I used to be slightly afraid of heights. I was never like my sister Debbie; who probably still won't go near the railing of her deck because it's about three steps off the ground. I remember going through Onondaga Cave as a kid. She refused to walk over the natural bridge. The only way we got her to continue the tour was to make her close her eyes and allow us to lead her over to the other side.
It wasn't even that high!
I had a healthy respect for heights, but I wasn't afraid of them. I pretty much credit my brother-in-law Chris with getting me beyond any fear. Chris was into climbing and rappelling. I kind of thought he was off his rocker for jumping off cliffs; but to each his own. I had no real desire to participate. That is, until he invited me and Mom's response was, "Over my dead body!!!" For some reason that I still don't totally understand; I suddenly had an insatiable desire to go jump off a cliff with Chris and readily accepted his invitation. It wasn't that I actually wanted it to be over her dead body; it's just that her words somehow motivated me to rebel a bit and go jump off a cliff - with a descender on the rope, of course.
It took a lot for me to actually step over the edge that first time.
And the second time.
And the third time.
Eventually, though, I came to really enjoy it. I realized that I had overcome any fear of heights while setting ropes for a group one day and hung out over the cliff face to shake a rope free from a ledge below. I was just hanging out there in space with the rope looped over my arm and my feet against the rock face. It was there that the thought hit me that I would have never done that just a year, or so, earlier.
I continued to play around with climbing and rappelling through college. It was while in college that I got to experience the real fun of heights. My landlord in college was a Cape Girardeau firefighter who had a side business doing tower maintenance for the local television and radio stations. John offered me a job helping him work on the towers.
My very first climb was a whopper! The local CBS affiliate, KFVS Channel 12, was having some transmitter issues and wanted to install a dummy load in place of their antenna so they could do some testing and tweaking. The FCC required that testing be done between Midnight and 6:00 AM, so we were going to go up the tower in the middle of the night. The KFVS tower was 1,776 feet tall. An elevator went up the first 1,500 feet so we would only actually have to climb the last 276 feet to the antenna.
To say that the elevators in towers are small would be a vast understatement. There was enough room for us to load all of our equipment into the elevator and that was it. We climbed on top of the elevator, hooked our safety belts onto the elevator frame and started the ride to the top. The ascent took a long time and the view of the lights in surrounding cities was spectacular!
We climbed off the elevator and unloaded our gear upon reaching the observation deck at 1,500 feet. We rigged lines to the dummy load so we could climb to the antenna and then pull the load up behind us.
Up we went. The wind was whipping around and the temperature was significantly colder than the near ninety degree heat on the ground. We did our work and waited for the engineers to radio from the ground that they had completed their testing so we could unhook the dummy load, reconnect the antenna and begin our descent.
It was exhilarating, and I was making $10 per hour; which was great money for a college student in 1984!
I was hooked!
I did several other climbs before graduating from college and moving on. Some were easy daytime climbs and some were difficult nighttime climbs. The worst was going up an icy tower in the middle of a snowy night in an attempt to find a nitrogen leak in the transmission line. John decided that we would climb no more than 300 feet in the ice and snow since we had to physically climb to inspect the transmission line instead of riding an elevator. Fortunately we found it less than 300 feet from the ground.
I kind of miss the excitement of those climbs. Of course, I was much younger then - and in much better shape - so it was easy work. The combination of arthritic knees, asthma and protruding midsection, to put it politely, make it impossible for me to do that any more.
But every once in a while I think I would like to sit on top of one of those elevators again and ride up to an observation deck over 1,000 feet in the air just to get to be up there again.
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