Now I’ve really seen everything. War in Ukraine, the Cubs winning the world series, skin tones on emojis—and, two weeks ago, or three when you’ll be reading this, a standard California Condor glide 50 miles an hour over the grand canyon and slam headfirst into a thin young man from Philadelphia holding in his hands a long, cylindrical balance pole which in that critical moment fails to perform its intended function and sends the aforementioned young man from Philadelphia—who was called John Billingsley and presently suspended on a high-wire steel-and-carbon-fiber cable about 1500 feet above ground with no other safety apparatus—hurtling straight towards the canyon floor, which he hits at what is later deemed to be 9:53AM, breaking his neck. He dies on impact. At 12:44PM the New York Times publishes Grand Canyon Tightrope Walker Suffers Fatal Fall. The incident becomes real. Most events are not incidents—they are merely something that happened. But this was an incident.
His wife is present. I’ve developed a bit of a crush on her as part of the one month I’ve spent with John’s family, friends, partners-in-crime: pretty much anyone that could help me obtain a comprehensive portrait of what exactly it is like to be a methodical genius capable of world-changing feats of human daring. This guy is really something more than a human or a legend. He’s a children’s factoid: who was the first man to tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon? There wasn’t any doubt he could do it, or so they’re saying. He’d done the Petronas Towers in ’17, Niagara Falls in ’20. The Grand Canyon was about the limit of human possibility: ‘the big one,’ as per Philippe Petit, world-renowned egotist and the guy who did the WTC way back in ’74.
The wife is called Daisy Billingsley, she’s an elementary school teacher from rural Pennsylvania, and I could editorialize her reaction to witnessing the man she loved fall to his death but you can already watch it on the New York Times website in 4K. She’s the kind of 28-year-old who lays out cookies for visiting guests. I want to repeat that. She’s the kind of 28-year-old who lays out cookies for visiting guests. These are the kind of people we’re dealing with. Of course I’m going to develop a crush on her. This is far beyond what people like you or I deserve. She’s got herself a nice 4-person tent on a rented campsite about a mile off the edge—it’s been lying there for a couple days now despite the fact that we spent the last two days in a lodge, instead. It’s the first time she’s ever seen the canyon, and four days after the funeral she swears to me it’s going to be her last. She doesn’t like the idea that her husband is buried in Arizona. But she’s glad that they let her carry him out to Phoenix; she was beginning to think the authorities would never return the body. That way she won’t ever have to return to the damn canyon again to visit him—she can just fly into Phoenix and out. ‘The Indians were right,’ she says. ‘That’s cursed land. All kinds of things can happen out there.’ They’ve got a two-year-old son called Malcolm who’s got a tiny tightrope out by the garden himself. ‘We’ve got contingency plans,’ continues Daisy. ‘We’ve thought it all over—there’s insurance, there’s savings, I’ve got his accountant. It’s not as if we weren’t ready for it, you know. But it’s all about the way that it happened. And I loved him, and I got a decade with him, but the thing that gets me is that Cole is going to grow up without a dad. It was going to be his last walk—I didn’t want him to do it, but how could I have stopped him? It wasn’t mine to stop.’
