The Only Way To Go Is Up

Nonetheless, Thursday night, before he took his phone off the hook and went to bed at about 1 a.m., Willig tried again to answer the question. "A couple of times during the year I planned this climb I thought. 'What the heck is in me that makes me want to do this?' I guess it's just a love of excitement and adventure, an appetite for action. Maybe it has a lot to do with asserting my life, just to myself—feeling more alive.

"I did wonder, at times, if I should go through with it. But I never at all seriously considered not doing it, never from the first time I got the idea."

"George did what he dreamed of doing for a year," said his girl friend Randy. "He would get shivers and goosebumps every time he thought of it. He'd go down and just stare at the World Trade Center all the time." "When George says he's going to do something, it's almost a fait accompli," says Mrs. George Willig, the climber's mother, a remarkable woman in her own right. She has raised six children while working the last 13 years. Two months ago she became a grandmother and next January will receive her B.S. in accounting from St. John's. "George would mention the climb every now and then, but I had no idea he was working on it with such a single-minded purpose. He told me he was going to make the climb a couple of days before he did it. and I tried not to think of it too much."

Mrs. Willig never considered trying to talk George out of the attempt. "Knowing my son, knowing how much he likes to accept challenges and do things out of the ordinary, it would have been a waste of time," she said. "Besides, he's 27; he's not a child.

"This sounds like a contradiction, but as much as he likes to do dangerous things, he's very careful about them. People have asked me if he got hurt a lot as a child, but he hasn't had many accidents. It isn't what you do, it's how you do it. and George is a good example of that principle. I think his whole family is rather proud of him."

More than his family has taken pride in Willig. The country immediately adopted him as a folk hero, viewing his climb as an expression of its own yearnings and as a reaffirmation of the splendid challenges that, when successfully met, ennoble the human spirit.

All George Willig wanted to do was, to use a climber's expression, "go for it." which may be what life is all about. Along the way he scraped a raw nerve and the country twitched, but in admiration, not pain.