Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25240
III At the Brooklyn-side tower, Law and Burning Man chief carpenter Dan Miller find a way into the tower by climbing first through a portal in a vertical beam, using the rivets as hand and foot holds, then pulling themselves out a second, higher oval portal, inch- ing along a ledge, and up rungs like oversize staples punched into a metal cornice: an awning over a dead drop to the water. It's a bit dicey, but Law, Miller and a professional rigger named Lotar station themselves at pivotal points along the way to make sure no one slips. No one does. We race up a ladder to the platform above the tarmac during breaks in the traffic and hide out behind the huge highway signs. The platform itself is in sorry shape and disconcerting. Its surface has grooves the shape of rain puddles and the metal has rusted through. I walk and sit only where there are rivets. I chat with Mark Herbert, a San Francisco radio DJ and engineer. Talking to him , .. keeps me from thinking about the 200 feet of ladder between the platform on which we're lounging and the top of the tower. The rest of the ascent should be cake. Just hand-over-hand, foot-over-foot, and every 50 feet or so there's an enclosure of sorts, a metal box you can lean back on or even sit on to rest. Still, I have a fear of heights. My vertigo isn't the sort that paralyzes, but it never goes away either. When, halfway up, I chance to look down, I draw a hurried breath and experience the first of a couple central nervous system skirmishes. I'm grabbing the bars of the ladder-cold, filthy rods encrusted with peeling paint that crunches in your palms like squeezed potato chips-way too hard. All experienced climpers hknow about this: tile modre .you gnp, t e sooner you tire., an tne morQ prone you arQ to falling. Peter Matthiessen remarks on it in his classic The Snow Leopard: 1/ And of course it is this clinging, the tigntness of panic, that gets f:eople killed: 'to clutch,' in ancient Egyptian, to clutch the mountain,' in Assyrian, were euphemisms that signified 'to die."' Hold on loosely, but don't let go. "You all right?" Law asks, startling me, when I reach the utmost landing, 20 feet from the top. "Yeah." We are in the wind now. Blustery, on-high gusts that thrill the senses. Law asks me to wait here and tell the others to do the same while he climbs up into the dark and wrestles with a nautical-style hatch. I feel as if we are on the deck of a flying submarine. I hear him throw the hatch back-we'll gain the top!-and hear his giddy triumphant laugh. When we have all assembled on the landing, we climb the final ladder and find a post where we feel secure on the top, a long, nar- row roof, something like a giant, smooth, steel motorcycle seat. Law scrambles out on the suspension cable to wrap his sport coat over a lamp so we will be less visible-to whom, I wonder, heli- copters? He's like Tigger now, bouncing around oblivious to the 400-foot drop to the water below, tugging at his moustache, taking a head count, and checking with everyone to see that they're okay. We're all grinning. He's thriving on the grins and it strikes me that he's touching base, rejuvenating, continuing to do what he loves. "It's great when you can get people to test their own limits," Law observes later. "You'll have people who didn't know they could do it-and you can't do it for them." Soon, the stories start. The kind you tell in the small hours after climbing up inside a church steeple or on top of a bridge. One acquaintance, a sculptor named Jack, had a thing going for awhile where he and a friend climbed up abandoned smoke stacks and planted trees in them-sprigs poking out of 100-foot silos. Just a few weeks earlier, he confesses, on the day the stock market hit an all-time max, he went out on a Wall Street ledge 34 floors up and mooned a brokerage house. On my watch, it's 3:15 and the traffic's thin. You get the impres- sion it's slack tide on the lanes below, somewhere between the ebb of those returning home after a long night out and the flow of those who will head into Manhattan for the day. Before the pr.:-dawn chill.cause~ us to decamp fro~ our perch, I sense that the city that never sleeps IS dreaming fitfully, and I think: Gargoyles have a good gig. II