Balance work. Balance relationships. Balance health. But what about balancing yourself. Your actual clumsy body. Not on a curb or a balance beam but hundreds of feet in the air on a line of rope. And if you fall you break a bone or multiple bones or you just die. The art of tightrope walking is actually called funambulism and requires a person, with what some might call “guts”, and a thin wire rope. Tightrope walking is nothing new and it crosses all kinds of cultural and historical boundaries from an ancient Korean tradition to the Niagara Falls stuntmen. Of course you have the cliché circus performers most of us associate tightrope walking with but this activity has more than just a few daredevils throughout its history. Take Jorge Ojeda-Guzman who lived on tightrope wire in Florida for 205 days. That’s right, over 6 months of being perched like a bird on the electrical lines outside your house. Or what about Eskil Rønningsbakken, a Norwegian who’s famous party trick was tightrope walking between two hot air balloons in flight. Unfortunately death comes with the territory of daredevil acts. People such as Stephen Peer, who fell to his death over Niagara Falls in 1887, came to morbid and often public ends. What causes these individuals to throw themselves across enormous waterfalls or between skyscrapers on only a thin piece of rope? I don’t know. Why does anyone risk their lives for public entertainment? Or better question, why do these gravity-defying thrill-seekers enthrall and entertain us so much?