You’ve heard all this before, probably on video. One of the downsides of shadowing guys like John is that the entire nature of their being can be broadly categorized into some manner of type—either you get the Petits, who have a delusional grandeur about them that proceeds in a more or less predictable manner—proclamations in the vein of ‘I am my own father, for my true birth was merely when I fell across the Kármán line unassisted’ when questioned about family history—or you get the Johns, who are so unassuming so as to be entirely unnotable. This is the kind of article you can start typing out before you’ve even hit the landing. It’s not that it’s unfun—being paid to hang around with a guy who’s going to walk two straight miles across the most recognizable American natural formation on a bit of wire without a safety is hardly unfun—but it’s still some amount of going through the motions. And then the condor thing happens, and all of a sudden the nasty bits of business you’ve never even paid much attention to start looking like entire encyclopedias’ worth of exploration. For instance, it’s not until you hear the wife complaining about it that it strikes you that Section 11-594 of the Arizona Revised Statutes makes no practical mention of the amount of time the county medical examiner can actually hold on to a body for forensic examination even as it lays down the exact fee it can charge the appointed forensic physiologists to conduct said forensic examination (it’s something like $10,000). Or that they can fly it out without your permission from the National Park Service office to said county medical examiner, and that you’re only told a few hours later that you can’t see your husband because he’s probably somewhere on a helicopter right now—besides, wasn’t he a fan of heights, anyway? Cop said that, true story. Or that when they do return your husband’s body after an entire week of autopsies it’s actually during the viewing that they choose to inform you that besides being charged with a breach of Section 7.29 of Title 36 of the Code of Federal Regulations that requires any activity not explicitly outlined in the National Park Service Regulation Guidebook Chapter 22 (which of course fails to include high-wire pyrotechnics) be subsidized by a Park Permit and is punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 along with 3 years of jail time you’re also being charged with a violation of Section 11(a) of the Endangered Species Act that is further punishable by a first-time offender fine of up to $25,000 because the bird involved was the critically endangered California Condor which has only recently been reintroduced into Grand Canyon National Park and has a population of approximately 600 individuals as of writing this article. Or that they tell the funeral home you’ve already made preparations with several months in advance to fuck off for no good reason at all and they’re going to be burying him in Phoenix and there’s nothing no one can do about it. Or even that your lawyer’s a guy called Aiden Sommerfeld, and he’s supposedly one of the best lawyers in the state. And it’s only when you’re sitting down and Aiden’s going on a long, droning rant about how all this business is what in legalese they call a real ‘no-man’s land’ and there’s little chance that they’re actually going to seriously prosecute you for what essentially isn’t anything more than a television stunt and the whole reason they’re putting you through all this hell anyway is merely to deter future imitators from attempting similar death-defying acts that you stop thinking about how deeply dysfunctional the so-called ‘authorities’ are and you realize that the reason they’re being so dysfunctional about it is because attempting to tightrope across the Grand Canyon is simply something new. No one’s ever done it before, and they’ve got no clue what to do about it. All the infrastructural systems in place have simultaneously collapsed under the weight of this one man’s pressure—this was a guy who actually looked out there towards the foggy horizon over the ravine and didn’t hesitate a second before saying ‘You know what? Why not.’
The thing that sets guys like John apart is that there’s a serious unambiguity to their positions which makes it all the more taxing to actually encounter them and form any kind of impression that isn’t easily reducible to ‘Really? This guy?’ You almost hate your own self for thinking these things, because unlike someone opposingly talented like Ozzie Osbourne this guy’s supposed to be, like, verifiably insane in the type of way that can’t simply be explained away as ‘coke fucked his brain up.’ Everyone knows that the reason Ozzie’s nuts is because he’s doing some kind of occultist blood magic. His madness is comprehensible. But there’s a certain type of madness in suspending yourself above Niagara Falls for funsies and then driving back home to some fresh apple pie in a Philly suburb. For example, John was an Eagles fan. You almost wish that the kind of daredevil you’re encountering is the egotist type because the psychology of the egotist is ultimately a psychology of the self and more specifically of a daring narcissism that everyone’s experienced at some point or another, or at least when you’re fifteen and trying to ask that girl out—‘if I can’t even ask her out, I’m such a fucking loser,’ and when you inevitably do and it turns out that she’s been keeping an eye on you for a while and says she’d love to go to homecoming dance you’re not a loser anymore but some kind of demigod fashioned by the heavens themselves. Except for this guy it’s not Stacy Thorpe but scaling an Arctic glacier with just a toothpick, or something. This is simple. It’s explicable. It operates on known principles. But if John’s an Eagles fan by day and a tightrope walker by night then the texture of this madness we’re talking about is entirely defined by some kind of lack of cognitive dissonance. And what’s worse is that when your job is asking the inevitable questions that attempt to bypass this dissonance to paint a coherent narrative getting answers that are tantamount to prepared statements makes the whole thing a very frustrating experience.
