The Walk

---

"Why?" That is the question that people ask me most. Pourquoi? Why? For what? Why do you walk on the wire? Why do you tempt fate? Why do you risk death? But I don’t think of it this way. …Instead I use the opposite word: life. For me, to walk on the wire, this is life. C'est la vie.
~Philippe Petit in The Walk

---

Take a deep breath. That was my thought as the vast spaces between and below the skyscrapers rolled across the theater screen the first time I attended The Walk. The cinematography, especially with 3D enhancement, was—literally—breathtaking.

Of course I'd already read and watched everything I could about Philippe Petit's walk between the Twin Towers of New York. This was my chance to glimpse the grandeur of those heights and depths, skies and abysses, as if I were there with Philippe on his wire. It was so well done that even from the safety of my seat I was fighting vertigo. As I imagined that it was me on the wire, I practiced the deep breathing of a highwire walker/highliner to steady my senses. As I pulled in a deep (audible) breath, I heard my friend Melissa, in perfect unison, suck in breath as well. Yes, the two of us were certainly wrapped up in the movie.

Photo: Sony Pictures

The Walk isn’t just a beautiful dramatization of a unique historical event, it is a glimpse into the world of highwire walkers and, most importantly, how incredible dreams are realized. There are plenty of talented movie critics who can tell you all about the movie and what makes it stellar cinematically, so I’ll just tell you what I took away from it, what I learned about dreaming.

To look at two massive, solid skyscrapers and dream only of conquering the intervening void, to actually rig a wire there, 1,350 feet from the ground, was probably insane, arguably irresponsible, and certainly illegal. It’s no wonder that the movie begins with the quote above, highlighting the question “why?” But according to the character of Philippe in that opening scene, there may not be an answer he can express in words for why he did what he did and dreamed what he dreamed. The best he can do is show us the how.

Even though, supposedly, this movie is only about how he pulled off his illegal walk, as you watch, you may find the why on your own along the way: if your heart turns over with as much joy as fear, then you know why, if you echo the many characters in the movie who simply called it “beautiful”, then you understand why. If it doesn’t…then your heart is tuned to different dreams and perhaps no explanation or justification for that question "why?" could ever convince you that Philippe Petit wasn’t just mad.

Often in this blog I try to explain why my heart is drawn to a dream similar to Philippe’s. It is something I will probably continue to do as long as I continue on this journey of seeking balance and continue writing about it. But I hope to take from this movie the truth that sometimes we cannot describe what drives us; then all we can do is focus on how we achieve our dreams.

Pulling off his walk between the Twin Towers, Philippe called “The Coup”.  Naturally then his friends and support crew became “accomplices”.  A coup is a victory—a brilliant, sudden, difficult, unexpected achievement. His walk certainly was all that. But as a former political science major, my mind wandered to the alternate, political definition of the word: an overturn or upset; an overthrow. I asked myself if that definition applied as well. But what was he overthrowing? His friend Jean-Louis had already claimed that all artists are to some degree anarchists, and the walk was certainly very illegal.

Photo: Sony Pictures

On the day of the walk, Philippe stood impishly defiant on his wire beyond the reach of police officers, the representatives of law and executive government, leaving them no (humane) avenues to enforce their commands that he come off the wire. Even as a law-abiding citizen myself, I can never quite bring myself to fully condemn Philippe’s coup—because it was more than just overthrowing the law. On that day, when he walked between the towers, he overturned the governing status quo: where we believe men can walk, what we as people believe is possible.

That is the second thing I want to remember: that impossible dreams aren’t out of reach, that with practice and passion I may wrest power from the despotic status quo. Elsewhere Philippe talks about the final, unseen accomplice to his coup, and offers advice on how to make him our accomplice as well: “The ‘impossible’ is not your enemy, he is your co-conspirator. …if you walk with him long enough, he is willing to let you in on a secret, to help you do something astonishing.”

