From the departure point, the void hits you like a thunderclap. It is sixteen hundred feet down, straight down, to the meandering bed of the Little Colorado River. The distance across, to the isolated mesa on the other side, which Philippe Petit will walk to on his cable, is twelve hundred feet. Several million years of geological time are on view in that perpendicular rockface, with its tan, purple, and reddish-ochre layers. Petit has photographed and mapped every inch of it. He has given names to certain areas, to help him identify the forty-six anchor points for the twenty-three cavalletti, or guy lines, that are needed to stabilize the cable. “You see that circle there?” he says, pointing to a patch of lighter tan near the top. “I call it the Clock. If you imagine a clock’s hands there, I will arrive at noon.”
Philippe Petit, the only living high-wire artist who performs in the world at large, outside the circus, has been planning his Canyon Walk for years. He put a cable across in 1988, but then Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris, gave him permission to do his Eiffel Tower walk for the Bicentennial of the French Revolution, and that and other projects intervened. The old cable, recently severed, hangs down the cliff face from the departure point; it will be removed before Petit and his crew of riggers install the new one. Standing too close to the edge, jauntily pointing out other spots he has named on the sheer rockface—“giant’s foot,” “shopping list,” “living room,” “stovepipe”—Petit is the focal point in this harsh, tremendous landscape. He is five feet seven inches tall, slim but sturdy, with red-brown hair and large, powerful-looking hands. He talks fast, in French-accented but confident English. He is forty-nine years old. It is twenty-five years since he secretly stretched a cable between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and electrified New York by performing on it for nearly an hour. He has made seventy high-wire walks, all over the world. Most of them have been legal, unlike the World Trade Center caper, and each one, in his mind and in the eyes of thousands of spectators, has been a work of art—not a daredevil stunt but a complex and intricately choreographed theatrical performance.
After the World Trade Center crossing, in 1974, American admirers kept telling Petit that he should “do” the Grand Canyon, so eventually he went to see it. “I found it almost ugly or boring,” he recalls. “Two rims twelve miles apart—for four hours I would be a little dot in the sky, and break a record for distance. I’m sorry, that doesn’t interest me.” Looking at the map, though, he noticed that about fifteen miles east of Grand Canyon National Park, where the tourists congregate, a tributary of the Colorado River narrowed and ran through a vast tract called the Navajo Tribal Lands. Petit and Kathy O’Donnell, who is his companion and since 1987 has been the producer of his high-wire spectacles, spent two weeks driving around this area with a Navajo guide. “I didn’t know what I was looking for except that it should be something that will stop my heart in the landscape,” Petit told me. “We saw many magnificent canyons, but essentially boring canyons, until the very last day, when we rented a small plane. We had no more money, we could not have bought one more hour of air time, but then, from the airplane, I saw a site that had profundity, that had mystery, that was stopping my heart. In a bend of the Little Colorado River gorge I saw a rim that was like a presqu’ île—an almost island—and across from it a solitary mesa, a tower of gigantic proportions. Here was a site, I realized, where I could walk from the known to the unknown, from civilization to a place where man had never set foot. I made a quick sketch from the air, and the next day I came back and explored that place on foot, and then it became the only place.”
Canyon Walk, Petit says, will be his masterpiece. In a written statement whose cadences simultaneously echo and mock the circus hyperbole that he detests, he calls it “the greatest show of my life, the most arduous crossing, the most fragile, the most astonishing, the most icy, the most shared, the most intimate, the most radiant, the most imposing, the most celestial. Like all the others, past and future.” It is scheduled to take place this summer, on July 17th (depending on the weather), sometime between one and four o’clock in the afternoon, and it will be telecast, live, for a global audience that is expected to be in the millions. Although his Eiffel Tower walk, in 1989, was much longer than this one—more than two thousand feet, on an inclined cable stretching from ground level, at the Place du Trocadéro, to a point near the tower’s second-stage landing—Canyon Walk is the highest: the cable here will be three hundred feet higher than the one at the World Trade Center. The combination of length and height and the exposed nature of the site, which offers no protection from the wind, makes this the most demanding and, of course, the most dangerous of his walks, but danger is not an element that figures in Petit’s calculations. As he often says, he takes no risks. What he means is that he prepares so thoroughly for each walk—learning everything there is to learn about the site (weather, wind patterns, history, geological or architectural features, etc.), rigging his cable and cavalletti according to ultra-conservative safety factors, and trusting his own phenomenal powers of concentration to rule out any misstep—that the danger, although real and present, is subject to his control.