The first time I met John was exactly forty-four days before his fall and in a Chick-fil-A. Brand deals and NIL Agreements have made him a multi-millionaire, but he’s still choosing to eat in a Chick-fil-A. ‘Why?’ I ask him. This is the kind of thing they’ve asked Bill Gates too many times, and the Gates answer isn’t all that different from John’s: ‘I’ve liked it ever since I was a kid.’ Fair enough, and it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation—but it’s not material, and the underlying schmaltzy story behind it isn’t material either. John loves going on these digressions. ‘You know, I remember going to Chick-fil-A with my dad at the mall—was all the rage back in the ‘90s.’ There are 10 million people who could say the same thing, and none of them want to high-wire across the Grand Canyon. The reason for this meeting and the assignment in general is because I’ve been told that he’s been secretly preparing for his next (and biggest yet) stunt, and though we’ve exchanged a series of emails that lay down the rules as to how I’m going to proceed—for example, his wife is so nice that she’s actually prepared the guest bedroom for me, ie. there’s going to be a totally wild-card reporter sleeping in his house—I don’t actually know what this stunt is yet, and he’s been unwilling to provide any information about it over a non-transient channel. ‘You’re not wearing a wire, are you?’ he asks, before giving a loud laugh. He’s about five-foot-eight and maybe like 135 pounds, which means he’s bony and the hearty laugh doesn’t exactly fit the visuals. He’s 33 years old. He was born in Fairfax County, Virginia, but he moved to Philly when he was three and never left. He’s the kind of guy who says he’s Philly through-and-through. I say ‘trust me, if there was a wire on me, you’d know,’ which means absolutely nothing but he still finds it funny enough to keep laughing. Then he comes close to me and whispers, ‘I know you’re dying to know this—we’re doing the Grand Canyon.’
One thing that’s less known to the public is that sky-wire performers—and John by extension—are also career criminals. It’s both true and reasonable to expect that any act which could potentially involve falling thousands of feet is carefully regulated or more simply just deemed illegal. This is doubly so for any such act carried out in a National Park, because national park regulations are basically constructed in such a manner that the most risky activity that you’re allowed to carry out in one of them is attending your ex-husband’s wedding; there’s more chance that they let John scalp rattlesnakes than allow him to run a wire across the full length of the canyon, which makes applying for a permit all but impossible because all that’s going to accomplish is alert the authorities to a potential sky-wire attempt. The last thing you want is for the Park Rangers to start inspecting every Silverado in the hopes of finding a bundled-up mile-long steel cable buried under some linens on the bed, and so really more complex than the actual stuntwork itself is the actual planning and execution that goes along with it. ‘I can do the walk,’ says John, ‘whether we can get the wire across is a whole different matter.’ When we reach his beautiful midcentury home he invites me inside to show that the garage has basically been transformed into a scale plaster replica of the canyon complete with a variety of stenciled lines that look more than anything like battle mechanics. You don’t walk so much as inch around it, and judging by the mound of dust on the parkway side the garage door hasn’t been opened in months. John toothily picks up one of several LEGO minifigures lying on a shelf and places it on an X-marked spot somewhere at the very edge of the North Rim. ‘That’s the starting point,’ he says. ‘And right there—’ he points to another X on the opposite end, forming a diagonal line that cuts across the canyon—‘that’s the landing. Point to point, I’d say it’s about 2.4 miles.’
He ended up making 1.4 of them. But even this brief digression is enough to reveal what took me about two days in the Billingsley home to learn: John’s not good at describing anything about his life or about his brain, but he’s refreshingly brilliant at explaining the mechanics of the task he’s about to perform. The whole tour-de-force has a startling Ocean’s 11 quality to it. It’s all about the specifics—he’s not doing do the walk so much as pulling it off, and that makes all the difference. When he tells me on day four that his favorite food is the peanut butter sandwich he’s not the one who’s correctly able to articulate the fact that the only reason he likes peanut butter sandwiches is not because there’s something specific about the taste of peanut butter and bread together—I mean, he doesn’t even put jelly on them—but it’s because it’s the quintessential on-the-go food, and to someone like John, on-the-go is where he always is. He likes them because they’re all he eats, not the other way around. This is not a person who’s concerned with gustatory receptors or the minutiae of whether a white wine glaze truly fixed the underlying ‘acidity’ of whatever Italian sausage is being served to you along with a side of leeks. He’s not really concerned with food at all. Daisy says he loves her lasagna, but so do I, and it’s for the same reason any sane human loves lasagna—it’s meaty and cheesy and she knows how long to bake it, that’s about it. And it’s partly because of this underinsistence on food that John is able to articulate to a significantly higher degree just how exactly steel cables are manufactured, for instance, or how the details of the precise alloy can make-or-break the walk. ‘The amount of carbon is inversely proportional to the brittleness of the steel, but you need to maintain a strict ratio for tasks like these. We’ll need something like 0.8%,’ he says. There’s a lot of complexities about aerodynamics and the tautness of the wire that goes over my head, but I’m sure will be perfectly comprehensible if I ask him to slow down—he has a habit of getting lost in specifics. This state of knowledge extends full well to the law, as well. ‘They’re going to hit me with the Code of Federal Regulations. But I’m expecting that the record’s enough to get a full official pardon, otherwise I’ll have to do a couple months. All worth it, though.’ The walk isn’t going to be the highest, but it will be the longest skywalk ever done.
