WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, MY FAMILY HAD A SMALL wire strung across our backyard. It’s the one I first walked when I was two. It’s the one my mother and father patiently instructed me on, teaching me the mechanics and movements of the Wallenda family. I remember falling off that wire and landing in the grass. I remember my first turn on that wire. I remember the first time I sat down on that wire. But more than anything else, what I remember about that wire is that almost any time I was on it, so was Lijana. We would pretend we were our mom and dad or that we were in their act. Being on the wire together was as natural for us as being together anywhere else.
With New York firmly in mind, I was thinking about that backyard wire a lot in the days before I finally called her to pitch the idea. I was hoping that what we shared was more than a last name, more than just good memories. I was hoping we shared that same drive to be on the wire again.
Finally, I called her.
When she answered, I didn’t waste a second. I simply said, “Lijana, would you consider doing a walk across Times Square with me?”
There was a pause, and it was scary for me, nerve-racking even, because I was talking to somebody who had fallen from a wire twenty-eight feet in the air. (It was more like thirty-eight feet, since she was on that second level.) And not only that, but she was still recovering, still rehabbing, still going through surgeries to get back to herself. I just didn’t know what she would say.
“Absolutely” was her response. “I want to do it.”
She began telling me how she’d been slowly getting back on the wire, as much as her injuries would allow. She started out low, like maybe twenty-four inches off the ground, but she was gradually increasing the height as much and as often as she could because, in her words, “I was born for this.”
That was all I needed to hear. After we talked, I called my manager and told him that Lijana was in—Times Square was a go. It didn’t take long for our broadcast partners to sign on to the idea, and we quickly arrived at a date: June 23, 2019. We would string a 1,250-foot-long cable—three times longer than anything Lijana had walked before—from the roof of 1 Times Square to the roof of 2 Times Square. We would be twenty-five stories in the air (250 feet) and the cable would have a twelve degree incline from one end to the other. I would start on the higher end and walk downhill toward Lijana, who would start on the lower end. We would meet in the middle, she would sit down, I would step over her, she would get back up, and then we would walk to our respective rooftop endpoints. All live on television, with an audience cheering below in Times Square. Meanwhile, as we walked, the television announcers would share Lijana’s incredible story of recovery and tell the world about our walk to redemption. There would be press, media appearances, and lots of opportunities for us to talk about what God did in our lives after the accident. I was excited thinking about it because I knew it would be incredible.
I also knew the production was going to be a challenge because I was going to have to pull double duty: I would not only serve as executive producer for the walk but also have to help coach Lijana for the stunt. I didn’t think either job individually would be especially challenging—certainly nothing I hadn’t handled before—but the idea of splitting my attention made me a little nervous. I didn’t want to underserve either of those roles, especially with Lijana. She was putting her faith in me again, and after Sarasota, I was not going to let her down. I was going to do everything in my power to make sure she not only felt safe but actually was safe. She nearly lost her life trusting me once; now here she was trusting again. God forbid that something would happen this time. I’m not sure I could have lived with myself.
There were days the pressure felt overwhelming, but I couldn’t show it. Ironically, one of the first things we would have to address was the safety harness that New York state law requires performers to wear. It was going to be an issue.
Our family preference is not to use safety lines, but the good people of the state of New York and my TV network partner felt differently, maybe because so many daredevils careened over the edge of Niagara Falls in barrels. When I performed my walk across the falls in 2012, I not only had to have safety equipment to make the crossing, but the governor also had to sign legislation giving me permission. The legal hoops were easy enough to navigate, but helping Lijana get accustomed to the safety harness would take some work. And we would have to figure out how to complete our walk in light of the fact that the harnesses would make it almost impossible for Lijana and me to cross over at the center of the wire. My brain was turning nonstop for a solution.