“I prepare by reducing the unknown to nothing,” he tells me, up there on that cliff, “but also by knowing my limits. If I think I am a hero who is invincible, I will pay for it with my life. Anyone you bring here will be slapped in the face by the immensity of the site. How arrogant of me to dare to put a wire across and say I will walk! I have to be very respectful of the space. The space is something I will never conquer or master. But if I walk it with artistry, with poetry, with meaning, as a piece of theatre, or an opera, which is what I call this walk, then maybe it can inspire you. I would never have attempted this walk thirty years ago. It has taken me a lifetime of serious confrontation.”
The history of walking on ropes has not yet been written. Petit plans to do that when he finds time. He has been gathering material for it since he began wire walking, at the age of sixteen, and in “Funambule,” one of four books he has written and published, he devotes a section to historical notes on the practice. Ropewalking, he tells us, had its origins in ancient Greece. It spread to Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius and became hugely popular during the Middle Ages, when acrobats danced and performed high above the heads of spectators at major public events, or ascended and descended inclined ropes attached to the bell towers of cathedrals and other high places. The immense popularity of these spectacles eventually led to their being shut down by the clergy, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the art of ropedancing, as it had come to be called, was confined to small theatres in Paris and a few other cities. Open-air “ascensions” reëmerged after the Revolution, and master funambulists—from the Latin funis (“rope”) and ambulare (“to walk”)—became the toast of Paris. Pierre Forioso (the “incomparable”) walked on a rope from the Pont de la Concorde to the Pont des Tuileries to celebrate Napoleon’s birthday in 1807. Mme. Saqui, née Marguerite-Antoinette Lalanne, so captivated the susceptible Bonaparte with her ascensions and her dramatic evocations, at great heights, of the Battle of Wagram and the crossing of the Great St. Bernard pass that he named her Première Acrobate de Sa Majesté l’Empereur et Roi and sent her off to perform for his troops.
The most famous funambule of the last century, however, was Jean-François Gravelet, known as Blondin, “whose dangerous and difficult leaps,” Petit writes, “were executed with a precision and assurance that exceeded anything done before him.” Having conquered his native France and the rest of Europe, Blondin laid claim to America by walking over Niagara Falls, in 1859. Not the falls itself, as Petit points out: he put his manila rope across a narrow gorge some distance below the falls and enthralled thousands of spectators with his daring maneuvers; on one crossing he cooked and ate an omelette. Petit, playing the role of Blondin, re-created his Niagara crossing for a 1986 IMAX film called “Niagara: Miracles, Myths & Magic.” The film, he says, was “historically ridiculous.” His unfulfilled ambition is to make films—films conceived, written, directed, produced, starred in, and maybe even distributed by him. There is a certain arrogance in this, but then, as Petit says in more ebullient and playful moments, he has earned the right to be arrogant.
