Highwire Act

See the workers scurrying to their cubicles. See the Towers gently rocking back and forth in that relentless wind. See the sliver of slate gray sky. See the world as it once was. Now, go back to that day in 1974. Although technically unfinished, the Twin Towers had completed their inhuman ascent over their relatively low-rise neighbors. The buildings were already being attacked by architecture critics as "banal" and "so boring as to be unworthy of a bank headquarters in Omaha," as critic Paul Goldberger (now of the New Yorker) wrote at the time.

After nine years of dreaming and eight months of planning (which included countless forays into the buildings dressed as workmen), Petit had his crossbow-toting accomplice shoot a hemp rope from the North Tower to Petit on the South. The pair used the rope as a conveyor belt to shuttle stronger lines across the 131-foot canyon.

At 7:15, with his wire taut and his courage screwed to some unseen sticking post 1,350 feet above the concrete, Petit took his first steps. The wind blew hard, but after a couple of strides, Petit got his legs. He even started dancing on the wire. Workers on the ground stopped in their tracks. From their vantage point, of course, the wire was invisible. A man appeared to be walking on air between the Twin Towers.

At one point, Petit even lay down on the wire itself. Looking at pictures from that day, I still get breathless, me, a guy who could barely even look down on the world from the Observatory deck of 2 World Trade Center without hyperventilating. Yet I always felt inspired by what Petit had accomplished. But now, in light of the attack, when I close my eyes to relive Petit's stunt, hoping that a fond memory of a great feat of human poetry will pull me through this purgatory of dread, I can only see Petit falling. Even in my imagination, I never see him make it across. Something in my mind starts him wobbling and then he slips. There's nothing I can do.

I try to get him across that wire by re-reading newspaper clips of his stunt. I find it helpful to read stories that recall how even the cops sent to arrest him were in awe of Petit's highwire act.

"He was going back and forth like this was his daily routine," said officer William Shanley. Even the shrink who examined him was impressed, proclaiming Petit "perfectly normal" - although he did add that "anyone who does this 110 stories up can't be entirely right."