"...they welcomed a trespassing poet"

In 1974 a young French aerialist walked a tightrope between Towers 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center. He stayed suspended above lower Manhattan for 45 minutes.

There, he was almost free.

Police couldn't get to him.

Authorities stood helpless, waiting.

Citizens cheered him from below.

For nearly an hour, as Phillippe Petit later described it, the Twin Towers breathed quietly with him, "as they welcomed a trespassing poet determined to etch his destiny on the sky."

When he completed his performance to his own satisfaction, he calmly stepped off the tightwire and back into the world, offering his wrists to the waiting handcuffs.

He was taken to New York's Downtown hospital to be examined for mental illness. “The police thought he was crazy,” remembers John Flynn, M.D., who at 87 is still practicing at the same hospital. “I told them he wasn’t — that he was a trained aerialist. Then they took the handcuffs off him.” Petit remembered Flynn and later sent him a photo. “We hung it in our bedroom at home,” he said.

Two years after the Towers fell, Petit wrote a brief and moving essay about them, My Towers, Our Towers.

He also published a book about his walk in 2003, To Reach the Clouds: My Highwire Walk Between the Twin Towers.

One of the finest essays about Petit's walk is anthologized in Best American Essays 2002. It's by Rudolph Chelminski, and it's called "Turning Point."

I have found it a wonderful story to teach teenagers about the WTC tragedy: a new and healing way to remember the Towers.

For younger children, there is Mordecai Gerstein's magical The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

For the rest of us, the Sonic Memorial Project contains--and is still seeking--sounds and spoken memories of the World Trade Center. One of the most interesting of the Sonic Memorial's fully produced radio stories is Walking High Steel, an account of how a cadre of highly skilled Mohawk men--known for their ability to work in hazardously high locations--have contributed to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.

Wonder what, how, and when we will commemorate the great and terrible stories of Katrina?