Chapter 13
Gonna take a flight of dreams, spread my wings, and soar above my fears
Take a leap of faith without a net and tumble free and clear
As crazy as it seems, I’m gonna take this flight of dreams
“Flight of Dreams”
We weren’t the only ones hurling ourselves through the air or perilously balancing on treetop heights during the seventies. Daredevils loomed large in that decade, with people like Evel Knievel and The Flying Wallendas, a circus act in the best sense of the word. Their multigenerational family high-wire show was legendary long before tragedy cemented their fame.
Karl Wallenda was the patriarch not only of the family, but of the art form itself. The world’s preeminent high-wire walker, he had been tempting fate from the age of six. Born in Germany to an already old and storied circus family, Wallenda and his brothers transformed the art of walking through the air into an act of bird-like beauty. Though many called out his art as mere reckless stunts, all admired the courage and skill Wallenda wielded throughout his life. The Flying Wallendas approached both life and the high wire with one foot in front of the other, face forward, slow, and steady. And they did it all without a net.
Over the years, the family suffered devastating injuries and losses, especially while performing and perfecting their one-of-a-kind seven-person chair pyramid. But every failure seemed to be followed by ever-greater triumphs. Throughout the 1970s, the world watched as Karl walked a fifth of a mile across the Tallulah Gorge in Georgia and successfully repeated the rare seven-person chair pyramid on live TV.
Then came San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the 121-foot-high promotional wire walk. That deadly journey captured the world’s attention, as well as the imaginations of the Sons of Starmount. Leading up to the event, announcers talked about the dangers of a stiff wind and the seventy-three-year-old’s health, but in the end, it was a few poorly connected guy-ropes that sealed his fate.
We sat mesmerized in front of the T.V. watching news footage of Wallenda’s wire beginning to shake. At first, it seemed to move side to side, then up and down, like waves on the ocean. As though it had a mind of its own, the wire eluded Wallenda’s every effort to overcome the inevitable. He tried standing still, then repositioning the long balance bar, and finally, bending at the knee, an old walker’s trick for stabilizing the wire. Every attempt to tame the wire’s will failed though, and in what seemed like only a few seconds of instability, the legendary high-wire walker fell chest-first onto the wire. Then, as gracefully as he had danced across it for nearly sixty-three years, he listed to one side and slipped off. He fell like a feather, and then like a stone, onto the street below and into the history books forever.
The boys and I were inspired to great heights of stupidity by far less dramatic events than Wallenda’s fall, so recreating his infamous wire walk was a forgone conclusion. Our high-wire scheme tested our limited knowledge of engineering, specifically our understanding of the concepts of weight and balance. After all, we had a well-deserved reputation for naive invincibility and hell-bent stubbornness, rather than precise scientific skill or expertise.
The towering wooden structure in Jim Maples’s backyard, known simply as “The Fort,” was an indispensable player in many of our adventures, missions, and everyday hanging out. Because of its height and home-like familiarity, we decided that The Fort would be the perfect venue for our very own death-defying circus act.
We spent at least five whole minutes in the planning and design stages, moving quickly to the materials-acquisition phase. With single-minded efficiency, we began collecting the various materials we would need from our parents’ garages, area junkyards, and dumpsters. We knew we didn’t stand a chance of finding a strand of wire long enough to string between The Fort and the pine tree. Even if we did, we were at least realistic enough to know we’d never be able to walk all the way across it. So instead, we pivoted to a design made of two-by-fours, spanning almost twenty feet from the top of The Fort to the large pine tree close to the house. We used every nail we had, which was more than we needed, to piece together several long two-by-fours. We also propped up several more as a base support in what we thought would be a structurally sound stance. Had we been older and less drunk on adventure, we would have realized that two vertical two-by-fours at either end of the long span met the textbook definition of under-engineered.
Staring at our new contraption, which stood at least ten feet off the ground, we waited for a volunteer to emerge from the shadows to claim the glory of the walk. With no immediate takers, we each tested the first few feet and all met with failures in personal structural integrity, better known as courage. Looking past our crazy bravado, we all knew that this was a fool’s errand. We began to trade glances that clearly said, “I think you’d be better at this than I would.”
We traded that glance for a few minutes before we ultimately determined that the first official high-wire walker needed to be one of the smallest, lightest, and lankiest of us. The youngest boys, John and Clay, were non-starters. In fact, they had already cleared out knowing that we would be turning to them first, even though we knew that our parents would never allow them up there. We turned to Matt Bourgeois next. He became “The One” without even having the chance to bravely volunteer.
