On March 22, 1978 Karl Wallenda, patriarch of the fearless family of high wire walkers, dies after plunging to his death from a wire in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was 73 years old.
El Condado, Beach front hotels, the wire tethered between them
“Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting.” – Karl Wallenda
My introduction to the legend of Karl Wallenda was simple enough: my mother told me about a circus man who had died after falling from between the two buildings we were walking by one day. Since then the image of this sky magician plummeting to his death with the gruesome grace of a shot dove stuck in my mind. As a Puerto Rican boy having grown up in the island and outside of it, the event and the solitary man as its protagonist has been archived in my mind for no apparent reason, like so many details that are sponged by our unconscious. Now that the event has been reactivated from my unconscious, I seek its meaning, I want to find the series of coincidences beyond the apparent facts that brought this strange and spectacular convergence to my neck of the tropical woods.
A Puerto Rican boy is born on January 6, 1980 in Massachusetts, thousands of miles away from the street where two years prior, Karl Wallenda dies on the pavement, in a city, on an island that he would know and he would leave. It’s not that this boy, now a man living far from that island, has a direct link to the event being related. At least not one that he can pinpoint before these reflections. An image, a recollection in a book by a German author sparked an interest in the high wire. The performer mentioned by this author was Blondel, the legendary Blondel. From there the link was established to Wallenda, a name the boy remembered from adult conversations on the island, a name mentioned in a conspiratorial whisper by those who remember the images on television and the corresponding narration provided by a local journalist—a news bit which led the evening news broadcast on March 22, 1978 the world over. After the memory is activated by this passage in a book, he digs up the footage on Youtube and watches the two minute clip for hours.
Wallenda comes across as a strong elder, walking the wire as on a pilgrimage, calm and determined but bearing the marks of a lifetime of near fatal close calls. The 30 year old footage is grainy and, as is to be expected in the new form of our Internet age, the fall, the money shot is the focus. Thus we see Wallenda teetering halfway across the stretch of wire tethered to the sea side hotels, the wind shakes the wire and he begins to crouch, his left foots slips, then he falls, then nothing, the clip is over. The voice over by the journalist, Guillermo José Torres, is cut short just as he’s about to collect his thoughts and improvise an explanation to the viewers watching at home. The context is missing; there seems to be no context. Clearly it was an accident, clearly the man was old, clearly he died. Yet what of the boy who years later unearths the memory of that man falling. The boy who grows into an educated man and has the words to explore this convergence and use it to speculate on the meaning it has for his life. Karl Wallenda died on my island, of all places, he tells himself. Here he finds a place to begin assimilating the event in the specious and often times contradictory trajectory of his own life.
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