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"  Can you tell me a little bit about your background and about your family? I am a seventh-generation member of the Wallenda family. My family started performing in the 1780s in Bohemia before going over to Germany. We came to the United States in 1928 to perform for Ringling Brothers circus.   I started walking a wire at 2. That [was] just 2 feet off the ground; my parents would hold my hand and I would walk back and forth. At 4, I was actually walking on my own. And my first high-wire performance was at 13, and I was about 25 feet above the ground. Once I started performing, I never stopped. It&amp;#039;s life to me. My great-grandfather Karl said, &amp;quot;Life is on the wire and everything else is waiting.&amp;quot;  When you&amp;#039;re scouting a location, what characteristics are you looking for? We look at the building and what there is to attach [wires] to. My uncle Mike, the engineer, takes a lot of measurements, and he&amp;#039;ll draw things up for usjust a simple drawing of the distance and the height [of the walk], and the rating on the [building&amp;#039;s] beam, and where the davit points are on the roof. Davit points are what are used for window washers. So often we will be able to rig with those. And he&amp;#039;ll work with the building engineers to get their information: What are these points rated at? How thick is this block wall? And from that point we will put our heads together and come up with a way to attach that is safe.   I use a dynamometer, which is basically a big scale that tells me how much tension I put on my wire. And my uncle has a program where he puts in the height and length of the wire and how much [tension] we can pull it to. Let&amp;#039;s say these [davit] points are only rated at 4500 pounds. Well, if we rig to a 4500 weight and it&amp;#039;s an 800-foot long walk, he can tell exactly how much the wire is going to sag in the middle. Sometimes we can&amp;#039;t pull the cable as tight as we would like. In that case, that means the wire is going to be a lot more sloppy under my feet and I&amp;#039;ll do some training back at my facility in Sarasota [Fla.,] under that sort of tension.  When you&amp;#039;re rigging, what factors besides wire tension do you have to consider? Wind is definitely a factor. That is something that we train for at our facility as well. We use an anemometer, a wind meter. And we have a huge fanwe&amp;#039;ve even used airboats in the past. We&amp;#039;ll park an airboat and rev it up to 70, 80 miles an hour and I&amp;#039;ll walk the wire in the wind. So that&amp;#039;s part of the training process.   The weather is a factor. Where the sun is going to be often determines the time of the show. Directly overhead is usually best. We can walk in the rain if there&amp;#039;s no lightning in the area. But we monitor the weather systems and often have a portable weather system with us to tell us if there are lightning strikes within 15 miles of the area. It&amp;#039;s very complex, what we do. People don&amp;#039;t realize how much engineering and science goes into everything. What kind of wire do you use? Does it depend on the event? It does, but generally I use a galvanized 7 x 19 inner wire rope core. We use galvanized [cable] because there&amp;#039;s usually very little lubrication it, and it&amp;#039;s made to not rust. Generally when there&amp;#039;s wire rope, they add grease to it, and [it] is not good to walk on. I have a cable that was made by Bethlehem Wirerope Works in Bethlehem, Pa., specifically for me to walk across the Grand Canyon. And it is a super-packa highly compressed cable and a high-strength cable.   The wire I use varies by distance. If I have to walk a longer distance, we have to use a bigger diameter cable because of strength of that cable. The diameter of a basic cable is 5/8 of an inch, about a nickel. And that&amp;#039;s what I walk on 90 percent of the time.  We&amp;#039;re trying to get a law passed in New York so that I can walk across Niagara Falls. And that will be a larger cable. When I walk a longer cable, approximately every 50 feet we have two stabilizer cables that come off to the side that go to the ground. But rigging that over the falls is nearly impossible. There are some ways to do it, and my uncle has done some scaled-down versions of it. But we are actually working on a system where I may not use any stabilizer cables at all, which entails using a much larger cable, possibly a 2-inch cable, because the weight [of the cable] itself will help stabilize.  