Growing up in the suburbs of Paris, an absurdly rebellious middle child (older sister, younger brother) in a bourgeois family, Petit taught himself to walk on a rope by stretching several ropes between two trees in a meadow on the family’s country estate and then taking them away one at a time. Other passions competed in those years—magic, juggling, classical equitation, fencing, theatre, drawing, bullfighting. All played havoc with his education (he was kicked out of five schools) and tried the patience of his father, Edmond Petit, a French Army pilot and an author. (His “World History of Aviation” is currently in its ninth printing.) The wire won out, but when Rudolf Omankowsky, the leader of a famous troupe of touring wire walkers called Les Diables Blancs, offered to train Petit as a circus performer Petit declined. He paid Papa Rudy to show him the techniques of rigging and securing wire cables, and learned the rest on his own. Petit swears that he has no special athletic abilities or sense of balance. “It is not difficult to walk on a tightrope,” he assured me. “But you need to have passion, and you have to work madly, to practice all day long. Within one year, I taught myself to do all the things you could do on a wire. I learned the backward somersault, the front somersault, the unicycle, the bicycle, the chair on the wire, jumping through hoops. But I thought, What is the big deal here? It looks almost ugly. So I started to discard those tricks and to reinvent my art.”
Because no circus would hire Petit, who demanded to be allowed to perform in his own style, he became a street juggler. He developed a character (non-verbal, black-clad, intensely concentrated) and a brief performance that included some magic, some juggling, and much subtle and humorous interaction with the spectators; it usually ended with a few minutes on a length of rope strung between improvised supports. He would perform three or four times a day, creating his own stage by drawing a circle in white chalk on some chosen spot (for years he worked outside the Café les Deux Magots, in Saint-Germain des Près), and, in spite of more than five hundred arrests (by his own count), he never went hungry.
He lived in a tiny room on the Rue Laplace. From that Left Bank neighborhood he could just see the towers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. “One day,” he recalls, “I decide that I am going to put a wire there, and surprise Paris, surprise the world.” It took him three years and countless visits in the guise of a tourist to prepare this first, clandestine “coup,” which took place on June 26, 1971. The day before, using subterfuges and techniques that he later adapted for the World Trade Center walk, Petit and two volunteer assistants smuggled in several hundred pounds of cable and other equipment, hid until dark, and passed the cable across from one tower to the other by throwing a rubber ball with a fishing line attached to it. At ten o’clock the next morning, Petit emerged from his hiding place, picked up his long balancing pole, and stepped out onto the wire. He crossed and recrossed between the towers, knelt on the wire, lay down on it, put aside his pole and juggled three Indian clubs, and held the city of Paris in a delirium of suspense and delight. It was the beginning of his real life as a high-wire walker and the end, in a sense, of his life as a Frenchman. Deeply wounded by what he felt to be the short-lived enthusiasm of his countrymen—he was arrested, released, lionized for a day or so, and then quickly forgotten by the French news media—he packed up and took his street-juggling act to the South of France and then to other countries: to Russia; to Australia, where he pulled off another clandestine walk, on a cable between the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge; and eventually to New York, where, without money and knowing no one, he achieved the almost unimaginable feat of investing the World Trade Center, those two slabs of architectural ennui, with a thrilling and terrible beauty.
The offers poured in after that, of course—from Arrow Shirts and Burger King and a dozen other commercial franchises. He rejected them all. Instead, with certain misgivings, he joined the circus. Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus made him a featured performer, and he toured the United States in that capacity for nearly a year—an experience he describes as “a dream and a nightmare combined.” He disliked doing the same twelve-minute routine two or sometimes three times a day, so he improvised freely. Performing without a net, he did all the circus tricks that were expected—the forward and backward somersaults and the unicycle and the stick-and-ball balanced on his forehead—but he refused to play to the audience in the “vulgar” way that a circus walker does, by making the tricks look more difficult than they are, or pretending to lose his balance so the crowd will scream. Petit fell once, from a forty-five-foot-high wire, during that year with Ringling Brothers. It was the only serious fall he has ever had—he broke several ribs, and sustained internal injuries as well—but because it happened while he was practicing, rather than performing, he insists that it doesn’t count. He made a rapid recovery, and finished out his contract with Ringling Brothers. He has been on his own ever since.
