by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I spent the evening “in”
watching a peculiar spectacle on TV: Nik Wallenda’s tightrope walk across
Niagara Falls. I had seen this promoted the night before on ABC-TV’s Nightline program, in which it followed a story about silly
stunts young people are involved in — including rolling themselves off rooftops
in plastic trash barrels, “car surfing” (standing on top of a car and trying to
hold on while the car is driven around ordinary streets), the “cinnamon
challenge” (swallowing a spoonful of cinnamon and trying to hold it in your
mouth for 60 seconds — apparently almost nobody can do it and what usually
happens is you end up coughing up a great cloud of cinnamon dust) and other
idiotic stunts that are becoming more popular because their practitioners have
themselves filmed and the resulting videos are posted on the Internet, where
other people can learn about these potentially dangerous pastimes and try them
out themselves. (One teenage woman was shown with her head encased in a bizarre
white helmet which she apparently has to wear 24/7 because she took a fall
while “car surfing” and great chunks of her skull simply broke off; the purpose
of the headdress is to hold the artificial replacement pieces in place until
the whole thing heals.) It was hard to tell from the Nightline show why the teenagers who shoot each other doing
these preposterous stunts deserved opprobrium for their idiocy while Nik
Wallenda deserved acknowledgment as a hero for something even crazier — walking
across Niagara Falls on a tightrope, which according to the Nightline program he would be the first to do.
Not so, said
Charles: a Frenchman named Charles Blondin (his true name was Jean-François
Gravelet, and he was mentioned by that name in the Los
Angeles Times article announcing that
Wallenda was going to do this, which Charles said would be like writing about
Harry Houdini but using only his given
name, Erich Weiss) had done a walk across Niagara Falls — indeed, he’d done it
so many times it practically became a regular entertainment at the site.
According to Blondin’s Wikipedia page, “He especially owed his celebrity and
fortune to his idea of crossing the Niagara Falls
gorge on a tightrope, 1100 feet (335 m) long, 3¼ inches in diameter, 160
feet (50 m) above the water. This he accomplished, first on 30 June 1859,
a number of times, always with different theatric variations: blindfolded, in a
sack, trundling a wheelbarrow, on stilts, carrying a man (his manager, Harry
Colcord) on his back, sitting down midway while he cooked and ate an omelet and
standing on a chair with only one chair leg on the rope.” But in 1896 both the
U.S. and Canadian governments passed laws forbidding any more daredevil
tightrope walks across the falls, and Wallenda had to spend three years just
lobbying both governments either to repeal the laws or at least to set them
aside for him. (It wasn’t clear which.)
ABC inflated this stunt to a three-hour
program (the actual walk took just a shade over 25 minutes) including footage
from famous daredevil stunts throughout history (or at least ones for which
film existed, which basically meant everything from Evel Knievel on — the
rocket on which Knievel tried to leap the Snake River Gorge was shown, though
as I recall the stunt was a fizzle: Knievel neither made it nor died, and quite
frankly those were set up in the pre-event publicity as the only two
dramatically acceptable outcomes; instead he parachuted into the gorge, rather
anticlimactically) and backstory on the Wallenda family, which apparently has
been doing this sort of thing for seven generations (plus another one to come:
Nik Wallenda met his wife while she was performing as an acrobat at the same
circus that employed him, and they have two kids and both of them are doing practice tightrope walks in their
backyard), including Nik’s legendary grandfather, Karl Wallenda. I remember
first hearing about the Wallendas in 1962 when Life magazine showed pictures of the horrible accident in which
the Flying Wallendas’ seven-person pyramid on a tightrope collapsed; two
Wallendas were killed, a third (Karl’s son) was permanently paralyzed, and Karl
himself signed out of the hospital the next day, totally against medical advice
and with two broken bones, because he felt he had to do his next performance. Nik Wallenda is a quite
attractive, personable blond man (the sort of athletics he’s involved in means
he needs to be in excellent physical shape but can’t let himself get too
muscular — unnecessary muscles mean extra weight and make it harder to maneuver
in the straight line of a tightrope walk).
The publicity mentioned that ABC’s
conditions for telecasting the event included that Wallenda must wear a tether
— a sort of harness between his body and the rope that was supposed to snag him
in case he fell, though he claimed the tether was making the stunt harder, not safer, since he’d never used one and it was throwing
off his balance. In the event, Wallenda had to contend with the mist from the
falls (apparently the main difference between him and Blondin was he was
tightroping not only across the Niagara Falls gorge but over the falls
themselves, thereby having to contend with spray, mist and water on his
tightrope — he practiced for these conditions by having his practice rope
sprayed with a firehose and a wind machine aimed at him but still said
afterwards that the real winds from the Falls’ air currents were a lot harder
than anything he’d simulated during his practices), water on his rope and the
overall atmosphere of the stunt, which included him being wired for sound and
occasionally answering a few interview questions during the walk. At one point
he said he was praying to Jesus the whole way — and I couldn’t help but note
the irony that Wallenda was 33 years old, the generally accepted figure for
Jesus’s age when he was crucified. It was a fascinating program; for all the
hucksterism it was still a man pushing himself to his limits and doing an
heroic thing, showing off what a person can achieve if they just put both their
body and their mind to it and have this extraordinary level of commitment.
