Fly Girl
A few hours underthe small top sends one writer (and her nerves) soaring.
By Jenna Schnuer. Photographs by Justin Steele
With
just two rungs to go, I’m stuck. The ladder, the sort normally propped
against a house by a painter, is leaning against a blue-carpeted
platform that is 23 feet in the air. The platform has no walls and,
aside from a wobbly looking (or so it seems) black metal thing sticking
up from it, offers no apparent place to hold on.
“What do I do now?” In my not-panicked-but-not-exactly-clear-thinking state, it seems like a perfectly reasonable question.
“Keep climbing,” says the instructor, peering down at me with a bit of an amused grin from atop the platform.
Gee, thanks.
“Can I grab that?” I ask, pointing at the black metal thing.
“Yes.”
Well, that’s really all he had to tell me in the first place.
I
have been at trapeze school for less than 30 minutes, and already I
have dealt with my two odd fears: stepping over the top of a ladder and
anything that reminds me of grade school gym class (just the thought of
the President’s Challenge Physical Fitness Test is enough to send this
35-year-old back to bed with a pretend fever).
Before you
consider me brave for challenging my fears, let me admit to one thing:
Going to trapeze school was not my idea. But when my editor asked if I
would, the I’ll-do-anything-for-a-story part of me (coupled with the
lingering determination of a younger sister who, as a kid, was
constantly challenged by her older brother) kicked in, and, within
minutes, I was on the phone with Trapeze School New York, setting up my
high-flying lesson.
The school is one of those funny New York
City things. Everybody I mentioned it to had seen it — you pass right
by it when you drive down the West Side Highway or toddle down the
riverside jogging path — but nobody I knew had actually scaled that
ladder. There’s a chance my friends just prefer earthbound activities,
but I think there’s something more to it than that. It’s like an
of-the-moment NYC restaurant: Some New Yorkers are dying to go but
never get around to making reservations, while others just don’t see
the need. Well, it’s time they (and anybody visiting NYC) get off the
jogging path and scale the ladder.
WHEN TRAPEZE DAY
arrives, I am tempted to skip out on my flying lesson. But spurred on
by the contract for this article and my need for the money it will
bring, I head toward school. Usually, trapeze students learn alfresco
when the weather cooperates, but I am happy to see that the school’s
tent is up when I arrive. I’ve made a fool of myself in lots of
different ways and always shirked it off with an attitude of, “Well, I
won’t see most of those people ever again.” But I quickly realize that
if I fly under the clouds instead of under the tent, I’ll be on display
for thousands of gawkers in their cars, along with walkers, joggers,
cyclists, and, since it’s New York, probably a unicyclist or two and
maybe even a guy with a parrot on his shoulder or a woman with a boa
constrictor wrapped around her waist. And, honestly, I really don’t
want a boa watching me on the trapeze.
Two women step through
the tent door just ahead of me. My classmates. I cross my fingers that
they are also first-time flyers. They are. Hey, things are looking up.
After
making sure we’ve signed the requisite death-and-dismemberment waivers
we were all given, school founder Jonathon Conant gives us a rundown of
the rules and then walks us over to the low bar. That’s where thoughts
of Mr. Malcolm’s fourth-grade gym class rush in. While the flying
trapeze is mostly a momentum thing rather than a muscle thing, the low
bar looks a bit too much like the pull-up bar that brought on so many
tears when I was a kid. Within seconds, I convince myself that I can’t
do it, that I won’t be able to get myself up to the bar, let alone hang
upside down from it. Naturally, my classmates end up hanging by their
knees in true trapeze style — the knee hang is the basis for the 150 or
so trapeze tricks. As for me, I knuckle my way through a few seconds of
hanging straight down.
And then it’s time for the climb.
Rung
by rung I go, 23 feet into the air. After reaching the trapeze platform
and stepping over the top rung, I hold on tightly to a metal bracket,
dipping one hand at a time into the bucket of chalk that I hope will
dry up the worry that is beading on my palms. The instructor unclips
the two safety lines from my belt that would have kept me from falling
to the ground if the ladder climb hadn’t gone well and clips on the
lines that an instructor down below will pull to help me through my
flight.
What happens next goes against anything the brain should allow the body to do.
With
the instructor tugging on my belt from behind, I grasp a pole on my
left side, step forward until my toes are hanging off the platform,
lean my hips forward into space, and grab for the bar hanging out in
front of me. I have to believe that the grab is a bit easier for people
taller than my whopping five-foot-three self. And then, with a person I
have just met still holding on to my belt, I let my left hand go and
grab the bar.
“One. Two. Hep!” Conant yells from below.
There’s
only one real skill that first-time flyers need to succeed in trapeze
school: the ability to listen. While your body wants to do one thing,
the only way to fly safely and successfully is to follow the
instructions shouted up to you. In trapeze, timing is everything. You
become a living physics experiment.
I take a small hop off the
platform. For a split second, I am just falling. Then, as I become
engaged with the bar and start to swing in an inverted arc, I feel
every fiber of the grip tape pressing into my fingers. My arms are
stretched as far as they can go. I hang straight down, my toes pointed.
I feel like gravity is stretching me instead of pulling me down
toward the ground. Mr. Malcolm has been pushed out of my thoughts
completely, as I now have much greater issues to deal with. As I get to
the top of the arc, clear on the other side of the tent, I hear another
“Hep!” I let go and fall backward, my legs together and pointed toward
the front of the room, my arms in front of me, and my eyes looking
ahead so that I fall in a sitting position. The bar falls away and I
drop into the net. And then everybody is clapping. I am not dead, after
all.
During the next 90 minutes, I take four more trips up the
ladder. Each time, I swing a bit longer. It turns out that, with the
thrills of the initial leap and dropping to the net, I could happily
swing forever. Though my hands sting like I have been gripping a tennis
racket for an entire summer’s worth of matches and I never really fully
get over my ladder issues, the swing’s the thing — even though I am the
only student who never makes it to the upside-down position.
By
the end of the fifth flight, I am about as tired as I have ever been.
With each trip up, the adrenaline goes full tilt and then drops as you
await your next turn. It’s a supercharged sugar rush, no dessert
necessary. I will fly again.