Wallenda for a Day: Club Med's Trapeze Program Gives You the View from the Top of the Circus
By John Rosenthal
"You must try the flying trapeze," my lunch companion says to me on the day I arrive in Club Med’s Turkoise vilage. "It sounds hard, but it’s not," she continues. "Anybody can do it. If you can hold a knife, you can hold the trapeze," she says, grabbing the butter knife in front of her and curling her fingers tightly around it.
And she’s right. Since the first trapeze was set up at Club Med Eleuthera in 1983, the program has expanded to 22 villages on six continents. The trapeze instructors swear they can teach even the most athletically challenged.
My wife, Lisa, never the athlete, and grounded (literally) as always, immediately declines, knowing she will hate everything about it—the hanging, the twisting, the climbing 30 feet into the air, and the inevitable falling some portion of that distance back to the ground. Especially the falling.
I’m more ambivalent. I’m not acrophobic, but nor have I ever had a burning desire to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. This is not a skill that’s going to come in handy any time soon—though wouldn’t you like to live in a world where it did! On the other hand, when, if not at Club Med, will I ever have the chance to learn something so thoroughly impractical?
So after spending all morning swimming with a dolphin—JoJo, the island’s resident bottlenose, who periodically visits the resorts on Grace Bay, allowed me to tread water within spitting distance of him as he did laps around a moored snorkel boat—I decide it’s time to fly with the eagles.
When I arrive at the trapeze, one of the instructors puts a safety belt tightly around my waist.
"Is it supposed to be that tight?" I ask, inhaling defensively.
"Wait; that’s not tight yet," comes the reply. He then cinches it another two notches, and I no longer need to suck in the belly that has been peeking over the top of my bathing suit. Then he hooks me up to safety lines, and implores me to climb the impossibly thin ladder straight up to the trapeze platform.
I scale the first few steps quickly. But as I climb higher above the safety net that prevents Flying Wallendas from becoming Dying Wallendas, the rungs seem more and more like toothpicks, and my bare feet seem to grow to clown-size proportions.
Finally I reach the top step, and another instructor tells me to step across what appears to be a grand canyon separating my ladder from the trapeze platform where she is waiting. (Admittedly, once I complete this quantum leap, I realize it was no more than two feet.)
The view from here is incredible. The entire island unfolds before me, and I can see dozens of beaches nearly as beautiful as the one I’m standing above. If I do nothing more than fall off the platform from this height, it will have been worth it. But before I have the chance to compose a mental photograph, there’s more instruction to digest.
Stand here, hold the bar, lean out to a 45-degree angle and grab the bar with your other hand, step off, and fly.
Whoa! So much to process. Yet there I am, flying through the air like that daring young man. Holding on to the trapeze is indeed as easy as holding a butter knife--a Brobdignagian butter knife that will support my entire 195 pounds, that is. Whoah turns to whee! I’m five years old again, flexing my hanging-on muscles that I haven’t used since recess period ended.
Then still more instruction from another acrobat on the ground:
Bring your legs up and hook them on the bar, let go with your hands, swing forward, arch your back, look up, bring your hands back onto the bar, let go with your legs. Relax —yeah, sure! Kick forward, backward, forward, let go of the bar, do a back flip, and tuck your knees for a soft landing on the net.
Well, those are the instructions anyway. My ability to put them into practice is another story altogether. The careening through the air part is cool, but all this gymnastics stuff is better left to 14-year-old Romanian girls. I make several attempts before I master this basic sequence, but on the fourth try, I nail it. "That’s a catchable knee hang," says Simone, one of the impossibly lithe acrobats offering instruction and encouragement
"Catchable?" I ask naively.
"Yeah, the next step is to get caught," says Simone. "Go chalk up your wrists."
After just an hour, I am apparently ready to do an actual trick, the kind of thing people pay money to see at a circus. Now I learn how to hold out my hands so that Josh, the impossibly muscular acrobat hanging by his knees from the swing at the far end of the trapeze, can grab me by the wrists and extricate me from my perch.
Needless to say, I do not achieve this on the first try either. Or even the second. Holding onto the trapeze for dear life was one thing. Flying Tarzan-style from one swinging butter knife to the next and back again is something else entirely. And as the sun nears the end of its daily descent into the ocean just behind me, the trapeze shuts down for the day. If I am to make a successful "catch and return," it will have to wait for another day.
The next morning, I wake up with sunburned arms and legs—you can’t wear sunscreen on the trapeze, as it makes the bar slippery)—and two taut rubber bands where my calf muscles used to be. The backs of my knees ache from holding my entire body on the trapeze bar. The kind of thing I did routinely on monkey bars as a kid is now causing some serious pain. I can’t even limp because I can’t decide which leg hurts worse. My return to the big top seems doubtful.