Obviously, John is a workaholic. He wakes up at 6AM and immediately launches into a series of stretching exercises that precede a full gym 45-minute gym workout—shirtlessly, which finally renders his hidden frame as muscular in terms of tension and density, not size; he’s thin but it’s all rock. Then he performs a variety of tightrope exercises in the lawn for a couple hours before shifting back into the planning process and spending time corresponding with his ‘crew’—prime among these is Brad Calwell, a high-school friend who lives about 20 minutes away and only moonlights as an illegal tightrope assistant; his day job is that of a car refurbisher. When I first meet Brad I’m put off by the fact that he’s not chewing on a reed and wearing a too-tight leather jacket. I’ve never seen it before but somehow this guy’s hair is actually slicked-back. There’s about six people total, including two more who are presently in Arizona; nothing about the materials they’re hoping to obtain is illegal but they’re hard to obtain without a construction license, and Brad’s been in contact with a warehouse owner in Flagstaff they call Heston that seems to be doing most of the administrative work required to actually procure these materials and test them out. We’re going to be flying out in about a couple weeks. This allows me several entire afternoons to pester John about the variety of things I would like to know; he’s a good volunteer, but I can tell he’s not sure what I’m getting at. He doesn’t get why the things that I call breakthroughs are in fact breakthroughs. By day eight it’s clear that John is meticulously aware of the law—he’s rote memorized most of the relevant statutes and has a solid understanding that in fact Section 22 of the National Park Service Regulation Guidebook is only enforceable within the boundaries of the National Park which are defined to be land boundaries and hence may or may not cover the precise zone in which he will be operating which (apart from about a 100ft stretch in the beginning and ending) is actually in the air, a fact that he’s planning to use in case the prosecution gets a little handsy and tries to make a circus out of him—plan A is still getting governor Rob Wallaha (whose second cousin is a former trapeze artist and has a daughter at ASU that recently made it to Vault nationals) to grant him an official pardon. He’s officially consulted with defense lawyers David Mitchum in Philadelphia and Savannah Cortez in Arizona and they concur that the case is probably an easy one, but he’s still convinced that he’s the leading expert in these legalities and he’s right. But this doesn’t take away from the fact that this understanding of the law is fundamentally childlike. There’s a notable whiplash when I ask him whether the law is right to prevent people from undertaking whatever tasks they’d like to a mile in the air over the Canyon. He’s never thought of this before, and he says ‘probably.’ When asked whether those same rules should apply to him, he says that he doesn’t really think so, because he’s a trained professional. That’s the real kicker; the way John thinks about the legality of what he’s doing is only in terms of whether the specifics violate a fixed code set by arbitrary people who seem to be in his way. The law to him is not a malleable societal construct that attempts to enforce something society has deemed morally necessary. Most of us are legally Catholic; the act of breaking the law itself induces some kind of vague guilt—hence the reason for following it. But in John there’s no guilt reflex. He’s operating on an entirely detached level of willfulness which renders such feelings obsolete. Is this a serious lapse in education? Is this the precise quality that people try to develop in an attempt to promulgate critical thinking? Because it’s looking to me like the manner of critical thinking that leads to a wholehearted and complete understanding of the law in its societal context—that innate understanding of what people term the spirit of the law, the exact trait which is what John is counting on to result in an official pardon rather than a full prosecution—the lack of that trait is partly what’s going to enable him to walk across the grand canyon on a wire that’s exactly three inches in diameter. Let me ask you a question—you, a lawful citizen with a full, concrete understanding of what the Founding Fathers and the Constitution of the United States were attempting to communicate during that sovereign day in 1776—have you ever even walked on a balancing pole for 20 straight feet without falling? And do you know what John’s got to say to the question of whether what he’s doing is legally and morally right if it violates the spoken and unspoken contract we sign when we reside in the territory we have chosen to civilize and exercise our right to choose the leaders which design the very laws that uphold said contract?
