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Getting into the swing

By Mary Voboril | Staff Writer

One reporter recounts the exhilaration she felt taking her first swing at the downtown Trapeze School.

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In the distance, the Statue of Liberty looms in a creamy mist. To my right, the day's first kayakers are skimming through the lightly riffled waters of the Hudson River. Joggers, skaters, cyclists, dog walkers and even dogs stop and stare, but I'm only dimly aware of all this, having other matters on my mind this luminous Saturday morning:

I'm about to get high.

On a flying trapeze.

At the moment I am being fitted for a gut-cinching belt by an instructor for the Trapeze School New York, now in its second season at Manhattan's Hudson River Park just south of Canal Street. For two hours, 10 of us would clamber up a 23-foot ladder, step into thin air and take turns swinging like maladroit chimps - some of us with the greatest of "eeeeeeease!"

But, oh, what a feeling.

"Once you're off the platform, it's all bliss." said school director Jonathon Conant, 42, an athletically trim, deeply tanned aerialist who has been in the trapeze school business for four years.

In my case, "bliss" was stretching it a little, though it did briefly resemble a runner's high. I don't suffer from a fear of heights and I have long enjoyed high- adrenaline sports - scuba diving, white-water rafting, competitive sailing and, in the Swiss Alps, hiking atop high-up, knife-edge trails. So, two weekends ago, when I came upon the trapeze school while bicycling along the Hudson River, it struck me as nothing more than a curiosity.

Then I read a newspaper account about the school. A New Jersey reporter described herself rooted to the trapeze platform, frozen in fear, "wailing, 'No, no, I can't, I can't!'"

That did it.

So here I was, clipping on double safety lines. Then, first in line (not by choice), I climbed the extension ladder to the narrow trapeze platform.

I chalked my hands. One of three instructors coaching us this day hooked on another safety line. He undid the ladder lines and, for my first "hang," gave me instructions that were calm and clear:

Left hand on the support. Right hand on the trapeze bar, which felt surprisingly heavy. Lean out, hips forward, shoulders back, feet more than halfway off the platform edge - a very counter-intuitive move. Surely I'd fall. But no: He was holding me by the back of my belt.

I leaned out. A broad white safety net stretched out not that far below.

"Ready?" His tones were authoritative. "Hep!"

I took a little hop, both hands now on the bar. The instructor released his grip. And I was off, swinging in a long, fast, swooping ride.

In two or three seconds, I reached the opposite end of this first swinging arc. Conant, down on the ground, called out through the roar of the West Street traffic: "Knees up!"

I snapped up my knees and slid my bare feet over the bar, by this time starting to swoop in the other direction. At the end of that second swing, I heard: "Hands down!"

And then I was swinging from my knees, arching my back, arms extended, biceps near my ears.