Safety harnesses aside, there was also the issue of the event being bigger than anything Lijana had ever done before. My sister is an accomplished performer and has done some amazing things with her troupe performing at Absinthe in Las Vegas. But the size of the stunt I was proposing was going to be a significant challenge. It was farther and higher than she’d ever walked before, and we were going to completely stop our momentum in the middle of the wire in order to execute the cross. Oh, and we had to contend with the wire being on an incline. It was enough to scare a seasoned solo performer who’d never had anything go wrong, but throw in the two of us, the accident, and the watching eyes of a world that can’t wait to see if you fail, and it was a big hill to climb.
And that’s really the only reason I agreed to do the walk.
The challenge of wanting to be great and pursue greatness rests in answering this central question: How do you continue to grow? How do you find your next win? How do you step outside of your comfort zone? In traditional sports, you move from game to game, from opponent to opponent; in business, you tackle the next problem your customer faces. But when you do what we do for a living, growth isn’t marked by making more money. It’s not about being an MVP or winning the championships. Instead, it’s all about facing and conquering mental and physical challenges that could hurt or even kill you. Candidly, it’s one thing to say that when you’ve never really been hurt by the wire. But coming off of Sarasota, seeing how hard and how long Lijana had to work just to get back to normal, the sensation changed. I understood that our walk across Times Square, as cool as it would be, was truly a testimony to something deeper, more significant, more powerful than the average person dreams about. It was a shout to the world that God, the one we worship and who made each person on this planet with care and love, was firmly in control.
We would demonstrate this by being in control of ourselves. I knew that Lijana and I would have to train for this like nothing else we’d ever done. I would have to push her limits, and mine, to get us fully prepared for whatever might happen on the wire. We would train in Sarasota, and we would train hard, incorporating elements I’d used for my walks across Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. We’d have simulated wind; we’d have simulated rain; we would walk across a variety of wires in order to find our strength and balance no matter what the wire might do or how it might feel. We would go back to the Wallenda way: put your feet on the wire right, hold tight to the pole, never lose your cool, and you will never fail.
I knew the first thing I would have to do is get Lijana reaccustomed to the wire. Though she’d been walking some at her home in Las Vegas, I knew that she was more confident in the wire than in herself, and that wasn’t where I needed her to be. I needed her to be assured of her own abilities, her own strengths. The wire that we were going to walk across Times Square was going to be the safest, most secure wire she’d ever walked, but if she had any doubts about her ability or her strength, the wire wouldn’t matter. She could potentially fall. We had to remove that potential. So I strung up a low-hanging wire in my backyard, not unlike the one we grew up walking, but I made it as sloppy and wobbly a wire as possible. The first time she stepped on it, she looked at me as if I were crazy.
“This isn’t very secure, Nik.”
“I know—but try it anyway.”
She did try it, and watching her wobble around, searching to find herself and her footing, was hard. I didn’t want to see her bail on the wire, even if it was only three feet off the ground. I wanted her to stick with it and prove that she could recover. The first day she walked only fifty feet or so of the eight-hundred-foot-long training wire, and it really freaked her out. It was like no wire she had ever walked on before because I had intentionally made it incredibly unstable. It took her more than a week to build up enough courage to walk the entire length. Even then she was still walking very slowly and cautiously. It was as much of a mental battle as a physical battle.
After about ten days, we began to talk through the routine and how it would go. I told her the wire would have a little bit of movement because of the height and because I would be walking toward her.
She looked at me the way only an older sibling can. “I’m not stupid, Nik.”
“I know. I just don’t want to take anything for granted. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“What about you?”
“Or me. But if anything were to happen to you, it would be as if it were happening to me. I don’t want to live through that again.”
After that, I continued to string up sloppy lines at increasing heights. We went from three feet to five; from five to ten; from ten to twenty. It was around thirty-five feet that we began to simulate wind conditions, bringing in fans that would blow at varying speeds. We got up to as high as fifty miles per hour during some of our sessions. That’s a ridiculous speed, I know, but the wind cuts through the New York buildings in ways that can really mess you up. One big gust and you could be off the wire, the walk over in more ways than one. We threw in rain simulations, too—anything to make us constantly focus and refocus on what our bodies were doing at every moment. We wanted to make sure that we were so locked in on our job of walking from building to building that crossing over in the middle would be a minor inconvenience on the way to our goal.