But by the afternoon, when the hot sun has receded enough to make it bearable to venture out of the shade, I feel ready to ascend the stilt-like ladder once again. On my next attempt at a "catch," I again miss my connection, while other vacationers who started their instruction after I did are now frequent fliers. I long for one more opportunity, but the day starts to grow late, and my chances don’t look good. But Josh agrees to hang around a little longer to give all the losers a second chance.
This time, I’m determined not to blow it. I ascend the 30 feet, grab the bar, and swing high over the safety net. I thread my aching legs between my arms, and hang from the bar. Almost instinctively this time, I arch my back, look up, and hold out my hands in the sign for a touchdown. And there’s an upside-down Josh, waiting to grab my wrists. He seizes me like he’s trying to prevent me from hitting him, and there is nothing to do but wrap my palms around his forearms. Almost as an afterthought, I release my knees from the bar, and I’ve done it! Josh and I swing like a two-man pendulum all the way to the vaunted far end of the trapeze, where only the privileged may venture.
But my flight doesn’t end there, for as we return to the center of the trapeze, Josh says he’s going to let go. The bar from whence I came is scheduled to meet me in the middle, and I’m expected to turn around and grab it. Logically, I know that this is the next step, having seen others do it before me, but when you’re literally arm in arm with a bare-chested, musclebound man in green tights, you throw logic out the window. He might as well have told me to clone myself.
There’s no time to think. Josh flings me back into the air like he’s shaking sand off a beach towel. Something—panic? survival instinct? the advice I’d been hearing over and over that day?—permits me to turn and see the original bar flying at my face. I reach for it and miss with my right hand, and I hear a loud gasp from the small congress of spectators who have come to watch the amateurs succeed or fail. But my left hand sticks, and the gasps turn to applause. I figure out where the hell I am, and manage to get my right hand onto the bar as well. Then, acting like I had meant to do it that way all the while, I let go and do a backflip onto the net.
"Sign your name in the book," said Simone. "You’re official." I had done a successful catch and return, and to top it off, Lisa was there to see it. I couldn’t wipe the goofy grin off my face. I started jumping around like I had won the Super Bowl and was going to Disney World. It mattered not that I had accomplished something that dozens of five-year-old children do every day. It mattered not that my "return" was a most ungainly spectacle. It mattered not that my knees were now pulsating with searing pain.
All that mattered was that I did it! I flew through the air. Not with the greatest of ease, mind you—with great difficulty, if truth be told. I would never become an artist on the trapeze. That would take years of study and practice, and a body much more suitable than my 6’2" frame. But for one moment, I had seen the view from the top of the circus.
"You must try the flying trapeze," my lunch companion says to me on the day I arrive in Club Med’s Turkoise vilage. "It sounds hard, but it’s not," she continues. "Anybody can do it. If you can hold a knife, you can hold the trapeze," she says, grabbing the butter knife in front of her and curling her fingers tightly around it.
And she’s right. Since the first trapeze was set up at Club Med Eleuthera in 1983, the program has expanded to 22 villages on six continents. The trapeze instructors swear they can teach even the most athletically challenged.
My wife, Lisa, never the athlete, and grounded (literally) as always, immediately declines, knowing she will hate everything about it—the hanging, the twisting, the climbing 30 feet into the air, and the inevitable falling some portion of that distance back to the ground. Especially the falling.
I’m more ambivalent. I’m not acrophobic, but nor have I ever had a burning desire to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. This is not a skill that’s going to come in handy any time soon—though wouldn’t you like to live in a world where it did! On the other hand, when, if not at Club Med, will I ever have the chance to learn something so thoroughly impractical?
So after spending all morning swimming with a dolphin—JoJo, the island’s resident bottlenose, who periodically visits the resorts on Grace Bay, allowed me to tread water within spitting distance of him as he did laps around a moored snorkel boat—I decide it’s time to fly with the eagles.
When I arrive at the trapeze, one of the instructors puts a safety belt tightly around my waist.
"Is it supposed to be that tight?" I ask, inhaling defensively.
"Wait; that’s not tight yet," comes the reply. He then cinches it another two notches, and I no longer need to suck in the belly that has been peeking over the top of my bathing suit. Then he hooks me up to safety lines, and implores me to climb the impossibly thin ladder straight up to the trapeze platform.
I scale the first few steps quickly. But as I climb higher above the safety net that prevents Flying Wallendas from becoming Dying Wallendas, the rungs seem more and more like toothpicks, and my bare feet seem to grow to clown-size proportions.
Finally I reach the top step, and another instructor tells me to step across what appears to be a grand canyon separating my ladder from the trapeze platform where she is waiting. (Admittedly, once I complete this quantum leap, I realize it was no more than two feet.)
The view from here is incredible. The entire island unfolds before me, and I can see dozens of beaches nearly as beautiful as the one I’m standing above. If I do nothing more than fall off the platform from this height, it will have been worth it. But before I have the chance to compose a mental photograph, there’s more instruction to digest.
