Courtesy Discover
Evita Wallenda is perched on a concrete highway divider, finger-drumming on a hole that's been covered for some reason by duct tape. "I'm reeeeeally bored right now," she sighs theatrically as only a 12-year-old can. About 120 feet directly over her head, her father is steadily walking his way across 1,576 feet of high wire stretched out above the Milwaukee Mile speedway, the evening's main attraction at the Wisconsin State Fair. Her two older brothers, Yanni, 17, and Amadaos, 14, are among the 22 crew members, all relatives or longtime friends, scurrying and checking the support ropes for tension as Wallenda progresses. This is billed as the longest walk of Nik Wallenda's career, 30 or so feet longer than when he crossed the Grand Canyon in 2013; he needs to push the envelope but he also needs to pace himself to support a life of subsequent record setting. But it's nothing Evita Wallenda hasn't seen before, every day, her entire life.
Watching a man walk slowly in a straight line does not seem like usual speedway fare, but from directly below the wire, each step is heart-stopping. Wallenda's feet, sheathed in special leather slippers handmade by his mother, Delilah, curl around the steel cable just so, but the margin for error is acutely, viscerally measurable. The grandstands are not full, maybe a couple hundred people, but the wire is visible from much of the sprawling fairgrounds, a slowly moving dot that is as much a part of the landscape as the Ferris wheel and villages of cheese curd stands. From that distance, what he does is so abstract — there's no mystery as to what can go wrong, of course, but from this vantage point directly below, it's so much clearer just how easily that could happen.
Nik Wallenda and his daughter, Evita, at the Wisconsin State Fair on Aug. 10, 2015.
Darren Hauck for BuzzFeed News
The cable is three-quarters of an inch in diameter and lined with 118 support ropes, 59 on either side. Each rope is held tight by a volunteer; a local radio station promised 120 contest winners to hold the guy wires, but fell a few dozen short. A few were too drunk to perform their duties as human ballasts — it's the end of a long, hot August day at the fair — so the difference is made up with state fair employees, spare crew members, and a lurking journalist. This isn't a new problem or one that hadn't been anticipated — for a walk a few years ago, so many volunteers were too drunk to hold the ropes that Wallenda had to more or less go unsupported. When Wallenda walked over the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls live on television, a much thicker cable was used because there was no way to stabilize with ropes and humans. Wallenda feels every vibration, every variation in tension; the less of either, the better.
Nik Wallenda prepping volunteers before the Wisconsin State Fair walk.
Darren Hauck for BuzzFeed News
At 6 p.m., about an hour before the walk was scheduled to begin, Wallenda stood in the loading area behind the fair's main stage clutching a megaphone, flanked by two of the riggers, and demonstrated how everyone needed to stand inside the rope's loop, placed just below the butt, and lean back so the line is as taut as possible. Oh, and, crucially, no mid-walk selfies by the rope holders, which was a big problem the time a high school football team served as holders — he notices every slight shifting of weight up there, please just be still, at least until Wallenda is several ropes past. "It's not that important a job," Wallenda announced through the bullhorn cheerily, "but if you screw it up, I'll die."
Steve Kandell/BuzzFeed News
Wallenda's guest of honor at the walk is Coulter, an 8-year-old fan from Houston with brain cancer, who is here with his mom and grandfather. They were part of the pre-walk prayer circle with his family and crew, and Wallenda introduces him from atop the wire, a brave kid going through a rough time. Wallenda and Coulter are both wearing a black wicking T-shirt with an NW/Nik Wallenda logo on the front and "Never Give Up, Coulter!" on the back, along with Isaiah 53:5 ("But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed"). #NeverGiveUp is Wallenda's motto and how he signs off on his social media dispatches — big-top attraction as motivational guru.
