Nosebleed Territory

I saw a great post over on Roberta X about working in high places; you should click over there and read all about it. It reminded me of the post Ernie Pyle wrote during his travels in the 1930's of visiting the Golden Gate Bridge during its construction. It makes me wobbly just thinking about it.

"Construction engineers are great fellows, and they are smart. They know all about stresses and strains. You admire them a great deal while sitting around a table looking at their blueprints. But just wait till you are seven hundred fifty feet up in thin air, standing rigid and paralyzed in a rickety little cage, suspended only by a piece of wire. At that moment you wish all construction engineers were in hell, and you know very well, figures or no figures, that a one-inch steel cable isn't strong enough to support a big guy like you who weighs a hundred and fifteen.

On the south shore there was a little frame building which served as field office for the great Golden Gate Bridge. We went in there to get our safety helmets. When we came out we couldn't see any bridge at all, because the fog was so thick. "Well, we'll go up anyway," the bridgeman said. "Maybe it won't be so thick up above." We walked out along the temporary pier under the bridge, to the immense south tower, three blocks out in the water. We got into a wire cage and started up.

This cage was like an elevator, except that it didn't go up anything. No shaft at all. It just went up through empty air, like a bucket on the end of a rope, and the top of the ride was nearly two hundred feet higher than the Washington Monument. As long as we were in the fog I was all right, because I couldn't see. But pretty soon we came out above it and then the fright closed in over me. We went up and up and up. The fog and snatches of bridge and shore and city widened out below us. The elevator began to swing up and down. I knew instantly what that was: it was the cable fraying, and only a strand or two was left holding us. At two places on the way up we passed little shelves where the elevator sometimes stopped to let workmen out. When you came to one of these shelves the top of the elevator would hit it, and the cage would bump and jiggle around. It was enough to make a man want to lie down on the floor and cry.

Finally we were up there. Then we had to step across and open slice of sky about a foot wide (wide enough to fall through, all right), and then climb a steel ladder for twenty feet, cross a catwalk, climb another ladder fifteen feet, and then we were out on top of the world. Oh, God, who ever talked me into this?

The top of the tower was big as eight or ten rooms. There were little shops and control houses, and men in helmets were sitting around eating lunch. The view was wonderful, if you dared look. The fog was vanishing now, and the whole immense bridge was there below us, in both directions, and there was the Golden Gate with little ships going through it, and over yonder was Sausalito, and back here was San Francisco, and out there was the ocean.

Around the edge of the top was strong wooden railing. Sense told me I could pound on it all day with a sledge and not make a dent, and yet I knew that if I leaned on it, as the bridgeman was doing, it would collapse. Furthermore, I knew that if I stumbled I wouldn't fall to the floor. No, I'd fall up about five feet, and then out about five feet over the rail, and then seven hundred fifty feet down. That's the way I fall at the top of a high tower. Consequently, I stayed about six feet from the edge, with one arm wrapped around the doorway of one of the control houses.

The bridgeman said I was doing all right; a lot of people kept their eyes shut all the way up in the elevator, and a lot backed out when the elevator stopped--they just couldn't step across that foot of open space. And others who had gone on up would get so scared they would lie down on the floor and turn white and sweat and tremble. I was doing all right, he said. I was very careful, however, to step rhythmically and like a cat, so as not to set up any vibration that would collapse the tower. He said it was built so that an earthquake wouldn't collapse it, but you never can tell.

He asked if I wanted to walk down the catwalk that ran beneath the two cables, from the tower clear down to the bridge floor in the center. I sure would have liked to, but unfortunately I had an appointment with my music teacher and couldn't wait. So we climbed down the ladders and waited for the cage, and went swinging and jerking down to sea level again, me getting braver with every foot of the descent.

There was a young fellow in workmen's clothes on the elevator. I said to him, "How long did it take you to get used to these high places?" He said, "When I started I was on the graveyard shift, from midnight till eight. It was so dark I couldn't see what was under me. By the time it got daylight I was all right. But I was so damn glad to get a job I'd of clumb the Eiffel Tower." Personally, I would joyously starve to death before I'd work one hour at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A newspaper friend of mine in San Francisco named Bob Elliott (he's a Hoosier too--they're everywhere) was the first man ever to walk from San Francisco to Oakland--the first to walk across the Oakland Bay Bridge. It took him all day. The bridge was then nothing but bare steel framework. In places he had to walk hundreds of feet on six-inch girders, twenty stories above the water, or on rounded cable, with only a thin wire guide rope to hold to. In places he had to climb right up over the top of great steel arches, slick with fresh paint, with no handholds at all. A hundred times he thought he would die. He wanted to quit and go back, but that was just as bad as going on. He was terribly shaken. He couldn't sleep the night after he made the trip, and it was three days before he became composed again.

I had the privilege of being one of the few outsiders to cross the finished bridge before it was opened. But it didn't scare me. No, sir. We rode across in an automobile."

Chapter Eight; Leadville and Points West, Home Country, by Ernie Pyle, Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, William Sloane Associates, 1947