It's Aug. 21, a sunny Saturday in historic Port Hope, Ont., clouds threatening to the west. I glance nervously at them as I walk toward the Butternut Inn. Waiting for me in an upstairs room is a man who is about to literally put his life on the line: an unforgiving steel line about the size of your index finger and more than 25 metres above a rocky river.
Three-quarters of a century ago, this house was the residence of arguably the most spectacular personality in Canadian history, a gentleman named William Leonard Hunt, who thrilled the world in the guise of the Great Farini, inventor of the human cannonball act, explorer of the Kalahari Desert and high-wire walker extraordinaire.
This Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. History Television will air Dangerous Dreams,a documentary about Farini's life. In it, the magic of 21st-century technology will place the audience on that wire in a recreation of Farini's 1859 Port Hope debut. But even that will not allow them to feel the full intensity of actually being there, either for the first event 140 years ago, or for the one in which I was privileged and petrified to play a part.
When I knock on the upstairs door there is no answer. One hour before his death-defying feat, Jay Cochrane is asleep. Moments later, he props himself up on a pillow and asks me to sit down. He looks much younger than his 55 years, especially from the neck down. In four decades of performing in the circus and constructing and walking the world's greatest skywires (including one almost 1,000 metres above the Yangtze River, a world record crossing), he has toned himself into a rock-hard athlete.
During the past few years, Cochrane and I have become friends. When I saw him walk a 60-metre high wire in Florida three summers ago I felt concern. Now, it is more personal. And the circumstances leading up to the Farini performance made it even more so.
When Great North Productions first contacted me, they asked if I thought it possible to recreate Farini's debut. I said it would be difficult. There are three or four high-wire walkers worldwide one can trust to do this feat. The best is Cochrane. He had other qualifications: like Farini, he is Canadian born and raised, and intent on walking above Niagara Falls, which the first great one accomplished in 1860.
But calling up the world's greatest skywire walker on two months' notice (some of his shows take a year to plan) to risk his life for what would be a pittance compared to the five and six figures he normally commanded, was a daunting task. At first he laughed when I got him on the phone. Then he surprised me. "Sure," he said, "I'll do it for you."
I wanted the cable to descend from the same building that was there in 1859, a tall grey structure that appears nauseatingly high when one stands near it and looks up. He flew in for a day, sized things up and said, "no problem." Then fast-moving, problem-solving Cochrane flew back out of town. We all waited.
About a week before the walk, he appeared again. Within days, I watched him and five assistants raise the cable, like magic, high above the Ganaraska. They strung it along the top of a block of buildings on the main street to anchor it. They guyed it and tightened it and hung it in the sky like an enormous spider web. People stopped on the Walton Street bridge to stare up; transport trucks ground to a halt as drivers craned their necks; children watched with mouths open. I sat on the grass of Farini Park under the wire, smiling. Skywires, to me, are like works of art, pencil-thin sculptures full of foreboding, bringing with them anticipation and wonder, wonder that human beings might actually conquer them.
The day of the walk, he dropped a bomb on me.
Three hours before showtime, as the crowd that would swell to 8,000 began to gather, an ostensibly calm Cochrane came to me, eyes as wide as Gretzky's on game day.
"Do you want a job?" he asked.
"Sure," I said, hoping he had some honorary task for me.
"Here's what you're going to do," he said. "See where the wire meets the roof of the building?" We looked up to the wire's apex. "You are going to go up there, stand on the edge, and when I come across on the wire, I'm going to hand you my balance pole. Otherwise I can't turn around."
I'm not sure if I said anything at that point, I may have just nodded. He slapped me on the back and disappeared. An hour later, after a mind-numbing trip up to my perch in an Ontario Hydro bucket to see if I would throw up or freeze like a cat up a redwood, I was visiting him in Farini's house.
"How does it look from up there?" he asks.
"It looks fine," I say, unsure. From the brink it had appeared absolutely terrifying. His wire seemed crooked, impossibly narrow, and the drop made my adrenaline rush like a Niagara rapid.
"How about the end, the last 10 metres before the building?"
"I think it's okay," I offer.
"Steep though, eh?"
"A little," I say.
