The high-wire walker must be an inventor.
Jean-François Gravelet, a.k.a. Charles Blondin, prepared an omelette on the wire; he also opened a bottle of champagne and toasted the crowd. He even managed to take photographs—from the middle of the wire—of the crowd that was watching him cross the rapids at Niagara Falls.
Madame Saqui created historical frescoes to the glory of Emperor Napoleon, all by herself on the tightrope.
Rudy Omankowsky, Jr., set off numerous fireworks from his cable. He specialized in somersaulting from a bicycle over four people (the bike would fall into the net at the moment of takeoff). His father, “Papa Rudy” Omankowsky, taught him the extraordinary dismount from the giant unicycle: jumping forward onto the cable. He himself was the master of a series of caboulots—his legs now shooting out to the right, now to the left, now on either side of the wire—and performed a dramatic crossing in a sack that ended with straddle falls and a series of rolls.
The ventriloquist Señor Wences has told me that on the tightrope, “facing the audience,” Miguel Robledillo imitated a staggering drunk.
Francis Brunn, the legendary juggler, remembers admiringly how Alzana would jump rope on wet cables and continue to jump even after he had lost balance and was being carried away from the axis of the wire.
I myself have witnessed the delicate crossings of Sharif Magomiedoff several times: he places the tip of his wife’s foot on his forehead and walks along the wire while keeping her balanced—she herself is protected from falling by a safety belt. My friend Pedro Carillo goes down the steepest walk by jumpping without a balancing pole and, almost in total darkness, slides down—sometimes backward—to reach the ground.
As for myself, I am endlessly hunting for new exercises—like throwing away the balancing pole; the half-turn with balancing pole sweeping through space; walking on tiptoe so as not to wake up the sleeping circus; bouncing a ball on my forehead; and other juggling acts directly inspired by Francis Brunn.
And, lest I forget the masters of us all: the high-wire animals. Artists have painted them with great enthusiasm, and photographs have allowed us to know the truth that lurks behind the legends.
Walking in wicker baskets is an old and very pleasant exercise. A great family of wire walkers robbed a cigarette manufacturer in this way.
It all happened long ago, so perhaps the story can now be told.
Once, while performing outdoors, they attached one end of their rope to the window of a cigarette warehouse. Having come to the basket exercise in their performance, the wire walkers repeated it so many times that the audience, which did not share this excessive passion for baskets, began to hoot with impatience.
The baskets were being systematically loaded at one end of the wire and then carefully emptied at the other. In this way, the family managed to steal enough cigarettes to fill a hay cart.
Without a balancing pole
This is the foundation of the art of high-wire walking.
For safety reasons, however, the high-wire walker has forgotten it.
It is rare to see a high-wire walker at great heights without a balancing pole.
It is, however, the purest image of a man on a line.
In a crossing without balancing pole, we see the qualities of an acrobat; in a true performance without balancing pole, we salute the blood of the high-wire walker.
The succession of balancings—first on one foot and then on the other—that allowed you to move along the wire with skill must now be developed into a controlled walk. The crossing must be made at an even speed, without the slightest loss of equilibrium.
If before you had to fix your eyes on the cable several yards in front of you, now you must look all the way to the end. This connection with the “target” is obligatory, and more than once it has saved a life.
Running without a balancing pole can be attempted only after your walk has become infallible. You can master it with constant and devoted work over a number of years. Like a juggler, you must practice fiercely and without distraction. Otherwise, your attempts on the wire will remain attempts, and you will always lose.
For example, consider the half-turn:
You can have an exact idea of it without ever being able to do it successfully.
Create a vertical motion in the wire; the moment to attempt the half-turn is when the wave is at its maximum height; the body will be lighter, the feet will turn more easily. This wave is imperceptible. Press down harder with the back foot; it will serve as a pivot. Remember that the feet never completely leave the wire during a half-turn.
To turn around on both legs at once, you must raise yourself slightly on the balls of your feet; the heels swivel one hundred and eighty degrees to meet up with the wire again at the same time as the front part of your feet. The half-turn can be done to the right or the left, after coming to a full stop or in the middle of a walk. This last will come as a surprise—like a sleepwalker suddenly changing direction.
If I had to present myself in the Paradise of Rope Dancers by doing one walk, and one walk only, I would make my entrance without a balancing pole. I would walk as naturally as possible, my arms at my sides, letting them sway slightly to the rhythm of my step. I would walk straight ahead without thinking for a single moment that I was on a wire: like some passerby receding into the distance.
And my salute would be a one-knee balancing without pole—which I believe is something no one has ever done before.
The king poles
The high-wire walker no longer lives among the low branches of the trees. A new wire is waiting for him.
