Crossing the line with the funambulists.
Elsa Leperlier, a young French woman living in Wānaka, didn’t have a choice when the small tabby cat adopted her. It was love at first sight.
Owning a cat isn’t easy when you’re a freewheeling spirit, travelling the world without any ties. Elsa was once offered a lucrative job on a cruise ship. She almost took it, but they wouldn’t let her take a pet. “I could get a boyfriend on the boat but not a cat,” she says. She turned the job down. Life became even more complicated when Minouche (“little cat” in French) got hit by a car and badly fractured her leg. Elsa took her to the vet, who said the leg would probably have to be amputated. Elsa decided to see if time would heal the injury, but two and a half months and an $8,000 veterinarian bill later, it was decided the leg had to go. Why spend $8000 on a cat when you could just get another one to adopt you? (This was the question her parents asked). “Because she’s mine.”
It might have been compassion that led Elsa to spend so much money on a cat she didn’t initially want. But maybe it was a subconscious decision. You see, Elsa is part cat herself.
High wire acts
Slacklining is the act of walking on a tensioned piece of webbing that is anchored at both ends. It’s a growing sport worldwide. Elsa has been slacklining, specifically tricklining, for ten years. In 2016, while living in Paris, she stopped working and started training every day, balancing, bouncing and pirouetting her way to the French Trickline Championships. She came second.
Tricklining is one of slacklining’s many sub-genres, and while it’s popular, Elsa tells me there are only about three other women tricklining in New Zealand. Tricklining is practised on a highly tensioned line close to the ground. It’s a bit like taking a full-size trampoline and cutting it down to a 2.5-centimetre strip, then doing backflips and somersaults on it, while hopefully staying out of hospital. The main injuries are broken limbs or lacerations, the result of falling off and catching the line.
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A highline trickliner performs tricks on a highline, which is a line affixed at a “great height”. There doesn’t seem to be an agreed specific height for the greatness of this height except that it should be high enough that if you fell off it would be really bad, like death bad. Despite this, highline tricklining is actually safer than straight tricklining because you don’t hit the ground when you fall. Practitioners wear a harness. This is different from freestyle highlining, which involves doing tricks on a highline, while always maintaining contact with the line. Freestylers are proficient at “Yoda rolls”. Picture a semi-cute, semi-creepy character crouched sideways on the line while holding it, then rolling around and popping back up to balance back on the line. “Do or do not. There is no try.” Then there’s a highliner, who is someone who doesn’t bother with all the trickery and just gets on a line and walks. The world record for walking a highline without falling is two kilometres.
It goes on. Surflining involves standing on a line with a deep dip and swinging it side to side, like a surfer; rodeolining is like surflining, but the rope is even looser; waterlining happens over water; yogalining, well that’s obvious; and parkliners don’t really like heights or tricks. For them, it’s mostly about hanging out with friends.
Slacklining and all the other linings are considered new sports. But teetering on nylon webbing was a climber’s rest day activity for those living in Camp 4, the legendary Yosemite Valley campground, way back in the 1960s. On their days off, climbers experimented by walking on chain link fences, slackwires, climbing ropes and eventually the webbing that was used for anchors and slinging rock protection. They sometimes used a crevasse rescue technique called a ‘Z pulley’, a 3-1 mechanical advantage pulley system, to tension the lines. And long before them, Romans were entertained by artists known as funambula, who performed daring feats on tightropes high above the Coliseum. That’s how we get ‘funambulist’ as today’s technical term for wire walkers, tightrope walkers and slackliners.
Don’t get this confused with the circus activity involving walking on a highly tensioned steel cable using a pole. That is what is known as highwire walking, and it isn’t practised by slackliners. The most famous highwire walker is Philippe Petit (of Man on Wire fame) who stealth-rigged a steel cable, 40 metres long and weighing 204 kilograms, between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Centre in August of 1974. He made several crossings without a safety harness, all the while taunting the New York police who had come to arrest him.
There are now slackliners in almost every country in the world. I came across my first slackliners when a group of them were highlining at Boundary Creek, near the head of Lake Wānaka. There’s a small but active group of slackliners in Wānaka; they congregate at the Dinosaur Park in the centre of town every Wednesday evening. They are drawn to slacklining because it is relatively cheap, accessible and exciting. Also, there is a strong sense of community. They are supportive of each other and seem to post on social media to promote the sport and share the stoke, rather than for individual recognition. They are some of the loveliest people I have ever encountered.
