Dopecentury IX --- The Tower
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
Looking back with hindsight later, it would have seemed like a foolish thing to do. But it is (presumably) impossible to look back with hindsight once you are dead.
Why even do it?
For the view? Certainly magnificent, but more safely and easily achieved by visiting the nearby museum-on-a-hill that featured views of the valley, as if to reward visitors for the vegetable-eating task of coming to see the museum’s art collection.
For bragging rights? Surely. One could later point to the tower, visible all around the community, and say “I climbed that.” But to do this, one had to live to tell the tale.
For the experience alone? Doing the thing others are afraid to do? A pure thrill of taking a risk and overcoming it? There is a pure satisfaction that comes with pushing the envelope and surviving. To test one’s courage and skills, to feel out the edges of what you are capable of. But again, you need to not die if one goal is to reflect afterwards on what you achieved.
Maybe it’s a death-wish? Some kind of deep lower-brain suicidal impulse to go out in a blaze of glory. Or at least the impulse is strong enough to push you to stand at the edge of the precipice of death, where most others aren’t willing to go. Just to see what’s there.
Whatever the motivation, the tower seemed to have the ability to spin up latent motivations into actual ones. It tempted those who were susceptible to such things — a factor of its height (something like 300 feet) and the cross-bracing between the vertical tubes that so strongly resembled hand-holds or a ladder (even if many of them crossed at a 45-degree angle). To the susceptible, it begged to be climbed, and the chain-link fence surrounding it did little to mitigate the call of the tower.
To the engineer’s eye though, it was clearly not intended to take the weight of a human being, at least not outside of calm weather and with the safety of a harness and the support of a cherry-picker at the base. The three vertical tubes were not much further than a foot apart. It was more antenna than tower. Steel guy-lines stretched up to about the half-way point, and it was firmly anchored to the concrete pad at its base. It was structurally sound, as long as a unintended loads were not thrust upon it.
So it was foolish for the girl to think she should climb the tower. But she was susceptible. She couldn’t resist. The warm summer nights, with no school to be up for in the mornings, drew her and her friends out into the countryside, in long walks through the woods and the fields in the darkness. That’s how they discovered the tower, stumbling on the fenced-in base pad in the middle of a field on the top of a hill. The nearest houses were half a mile distant. The group found themselves inside the chain link fence, alone with the tower, analyzing it, discussing the possibilities. And once the suggesting that those hand-holds would make it easy to climb was made, it was inevitable that someone would have to climb it.
The girl who was most susceptible was the one who tried it.
The climbing was easy at first. The crossbars did in fact make solid hand and foot holds, placed just the distance necessary for a human to climb the tower (as in fact they were designed for, with the notion that maintenance might be called for).
Above about 40 feet is where the girl started to have doubts, possibly due to some human understanding from deep in evolutionary history of exactly how high a human can be above the ground before falling would be unquestionably fatal. When she looked at her hands, though comfortably holding the cross bars, she could not help but imagine how easy it would be to simply let go. She put that thought out of her mind though, looked up at the top, and kept climbing.
At 100 feet, she looked down, and that was a mistake. At 150 feet, she reached the point the guy lines attached, which felt somehow reassuring. But she was only half-way to the top.
Above the guy-lines, she began to feel the tower swaying in the wind. It was only a small movement, not enough to make the climb any more physically challenging, but it was hard to ignore. She reassured herself that tall structures were designed to sway in the wind. As she moved upward, the swaying increased. She did not know it, but the gentle breeze was moving at just the right speed that it was adding a small amount of movement to the tower with every swing. And her weight — as it moved slowly up the thin, flexible steel tower was adding to this effect.
The top of the tower had a crow’s nest type thing. Three crosstree spars stuck out a short way with red blinking lights at their ends. Rather than simply hanging on to the tower, she opted to climb out on top of one of the spars where there was a flat space created by more cross-bracing. There she could sit, somewhat uncomfortably and without ever letting her grip slack, and look out at the view.
It was a matter of minutes before she realized the swaying had dramatically increased. Her weight at the very end of the whippy length of steel, combined with a wind speed that was just the right frequency was rapidly increasing the distance the tower swung back and forth. The tip of the tower, with her perched on it played out a metronomic beat against the sky. It steadily increased the length of its swing, the beat growing ever slower.
Now the ground was moving beneath her, back and forth. She lay out flat, face-down, on the spar and gripped it tightly, watching the ground pass in greater and greater swaths beneath her.
She assumed the wind would eventually die down and she could slip back down the tower. She was not deeply concerned until one of the guy-lines, stretched beyond its capacity, snapped with a twang and whipped freely. This was accompanied by a far-off scream from her friends below.
Now the girl knew she was in real trouble, though the tower seemed almost more peaceful as it quietly described its now very-long arc across the sky.
And then the tower moved in a new way a sharp jolt that shook upward from the base, a lateral movement against the smooth swing of the metronome. The girl knew immediately, just from the sensation of it, that the tower had failed at the base.
And she knew now that the end was soon approaching. The tower swung one last time across the sky, in its longest arc yet. It seemed to go on forever. And the girl lifted her head up, and faced the coming end. She decided then that this would be her last ride, and it would be the best one. She let go of the tower, and got into a crouch on the spar, and put her arms out into the ever-increasing wind, and rode over the top of the arc and down the long slide on the other side, watching without blinking as the huge ground came up at her.