Man on Wire

We went to Boston the week before school started - Freedom Trail, Museum of Science, New England Aquarium, whale watching, Harvard tour - the whole deal. The last night we were there we went to see "Man on Wire," which had just opened in theaters. This is a wonderful film about Philippe Petit's daring bid to string a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center. With a motley crew of accomplices, he succeeded in getting the cable across the sky and early in the morning on August 7, 1994, spent almost an hour suspended over lower Manhattan, in turn walking, dancing, and reclining, up so high he could barely be seen from street level.

Petit recounted how at age 17 he had read an article in a magazine about the World Trade Center, not yet built, and how from that moment he was obsessed with walking between the two towers. It took years of planning, but he finally did do it; had we not known how the story ended (the still-living Petit tells the story in the movie) it would have been a very frightening story. His friends talked about how they feared for Petit's life, how they were afraid he would not survive - and how they helped him do it anyway.

It is a wonderful film, in part because it doesn't end quite the way one expects - Petit does succeed in walking the wire between the towers, but in the aftermath loses friends and a lover. We expected a happy ending, but it didn't really have one.

During the movie, Tom's cell phone rang. He didn't take the call, but as we were leaving the theater, walking back to the T station, he returned the call; it was Amy's brother-in-law, with the news that our friend Dan had died that day in a motorcycle accident in Montana. Tom and Iain had visited him in Florida just before he left.

Dan was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, and then was an engineer with AT&T for more than 30 years. He was an accomplished athlete - he ran marathons, and had competed in whitewater events at the national level. He flew airplanes and he had jumped out of them (including on his first date with Amy). He raced cars and had a livelong love for motorcycles. After he retired, he had a second career as a motorsports writer and photographer.

Sarah picked up a "Man on Wire" postcard at Movies Worth Seeing after we got back home; it's now on the refrigerator. Seeing it there, the other morning Tom said that he couldn't think about the movie without thinking about Dan, and getting the sad news of his death. I told him I felt the same way, but that it seemed somehow fitting - Dan lived his life fully and he too was in his own way a man on wire.

And the endings? Well, they aren't always happy.