“Uh…yeah…okay…well…I think I can get across there. I mean, how hard can it be, right?” Matt said with increasing confidence.
We totally had his back as we chimed in, “Of course you can, man. You’re perfect for this!”
The closest thing we could come up with to match the long metal balance bars used in traditional high-wire acts were two hollow metal tubes that we dug out of the Centel telephone company dumpsters behind The Fort. They were about two-feet long and quite heavy. Idiotically thinking those dimensions and weight were perfect for Matt, we instructed him to wear one on each arm. We dubbed them “Metal Arms” and thought these hard-won treasures would surely serve Matt well as he tried to maintain his balance on the two-by-four span.
Showing off was part of the Starmount ethos, so as with many of our schemes and events, we sold tickets to our parents to attend this daring feat. We lined up lawn chairs around Jim’s backyard and ushered the parents into the arena. We had at least four or five moms and dads in the audience. Some came for the opportunity to capture a cute “Kodak moment,” while some came out of morbid curiosity, but I think most came out of a false sense of security, believing that if needed, they could intervene before gravity took hold. Several parents and neighbors decided to stay at home, like mother and father ostriches with their heads in the sand. To be fair, they likely knew the most probable outcome and chose to keep their memories free of the inevitable carnage.
After some last-minute preparations and a long pep talk inside The Fort, Matt readied himself at the edge of the last secure board he would feel for the next thirty seconds. Struggling to hold his arms out straight out under the weight of the Metal Arms, Matt took his first steps onto the wire, or in this case, the wooden two-by-fours. With what seemed like little concern for the ground below, Matt quickly took a few more steps out into the great blue yonder. The rest of us celebrated this early success with high fives and a sense of relief that we were not the ones out there with our asses in the wind.
“Wow, I can’t believe it’s holding,” Tommy exclaimed with a degree of happy surprise.
“Of course it is,” Jim shot back confidently.
I kept my mouth shut, finding myself caught between Tommy’s and Jim’s perspectives. I was convinced that it would hold because it had been my idea in the first place, but I was also quite sure that I didn’t want to be the one up there if it did give way. Plus, we were old enough to understand the concept of bad luck being brought on by a jinx, so I thought better of angering the gravity gods with some lame play-by-play commentary.
Not to make light of the fatal fall that killed Karl Wallenda, but our wooden “wire” began to undulate and shake as much as any wire the Wallenda family had ever walked. Looking back at us with a stare that begged for a solution, if not an outright rescue, Matt clearly realized just how vulnerable he was. All we could do was stare back at him with a look that screamed concern rather than one that whimpered with relief.
“Uh-oh, guys, look at that,” I said sheepishly. The “wire” began to take on a life of its own.
Jim, as confidently as he had predicted success just moments earlier, announced in a matter-of-fact tone, “That thing’s coming down.”
We all started yelling at Matt to hurry across the boards before they fell apart completely, as if we thought that yelling those instructions with all our panicked might would somehow blow him safely to the opposite side. Other noises quickly drowned out our voices: mothers screeched, fathers cursed, and timbers cracked. All we had left to do was watch our feat of engineering buckle, snap, and fall to the ground, along with our daring and much-loved friend. The whole spectacle, though meant to recreate a great circus act, far more resembled the infamous Hindenburg dirigible crashing to the ground, sans the fire.
We all stared down at Matt lying in the dirt, twisted between the broken pieces of our two-by-four “wire.” He looked like a crime-scene chalk outline. One of the many fortunate qualities of being ten years old is having a body that still possesses that protective trifecta: wildness of heart, pliability of bone, and elasticity of skin. Matt got the wind knocked out of him, but he never lost consciousness or the wry smile that every Son of Starmount wore in the face of trouble. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Matt picked himself up and dusted off his Levi’s. That wry smile turned into one of confidence, the kind of smile that comes over you when you realize you have become a legend. Success without some measure of mishap would have fallen short of our code of adventure. So, with our friend back on his feet, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us, this very public failure felt more to us like a win.
We were ridiculously young to be exposed to those daily doses of life-threating danger. But we were blessed with blind courage, and also, thankfully, an equal amount of beginner’s luck. We frequently made mistakes, but without the permanent yoke of self-doubt or shame. We knew, even at ten, that life was meant to be tested and passionately pursued. We lived life leaning into the wind and sometimes flying through it. Anything less seemed a waste.
Karl Wallenda said, “Life is being on the wire; everything else is just waiting.” That was the spirit of the German-born wire walker, and it was the essence of the Sons of Starmount. And to this day, it is the essence of me.