What are the logistics of putting up the wires? Are the stabilizer cables pre-attached to the main cable you&amp;#039;re walking on? There are a couple different processes. Some are permanently attached, and it kind of makes for a big spider web. So we have another system where we use a screw-pin anchor circle. We&amp;#039;ll put that over the cable and it will slide into place. It&amp;#039;s quite challenging at times to get these stabilizers on because of all the obstacles [on the ground] that we deal with. Often we only have one place to rig to.   When I walked across the Allegheny River, I used a 500-ton hydraulic crane on one side and a 330-ton on the other. That, as far as science and engineering goes, was a totally different ball game. I was walking over a river, and we only had a bridge on my right sidenothing on my left side. So we had to put stabilizer cables on the right side.   Every single walk that we do, we have got to re-engineer what we do. It&amp;#039;s a brand-new project.  So, when you&amp;#039;re doing this between buildings, how do you actually get the cable up there?  Manpower pulls it up5/8-inch cable weighs .77 pounds per foot, I think, so it&amp;#039;s not that heavy. If you&amp;#039;re picking up 300 feet [of cable], you&amp;#039;re only lifting 260 pounds. We use a pulley block to reduce that weight down, and have guys on the roof that will actually pull it up.  How do you attach it, physically, to the buildings? Technological advancements have made my life a lot easier than my parents&amp;#039; or grandparents&amp;#039;. They had to take a wire rope sling, just a piece of the cable that you walk on, and wrap whatever beam [the cable was] going be tied to. But in order to do that you need to protect every corner, because it can cut through the steel, and you have to pad everything.   Now we use a nylon round sling. It&amp;#039;s a nylon loop, and we will wrap that around whatever [we&amp;#039;re attaching the cable to]I-beams, or a lot of times we&amp;#039;ll use elevator shafts because they&amp;#039;re solid concrete. We don&amp;#039;t have to worry about padding. So we will wrap it with that and from there, on the dead endwe call it that because there&amp;#039;s no moving partswe hook in a screw-pin anchor shackle. On the other end we will use a grip pullerthe cable goes in one end, you crank on the machine, and the cable comes out the other. The machine doesn&amp;#039;t affect the cable, it doesn&amp;#039;t damage it, it just pulls the cable right through. That attaches to our dynamometer and that will attach to another round sling easily, in a building-to-building application. Then we&amp;#039;ll tension the cable to whatever number Uncle Mike gives us, and that&amp;#039;s it. And then at that point we will add our stabilizer cables and slide them into place. Do you have to wear special shoes? I wear a shoe that actually has a suede leather bottom and just a regular leather upper, kind of like an Indian moccasin. And my mom actually makes them. She has made them ever since I was 4. So we just call them wire shoes. What&amp;#039;s the bar you hold when you&amp;#039;re walking? It&amp;#039;s a balancing pole. Whether or not I use it depends on the location and what I&amp;#039;m doing. My pole is 23 feet long. It comes in three sections and weighs about 45 pounds. It adds stability. It&amp;#039;s kind of an extension of my arms. If the wind came up and knocked me, I could actually recover. If I was in that situation without a balancing pole, it would be nearly impossible to recover.  How much time do you spend training for these events?  When I do special events, I spend about six months in training for that. When I&amp;#039;m training for a big walk, like Niagara Falls, I&amp;#039;ll train about 6 hours a day, six days a week.   I think that most people look at what we do and say, this guy&amp;#039;s crazy. But really, there is a method for what we do. I have a beautiful wife and three beautiful children. I don&amp;#039;t have a death wish at all. I enjoy life, I love life, and I also love doing what I do. But I am going to do it in the safest possible manner.   Not all daredevils are just crazy guys who are jumping off the edge of the bridge just to jump off. I&amp;#039;m going to tell you how deep the river is, how much salt is in that water, and we are going to do test after test after test before attempting anything. You&amp;#039;ve broken a lot of world records. But what&amp;#039;s the most memorable walk you&amp;#039;ve done? It&amp;#039;s one that I did about three weeks ago. My great-grandfather, in 1978, was walking between two buildings in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and fell to his death. My mom and I just went back there and did the walk together, on the exact same buildings. As I was rigging, [I could see] exactly where my great-grandfather&amp;#039;s cable had rubbed against the edge of the building as they were putting it up. It gave me chills. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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