Higher Education : Walking Above His O.C. Home Reminds 66-Year-Old That Life’s a Balancing Act

There’s something to be said for unincorporated areas. In more civilized parts of the county, there are laws and rules designating what four weekends of the year one can have garage sales, or even how many minutes of the day your garage door can be open. Community associations can make folks tear down their ducky weather vanes, and La Habra is mulling an ordinance to prohibit hanging laundry in public view.

Meanwhile, in the unincorporated hills above Tustin, two ungainly aluminum framework high-wire towers jut above Hendrik de Kanter’s yard. Nearly every day his neighbors can see the 66-year-old out on them practicing his skill at tightrope walking. Sometimes he’s on the wire on a bicycle or roller skates. Sometimes he is nude.

“The majority of the people here seem to have a certain amount of imagination,” De Kanter says of his neighborhood. “They think it’s just fine what I do.”

De Kanter’s ranch-style home lets you know he’s interested in balance and suspension. Mobiles, including one made with old wrenches, hang on wires above his driveway. His stereo speakers hang off metal poles mounted in his fireplace. Sculptures and chunky mineral formations are cleverly balanced on elegantly simple stands he builds. A cassette deck, metronome and microphone float on wires in his living room above a Steinway grand piano, which, thankfully, is earthbound.

“I like to suspend things,” he said, with a touch of Dutch accent. “It’s easier to clean under them.”

There is a firm face and inquisitive eyes under his gray hair. Attired as he was in a blue jumpsuit and matching orange scarf and pocket handkerchief, he looked as if he’d stepped out of a Dragnet episode, a Dutch Hollywood Hills eccentric artist perhaps.

Actually, for most of his life De Kanter has been an engineer and inventor. He was an advance design engineer on the Apollo space program and since the 1970s has headed his own company, which manufactures a machine that cuts glass tubing for use in electrical diodes. A widower since 1976, he also spends his time composing music, painting, skating and modeling--clothed and otherwise--for art classes.

And three years ago, at an age when many people are permanently bonding with their TV remote controls, De Kanter decided to take up tightrope walking.

“I got to be 63 and it happened. I think I’ve always been a tightrope walker, but it took me this long to come out of the closet, to admit to myself that it was what I wanted to do,” he said.

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Surprisingly, he didn’t grow up with a love of circuses. But one year when he was a child in Holland, his industrialist father got a tightrope walker--actually a Dutch variant on the practice called a cord dancer --to perform at the annual factory variety show. De Kanter was entranced, and “I think ever since it’s been in there.”

Three years ago a neighbor who knew of his interest told him about high-wire artist Jay Cochrane, billed as “the Canadian Prince of the Air,” who was then appearing weekly at Knott’s Berry Farm. De Kanter saw Cochrane perform and was so impressed that he now says he reveres him, and keeps a photo of his tightrope shoes. After De Kanter pestered him for two weeks, Cochrane, in turn, was impressed enough with his sincerity that he agreed to give him a lesson.

That invaluable 2 1/2-hour lesson in De Kanter’s back yard formed the basis for what he’s done since. He works on his wires an average of 15 minutes a day--for hours some days and others not at all--with the present goal of being able to walk safely along the seven-sixteenths-of-an-inch steel cable without use of a balancing bar.

He has three wires running in the yard. There aren’t kits for such things, so he had to design and build them from scratch. “It helps to be an engineer,” he advises. One wire is barely a foot above the ground, for practicing, and directly above it is an 11-foot-high wire. They are 31 feet long. If one were to fall, there is a lawn to one side and a rock garden to the other. The third wire, 38 feet long, is strung over a cliff drop in the yard, making it an 18-foot drop to the cactus patch below.

“That’s just a reminder that you want to stay on the wire, given the choice,” he said. We did mention, didn’t we, that he does this naked sometimes?

He has kept a log of his air time and estimates he has navigated the 18-foot-high wire 736 times, adding up to several miles traveled on a cable thinner than a pinkie. He’s never fallen and doesn’t expect to.

