America's Front Porch: 360 Degrees Unobscured

I am happy to introduce America's Front Porch, a new feature that brings you great American stories from everyday people. I am the co-founder of Tokoni.com, a new online community that allows you to connect through your stories and shared experiences.

Each week on America's Front Porch, I will feature one Tokoni story that captures the rich diversity of the human experience.

On Mother's Day last year, my son took his first steps. This year I don't know what he has in store for me. But I can guess.

In the last week, I have seen my son climbing onto chairs and coffee tables. I have caught him reaching high on the kitchen counter for things he cannot even see. I have seen him wedging his toes in the spaces of the safety gate, looking for a way over it. And I know. It is only a matter of time before I find him standing triumphantly on top of some table in some other room.

How do I know this? I have glimpsed into my future.

I was reading this story on Tokoni and saw of flash of what my own son has in store for me. Because I have learned that he is a climber and that he has an impaired sense of danger. And I wondered if other mothers would want to know that their child rappelled a 35-story building at night....

360 Degrees Unobscured
Posted by JibberFisch

This is the story of a bewildered underclassman learning the "tricks of the trade," getting the most amazing view in Houston, and continuing the tradition.

It was windy. It hadn't seemed so from the ground, but up here, the wind was a powerful, gusty force. It was just the two of us. A master and an apprentice, the expert and the inspiration. Two friends.

My cohort and I had met by chance some months before, a short time for us to become as close as we were that night. Turns out we had been living in the same residential college at Rice University for almost two years and had crossed paths only minimally. I had expressed an interest in one of our campus's longest traditions- building climbing. I, at the time a sophomore, had been pointed to a secretive senior. Most of my friends who were into that sort of thing regarded my cohort as the expert of our time on various means of ascent.

He agreed to meet me for an expedition. I didn't know where we were going, but I was excited. Dressed in grey because black causes silhouettes, I snuck out into our college's parking lot. He had been waiting there for some time and watched me search for him for a few minutes before calling to me. I was quite impressed. That was the first night.

That night, we crossed Main St. and snuck between two already splayed fence posts into a construction site for the new Memorial Hermann Hospital monstrosity. The elevators hadn't been installed yet, so we climbed all 34 stories in the stairs, stopping every decade or so to poke around and see what was getting installed. Over the course of several hours in the dark early morning on a Sunday, we ascended the entire building.

From the top floor, we took the catwalk to the attached crane and ascended it. From the top of the crane- past the cab, past the ladders and winches, to where the wind indicator was collaborating with the blinking red light- we could see downtown, the Texas Medical Center, and the Galleria, all at once. He and I, describable only as co-perpetrators, stood awestruck for twenty or so minutes at the top.

It was three weeks later that we took a third friend to the top to explore. And a month after that that we took yet another friend up. Then my cohort came to me with an idea. It was so farfetched that I had no choice but to agree to it. The reason he had originally agreed to take me was for my climbing prowess. To be arrogant for a moment, I am one of the best rock climbers at Rice and the only one with 60 meters of good rope.

So we stood once again, atop the crane. Master and apprentice. Two friends.

"We should probably get each others' home phone numbers in case we get injured or die."

"Yea, not a bad idea."

So we exchanged numbers. I was still out of breath from hauling all our gear in my backpack up those stairs. Several hundred of them at least. Neither of us noticed that the other was shaking with anxiety. I flaked out the rope again, making sure it was loose and ready to drop. He slid a loop of webbing through a counterweight at the back end of the crane. It fit perfectly. We harnessed up and double checked our devices. Then it began.

"I'll go first," I stuttered, knowing that this might be an awful idea that would end in what could be up to a 450 foot fall. So we dropped the rope, and I straddled the hole just in front of our tie-in point, a 90 foot drop below me to the top of the building. I cinched the rope tight and leaned back on it, gradually taking weight off my feet and trusting the rope more and more. Then came what we later called "the moment of truth". It held me. Like all of my equipment had been designed, my weight was suspended from the crane, though I was still level with the deck. I gave it some rope from my control hand.

And the descent began. For what couldn't have been more than two minutes, I dropped 90 feet. At the halfway point, I got what I had come for. The adrenaline rush was one thing, but the view put it to shame. When you rapel from such a height, you get the perfect view. Unlike the crane, where you couldn't see below you and you had a bit of the horizon obscured by the crane itself, this view afforded 360 unobstructed degrees of perfect view of the Houston skyline. People in the suburbs couldn't tell I was watching. I could see the glimmer of lights in the Gulf. We were high enough to see the off-shore rigs. I had suspended the effects of gravity on myself.

And then my feet touched down on a catwalk. But my adventure was hardly over. I hadn't known, but my cohort had seen the early work crews pull up while I had been rapelling. He clipped in with some haste and flew to the halfway point. I couldn't begrudge him a nice long view. Then he hastened down the rest to another safe landing. We quickly pulled the rope through- his expertise had come in handy. We had rapelled both sides of the same rope with it looped through a bit of gear at the top.

"Let's leave the 'biner and the webbing and go. There's a work crew. This is non-ideal."

So we pulled the rope, and packed it into my backpack which had ridden empty on me on the way down. We crammed all of our remaining gear, the harnesses and rapel devices and spare carabiners and his digital camera and everything into his pack and rushed for the stairs down. I have trouble remembering the remainder of the evening because so little of my blood was left for my brain function. I know we snuck past some workers while they were unloading their truck. We hopped the fence on the opposite side of the building and fled into Hermann Park where we knew we could hide if we had somehow been seen. But we hadn't been. Our escape had been clean.

Our adventures continued for a time. Personal circumstance has dictated that I no longer participate in such activities. Regardless, I tell this and other stories to Rice freshmen with the idea that even if I can't climb, sneak, tunnel, or evade capture, they can and should. After all, this is one of Rice's oldest and most prestigious traditions.

-- Originally posted on Tokoni, America's virtual Front Porch. www.tokoni.com