“Some wire walkers in the circus are technically much better than I am,” Petit told me. “They perform every day, and they do things I never do—human pyramids, somersaults from a bicycle. But I am a better wire walker because I have something they will never have. There is nothing more beautiful or essential in the world of wire walking than simply walking on the wire, but in circus school no high-wire walker is learning that. They don’t walk beautifully, or elegantly, because they don’t love it enough. They are not inhabited by the wire.”
St. John the Divine is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. The church, its ancillary structures, and its garden occupy three blocks from Amsterdam Avenue to Morningside Drive, between 110th and 113th Streets. Philippe Petit has been an artist-in-residence there since 1980. He fell in love with the place when James Parks Morton, the cathedral’s charismatic and somewhat unorthodox dean, invited the fledgling Big Apple Circus, with which Petit had appeared once or twice as a guest artist, to use the Synod House as its circus school for a few weeks. Petit told Morton he would like to do a high-wire walk inside the cathedral. Morton, who knew about the association of cathedrals and tightrope walking in the Middle Ages, was all for it, but his trustees said no. (What if he fell?) Petit put up a cable anyway and did his walk. When he came down, the police arrested him for trespassing. They were taking him away in handcuffs when Dean Morton, who hadn’t witnessed the walk, appeared and told them to release the culprit. “He wasn’t trespassing,” Morton told the cops. “He is an artist of this cathedral.” Afterward, it seemed like such a good idea that Morton and Petit made it official.
Petit has his “office” high up in the triforium, a narrow balcony over the nave. He has built shelves, cabinets, and workspaces there; everything is organized cleverly and meticulously, as on a ship. He and I stood on his balcony at five o’clock one Sunday afternoon, listening to a choir rehearsing for Vespers far below us. “I am not a man of belief, but I really belong in this cathedral,” Petit said quietly. “When you think about it, wire walking is very close to what religion is. ‘Religion’ is from the Latin religare, which means to link something, people or places. And to know, before you take your first step on a wire, that you are going to do the last one—this is a kind of faith.” Dean Morton had told me that Petit is one of the most religious people he knows. “Sometimes very unusual people turn out to be the most religious,” the Dean said. “I think of this as God’s joke.”
Since his unauthorized 1980 walk, Petit has done six authorized walks in St. John the Divine, the last one in honor of Dean Morton’s retirement, in 1996. He has a practice cable installed in the Synod House, and one evening last winter I went there with a small group of his friends to see him walk. “This is not a show,” he explained to us at the outset. “Just cooking.” He stripped down to a black T-shirt and black knee-length tights, which gave him a sort of rough-and-ready, working-class look, and put a tape of classical guitar music on his portable tape player. Before getting on the wire, he did some juggling to warm up. Petit, who readily admits that he is not a great juggler, seemed rusty at first. Every time he got six rings in the air at once, one or two of them would clatter to the floor. Two teen-age girls in our group started to giggle. Petits movement’s were quick, fluid, and a little impatient. After ten minutes of this, he got on the wire, which was stretched fifty feet between the balconies on either side of the room and guyed by two cavalletti anchored to the hardwood floor, about eighteen feet below.
He looked entirely different to me up there—lighter, taller, aristocratic. He walked barefoot, in a smooth, steady rhythm, his head held high. His eighteen-foot-long balancing pole nearly brushed the chandeliers when he made his turn and started back. After several crossings, he stepped off the wire, put on a pair of ballet slippers, and changed the tape from guitar music to jazz. Back on the wire, he moved in a different style, which I recognized, from his writings, as his marche de torero.
There are an infinite number of walks on the wire, Petit tells us in “On the High Wire,” the only one of his books available in English. (The translation is by the novelist Paul Auster, who is a friend of his.) “There is the walk that glides, like that of a bullfighter who slowly approaches his adversary, the presence of danger growing with each new step, his body arched outrageously, hypnotized.” Petit, who spent a year of his youth as an apprentice torero in France and Spain, slid one foot along the wire and then the other, his body projecting a sinuous arrogance. By this time, I had lost any sense that he could fall. He knelt down on the wire, and then reclined on his back, stretching his legs until one lay along the wire and the other hung down; he rested the balancing pole on his stomach, and let his arms hang free.
