LIJANA’S JOURNEY BACK FROM THE ACCIDENT IS WORTHY of its own book. After the Big Apple Circus, I came back to Sarasota and put my focus on helping her recover. My sister is tremendously strong—her ability to bounce back from her injuries is nothing short of inspiring because she had to rehabilitate her body, mind, and spirit. It was a much harder and more difficult journey than I can even begin to describe.
The guilt and emotional stress I had been feeling for allowing my sister to get injured was only magnified because of something I haven’t told you yet: Lijana wouldn’t have been on the wire if not for a last-minute team choice. You see, we didn’t ask her originally because she was busy performing with her own wire team in Las Vegas, but a week before the Sarasota show was set to open, the person we had originally chosen backed out. We needed a pinch hitter, someone we could trust implicitly and wouldn’t have to spend a ton of time training. We needed a pro, and we needed that person quickly.
We needed Lijana.
Lijana has wire walking in her blood just like I do. I can remember when we were kids out in our backyard practicing together, her helping me, me helping her, the two of us speaking the unspoken language of a family that lives for the same passion. She’d also held the pyramid with me before, so I knew we could bring Lijana in, even with only a week of training, and our bond would be able to cut through the time pressure.
Other people have done an eight-person pyramid before, but the top level of the pyramid is just two people together, instead of building to a true point. So it’s essentially four people on the bottom, two in the middle, and two up top. In my mind, this could be seen as cutting corners. Sure, it provides for more stability, but it doesn’t give the audience the same Wow! as a true pyramid structure: four people as the base, two people as the second level, one person as the third level—and the final person sitting atop their shoulders as the top. That’s what we do, and it’s dangerous.
The highest we’d ever done it was twenty-five feet off the ground in Japan, which set a world record in 2001. We’d be attempting to break that record in Sarasota by raising the wire to twenty-eight feet, so we needed someone who could handle the pressure—which is what caused our original teammate to back out. As the front person of the second level, he was the one who had to hold his balance so the third and top levels could hold theirs. He was still a bit shaky, even after all the rehearsals, and he simply couldn’t handle the stress.
We could still do the seven-person pyramid and be within our contract. But we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to do the eight-person again, this time in front of our friends and family, on our home soil. As I’ve written before, my vision for our family’s legacy is to elevate the general public’s perception of circus performances, and holding a world-record eight-person pyramid for the opening night of Sarasota would be an example of how we go beyond everyone’s expectations and deliver to the greatest of our ability. So even though we didn’t have to call Lijana, even though we could’ve settled for the seven and kept our contract intact, we knew it wouldn’t be a record. Plus, we would know that we delivered less than what was possible, and we were not willing to settle for that.
So I called Lijana and asked, “Do you want to be a part of this?”
“Heck yeah, I do,” she replied, “but let me practice holding a few pyramids with 250 pounds on my shoulders down low here in Vegas and send you guys a video to see what your team thinks.” Later that day we received a video of Lijana practicing and watched it as a team. We all agreed to have her jump on the next plane cross-country.
That’s the way it is with with Lijana and me—we’re willing to be there for each other, to be part of anything the other one is doing. Lijana told me she was willing to do anything we needed her to do, and that’s what she did. With less than a week to go, she came in and took the same place she held back in 2001, the second-level spot of the pyramid. She jumped into rehearsals with the team and even practiced a lot by herself by carrying heavy weights on her shoulders. Her work ethic was unstoppable, and despite the time crunch and Lijana’s learning curve, everything was going well. We practiced the eight-person several times in the first five days after her arrival, and she gave us nothing less than her best.
Each practice saw us get a little bit better as a team; the night before the accident, we took the pyramid up to twenty-eight feet, and it went well. It wasn’t perfect, mind you, but it was good, so we called it a night and went to dinner and laughed for hours, talking about how much we were enjoying being together.
The next day, we came in for the final dress rehearsal. I knew there were still a lot of nerves, and not just the typical opening-night jitters. We were attempting an eight-person pyramid at a world-record height, and we were doing it with a team member who had only been with us less than a week. Just like every time we perform the seven- or eight-person pyramid, I checked in with every member of the team moments before we began to build the pyramid.
“How you feeling? Good?”
“Good!”
“Good. Okay, let’s go.”
And we began. As we were walking out on the wire, I remember that everything was going smooth at first, but then things changed probably eight steps out, which is about where I stopped. I saw a balancing pole swing way down, and I thought, Something’s not right. And then the pyramid just toppled before I could say anything.
During the aftermath of the fall, I saw a guy videotaping with his phone, and it enraged me. I remember thinking, What kind of sicko would video my family bleeding in the ring? One of my friends went up and grabbed the phone from him. This wasn’t something any of us wanted to have around to bring back horrific memories. I understand if that sounds extreme to you, but here’s why I felt so strongly: I didn’t want any of my family to be able to relive the accident. Of course, we live in an age of cameras and screens, so being filmed is now the norm. I learned from the police report that they acquired the video of the accident from his phone because the police wanted to see if there were grounds for criminal charges, if any foul play was involved. The police investigation was different from the OSHA investigation, which assessed whether the accident was the result of a rigging failure or something wrong that we did within the work space. They cleared us immediately.