In some ways, it was like being a child again. Working with Lijana and getting the chance to reconnect after the accident was a blessing—and it brought to life one blessing I didn’t expect. If you’ve ever been through a traumatic event, you know what I’m talking about: it gets easy to be with people without being with them. You can be present yet distant, connected yet removed. I hadn’t been aware of feeling any of that with Lijana, but it surfaced as we practiced for hours every day. I began to realize how much I had pulled away in the aftermath of the accident. Maybe it was part of the shame I struggled with, or maybe it was just because she had to work so hard on her recovery. As I watched her working, I realized that although each of us had recovered from the fall, we were both still healing, and there was a difference between the two.
Recovery means getting back to how you used to feel. Healing means getting used to how you are now. Some people call it embracing the new normal, but whatever you call it, it requires work and dedication, and Lijana and I were doing all of that together as we rehearsed.
When I wasn’t walking the wire with Lijana, I was on the phone with our production partners, making sure that everything in New York was coming together. There were site visits to make, measurements to take, legal documents to sign, marketing to create, press to book, and a thousand other things that needed my near-constant attention. In a way, it was my own form of a “sloppy wire”—I had to fight to get my head in the game every time Lijana and I were together. I had to learn to trust myself again. To aid me, I made a playlist of new worship songs and shared it with Lijana. We don’t always have the same tastes, but she enjoyed the songs I shared with her, as they gave us a common focus on the wire. We both decided that when we walked in New York, we’d wear our earbuds so we could not only listen to the same playlist but have the ability to communicate with each other as well.
As we came through the winter into the spring, Lijana and I added media appearances to our routine. We were still practicing each day, but we began talking to various media outlets around the country, both print and television. We did local news in Florida and made our way to some of the talk shows around the country. Each place we went, we talked about the redemption we were seeking. It’s funny, but I’ve mentioned how I’ve always sought to redeem things that my family had done—the fall in Detroit, my great-grandfather’s fall in Puerto Rico—but redeeming the past felt different from what Lijana and I were chasing. We weren’t seeking to redeem the fall in Sarasota; we were seeking to redeem ourselves from what the Enemy wanted to bring out of the fall. We were rebuilding the final pieces of our faith.
Soon enough, we were in the middle of May, and it was time to begin working on the set for the walk. My team and I would do the rigging, and as always, I asked my father, Terry, to oversee everything. I always want his eyes on each piece of the rig, from the smallest bolt to the wire itself, because I want his blessing and experienced assurance that everything is rigged safely and properly. In fact, I had gone to him and Mom and asked for their okay before I even spoke to Lijana, and well before I signed off on the walk.
Those final days were tremendously stressful. The distance and the incline proved to be significantly more challenging than Lijana and I anticipated, so the rigging process kept changing. This caused a lot of concern for both of us. Just days before the walk, Lijana came to me with some doubt, and I promised her we would get it right, that everything would work out. But she wasn’t sure—and neither was I. What was our private struggle became public the Thursday before the walk when ABC News and other outlets reported on the problems we were experiencing. In the end, the report only served to drive up the drama for our Sunday walk, which meant the viewership was going to be up. That same day, I appeared on Good Morning America and took Michael Strahan up to the platforms where we would walk. That morning there was a thick fog in the city, which made visibility challenging. Strahan asked me if I was scared.
“It’s a little intimidating,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Strahan asked.
“One of the challenges that we have,” I said, pointing to the platform, “is we’re at 17 stories here”—I pointed to the opposite platform—“but we’re at 25 stories there. . . . It’s pretty steep on that end, a little more than I expected . . . so it’s stressful for me. I have to walk down that incline so it’s extremely intimidating for me just standing up here looking at it.”1
The rest of that weekend is a blur. There were so many details that needed attending to, so many commitments that required my time. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was just grateful for show day.