After another sequence of linked crossings, he put the balancing pole down on one balcony and crossed back and forth without it, using his arms for balance. He walked quickly, in a sort of running dance step. He picked up three Indian clubs and juggled them, expertly this time—no misses. Leaving the wire again, he signalled to Evelyne Crochet, a concert pianist who has worked with him on a number of his performances. She left our group and walked across to a piano at the far end of the room. As she began a meditative rendering of “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Petit slung his balancing pole over one shoulder and demonstrated another of his favorite walks, a casual and relaxed stroll, eyes turned upward, free arm swinging at his side. It is what he calls “the solid walk of a man of the earth returning home, a tool over his shoulder, satisfied with the day’s work.”
Afterward, over dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant, Petit told me that he likes to work without a balancing pole. He has done many short walks that way, including several on an inclined wire. (Inclined wires are no more difficult to walk on than straight ones, he says. He has even walked on them blindfolded. In circus parlance, the blindfolded walk on an inclined wire is a “death walk,” and it is always referred to as an “attempt.”) “I want one day to do a big walk without a balancing pole,” Petit said. “It has never been done, in the history of acrobatics. And, since I am a man of the theatre, I have invented a dramatic way of introducing that. I turn the pole until it is almost vertical and then throw it out, so that it does not bang on the wire. I would love to present the image of a human being leaving the crowd and becoming part of the sky, with no balancing pole.”
In the living room of a small, cozy farmhouse near Woodstock, in upstate New York, Petit shows me “The Book” for Canyon Walk, a bulging album filled with eleven years of accumulated data: handwritten notes; drawings and photographs; engineering specifications; geological surveys; maps; weather records from Grand Canyon Village going back fifteen years; information on Navajo customs, dress, music, art, history, and mythology; and technical information on cables, state-of-the-art polypropylene ropes (for the cavalletti), clamps, shackles, rock drills, bits, pulleys, anchors, block and tackles, counterweights. In an office in his basement are file cabinets and plastic cartons filled with more data, all splendidly organized. This represents the enormous effort of reducing the unknown to nothing, and Petit does it himself, without a secretary or a computer.
Kathy O’Donnell handles the computer work, the telephone, the fax machine. As Petit’s producer and working partner, she makes it possible for him to do what he does. “I’m the bitch in the organization,” she tells me, laughing easily. “I’m much tougher than he is, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. It was always easy for me to talk to people about Philippe, because I got what he was trying to do. When you have a man who won’t do commercials, and who is as uncompromising about his work and his life as Philippe is, it is pretty clear that he is not going to give us cheap thrills. But a lot of people just don’t get it.” O’Donnell grew up in Manhattan. Her father was the executive vice-president of Doubleday, and she worked in the book business herself until 1987, when, having met Petit and helped out on a couple of his walks, she quit her job to help produce Walking the Harp/A Bridge for Peace, a high-wire performance on a cable linking the Jewish and the Arab quarters of Jerusalem. She has been the producer of all his projects since then, and he depends on her for many things. She helped him survive the death of Gypsy, a daughter he had with his previous companion, Elaine Fasula. A lovely and spirited child, Gypsy died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1992, when she was nine and a half years old. Her ashes were placed in the columbarium at St. John the Divine.
Across the driveway from the house, Petit is building an eighteenth-century barn. He has worked on it since 1993, off and on, using only the methods and the tools that were available to builders then: no nails, no power saws. “I actually dislike pretty much the world in which we live,” he told me. “If I could choose, I would probably live in the Renaissance or the Middle Ages.” Since the World Trade Center walk, he has lived mostly in this country. “I love many things in France—the wine, the cheese, the bread, the art, the architecture, the history—but there is a lot I dislike in the French system,” he confided. “Do I like America? Not really. I have nothing to do with money, with power, with success. I didn’t choose this country, I chose the twin towers, and I stay here one week, one month, one year, and now it’s twenty-five years. But I live in my own world. I could be anywhere.”