On the ropes
It’s a standing joke. One of the questions highliners always get asked is “how do you get the line across the gorge?” Tristan Perkins, a rigger of numerous highlines, says they’ve tried things like a spud gun, a slingshot, and a bow and arrow, but the best tool is a drone. He has come out early to Boundary Creek to check the rigging before the rest of the slackliners arrive. This is where the community spirit comes in. There are only a handful of people skilled enough to rig the line. It has to be anchored, usually with expansion bolts placed in the rock, and redundancies built in in case an anchor fails. Tristan sits on the edge of the gorge and checks each highliner’s harness and knot. He even counts the loops of the figure eight knot they’ve tied in with to check it is correct. There is also a back-up line, so if the mainline fails no one dies.
Most people, upon seeing someone creeping across what looks like a spider’s web above an abyss, would assume they were watching something highly dangerous. But while it’s much more skilled, highlining is in the category of other low risk, high consequence activities like bungy jumping. As long as you tie in properly, it’s very safe. Although Henry Adams, another local highliner, tells me he’s seen lines swing so much in strong winds that anchor bolts ripped out of rock, and trees that were being used as anchors broke. In Brazil in 2018, a 33-year-old slackliner’s lines began oscillating during a thunderstorm with gale force winds. The movement was so violent he couldn’t hold onto his leash and he was thrown metres in all directions. It’s believed this was enough to loosen the waist belt on his harness. He was ejected out of the harness, falling 13 metres to the ground. He died in hospital three days later.
There is a small minority of highliners who solo without a harness at all. Their safety lines are mind, balance and cat-like reflexes. When they fall, and they do fall, they quickly drop onto the line and grab it. Nobody in the Wānaka group is interested in soloing, but true to form they’re really nice about other people’s choices to do so and don’t openly criticise it.
At Boundary Creek, Elsa steps up to the line for her turn. After being checked by Tristan, she scoots out into the void using a pulley. Then, almost like mounting a horse, she hops onto the line, crouches and in one graceful movement stands up, in perfect balance. Elsa walks with her arms outstretched. They are her main stabilisers. She does little flicks with her hands that work as micro-stabilisers. These are the things you can see that keep her from falling. Under her shirt, her core muscles are working as hard as if she were doing Pilates.
What is balance? Put simply, it’s the ability to maintain the body’s centre of mass over its base of support. Our brain is constantly adjusting to input from what we see, from the pressure put on the balls of our feet, and from the movement of our legs, arms and other body parts. But it’s the vestibular system that is the engine room of balance. It’s an ear thing. Each ear includes the utricle, saccule, and three semi-circular canals. The utricle and saccule detect gravity and linear movement. The canals, which detect rotational movement, are located at right angles to each other and are filled with a fluid called endolymph. When the head rotates in the direction sensed by a particular canal, the endolymphatic fluid with it lags behind because of inertia, exerting pressure against the canal’s sensory receptor, which sends impulses to the brain about movement. When the vestibular organs on both sides of the head are functioning properly, they send symmetrical signals. But if they’re out of whack, you fall over. (Animals like Elsa’s cat Minouche and my late border collie Tasman have vestibular organs too. I witnessed this first-hand one day when Tasman fell over and was unable to get up, and nearly died from vestibular disease.)
A fine balance
If mountain biking is the new golf, is slacklining the new mountain biking? Probably not. Slacklining can be an intensely frustrating thing to learn. Personally, I haven’t gotten past standing on the line then promptly developing “Elvis leg” and falling off. But the small active group in New Zealand are going for it. There’s talk of trying to break the New Zealand highline distance record of 375 metres, set last summer across the terminus of the Brewster Glacier. This is logistically a difficult task, as you have to find a site that is high enough, but not more than 60 metres above the ground, otherwise aircraft operators have to be notified of the hazard. Then you have to carry all the equipment into a potentially isolated location.
There is definite kudos if the line is rigged in a beautiful place. To date, lines have crossed Harwoods Hole, New Zealand’s deepest vertical shaft at 183 metres, mountain passes like Gertrude Saddle in the Darran Mountains, as well as the Kawarau River. Elsa isn’t interested in highlining records, she’s more intent on inventing new tricks. She recently went from balancing on the line in the splits, to grabbing the line and swinging all the way around it while staying in the splits. She didn’t give it a fancy name, just “splits roll”.
But what about Minouche, the tripod cat? Elsa tells me she was able to push with her back leg enough to climb a tree the other day. Elsa was worried she might fall and damage her hip, which has been screwed back together, so she gave her a “spot”. She stood with her arms raised above her head, ready to catch Minouche, like a climber spots their partner as they start a climb. But as Elsa says, grinning, “I needn’t have worried. She got back down by herself, and her balance was fine.”
Words & images: Allan Uren