It’s never even crossed his mind.
Then what does cross John’s mind? In fact, after all is said and done, the remaining question I’m interested in is, more precisely, what is the exact thing crossing John’s mind during the 20 seconds it takes between him losing balance on the wire and him landing headfirst onto the canyon floor? Because that’s the million-dollar question. That’s the bang-for-your-buck, the thing that everyone who picks up this rag wants to know, it’s the only reason they’ve got so far, even if it’s only hidden away inside multiple layers of comedic distance—because fact of the matter is that it’s funny that this guy who spent six months planning the heist to end all heists got hit by a condor, but after you take away the fact that it’s fucking hilarious and get to the rotten core of the whole damn apple all you want to know is the morbid feeling of what exactly it feels like when things go so suddenly and irrevocably wrong that rock bottom is something you’re actively hurtling towards at 300 miles an hour.
Maybe it’s easier to ask what’s going on in his head when he’s on the tightrope, and believe me, I’ve asked. You know what the answer’s like. ‘Always the next step. Take it one step at a time. That’s all I’m thinking.’
Day thirteen I’m walking the tightrope on the lawn myself; that’s the only way I’m going to get anything out of this. It’s not easy to pick these things up. John’s been doing it since he was four. Says his dad worked as a circus manager for twenty years, and really imbibed this philosophy that circus acts from an early age build hand-eye-coordination, but he didn’t think his son would take to it so well that he’d become one of the most famous tightrope acts in history. The Petronas Towers one even involved a whole wheelbarrow. He’s not planning anything too fancy with the grand canyon—that’s more an endurance test—but if you sift through the adjectives that the seventeen or so thousand people who were lucky enough to see that one live used in news clippings then ‘divine’ stands out as the least hyperbolic. The one time John hits me with the ‘is that really necessary?’ is when I ask him if I can get in contact with his parents, who also live in the greater Philadelphia region. You think I’m not going to comply? I don’t even know their names; he says they’re getting old and it’s best to keep them out of this stuff, so of course I keep my trap shut and my legs on the rope. There’s a very particular manner in which you’re supposed to keep your feet on the rope, which involves placing each foot diagonally but in opposite directions so they would form a V if kept adjacent, sort of gripping onto it with your bare sole. Sometimes it’s easier to keep yourself in motion than stand—the right shoes help quite a bit, and the ones John uses are soft and toed, along with which he also applies a certain amount of chalk in order to help with controlling friction. Of course, this is only for the big walks; he can zip across the lawn rope in sneakers if he wants to. That one’s for the baby, anyway. At around 6PM he’s going to drive up to Parkland Gymnasium which recently obtained a $250,000 gymnastics grant from the Billingsley foundation and has in turn allotted him essentially unlimited access to several indoor and outdoor tightropes they’ve placed at his direction. There’s several close to the entrance which are tied to large, obelisk-shaped poles, and a common pastime of the elementary school kids in the 6PM-8PM Tuesday class is to watch him run around on them about 40 feet in the air. That’s his main practice area—there are other practices which he fashions to adjust for wind velocity that involve a large number of giant fans, though they don’t seem to be available right now. Supposedly they’re a hassle to maintain.
None of this is making me any more confident at tightrope, and becoming more confident at tightrope doesn’t ensure that I make any progress in solving my problem, either. The central paradox at the heart of this exercise is one of awareness—the more I attempt to formulate what I’m thinking while performing a tightrope act, the less I’m going to be able to effectively identify my natural, disaffected thoughts while the act is going on. It doesn’t help that John’s advice is mostly useless. ‘Just focus on keeping balance,’ he says. ‘It’s all about keeping balance.’ I’m sorry? Did you really just tell me that tightrope walking is all about keeping balance?
I’m now going to tell you the answer to the question of why John likes to do high-wire acts, which I asked him while we were celebrating my accomplishment of walking 20 straight feet on a tightrope suspended 3 feet above the air by sipping Minestrone Soup at Olive Garden, which is what John and Daisy do when they want to feel posh.