Petit’s intransigent nature and his drive to control every aspect and detail of his strange calling make Kathy O’Donnell’s job difficult at times. But Petit can be gregarious, funny, charming, and mesmerizingly persuasive. “Philippe has never been bored in his life,” according to O’Donnell, “and there has never been a moment when he didn’t know what he wanted to do.” In spite of having no interest in money or success, he loves good food and good wine, and he is on friendly terms with the owners of some superlative restaurants, including Taillevent, in Paris, and Chanterelle, in New York. Petit designed a menu for Chanterelle some years back, a talent for drawing being another in his seemingly endless repertoire of skills. A number of artists in other fields are in awe of him. Mikhail Baryshnikov, who engineered the crucial meeting between Petit and Jacques Chirac which led to the permission for Petit’s Eiffel Tower walk, vividly remembers a night in a Copenhagen restaurant when Petit invited a young woman who was dining alone to join their table and then managed to get her watch off her wrist and on his own without her noticing it. “What’s impressive about Philippe is the purpose, the idea, the complexity of his work,” Baryshnikov said recently. “There is always a certain quest, which is noble.”
Canyon Walk will cost three and a half million dollars to produce. O’Donnell had hoped that a large part of this would come from the sale of television rights, but none of the networks would commit themselves to a live telecast (Petit insists that the walk be shown live) because of the perennial “what-if factor”—not what if he falls but what if somebody’s four-year-old sees him fall and the parents sue the network for traumatizing their child. At the moment, O’Donnell is working out a deal with a pay-per-view provider, to do a live ninety-minute telecast of the walk, with interlinear footage on Petit and his career, and on the Navajos. Meanwhile, a young German management consultant named Thomas Ring volunteered to raise the front money for the walk. Ring had heard Petit lecture at a symposium on creativity and motivation, in Zermatt; hugely impressed, he arranged to meet him and asked what he could do to help. O’Donnell, who had been skeptical at first, was eventually won over by Ring’s dedication and enterprise, and he ended up raising the necessary funds. Petit and O’Donnell are cautiously hopeful that the global telecast of Canyon Walk will be a watershed event in his career, one that will make future projects easier to produce. “It may change my life, don’t you think?” he asked me, half kidding. “If not, I am going to kill myself.”
On May 3rd, Petit and O’Donnell move out to Flagstaff, Arizona, to prepare for Canyon Walk. The new cable will be stretched across in June, and Petit and his team of riggers, who are also experienced rock climbers, will spend eight weeks anchoring and installing the twenty-three cavalletti. Petit usually depends on this hard and highly specialized work to get him in shape for a performance, but during the countdown to Canyon Walk he will also work out in a gym adjacent to their motel, and, not far from the walk site, set up a practice cable about twelve feet off the ground and three hundred and fifty feet longer than the real one. “It has the same orientation, so I will receive the same winds,” he told me. “And I will practice sometimes under the worst conditions: at dusk, when I can hardly see, with a balancing pole that is too heavy, without cavalletti. I will do it with friends banging on the cable. I will do it in the strongest wind, to the point where maybe I will have to grab the wire. I will do it in the rain, and with the sun in my eyes, and when I am too tired to do it. That will put me in a very aggressive frame of mind, so that when I find myself on the real wire, on a beautiful calm, sunny day, it will seem like a nice promenade.”