A solid gray wire, perhaps fifteen meters long, stretched out six or eight meters above the ground between two poles painted in the performer’s favorite color. On these poles the wire walker can rest, place his different balancing poles, store his chair or his bicycle, as well as his juggling clubs and unicycle. The platform floor should be a square of wood strong enough to support all the equipment and the aerialist himself. It is positioned below the cable. The platforms of low-wire artists and ropedancers are positioned above the cable. They step down onto their cable. The high-wire walker, however, steps up onto his. Along the vertical axis of the walk cable, and on each side, an ungreased cable is stretched down to the ground. One of these inclined cables is drawn out to maximum length for the Death Walk. It is along this path that you will climb up to the installation, unless you have the patience to build a hemp-rope ladder with oak rungs.
Each pole is held vertically by the “obseclungs”—two thin cables attached to the top of the pole that come down perpendicular to the walk line and form a forty-five-degree angle with the ground. These guy wires are pulled into place by pulleys attached with “beckets” to “stakes.” The whole installation is thus anchored by the stakes, thick steel bars—formerly wooden bars—that are driven into the ground with sledgehammers. These in turn have a sling of steel or hemp attached to them. This is called the becket.
Putting up the king poles will be your first great joy as a high-wire walker.
You measure the terrain. In the designated spots you lay out the pole sections that you will later fit together; these are hollow tubes or trussed pylons. Then you proceed to the “dressing”: one by one jibing the platforms and poles with all their cables, in an order so complicated that the neophyte will have to go through it several times before he can assume sole responsibility for it. It goes without saying that you must have won the friendship of an old high-wire walker who will share his rigging secrets with you, and that he is with you now. If not, you will have to go about it according to your own ideas, and sooner or later you will pay for it with your life.
When the equipment is ready, you drive in the stakes. If five men produce a series of strokes in rapid successio
n—“a flying five”—watch out for the pieces of steel that whistle down, to land in a tree trunk twenty feet away, or in the flesh of a man who was not paying attention.
You raise up the king poles. One after the other. With the aid of a six-sheave block and tackle. Then you attach the tightening device: a heavy chain hoist or a giant turnbuckle. This latter should not be used for a big installation if the longitudinal section of the screw forms a series of triangles, for it wears out and gives way. The screw should have a square shape so that it will never loosen. This is the kind of turnbuckle used for coupling railroad cars.
The curvature of the wire changes according to the height. Soon it will trace a straight line that seems rigorous; you then attach the cavalletti to the blocks and give a final turn to the tightening device—the “pull to death”—just before beginning your work.
To give your routines on the wire an aspect of perfection and to execute highly delicate balancings, the cable must not buckle or sway between the two poles. To avoid this, you attach a thin plate of light metal over the walk cable at appropriate intervals. These plates will fit snugly over the wire. To each flap you attach a length of hemp, the same thickness as the walk cable, that will be drawn down to the ground from various points on the wire at the same angle as the obseclungs. These are the cavallettis. The shape of the plates allows a bicycle rim to pass over them without jumping off track; because of the thickness of the ropes that secure them, you will not find yourself on the ground looking at your own severed arm after an accidental slip—which happened to an artist who had chosen to use a thin steel wire.
At times the cavallettis require these plates; at other times they do not. The cavallettis are necessary for great crossings and preferable for “high work” between the poles; in the open air, they are generally spaced fifteen meters apart. But Blondin, who worked on rope, placed them at every two meters for difficult crossings.
For a fifteen-meter wire between two poles, two cavallettis will be acceptable. Obviously, when there are too many cavallettis or when they are too close to one another, we sense the amateurism and cowardice of the performer. If you want to avoid the slightest jolt on the cable, if you want to be certain that it will not vibrate as you go over the cavallettis, at the end of each rope you must use a pulley and attach a counterweight—a bag of sand or a bucket of water. The rope crosses through the pulley, which is attached two meters from the ground by a brace anchored to a chain that in turn is tied to a stake. The wire will then breathe with each of your steps without giving way or turning.
All this must be learned. You cannot make it up.
There are some high-wire walkers who would rather die with their knowledge than let newcomers learn it. Besides, circus people distrust anyone who does not “live on the road,” and how could it be otherwise?
The length of the walk cable should always exceed ten meters; the length works as a function of the height of the poles. For six-meter poles, a good length is twelve meters. A number of aerialists would say fifteen meters; this makes the installation easier, since the circus ring measures thirteen and a half meters in diameter and the poles are always placed just outside the ring. The more one stretches the line without raising the height, the lower the installation will seem. And vice versa.
The high-wire walker eagerly carries his balancing pole to the foot of the king poles. With a smile he abandons the “little wire” of his first crossings. From now on, he will return to it only to learn new exercises or to throw himself into some whirling caper he hopes to invent. He puts his foot on the inclined cable and scales the sky, where the motionless birds are waiting to meet him.