He speaks over the PA the entire duration of the walk, interviewed by the emcee who is standing on the grandstand stage, rattling off lines he says practically every time he is near a live microphone: that he's a seventh-generation performer, that his great-grandfather Karl Wallenda used to say, "Life is on the wire, everything else is just waiting." He's so dialed in the words may be coming out unconsciously. He later plugs his soon-to-air episode of Say Yes to the Dress featuring him and his wife, Erendira, renewing their vows; they never had money to throw themselves a real wedding 15 years ago, he explains casually. He has to pause and kneel on the wire several times, his monitor and headset mic keep slipping off his ear — of all the things that could kill him right now, indulging in light banter has shot to the top of the list. Three-quarters of the way across, crew members scramble to stabilize a spot in the wire that isn't taut enough. Then Wallenda reaches the end of the line and is lowered down on a lift, where his family and Coulter's family greet him, another record on his CV.
Darren Hauck for BuzzFeed News
The best circus performers were always as good at branding as they were at swinging from trapezes and standing down lions — they just didn't call it that. Wallenda is more than happy to call it that; his dozens of cousins and uncles and stepcousins, he thinks they'll never get it, they don't want it bad enough, they would rather tear him down than build themselves up. Self-promotion is no less an integral survival skill than keeping one's balance on a wobbly steel wire no wider than a nickel, and no less susceptible to volatile environmental vagaries. He is known for crossing Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon while unabashedly praising Jesus during live, widely viewed primetime TV specials, but he is not known as well as he would like. For all the cinematic audacity of the event walks he's plotting for the future — between the world's tallest twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, over rain forests in Brazil, atop skyscrapers in Times Square — openly coveting household-name ubiquity for performing potentially suicidal acts in front of the largest audiences possible at a time when spectacle is cheap and readily accessible in your pocket, all while maintaining an image as a pious, God-fearing family man is, in fact, Nik Wallenda's most daunting challenge. He knows he's not going to fall off a high wire.
Darren Hauck for BuzzFeed News
"I’ve had people come up to me and touch me to see if I’m real," Wallenda, 36, says over lunch at a Longhorn Steakhouse near his home in Sarasota, Florida, one afternoon in June. "People are fascinated by the fact that I could die at any point. They don’t necessarily want me to die, although there’s probably a certain percentage that do, and that’s OK. It doesn’t offend me whatsoever; that’s the reality of what I do. I know that’s gross and scary, but it’s the truth." Next to him is his intern, John, 18, a recent graduate of Sarasota's vaunted Sailor Circus, a training school for performers that is part of the town's heritage as the longtime American capital for all things circus-related. (When Wallenda drops in during a summer camp session, he is besieged by young autograph seekers.) John is apprenticing to learn the trade, both on the high wire and off.
Wallenda's hair is blonde thinning and swept back and to the side, his boyish face freckled and tattooed a reddish bronze from a life spent under the Florida sun learning how to not fall off of things. He wears, as he almost always wears, a tight T-shirt with a long crucifix necklace over it. He sips an iced tea and gingerly flexes his swollen hand, injured in a home-repair mishap as his new house was being remodeled. Amadaos recently broke his right hand trying to punch through drywall, only to find a stud. "Accidents come in threes," Wallenda sighs.
After a couple hundred years as cultural sideshow, funambulism is having an unlikely moment thanks to The Walk, Robert Zemeckis's vertigo-inducing dramatization of Philippe Petit's 1974 renegade tightrope walk between the newly erected Twin Towers, previously chronicled in the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire. If Joseph Gordon-Levitt's portrayal of Petit is the face of this art form as expressionistic, authority-flouting public spectacle, then Wallenda is its pragmatic flip side — careful, law-abiding, part of a long-tail business plan.
Nik Wallenda was born Nikolas Troffer, a fluke of societal patronymic bias. But he is a Wallenda by blood and by trade, the standard-bearer of the most hallowed bloodline in circus performer history, the most visible branch on a family tree that looks like kudzu and contains enough shifting alliances and betrayals and clan rivalries to exhaust George R.R. Martin. Wallenda estimates there are as many as 14 of his relatives currently performing around the world. He doesn't speak to many of them.
"When I broke my first record by myself in 2008, for a lot of the headlines, I think it was the New York Times, it was 'King of the High Wire,'" he says. "So my managers read this and said, 'We’re going with this, that’s a great title. My family hates that: How dare you call yourself King of the High Wire? It’s a marketing tool! You can put it on the record: I’m definitely not the best wire walker in the world. But as far as business goes? I’m up there with the best for sure."
