Caldecott Monday: The Man Who Walked Between the Towers

[osprey_archer]

Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers won the Caldecott Medal in 2003, and I gotta confess, I think that right-after-9/11 timing has a lot to do with that win. The illustrations are perfectly serviceable, if somewhat Schoolhouse-Rockish - which fits with the 1970s setting of the story - but still, it’s a book about the World Trade Center.

Specifically, it’s a book about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the two towers in 1974, and it is possibly the most 1970s story in the world. Petit and his friends sneak the tightrope into the towers, string it up under cover of night (with the help of a bow and arrow!), and finish just in time for Petit to begin his tightrope walk at dawn.

The police of course are unedified, but no one is going out on that tightrope after him, so he stays up there dancing on his tightrope as long as he feels like it (to the delight of all New Yorkers below, one presumes), until he steps off and graciously holds out his wrists for the cuffs. The judge (portrayed in the book as a kindly bald man) sentences him to perform in the park for the children of the city.

I think today the police and the judge and for that matter building security would all take a dimmer view of this sort of thing, although who knows really. Maybe they would all be so pleased to have some good news for once that they too would be inclined to blink at whatever 150 rules Petit must have broken with this sneak high-wire act.

Comments

[sovay]

(And, the grandiosity and attention-seeking may be too much of a turnoff, too, depending on the person and the feat and us, ourselves, and how we feel about those things.)

Some feats are more for display; some are a contest with oneself; which kind it is makes a difference to how I feel about it. Philippe Petit seems to have been more the latter, which doesn't mean he was the angel that wire-walkers so often look like, but he didn't need to be. The thing he dreamed into reality did not hurt anyone. Partly he got lucky, partly he was as good as he thought he was, and it was not intended to. And now it's a dream again, because no one else will ever even try to walk between those towers, because that road of air is gone.

[asakiyume]

You say it so beautifully. Yes.