The Walk was as breathtaking the third time as it was the first. Yes, I watched the movie twice more in theater 3D, each time with friends who, in the last few years, have become accomplices to my dream. Each time, from the darkness on either side of me, I heard satisfying quiet gasps and indrawn breaths. Each time I walked out of the theater fired with ambition, motivated to continue seeking balance, and feeling very much alive in those ambitions.


Oh, and I am incredibly jealous of lead actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s eight-day wire workshop with the real Philippe Petit.

Precious Moments, People Moments: Heather

---

Many of the brightest threads in my tapestry of memories are woven from the slender strands of human connection—simple yet precious moments of shared humanity: a genuine smile that tugs my lip into smiling in return, an inside joke that becomes increasingly hilarious only because we're both laughing, or simply recognizing in a stranger a kindred spirit.
~Me

---

The story of my adventures at the Girls Only Slackline Festival isn’t complete without writing about Heather Falenski. Usually the posts I write under this heading are about the occasional, fleeting moments of human connection, often about strangers whose names I may never know. In this case, however, I was blessed to have two and a half days full of moments, camaraderie, conversation, and friendship with a person I came to admire very much.

Prior to the festival, I didn’t know Heather personally. We connected a week or two before the festival when she wrote on the event page that she was looking for someone to travel with from Prague. Given the remote and somewhat difficult-to-find location of the event, having a travel buddy was a huge bonus. I responded. From that brief instant message conversation, I was convinced that I would really like this girl. I felt like things were finally falling into place for the trip. Heather seemed to feel the same way: she wrote, "I love how everything just works out when you're following your heart."

For Heather though, not everything would work out the way she’d anticipated or how she would have liked. Her trip to the Czech Republic was complicated by computer glitches, missed flights, and lost luggage—very lost luggage. When I arrived, more than a full day after she had, her checked bag containing gear and clothing was still completely, utterly, distressingly lost.

Heather is an experienced highline rigger—which is very, very cool. A complete highline rig, as well as her personal highline gear, were in that missing bag—which, to a rigger especially, is very, very uncool. Though the suitcase was eventually located, what Heather had imagined for the festival—rigging and walking her own highline—wouldn’t happen. Rather than wait by herself indefinitely in a hostel near the airport for news of her suitcase’s whereabouts, she decided to make the best of it and continue on to the festival, after first picking up a few replacement essentials, of course.

How Heather handled that whole stressful mess tells a lot about her. Vivid in my memory is one particular walk down to camp from the highlines. We were passing through dappled forest sunlight, skirting the base of cliffs whose tops we could only partially see through the trees—a scene worthy of a fairytale. Heather, walking in front of me, commented on how the trip wasn’t turning out at all how she had anticipated, and then she added, with heartfelt sincerity, ‘I really feel like I’m not here for me, like my purpose for being here is to be inspired by these other girls, by their achievements and growth.’

In spite of personal disappointment and added stresses, Heather focused on everyone else, on me, on the other girls.  She has a talent for celebrating others’ achievements.  I was especially grateful for that on this trip.  As odd as it may sound, I was so blindsided by the extraordinary success of my first highline walk that I almost failed to appreciate it.  Heather not only served as a mentor providing tips, reminders, and safety checks, she also jostled me out of my shock, applauded my victories, and let me know how impressive it was what I had done.  Have you ever had someone say incredibly nice things about you, and you desperately wish you had a tape recorder to capture the words so you could play it back to yourself when you’d had a rough day?  That is most definitely how I felt around Heather: wishing for a recording and wishing I could see myself through her eyes.

Photo by Noraxy Delgado

Heather pushed me to try new things, harder things than I thought I was capable of.  After I managed to “send” (successfully walk) the longline, she encouraged me to try the even longer highline, telling me I would be limiting myself to work on the intermediate highline instead of going straight to that most difficult highline.  It meant a lot that someone would believe in me that much—believe that there was a chance I could really walk a highline—only my second ever highline—that was three times longer than any line I’d walked on before that day.  I wish I’d had as much faith in my ability to conquer that line as she did.  Hopefully next time I’m on that kind of big line, with a little more faith, better remounting skills, and a few more tries, I’ll be able to accomplish the miraculous feats that Heather thought I was capable of.  I left the festival with the feeling that if someone I look up to as much as Heather thinks I’m inspiring, I must have more potential than I give myself credit for.