About a month later, after Lijana was released from the hospital, my fear about the video footage going public became the focus of an important conversation. Despite the severity of her injuries, Lijana was out relatively quickly, and we were able to get the entire team together at a restaurant in Sarasota called Gecko’s. We met in a private room—with Andrew, Rietta, and Lijana all in wheelchairs—so we could have the chance to talk in peace.
After we greeted one another and there was a pause in the conversation, I said, “I’ve learned that there’s a video out of the accident.”
Everyone looked at me, stone-faced. No one said a word. I looked each person in the eyes: Blake, Andrew, Nick, Zeb, Rietta, Alec, and, finally, Lijana.
“I don’t ever want to see that video,” I said. “It’s bad enough I have to see flashes of it in my mind. I don’t need to see it in real life.”
We then went around the table, discussing the pros and cons, and decided as a group that we wouldn’t watch it. We were grateful to have survived—we would move forward from the accident, not look back. Everyone, as a group, agreed that it would be best to not ever see the video. We then made a pact, a promise to one another, as a sign of solidarity and a strong bond of an inseparable team.
It’s been more than three years since we made that pact, and despite all of the television appearances I’ve done where they play clips from the video, I’ve still never watched it. I know that it’s on YouTube and has been shared on countless news sites, but whenever I’m around and it’s on a screen, I close my eyes, turn my head, or leave the room. The visual would simply be too powerful in my mind, and I don’t need that kind of competition inside my brain—not to mention that I made a promise to my team, and I am a man of my word. I need to be able to walk out on the line with a clear head every single time.
I know others in the group have since decided that watching the video was right for them and their healing, and while I’m disappointed that they went back on their word, I know that each of us has had to do what we believed was right. For me, keeping my mind free from disturbing images is what I must do to stay healthy. And healthy is what matters.
Lijana’s injuries healed as time went by, and she was able to begin rehab. The swelling and pain in her face subsided, and soon enough she was back on her feet. What she wasn’t back on, however, was a wire. Unlike me, Lijana didn’t go right back to performing. She’s an amazing coach, with a high-wire troupe that she’s been instructing for years. She threw herself back into her coaching and spent her time investing in them, helping them grow from her experience. I couldn’t blame her after all she went through. Because of the fall, she spent weeks in the hospital and months in pain, working to get back to the person she was before the accident. Her journey was hers to make. She was alive, and she was well, and she was my sister, and those three things meant more to me than anything else. Lijana’s recovery was all that mattered, and my responsibility was to support her, cheer her on, and be her brother—even if she never walked on a wire again.
So while she got better, I got busy booking new events and picking up more opportunities to deliver speeches to companies, which was a goal of mine. The months passed, and 2017 became 2018. In the middle of 2018, I challenged my manager to help me land another big event. I wanted to do something that would really capture people’s attention. I wanted to pursue a walk in New York City between two skyscrapers, and my manager proposed Times Square.
I hadn’t been in the city for an event since Erendira and I performed there with Big Apple Circus. I imagined it would be pretty awesome being suspended above such an iconic city, looking at the skyline that you normally can only see in a photo. I really liked the idea of a walk over NYC, but I wanted to go higher and longer than Times Square and felt that walk wouldn’t be an exciting enough special on its own, simply because of what I’d done in the past. For TV viewers, how does a 250-foot-high walk over a crowded city compare to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon? In my mind it couldn’t, which is why I initially didn’t want to do it.
So I began to focus on creating something magical for the TV audience, but I didn’t quite know what that was until I hopped on the plane heading back to Sarasota. It was then that I realized the answer to the problem. I was listening to worship music, and I was praying. Looking out of the window, I whispered, “God, I don’t know what to do here. I really don’t know. I don’t feel like this is enough. It’s not big enough, exciting enough, dramatic enough. But what would be?”
Then, it dawned on me. The thought came into my mind and literally made me sit up.
You should do this walk with your sister.
I stared out at the clouds, and the thought continued.
She’s the one who’s overcoming such a traumatic event. This will be an incredible opportunity for her. It’s redemption. It’s everything that she needs.
Having made my own journey toward healing by getting back on the wire, I naturally felt like this was a wonderful idea. After all, Lijana and I grew up the same—we had the same passion, the same love of the wire, the same desire to perform—so it made sense that our full healing could be found the same way. But my enthusiasm was tripped up by one single thought: she had gotten hurt, not me. Maybe her pathway couldn’t be like mine. Maybe it would have to be some other way. The guilt rose up in me for a moment; after all, she’d only fallen because I’d asked her to walk with us. But my faith rose up to fight that guilt. It reminded me that God had taken care of Lijana and everyone on the wire. There were injuries, yes, but everyone had lived. I thought about something the doctor told me the first day Lijana was in the hospital: of the five people who fell from the wire, statistically two of them should’ve died based on the height of the fall. We’d beaten the odds on the front end of the accident, so who was to say we couldn’t beat them again on the back end?
I believed that Lijana could find healing by getting back on a wire. But did Lijana?