You are-you have been since you were old enough to grasp such things-perpetually aware of this fact. But movement keeps you centered if you stop moving, you'll eventually fall. The only way to stop the waves is to stop moving. Every time you place a foot on the wire it creates a vibration that sends a ripple down to the end and back, a perpetual frequency of waves. You are trying to "find a focal point," as Nik says, something steady to walk toward. Imagine yourself taking a step in Nik's shoes, inching your way across the open air, from one rooftop to another. It is much easier to idolize him, to follow him forever across the wire. All of this, to be sure, is your great-grandfather's fault, but it's hard to blame him for delivering your family-your grandmother and your mother, you and all of your cousins-into a similar fate, because you are so good at it. You are here because this is your job this is your job because, nearly a hundred years ago, it was what your great-grandfather, Karl Wallenda, decided he wanted to do. The cable moves beneath you, swings in the light breeze, ripples with each step. In this case, those shoes are an eighth of an inch thick, more like elk-soled slippers than anything, and they are resting firmly on a wire no wider than a tennis ball, 300 feet above the earth. Imagine yourself in Nik Wallenda's shoes.
On June 23, Discovery will broadcast Nik's quarter-mile long walk, 1,500 feet above the Little Colorado River-this time without a tether. The winds in the Canyon are erratic-big, swirling gusts and sudden updrafts strong enough to down a chopper. It's a stunt as absurd and perhaps even more terrifying than walking above the thundering cataract. Minutes later, though, when a reporter asked, "What's next for Nik Wallenda?", he declared his intention to brave the Grand Canyon over a course that is seven times higher** **than the Falls. He said his hands were going numb, that by the end he'd had a hard time hanging onto his balance pole. Upon completing the twenty-five-minute foot slog, Wallenda said he felt drained, weakened.
More than 13 million people watched the ABC special, the network's biggest Friday-night rating in five years. During the event, network mikes caught Nik telling his dad over the headset, "I feel like a jackass wearing it."
But in Nik's eyes, wearing a harness diminished the stunt, robbing it of the elements of risk and wonder, besmirching something sacred and time-honored. The prospect of hanging over Niagara Falls, while scary and unpleasant and no doubt humiliating, still seems to me a better option than death. "We had rescue plans, but if this thing gets caught, I'm screwed. "The tether scared the crap out of me," Nik says now, when asked if he'd been just a little bit relieved by ABC's mandate.
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