Often the other side of extreme beauty is something too horrible to look at. One of the abiding memories of my childhood is seeing a brief clip of 73-year-old Karl Wallenda plunging to his death one windy day in San Juan. Why was that old man up on a wire? How did he even get to that age behaving in such a way?
French daredevil Tancrède Melet didn’t reach senior status, having earlier this month, at age 32, suffered a deadly fall from grace from a hot-air balloon. Similarly to Philippe Petit, he thought himself more philosopher and artist than extreme athlete, though intellectualizing didn’t soften his crash landing. An erstwhile engineer, he climbed to the sky to escape the air-conditioned nightmare, and he managed that feat, if only for a short while.
A thoughtful Economist obituary celebrates the audacity that abbreviated Melet’s life, which is one way to look at it. An excerpt:
Essentially he saw himself as an artist of the void, weaving together base-jumping, acrobatics and highlining to make hair-raising theatre among the peaks. Love of wildmélanges had been encouraged by his parents, who took him out of school when he was bullied for a stammer and, instead, let him range over drawing, music, gymnastics and the circus. Though for four years he slaved as a software engineer, he dreamed of recovering that freedom.
“One beautiful day” he threw up the job, bought a van, and took to the roads of France to climb and walk the slackwire. In the Verdon gorges of the Basses-Alpes he fell in with a fellow enthusiast, Julien Millot, an engineer of the sort who could fix firm anchors among snow-covered rocks for lines that spanned crevasses; with him he formed a 20-strong team, the Flying Frenchies, composed of climbers, cooks, musicians, technicians and clowns. These kindred spirits gave him confidence to push ever farther out into empty space.
Many thought him crazy. That was unfair. He respected the rules of physics, and made sure his gear was safe. When he died, by holding on too long to the rope of a hot-air balloon that shot up too fast, he had been on the firm, dull ground, getting ready. It looked like another devil-prompted connerie to push the limits of free flight, but this time there was no design in it. He was just taken completely by surprise, as he had hoped he might be all along.•