Alone on his wire
Up above, about to begin a long acquaintance with his new territory, the high-wire walker feels himself alone. His body will remain motionless for a long time. Grasping the platform with both hands behind him, he stands before the cable, as if he did not dare set foot on it.
It looks as though he is idly basking in the setting sun.
Not at all. He is buying time.
He measures space, feels out the void, weighs distances, watches over the state of things, takes in the position of each object around him. Trembling, he savors his solitude. He knows that if he makes it across, he will be a high-wire walker.
He wants to line up his doubts and fears with his thoughts—in order to hoist up the courage he has left.
But that takes too much time.
The cable grows longer, the sky becomes dark, the other platform is now a hundred meters away. The ground is no longer in the same place; it has moved even lower. Cries come from the woods. The end of the day is near.
At the deepest moment of his despair, feeling he must now give up, the high-wire walker grabs his balancing pole and moves forward. Step by step, he crosses over.
This is his first accomplishment.
He stands there trying to absorb it, his eyes blankly staring at this new platform, while darkness skims over the ground.
With the tops of the trees he shares the day’s last light, a light softer than air.
Alone on his wire, he wraps himself more deeply in a wild and scathing happiness, crossing helter-skelter into the dampness of the evening. He attaches his balancing pole to the platform before settling down at the top of the mast. There, in a corner of dark and chilly space, he waits calmly for the night to come.
Practice
The shock of it lasted several days.
Every morning he ran to his wire, leaping over the grass so the dew would not weigh him down. Distracted by so much happiness, he would let himself simply walk back and forth, again and again. There are those who think this coming and going will turn them into high-wire walkers. The true man of the wire, however, cannot accept this horizontal monotony for very long: he knows that the path he is about to take has no limit. In rememberance of his recent birth, he stops short and sets to work. Silent and alone, he brings to the high cable everything he has learned down below. He discards the movements space will not support and gathers up the others into a group that he will polish, refine, lighten, and bring closer and closer to himself.
Each day he adds another mastered element.
Soon he goes out on his wire with only one goal: to discover new ideas, to invent a combination of unexpected gestures. He goes out hunting. And what he catches he hangs on his wire. Then he distracts himself with inconsequential walks, whimsical postures, exercises with no future, like a bear wallowing in his pool at the zoo. And if he loses his taste for movement to such an extent that he loses control, better that he should rest on the wire than stop and climb down. For you must reach some apex before stepping to the ground, no matter how small it is: your existence as a high-wire walker is at stake. You must leave the wire in triumph, not out of weariness.
Now that he knows how to go about practicing, each session will be longer, more fruitful, and the day will be meaningless unless it bears the shape of the wire.
Then the music starts!
For stimulation, he turns on the brassiest Circassian marches; he draws courage from Spanish bullfighting music; and, with exquisite ardor, he surrounds himself with the sound of a full orchestra.
The wire walker at rest
At the time when wire walkers stretched their ropes between two X’s of wood, one of the X’s was always reserved for resting.
There was a simple hemp line stretched between the tops of the two beams, high enough for the dancer to lean the small of his back against it. It was covered by a large cloth decorated in the artist’s colors and embroidered with fine gold threads. Leaning against it in this way, the acrobat could indifferently let his eyes wander down to settle on the rope.
As his name indicates, the wire walker of great heights is a dreamer: he has another way of resting. He stretches out on his cable and contemplates the sky. There h
e gathers his strength, recovers the serenity he may have lost, regains his courage and his faith. But weariness is necessary: you must not treat resting as an exercise.
Sit down. Fold one leg on the cable and then lean backward until your head touches it. A moment later the foot will begin to slide, and the leg will stretch out completely; the other leg will hang down and sway. Sometimes one hand lets go of the pole; sometimes it retrieves it. You want to feel the line of the wire. It will become your spinal column. Each passing second shrieks like a grindstone. An endless pain takes hold of your body and breaks it down muscle by muscle. If you resist and cross the threshold of what is bearable, the torture will extend into your bones and break them one by one across the wire. You will be a skeleton balanced on a razor blade. Beyond this limit, millions of terrifying enchantments await you. Beyond this limit, breath and confidence go together. And still further beyond, a patience without desire will give each of your thoughts its real density.
Then be lazy—to the point of delirium!
With your back on the wire, you feel the vastness of the sky. To be a wire walker in its profoundest sense means to leave the wire behind you, to discover the cables that have been strung even higher and, step by step, to reach the Magic Wire of Immobility, the Wire that belongs to the Masters of the World. The earth itself rests on it. It is the Wire that links the finite to the infinite: the straightest, shortest path between one star and the next.
On the High Wire Page 4