While my impressive first highline walk is something to be proud of, some of my favorite memories of the festival are actually of tromping up—or down—the hill to and from the highlines, with Heather ahead of me, both of us chatting the whole way.  We definitely had some good geek out conversations—Heather sharing her passion for rigging and rigging physics, me sharing my balance-life analogies, and for both of us all things slackline.  We got so caught up in our conversation once that we may have accidentally wandered into Germany before realizing we’d overshot our camp.

I’m grateful for the time I spent with Heather at the festival, for her ability and efforts to inspire those around her to reach their full potential, as she did so selflessly for me. So many of the greatest things in life are based on the experiences we share with others, and she has a gift for forging those moments of human connection. That is an incredible gift to have.

Time to Highline

---

Highlining took everything I thought I knew about fear and threw it into the sky. To stand on one inch webbing stretched across a void, with all exposure penetrating your vision and unhinging your brain, every iota of your being is telling you not to be there. This is fear and each step across that line pushes it slowly away.
~Faith Dickey

---

After four weeks and two teaser posts, my attempt to describe walking a highline is finally ready. It was a remarkable experience; maybe that is why it has been remarkably difficult to find words for it.

From my last post, you already know that I’d been dreaming of attending the Girls Only Highline Festival in the Czech Republic for several years. Choosing to go this year was a big, and somewhat scary, leap of faith. I’ve been practicing on the same basic gear—short ratchet kit slacklines—ever since I started slacklining over four years ago. The one exception was my first (and only) highlining exposure experience over a year ago—where I didn’t actually walk on a highline. I was traveling six thousand miles to highline…and I only had two full days at the festival. It absolutely felt right to go, but what could I possibly hope to accomplish in just two days?

I decided to keep it simple: aspire big in the long term, but have a defined “success” that was very attainable. In Moab I hadn’t found the courage to stand up on the highline, so that was my goal: to stand, even if it meant falling. I had done what I could to prepare with what I had. I assured myself that I was more ready this time to walk. But most of all I was determined to stand up, to take my first leash falls.

So on Friday afternoon, after a good night’s rest and watching the rigging of a long highline, it was time to head to a highline of my own.

A short hike brought me to a small group of girls sitting near one of the anchor points at the shortest highline, 18 meters, or about 59 feet. Conventional wisdom for highline success is to walk longlines close to the ground, then shorter, easier highlines where the mental (fear) factors of high balance come into play. That beginner highline was five feet longer than the waterline I’d trained on, and as long as anything I'd ever walked close to the ground. Since I’d never even been near a longline, my personal distance record might have been the shortest of anyone at the festival—not exactly a contest I wanted to win.

Enjoying the easy camaraderie in our little group, admiring the skill and persistence of the other girls, I felt remarkably calm…considering. I’d done a fairly good job of not thinking about the emotional and physical realities of highlining. I’d shoved my doubts down deep, bound them down tightly under outward stillness and unconcern. They were still there though, lurking beneath the surface, making me feel not quite in synch with my beautiful surroundings. The trees swaying in the cool autumn breezes, the bird’s eye view of our camp, the vast stretches of pinnacles lining the valley like sentinels couldn’t quite reach deep enough into my soul to soothe my disquiet. I wasn’t feeling very optimistic; I was worrying that I might fail at even my very minimal goal. Waiting for my turn on the line, I wasn’t even sure anymore that I wanted to try it.

