Why the girl on the crane and the boy who dug a big hole matter — Michael's essay
The girl on the crane, the Frenchman on the wire, the young man in his hole.
They are different from you and me — very different, in fact, from the rest of us.
They reach deep inside to discover themselves by daring to touch the threatening edges of outlaw-hood.
They tempt and test and break conventions that the rest of us strive to uphold. They embrace danger and consequence the rest of us would flee from. They eschew security in favour of risk.
They are anti-us.
These are people who give us tiny windows into difference, different ways of thinking about things, different approaches to living- Michael Enright
The young woman on the crane is Marisa Lazo and she is 23 years old. She somehow managed at four in the morning to climb a building crane and sit astride the crane's lifting block 12 storeys above a downtown Toronto street.
For four hours she sat there, serenely surveying her surroundings, while far below, firefighters, cops, paramedics and reporters jammed the street, all looking up.
A 52-year-old goalie-playing firefighter named Ron Wonfor climbed the crane tower, attached a line to the young woman, grabbed her around the waist and brought her down. It took two and a half hours.
Of the young girl, he said, "She was great." He was genuinely saddened that the ham-fisted cops on the ground led her away in handcuffs.
Lazo was charged with six counts of criminal mischief. Now, the word mischief is telling here. Mischief usually applies to something a child does — a prank, a dare, a harmless caper.
Put the word criminal in front of it and it takes on a whole different tone.
The Calvinist inclination in our civic nature broke free in all its condemnatory fury.
People were outraged. How dare she? How much did her rescue cost the taxpayers? Look how she endangered the lives of her rescuers, and the people on the street.
In 2015, a shy 22-year-old man named Elton McDonald dug an elaborate hole on the campus of York University. He outfitted it with a generator, lights and decorated it as an underground den.
The story of the hole went all over the world.
When Mr. McDonald's hole was discovered, elements of the hysterical press raised the spectre of some kind of terrorist plot — though not many terrorists adorn their underground headquarters with a rosary and a print of the Madonna and Child.
When everybody finally calmed down, the chief of police said no charges would be laid. The cops simply said, "Don't dig any more holes."
We the public were sorely confused. Why would somebody dig a big hole in the ground? As with the girl on the crane, we asked ourselves why people do such stupid things.
As we did in August 1974, when the Frenchman Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan across a 200 kilogram cable more than 400 metres above the ground.
His 45-minute aerial performance snarled traffic, involved hundreds of cops and firefighters and shut down Wall Street.
Public fury when something like this happens usually revolves around cost. How much does it cost us to rescue these bozos?
The girl on the crane, Marisa Lazo, silhouetted against an early morning sky, hundreds of feet in the air, presented a picture of complete calm and youthful resolve.
And in an era when the term hero is thrown around with mindless abandon, we were confronted with the real thing: the firefighter, Ron Wonfor.
We should treasure them, the man on the wire, the girl on the crane, the man in his hole and the firefighter who looked on his life-saving role more as a facilitator in the caper than a rescuer.
These are people who give us tiny windows into difference, different ways of thinking about things, different approaches to living.
They enliven our imaginations. They drive away the fog that is brought on by too much thinking.
We need them. They belong.
Click 'listen' above to hear Michael's essay.