Read To Reach the Clouds Online

Authors: Philippe Petit

To Reach the Clouds

This story is dedicated to Jean-Louis Blondeau
and belongs to Jim Moore,
 
Annie Allix,
Jean-François Heckel,
 
Papa Rudy,
Francis Brunn, .
Barry Greenhouse,
Jean-Pierre Dousseau,
 
Ann Forster,
Jessica Lange,
Rick Schneider,
Mark Lewis,
Paul Frame,
Judy Bohannon and my friend Baron,
Loretta Harris,
Pat Pannel,
Alain Ballini,
Oscar Figueroa,
Philippe Rodier,
Yves Bourde,
 
and to that seabird circling over me on the morning of
August 7, 974.
 
As for the false friends who helped and gave up, who helped
and betrayed, they are merely guilty of not having had enough
heart to move mountains. I forgive you. This is why I changed
your names in the text and blackened your eyes
in the photographs—to confuse the gods.
Perhaps they will not recognize you.
This book is dedicated to
my ever-generous partner in crime,
thought-provoking longtime companion,
trusted in-house editor, and gifted cook,
Kathy O'Donnell
Table of Contents
Title Page
BEFORE
TOOTHACHE
TO REACH THE CLOUDS
NOTRE-DAME AND SYDNEY HARBOUR BRIDGE
PARIS MATCH,
1972
“I'M GOING TO AMERICA!”
FIRST VISION, FIRST VISIT
POSITIVE IMPRESSIONS
ALMIGHTY VOID
AT 40,000 FEET
JEAN-LOUIS
ANNIE
“WTC”
NEW YORK MAGIC
SPY TIME
FIFTEEN MINUTES IN MID-AIR
WHAT'S THE DISTANCE?
I.O.
PHYSICALLY CHALLENGED
AN ARGUMENT, A FRESCO, A FRIEND
THE FIRST CAHIER
GALLOPING IN EUROPE
THREE WARNINGS
PAPA RUDY
VARY
CUSTOMS
I HAVE NO IDEA
ABORT
TO FORGET WTC
MY FRIEND BARON
PRELUDE TO AN INTERVIEW
THE INTERVIEW
INSIDE MY VEINS
DEAR JEAN-LOUIS …
ULTIMATUM
“YOU CAME TO THE RIGHT PLACE!”
COME ALONG
STREET MAINTENANCE
BEREFT OF ALL FAITH
FORTUNE COOKIES
SUCH A NICE COUPLE
WTC EVERYWHERE
“NEW ORGANISATION”
LOST & FOUND PART I
PUBLIC RELATIONS
LOST & FOUND PART II
LOOKING FOR DIRECTION
LE DIABLE
NEW ACCESSORIES
ARCHITECTURAL BEQUEST
WORLD PREMIERE
DIRTY LAUNDRY
TWENTY-ONE PAGES
DUSTIN HOFFMAN
ALBERT
JEAN-FRANÇOIS
I HAVE AN I.D.
NEW PALTZ FIASCO
COUCH POTATO
NOBODY'S FAULT
VIPs
THE COFFIN
THE CARROTS ARE COOKED
PHILIPPE IS GOING TO DIE
THE PLAN
“ONE-OH-FOUR!”
AN ETERNITY
BAD, BAD PANELS!
BOW & ARROW
BAGFUL OF WORDS
OFF GUARD
PAS DE DEUX
BEFORE LETTING GO
A LESSON IN RIGGING
MONKEY BUSINESS
CATENARY CURVES
A VISITOR
“THE WHEEL! THE WHEEL!”
“HE'S FALLING!”
WILD CAT
THE FIRST STEP
MEETING THE GODS
ONLY ONE BIRD?
FAREWELL
THE OCTOPUS
DEATH'S DOOR
REACTIONARY MEASURES
Rebel poet?
By four years old, disdain for my fellow man starts to show: I climb onto everything to distance myself. At age six, I announce, “When I grow up, I want to be a theatrical director!” Then I proceed to learn magic on my own.
During the next ten years, I study drawing, painting, sculpting, fencing, printing, carpentry, theater, and horseback riding, all with prestigious masters; I embrace focus, tenacity, respect for the tool, and passion.
The reaction of my parents to my unruly individuality is to legally emancipate me on my seventeenth birthday. Autodidact, I become a juggler and a tightrope walker.
By the time I turn eighteen, I've been expelled from five schools for practicing the art of the pickpocket on my teachers and the art of card manipulation under my desk. I refuse to take the basic exam to prove I can read, write, and count, and thereby jeopardize my chances of landing a job picking up garbage or operating a cash register. Instead, I leave home and become a wandering troubadour, a street-juggler without a permit who is arrested constantly … all over the world.
No one wishes to hire me, practitioner of an absurd arrogance; for a while I make sure it stays that way. It becomes essential to write, play chess, learn Russian and bullfighting, discover architecture and engineering, invent hiding places, erect tree houses, train at lock-picking—to indulge my gourmandise for knowledge while honing my perfectionism.
 
This course of events conduces me to imagine rigging a wire in
secret somewhere and performing on such an imposed stage, out of reach, in total disregard of the powers that be.
 
The adventure of the World Trade Center begins with the first appearance of such thoughts, in a dentist's waiting room in Paris. I am barely eighteen years old.
I am barely eighteen years old, free, rebellious, and untrusting. It's winter in Paris, 1968.
 
Pain from multiple cavities forces me to enter a dentist's waiting room. The air is stale, the ceiling low, the wallpaper hideous. A couple of naked forty-watt bulbs reveal half a dozen senior citizens, who greet my entrance with loathing and suspicion.
I grab a stack of outdated newspapers and flip the pages as noisily as possible. Suddenly, there is silence: I am staring at an illustration and reading over and over a short article about a fantastic building whose twin towers, 110 stories tall, will rise over New York City in a few years and “tickle the clouds.”
Over the photograph of the architect's model, in a display of classic French chauvinism, an outline of the Eiffel Tower has been superimposed at the same scale, for comparison. On the side, the pitiful Tour Maine Montparnasse, unknown to the world yet Parisians' latest pride, stands less than half the size of the American project. With typical French egocentricity, a large heading proclaims, 100 METERS MORE THAN THE EIFFEL TOWER, while a subheading informs us erroneously, IT'S THE “TRADE WORLD CENTER” OF NEW YORK.
 
Although I have been practicing only a few months, I have already announced my intention to become high wire artist supreme, and wire walking has already become my obsessive, nearly fanatical new passion. So it is as a reflex that I take the pencil from behind my ear to trace a line between the two rooftops—a wire, but no wirewalker.
I want this article. I need this article.
 
It is almost a crime in my country to deprive a professional antechamber of useless reading material, and almost certainly another to tear out a page.
I begin to stare with growing intensity at the cheap reproduction of
Les Nymphéas
hanging askew above the grandfather clock, as if a huge insect were strolling across the canvas. Soon, necks twisted, everyone joins me in staring at the painting. I let go of a giant “Aa-choo!” that gives me cover as I tear the page and shove it under my jacket, then hurriedly disappear.
The heist takes less than a second. It takes me a week to find another dentist, but the pain I suffer is nothing compared to the dream freshly acquired.
 
If this were a scene from my film, I would have the camera follow the clipping back to the young thief's studio, show the document being pulled out from under his jacket—tight frame—and being filed inside a large red box dragged from under his bed. A close-up would reveal the box's label in boldface Garamond: PROJECTS.
These files are not business ventures, but projects that ripen in the clouds. The secret desires of children who spend afternoons in treetops. Dreams.
 
And yet I will forget the clipping, for much of the next four years …

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