At that point I knew I needed to get on the highline before any of that pessimistic gunk came churning to the surface. When the line was free, I hurried (carefully) to be next in line. Imagine how weird it was sitting at the edge of a cliff, feeling impelled to hurry tying myself to a rope, so I could scoot off the edge of a cliff. Impelled. I don’t have a better word for it. I was thinking that perhaps I ought to just find a new dream…while my fingers continued to tie the knot.

Tied to the leash, double checked by the more experienced highliners, I scooted out…and just sat there for a while, looking down in a hopeless attempt to get used to the yawning void below me, to the cliffs whose sheer walls plunged down to a bare rocky floor. As the distant ground below me seemed to waver, inviting me to join a dizzy dance with vertigo, from behind me the voice of my new friend Heather reminded me not to look down. She was right: I wouldn’t get used to it; looking down wouldn’t help me balance.

A deep breath, and I focused my gaze and my soul on the far anchor point, took another deep breath, rocked onto one leg, stood up...and walked straight across without falling once.

Photo by Miriam Mrrm

I wobbled, but was never dangerously out of control, never seriously afraid of falling. The focus of that walk was a beautiful thing: only the anchor point and the slackline that led to it mattered: down ceased to exist.

Even though, in the process of sitting to turn around, I lost my balance and caught the line, it counted as a perfect first walk, an “onsight,” a big deal in the world of climbing and slacklining.

Photo by Heather Falenski

I got back up (a process that was significantly more difficult than I remembered from last year), and with just as much steadiness crossed back. This time, as I approached the end, I managed to kneel, then sit, then lay down, a simple routine I’d done many times on the waterline. Perhaps that feeling of familiarity lulled me into complacency…or cockiness. Lying there, I let my focus wander; I wobbled, and rolled off. I’d taken my first (gentle) leash fall.

After an even more strenuous second leash climb and remount, I was back on solid ground, and was greeted with congratulations…which I’m afraid I didn’t accept as graciously as I would like. With adrenaline still coursing, but smothered by the lingering deep focus, and dazed by a success so incomprehensibly beyond anything I’d dared hope for, my brain fixated instead on how pumped my forearms and fingers were from the remounting. Yes, my reaction upon successfully walking my first highline—on my very first try!—was, “But my arms are sooo dead.”

Eventually the adrenaline wore off—leaving me with my stomach quaking and hands trembling—and elation finally crept in. Then for the next half an hour or more while we watched another slackliner work the highline, Heather and Miriam got to listen to me muttering, “I walked a highline…look my hands are still shaking” and other similarly eloquent ramblings.

After a lovely long rest and almost a whole pack of Haribo (Pico Bala) gummies, I recovered enough to walk again. I managed a clean walk to the far end, then kneeling, turning, and mounting smoothly. A few steps back toward the starting anchor, I fell hard and decided to be done for the day. A very good, wildly, unexpectedly successful first day.


My second and last full day was packed with firsts as well. On our way up to the highlines again, Heather and I stopped by the longling in the field by the campground. She convinced me to try it too—a fifty meter line, nearly triple my then personal distance record. Much to both our surprise, by my third try I walked that line too. My very first longline.

At that point, Heather suggested I challenge myself by going straight to the long highline, skipping the short and intermediate lines. Fifty-six meters this time, and significantly less tensioned than my first longline an hour earlier. After two remarkable victories, on that long line I finally had the experience that I had been expecting all along—a line so difficult it took all my willpower to force myself to stand up to take a fall. And fall I did: the line bucked me off a split second after I stood. But I did stand. Plenty sore from the day before, after that fall I called it a day. Though I have a nagging regret that I didn’t make more attempts and take more falls, I still feel proud of what I’d accomplished in that day, too.

As is my custom, I made time for one last memory moment, one last goodbye. Sunday morning, already dressed for church and in a hurry to get to services in a city far away, I couldn’t resist giving the longline one last try. In the soft light of early morning, and in a dress no less, I balanced for a few moments over dew-damp meadow grass. It seemed an appropriate way to say goodbye to Ostrov, the Autokemp, and the festival.