This is it: ‘It’s pretty fun. Gives you the adrenaline rush, makes me feel alive. The planning’s great—a lot goes into it, part of it’s just cracking beers with Brad and the boys. And cause I go to a lot of these different countries I get to bring back these fridge magnets that Daisy really likes. What have we got, babe? 35?’
‘Something like that.’
Maybe it’s my fault that I asked him at Olive Garden. Maybe I’m a bad journalist. Maybe I’m a bad person. I should’ve asked him in a car. I should’ve driven him to New York City and let him moodily look over at the Manhattan skyline and say something about humanity is a different species. I should’ve let him ramble for an hour about how when he’s up there his brain goes all quiet. It’s like his life is a dream and he’s waking up. It’s the one thing that makes him feel human in this cursed, cursed world; it’s the whole reason for his life itself. I should’ve let him say ‘because.’ That’s it. Just ‘because.’ I don’t know what it means, but it would’ve been poetic. When George Mallory climbed to the top of Mount Everest in June 1924 he was asked by someone not dissimilar to me why he wanted to do it, and his answer was breathtaking—‘because it’s there.’ That’s all there is. 20,000 years of humanity building up to a climactic moment of one man ascending above all others and laying down the glorious flag of our race at the very apex of the planet and claiming it, once and for all, for ourselves—that that’s what we are, people who existed and who did things, who reached the very edges of all that God had created for us in the hopes of finding there the answers to the questions of our being. It was for both the climb and the peak. It was for doing something nobody had ever done before. Why did we reach the poles? Why did we sail to the Americas? Why did we circumnavigate the earth? Why did we solo El Capitan? And why, after all that, are we choosing to tightrope across the grand canyon? Because, contrary to what you may think, it’s not just John doing it. There’s a man up there. He’s one of us. And when he makes his way across the canyon it’s going to be not just him, but all of us that make their way across.
Why couldn’t he have said that? Was that so hard?
And what in the world is he thinking when he’s out there up on that rope?
Because you’d like to think that the point is that he’s not thinking. Because it seems, on the face of it, that John Billingsley is the kind of guy who thinks—and yet everything seems to contradict it. Have I finally encountered the kind of person who lives life on autopilot? John says his favorite book is Slaughterhouse-Five: what’s he getting out of it? Is he actually, fundamentally reading this book or are his eyes merely glossing over some words in a manner that is more akin to looking? Is his brain processing anything? ‘It always makes me cry when he gets out of the bunker, you know.’ That suggests that there’s something going on there, some kind of turning gearbox that has resulted in an emotion being created. If he’s capable of emotion, surely he’s capable of fear? ‘Everybody gets scared. I’m always trying not to look down—it’s kinda brutal, honestly. Always makes your stomach churn.’ At that point most people would back off, but he’s going anyway. Surely he must be challenging himself. ‘That’s definitely a part of it, but I also sort of know that I’m going to be able to do it, you know.’ This is all I get. Just… sentences. Nothing with any meaning. Somehow he’s operating at the basest level of human thought. Is he thinking about groceries? Is he thinking about God? Is he at all conscious of the fact that this is an act that could go disastrously bad? Did John Billingsley die happy?
And, it’s on the last day—precisely a minute before those 20 seconds that I’ve been trying to retrospectively quantify as ‘good’ or ‘bad’—that I think I get the answer to that question, and it doesn’t come from John because he’s out there on the high-wire but from one of the five hundred or so people that have managed to gather at this remote site off the North Rim, past the usual hikers and the camping grounds and all the various trails and park rangers that might try to stop him. It’s all over now. I’ve met Heston—he’s a tall, bald guy who wears round glasses. I’ve seen them drive out to either end in their trucks at 4:45AM when the shifts change. I’ve seen them unload. I’ve seen the baby look over the vastness of the canyon sunrise. I’ve seen them shoot the bow with what looks like nothing less than military-grade artillery over the edge. I’ve seen them fasten it. I’ve heard John’s bit about wind prediction. I’ve seen them pull the steel wire over the the taut rope. I’ve seen him put on his acrobat’s clothes and his ropewalking shoes and his climbing chalk. I’ve seen then measure the sway and determine that it’s safe to proceed. I’ve seen John kiss his wife and son before he steps foot on the wire. I’ve seen him tap the ground thrice in superstition. I’ve seen him give me finger guns and a wink that says ‘you’re watching history happen.’ I’ve seen the park rangers drive over with sirens on. I’ve seen the reporters start flooding in. I’ve seen the guy from CNN unable to wipe that smile off his face. I’ve seen Daisy muttering prayers under her breath. I’ve seen him cross the mile barrier. I’ve seen feds in complete disbelief. I’ve seen him cross the halfway point.