Stand here, hold the bar, lean out to a 45-degree angle and grab the bar with your other hand, step off, and fly.
Whoa! So much to process. Yet there I am, flying through the air like that daring young man. Holding on to the trapeze is indeed as easy as holding a butter knife--a Brobdignagian butter knife that will support my entire 195 pounds, that is. Whoah turns to whee! I’m five years old again, flexing my hanging-on muscles that I haven’t used since recess period ended.
Then still more instruction from another acrobat on the ground:
Bring your legs up and hook them on the bar, let go with your hands, swing forward, arch your back, look up, bring your hands back onto the bar, let go with your legs. Relax —yeah, sure! Kick forward, backward, forward, let go of the bar, do a back flip, and tuck your knees for a soft landing on the net.
Well, those are the instructions anyway. My ability to put them into practice is another story altogether. The careening through the air part is cool, but all this gymnastics stuff is better left to 14-year-old Romanian girls. I make several attempts before I master this basic sequence, but on the fourth try, I nail it. "That’s a catchable knee hang," says Simone, one of the impossibly lithe acrobats offering instruction and encouragement
"Catchable?" I ask naively.
"Yeah, the next step is to get caught," says Simone. "Go chalk up your wrists."
After just an hour, I am apparently ready to do an actual trick, the kind of thing people pay money to see at a circus. Now I learn how to hold out my hands so that Josh, the impossibly muscular acrobat hanging by his knees from the swing at the far end of the trapeze, can grab me by the wrists and extricate me from my perch.
Needless to say, I do not achieve this on the first try either. Or even the second. Holding onto the trapeze for dear life was one thing. Flying Tarzan-style from one swinging butter knife to the next and back again is something else entirely. And as the sun nears the end of its daily descent into the ocean just behind me, the trapeze shuts down for the day. If I am to make a successful "catch and return," it will have to wait for another day.
The next morning, I wake up with sunburned arms and legs—you can’t wear sunscreen on the trapeze, as it makes the bar slippery)—and two taut rubber bands where my calf muscles used to be. The backs of my knees ache from holding my entire body on the trapeze bar. The kind of thing I did routinely on monkey bars as a kid is now causing some serious pain. I can’t even limp because I can’t decide which leg hurts worse. My return to the big top seems doubtful.
But by the afternoon, when the hot sun has receded enough to make it bearable to venture out of the shade, I feel ready to ascend the stilt-like ladder once again. On my next attempt at a "catch," I again miss my connection, while other vacationers who started their instruction after I did are now frequent fliers. I long for one more opportunity, but the day starts to grow late, and my chances don’t look good. But Josh agrees to hang around a little longer to give all the losers a second chance.
This time, I’m determined not to blow it. I ascend the 30 feet, grab the bar, and swing high over the safety net. I thread my aching legs between my arms, and hang from the bar. Almost instinctively this time, I arch my back, look up, and hold out my hands in the sign for a touchdown. And there’s an upside-down Josh, waiting to grab my wrists. He seizes me like he’s trying to prevent me from hitting him, and there is nothing to do but wrap my palms around his forearms. Almost as an afterthought, I release my knees from the bar, and I’ve done it! Josh and I swing like a two-man pendulum all the way to the vaunted far end of the trapeze, where only the privileged may venture.
But my flight doesn’t end there, for as we return to the center of the trapeze, Josh says he’s going to let go. The bar from whence I came is scheduled to meet me in the middle, and I’m expected to turn around and grab it. Logically, I know that this is the next step, having seen others do it before me, but when you’re literally arm in arm with a bare-chested, musclebound man in green tights, you throw logic out the window. He might as well have told me to clone myself.
There’s no time to think. Josh flings me back into the air like he’s shaking sand off a beach towel. Something—panic? survival instinct? the advice I’d been hearing over and over that day?—permits me to turn and see the original bar flying at my face. I reach for it and miss with my right hand, and I hear a loud gasp from the small congress of spectators who have come to watch the amateurs succeed or fail. But my left hand sticks, and the gasps turn to applause. I figure out where the hell I am, and manage to get my right hand onto the bar as well. Then, acting like I had meant to do it that way all the while, I let go and do a backflip onto the net.
"Sign your name in the book," said Simone. "You’re official." I had done a successful catch and return, and to top it off, Lisa was there to see it. I couldn’t wipe the goofy grin off my face. I started jumping around like I had won the Super Bowl and was going to Disney World. It mattered not that I had accomplished something that dozens of five-year-old children do every day. It mattered not that my "return" was a most ungainly spectacle. It mattered not that my knees were now pulsating with searing pain.
All that mattered was that I did it! I flew through the air. Not with the greatest of ease, mind you—with great difficulty, if truth be told. I would never become an artist on the trapeze. That would take years of study and practice, and a body much more suitable than my 6’2" frame. But for one moment, I had seen the view from the top of the circus.
posted by John Rosenthal @ 3:32 PM