Cables for industrial use have grease worked into them during the manufacturing process (wire walkers must clean them carefully), but Diepa, the German firm that is making Petit’s cable for Canyon Walk, agreed to do it without grease. This meant shutting down the machinery that weaves the wires into cables, scouring away all the accumulated grease, and forming the cable very slowly, to keep it from getting too hot. Petit’s cable will be able to sustain a load of a hundred tons. To Petit, it is a live entity, like an animal. “To become a good wire walker, you should understand the wire, its construction, its tension, its vibration,” he says. “It has many moods that you can accord yourself with—by controlling your breathing, by controlling the way you shift your weight. The cable has three movements. There is the vertical, up-and-down movement. There is also a swinging movement; even with cavalletti, the whole system is going to swing. And then there is a very treacherous movement, which is inside the cable—a kind of torque, with the cable moving on itself. These three movements do not occur in a predictable way but in a completely surprise way.”
Since Canyon Walk will take place in the Navajo Tribal Lands, Petit and O’Donnell have spent a lot of time talking with various Navajo groups and organizations, and negotiating with them for the necessary permits. From the start, the Navajos have been impressed by Petit’s respectful attitude and by his wanting to make them part of his “opera.” Although Petit is reluctant to divulge the scenario of his performance in advance, he plans to begin it with a ceremony involving Navajos in tribal dress and traditional flute and drum music. He has also engaged a Spanish flamenco singer, who will be stationed on the riverbank at the bottom of the canyon. Petit wants him to perform the vocal exercise that flamenco singers use in preparing themselves for the extremes of flamenco sound, “a sort of howling,” and then, a little later, he wants him to improvise a song about the walker while he is on the wire.
There are to be just a few hundred invited spectators, sitting on bleachers about fifty yards back from the canyon’s edge, and they will not be able to hear or see the singer. Canyon Walk was conceived as a television performance; there will be at least fifteen cameras in use, and the best place to watch the performance, Petit tells everyone, is at home, on your TV screen. O’Donnell has arranged for tight security at the site, with a police checkpoint at the turnoff to the dirt road that Petit put in to provide access to his site, and a number of black-belt karate masters (friends of O’Donnell’s, who have helped out on other productions) to discourage gate-crashers. Petit expects the walk itself to take about thirty-five minutes. He will pause at intervals on the wire to perform movements and gestures that he has prepared, along with others he may improvise, but there will be no return trip. The scenario calls for him to cross from the known to the unknown, and then, metaphorically speaking, to vanish into the territory of myth. (Off camera, a helicopter will pick him up and bring him back.) The only thing that could delay his journey at this point is the weather. Wind is the wire walker’s nightmare. Just before Petit began a walk in Frankfurt, in 1994, the wind was blowing so hard that O’Donnell and others begged him to wait. He waited for twenty-five minutes and then went ahead anyway, unwilling to disappoint five hundred thousand spectators assembled in the square below, but there was a scary moment when a gust caught the long cloak that was part of his costume and almost lifted him off the wire. This time, if it’s too windy, he has said he’ll agree to postpone the walk until the following day.
“It is a terrifying walk, but you won’t be terrified,” he assured me. That may be true. Paul Auster, who has known Petit for twenty years, believes that the exhilaration we feel in watching him on the high wire comes from his taking us up there with him and conquering our fear in the process. “Obviously, it requires tremendous skill, and practice, and courage, but he makes it look so easy,” Auster said. “He wants to inspire that sense of participation.” Seeing him work out on the practice wire convinced me that Auster was right. And yet there is no denying that for both the artist and the spectator Petit’s art is conditioned by the knowledge that he is risking his life.
“I have the patience of those who have fallen once,” Petit wrote in “On the High Wire,” “and whenever someone tells me of a high-wire walker who fell to the ground and was crushed, I answer: ‘He got what he deserved.’” Petit knows that this will not happen to him. “I am not a death-wish person,” he said to me. “I want to live very old. It is true that death is part of the frame—that it frames such activities as bullfighting and tightrope walking. My world is a dangerous world, sure, but I am very safe in knowing my limits. I am not playing with words when I say I don’t take risks. The danger becomes so narrow that it is a novel companion with whom you travel. It is not an enemy.” ♦