Lijana and I met beforehand, and we prayed together for strength and courage. I was nervous—I will admit I wasn’t sure if she would be able to step out onto the wire, let alone walk it all the way. For all that we’d practiced, there was no way to practice the courage needed in the moment. You simply can’t replicate it. It’s either in you or it isn’t.
I made my way to my platform, twenty-five stories up, and the crew helped me into my safety harness. There were crew members of all types: television crew, production crew, rigging crew, people who were there to make sure nothing went wrong, and people who were there in case something did go wrong. I knew there was just as much commotion on Lijana’s side, but I couldn’t help her beyond what I’d done, and I wondered if what I’d done was enough. I wouldn’t fully know until I stepped out on the wire and began my walk.
Once everything was set up and checked for safety, the countdown to the broadcast began. Strahan was serving as a host from the top of the skyscraper Lijana started on and was connected into my in-ear monitor to tell me when to take my first steps. There were cameras positioned all along the wire’s span, above and below, and on the platforms as well. Whatever happened to Lijana and me, there was no way anyone could miss it. I laughed to myself as I thought about the person who’d videotaped the fall in Sarasota with his phone. I was mad at that camera, but now I was about to welcome in tens of thousands of cell phones with no more control over what was about to happen than I’d had in Sarasota. It’s funny how life does that. It was just one more thing God could redeem.
When Strahan gave me the word, I took a careful step onto the wire and got my pole in position. The playlist began to play in my ear. With worship ringing in my ears, and a peace filling my heart, I began my steady descent toward the middle of the wire, hoping that Lijana would meet me there. I purposely started before Lijana so that I could report back to her on how the wire felt. I could also report to my team in case they needed to make any last-second adjustments before she started walking out. It didn’t take long for me to tell her that the wire felt firm and steady and to let her know that it was safe to start her trek. We would meet exactly where we should on the wire and begin the delicate crossover dance.
The incline of the wire was unnoticeable because I was so focused on Lijana and her safety. I also knew that it wouldn’t be as stressful on her going up the incline, because she wouldn’t be fighting gravity. We made our way to the rendezvous point quickly, and as I approached her, Lijana began positioning herself to sit down. I was going to reach down and unhook her safety harness—a move that we’d been able to get approved—and then step over her. I would then reach back, reattach the harness, and make sure she was steady as she stood back up. Of everything we would do on the wire that night, the crossover was the most difficult.
I concentrated on the music in my ears as Lijana sat down on the wire and hooked herself directly in, and I was feeling good as I moved to disconnect her harness. But then terror struck: my balancing pole started to slide down. My grip had slipped just slightly, and I felt my breath catch.
Lijana looked up at me. “Are you okay, Nik?”
Her eyes helped me come back to myself. I stepped over her and reached back, being sure to keep my pole balanced; then I reattached the safety line to her. I held my breath before she stood back to her feet; after what I’d just experienced, I was suddenly worried she would struggle to stand. That worry grew when her balance pole became entangled in its own tether. But Lijana unclipped it and got it reattached, and then I heard her say behind me, “In Jesus’ name, I’ve got this. In Jesus’ name. Thank you, Lord.” She stood again, to great applause from far below, and was back on her way. With that we both continued walking the last leg of our respective journeys. I was able to complete my walk quickly, which meant I had time to get off the wire and watch Lijana.
I hustled my way down to the street and looked up; she was taking her time as she navigated the final length of the wire. I marveled at her courage and strength as she faced her fear. Each of us has to face our fears at our own pace, and I got to watch her take those last few steps. The hair on my arms stood up, and I raced my way to her building, hurrying to the top so I could be there when the crew reached out and helped her step to safety. Once she was on the platform, we embraced, squeezing each other tightly. I got goose bumps then, and I have them now just thinking about that moment. It was life-changing for us both.
Two years after the fall, I had helped my sister heal. And she had done the same for me.