I hadn't seen his great Yangtze wire in person, nor the one he had walked blindfolded between hotel towers in Las Vegas for U.S. network television, and assumed that this one could not possibly be as steep. But I had known him long enough to feel his concern.
"It isn't too steep, is it?" I ask.
"Well, if it is I'll just have to deal with it."
An hour later I am on the roof. Andrew Hunt, a relative of the Great Farini, plays bagpipes as Cochrane climbs his scaffolding. Sam Haskill, whose great-great grandfather had helped Farini erect his rope, introduces The Prince of the Air.
As Cochrane reaches the top of his tower, he looks 45½ metres across the wire at me. I can see him gather himself and then pick up his long balance pole. He is weighed down by audio equipment on his waist to record his words and a tiny camera around his chest to shoot down and give the film's viewers an amazing perspective. He may as well be carrying a man across the Ganaraska, as Farini did at Niagara.
Slowly a foot leaves the platform. All we hear is the river rushing by in this beautiful setting. Like all great practitioners of this 2,000-year-old art, Cochrane has a distinctive style. He walks in a measured fashion, body upright, head slightly downward, eyes riveted on the wire three metres in front of him. "You must watch the wire because it will move," he once told me, "When it moves, you react. You learn to control it, not it you."
He picks up the pace, gliding along in the sky, awing the crowd with the surprising, silent beauty of his art. He moves down the slope and walks directly toward me. Suddenly the wire sways. Pulled sideways, Cochrane stops. Down on the street people look away.
An anxious local assistant has jerked on a guy line he is holding at the river's edge. It is his job to gently pull on it as Cochrane approaches the stretch to which it is fastened, to draw the main cable as taut as possible. But he has jerked instead of pulling and nearly pitched the aerialist into the void. Cochrane remains cool. I can hear him shout firmly but calmly.
"Son? Do not jerk the wire! Pull down on it gently."
The assistant pulls down gently. The main wire tightens.
"Thank you," says Cochrane and continues on his way. At mid-wire he stands on one foot and salutes the crowd. They have been easing him across, as intense as if they were up there themselves. Now they burst into applause, proud of him and themselves.
Moments later he is ascending sharply, eight metres away from me. This is the steep section that concerned him. Soon he's just a metre away. It is an electric moment. I could reach out and touch him.
As he steps off, he tells me how to hold the pole, his voice calm. But in his eyes I can see that his concentration is turned on. "That was very steep," he says.
I'm getting worried. Climbing a high wire, even a steep one, is not a particularly difficult chore for someone of Cochrane's talent. One leans into the wire, a natural movement, like climbing a hill. But going down is something else: as dangerous an effort as exists in the art of funambulism.
Cochrane turns and waves to the crowd, a smile pasted on his face. We hear the people respond. He rotates on the perch, commenting on how small it is. My heart is pounding. Above us the clouds are darkening. A wet wire is a death wire.
He has agreed to walk back, for the cameras, something he rarely does. He adjusts his heavy equipment and looks out over the scene. "It's very steep," he repeats. I want to tell him he doesn't need to go back. I have no idea if I do. We are a step from each other. I can see the sweat on his face, the shaking in his legs from the strenuous climb. Below, no one knows what he is facing.
But the Prince of the Air isn't about to give up. Out he goes, almost straight down on the wire. He walks as slowly as I've seen him walk, making sure each foot is secure before he moves the other. It seems to take forever, but within moments he is at the first guy-line buckle and past the steepest part.
That's when I know it is over: he has conquered the Farini feat. He moves faster, conscious of the rain clouds. The instant he lands on the platform, rain bursts from the sky. Up on my perch, speechless and finally able to move, I give him a little bow.
I had often wondered what really motivated Farini to do all the extraordinary things he did. And why Jay Cochrane will one day cross above Niagara Falls.
Something had driven Farini to desperately seek out adventures around the world. Part of it had been an attempt to live out his childhood dreams. But standing at the brink of Farini's and Cochrane's wire, as petrified as I had been, I knew what it was really all about.
There was no drug that could give you that thrill, no special effect in any movie. I knew what Farini had felt that day in 1859. He had felt intensely alive. Shane Peacock is the author of The Great Farini: The High-Wire Life of William Hunt, published in 1995 by Viking Penguin Books.