He said: “One of the things you learn, and this applies to life, is you don’t want to take risks beyond your capabilities. So you start out low. Once you feel comfortable at that height and know you can stay on the wire, regardless of flies buzzing, cats running under the wire, someone shouting or whatever, or misplacing your foot a little, then you go higher and higher.”

Some of our conversation took place while De Kanter was on his 11-foot-high wire, and he chatted away, making it seem effortless. I had a few goes at his foot-high wire though, and it was anything but easy. There was a whole set of necessary brain-to-body communications (what De Kanter refers to as a “neuromuscular program”) I didn’t have on line. Nearly every muscle tensed up as the wire quivered underfoot like a taut bowstring. Just standing still on the thing was exhausting, and moving was a series of near-disasters.

De Kanter said I did pretty well for a first timer. But if I’d been doing as well on the high wire I’d probably be having to type this story with my nose.

De Kanter says he didn’t walk into his hobby blind to its risks.

“I’d done some parachute jumping, so I knew what it was to be facing the abyss of death from a height. And when I started going up high doing this, I complained to Jay over the phone one day that I still had fear. He said, ‘Good, that’s what keeps you alive.’

“On the wire I feel that’s as close as we come to being a bird. At the same time I’m always glad when it’s over. It takes all you have physically. You have to always have a certain tenseness. I know if I don’t concentrate I’ll be punished severely by the ground.”

In traversing a wire that’s barely off the ground or one that’s 18 feet, or even 250 feet high, “the only difference lies above the neck, meaning there is a difference, but it’s all psychological. The wire is your point of reference, wherever it is.”

He has no particular ambition to join Cochrane and the other experts at the real heights, though it is one of his goals to attain the assuredness on the wire to be able to do that if he chose to. More immediate goals are mastering his high-wire bicycle and skate techniques and working on walking the wire without a balancing pole, which is a far more difficult proposition.

His house abounds with original artworks, and he keeps a scrapbook of photos of art students’ better representations of his unadorned self. When he answers the phone, he announces, “De Kanter speaking!”

He’s often busy trying to leave his mark on things, from his modification of a cordless phone to attach to his head “so 50% of my dexterity isn’t used up just holding it” to his work-in-progress for a two-wheeled car that “has all the comforts of the car with a motorcycle so there isn’t that ridiculous waste.” He admits to a certain desire to be noticed and says the tightrope walking helps fulfill that. He’s appeared the last two years at the Tustin Tiller Days festivities, at a Federation of Netherlands Organizations meet in Long Beach and at other events ranging down to a neighborhood chili cook-off.

“It has to do with self-acceptance, self-worth and self-esteem. It’s a good ego booster, without having the attitude of saying, ‘I’m better than you are.’ I’m just saying I’m proud to share what I’m doing. I think you could also call it a mild form of exhibitionism,” he said, laughing.

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To him, being on the wire is more than just a metaphor for life.

“Life is a matter of balance. It is a series of risks and challenges, and it is a matter of concentration, and all that you experience physically when you’re on the wire.”

He often wonders what his wife, who died in an accident in 1976, would have thought of his tightrope walking. He hasn’t remarried and says: “She was the kind of person you think of every day. I do, and many of my friends tell me they do too. I have a feeling I’ve never worked her death out with myself and I’d just as soon not think about it. I like to think of the days that were so good.

“It was very difficult for me for a time, but with or without her, I think life is so beautiful--I always try to exercise what God has given me in the way of talents. That very thing, I think, helped me enormously to get over it.”

He feels sorry for people who, as they grow older, cease to take on new challenges.

“Life is safer that way,” he said, “but it might not be living. I think there is a little bit of the inventor in all of us, but some of us were fortunate to choose to make out a living with it. If you have an inventive mind, there is hardly anything that isn’t interesting, though that always depends on how much effort you’re willing to put into finding out more about things. It would be terrible punishing, wouldn’t it, to let go of pursuits.”