Karl Wallenda before his 1970 walk over Georgia's Tallulah Gorge.
Joe Holloway Jr. / AP
Karl Wallenda was the German-born patriarch of The Flying Wallendas, a name coined in the ’40s that he loathed — and not just because it led people to mistake the family for trapeze artists, but because wire walkers don't fly unless they're falling. (The name, in fact, was first used after an accident in Ohio.) Nik Wallenda was born in 1979, the year after Karl Wallenda fell to his death during a walk in San Juan, Puerto Rico. To say that his great-grandfather informs every aspect of his life is underestimating the degree to which family is the dominant force in circus performing, as well as the degree to which Karl Wallenda has defined, and still defines, that tradition. Much of the division among factions is complicated and deep-seated, and most certainly about money, but it comes down to who is most worthy of Karl's legacy, and his valuable surname (which itself has been the subject of numerous legal battles).
"There’s these groups with no leader, so now there’s competition, everyone feels threatened, there's this fight for who’s the patriarch," Wallenda says. "It’s the same lineage, same generations, the same great-grandfather, there’s always been this battle. I say this all the time, but I don’t give a shit who the patriarch is; as long as I’m in the news and making a living, you guys can be the patriarch if you want."
Delilah and Nik Wallenda in 1980.
Courtesy Nik Wallenda
Delilah Wallenda, 62, is the daughter of Jenny, who was the daughter of Karl and Martha, a ballerina he met when she was 15, married, then soon left. She married Terry Troffer, 60, in 1975. Troffer, who along with his brother Mike oversees the rigging on his son's walks, did not hail from a circus family. He joined the Sailor Circus and became an engineer; you can't be a good wire walker without being a good physicist. Delilah and Troffer performed as the Delilah Wallenda Duo for years. In 1980, Delilah says, they were performing 48 weeks a year, but that started fading around 1986, and what was once a nice living became increasingly untenable. "The people who ran the circuses started gearing them to children," she tells me one afternoon in her backyard, where she occasionally trains aerialists when not managing a local country club. Her 1993 memoir was titled The Last of the Wallendas. ("She wasn’t happy about the title, but I get it," Wallenda says. "My family sees that as demeaning; I see that as an incredible marketing tool.")
Nik Wallenda and his sister, Lijana.
Tom Rhein/Courtesy Nik Wallenda
Despite the diminishing returns, Nik Wallenda and his sister, Lijana, spent their entire lives on the road with their parents performing; he was walking the wire by 2. He had intended to go off to college but in 1998 joined his Uncle Tino as part of a seven-person pyramid, the Wallenda family's signature stunt, in Detroit — where two members of the Wallenda family died and one other was paralyzed performing the same act in 1962 — and never looked back.
He says that he and Erendira, eighth generation in another traveling circus family, may have first been in a show together when she was 2 months old ("It was love at first sight," he quips); their families always saw each other, they were part of the same circuits, stayed at the same campgrounds. They married in 2000; 2008 was the first time in her life Erendira wasn't on the road full time.
"I wanted to give my kids a choice to go to school and do the things I wasn't able to," says Erendira, 34, who is slated to hang by her toes from a hoop dangling from a helicopter above the Charlotte Motor Speedway in October. "I miss everything — performing, traveling — but of course it was easier before you had kids in the back screaming and punching each other every second."
The Flying Wallendas performing their seven-person pyramid in Detroit in 1998.
AP Photo/Richard Sheinwald
In 2006, Wallenda and his sister, Lijana, did a walk together in Detroit to promote McDonald's new coffee that almost ended badly when Lijana had some trouble on the wire. They made $18,000 for the walk, but more importantly, Wallenda remembers it as an epiphany of sorts, that he could make real money practicing this archaic art, and not from local carnivals or languishing circuses. Soon after, Wallenda says, he got a call from David Blaine, who wanted to meet him — so much of what Wallenda has come to learn about turning traditional entertainment into contemporary, commercial primetime events stems from this, and led to him signing noncircus representation.
Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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