And throughout this time, I’ve heard something that allows me to make a coherent theory about what might have happened in those 20 seconds that John Billingsley fell to his death.
Because there’s a profound sense in which John’s both like you and me but also terribly unlike you and me. I’ve never once doubted that the reason he’s giving me the answers that he is has something to do with honesty or integrity. John’s not a liar. He’s a good man. But maybe there’s something else going on here: maybe there’s a translation error. It’s possible that the way that concepts manifest to John are not, in fact, the way that they manifest to someone like you or me. When John says he looks down and feels scared I believe him. I believe that he feels the raw biochemical stomach-collapse and the churning dizziness and the reflex to immediately step back and resume standing on solid ground. I even believe that he feels the followup rationalization of ‘I probably shouldn’t do that again.’ But there’s some part of him, and maybe it’s cultural, or maybe it’s just nature, that doesn’t truly feel that burning, pathological self-hatred that comes from having a moment of fear that you weren’t able to conquer. Something like ‘fear’ is not the same concept to him. It’s merely a surcharge that when paid goes away. It doesn’t stick around and diminish him in the same sense that it can drive a failed marine into the throes of a lifetime of mediocre security-guard work with the underlying sentiment of ‘that stuff’s not for me, man.’ And it’s no wonder that I can ask him whether he feels self-doubt and he can answer ‘everyone does’ because to him that question is as meaningless as asking whether trees leave in the spring. He doesn’t know what self-doubt even is. Yeah—he’s sat at the edge of the canyon and thought ‘maybe I could die’ but to him that maybe is only a real possibility in terms of it being something that could happen in the abstract, like yeah if you think about it there’s nothing really stopping the Lions from winning the Super Bowl. It could happen. So his walk on that tightrope isn’t so much characterized by what he’s thinking but rather what he’s not thinking. He could be thinking about the weather, about spaghetti, about putting one foot after the other. Who knows? Who cares? He could even be thinking about how much he’s got left. He’s definitely thought ‘fuck, all that and I’m only halfway there?’ But I can write down and as God as my witness tell you that the one thing that’s never crossing his mind during the whole fiasco is whether he’s going to make it.
And if he hasn’t thought that once in his whole life then there’s no way he’s picking it up in those last 20 seconds. He’s not thinking ‘I fucked up.’ He’s not thinking ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ He’s not even thinking ‘Fuck, it went wrong.’ He’s not a guy who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. He’s the guy under whose weight the whole bridge collapsed. He’s closing his eyes and the wind’s blowing faster and faster and he’s thinking nothing more and nothing less than of Daisy and Malcolm Billingsley and his unnamed parents out there in their home in suburban Philadelphia and Brad and Heston and the times they had beer and Olive Garden and growing up and pancakes and his wedding dance because he cannot, even for a moment, conceptualize the idea of looking at a piece of wire a mile above the ground and thinking ‘I don’t know how people do that.’ It’s a category error. He can say the words, but he can’t internalize the feeling. He can’t think ‘that’s scary, man.’ He can’t feel the burning pit of fear that would drive a hazed freshman to never want to go back to school ever again. To sit at home and cry instead. He can’t even gestate the thought of ‘maybe not the next one.’ And he’s not once in his life—not since he was born at 9:00PM in Fairfax County and not even when he hits the floor of the grand canyon 33 years, 8 months and 12 days later on the 6th of June, 2024—has he ever had the possibility of even comprehending let alone dispersing to all the relevant parts of his skull that monitor higher-order brain functioning the first thought that came to the mind of the blonde woman from Utah trying to control her overexcited son upon witnessing that pale black dot that was for a brief moment an entirely new addition to that oh-so-familiar landscape: ‘Jesus Christ—I could never.’