessly, riotously brave people do us all a service: There is so much optimism and hope in their daring. They show us that, with practice, even the most improbable things become possible. And although I wouldn’t stake my life on my ability to hold steady under pressure (also, I have untrustworthy ankles), I’m grateful to those who do for reminding me that we humans have something vertiginous and tenacious in our blood.

These days I’m learning to walk the wire on point, which is a slower process than learning to do it in high heels. Falling off, in the restrictive soles of ballet shoes, is more painful than is ideal. But on the days it goes well, it feels like pulling off a quiet and unlikely heist.