altophilia
Some people are scared of heights... I'm the opposite: I love to get as far off this planet as I can. I'm not talking about the "mile high club" or anything fetishistic: in a plane, I get a little buzz from knowing that there are seven miles of bugger-all beneath me. As an adult (?), I can afford to fly across the Atlantic to Toronto, climb the CN Tower, and stand on the glass floor, looking straight down. Show me a skyscraper, and I want to see the view from the top.

As a kid... well, you can imagine what happened when grain silos went up, in the small town I lived in (in Natal, South Africa). Two rows of six concrete monstrosities, each about two hundred feet high, with a conical roof.

We soon found that there were no security guards at weekends, and this was before CCTV became common. My stepbrother was chicken, but I was straight up the ladder on the outside of one of the silos. At the top, each silo was fed by a covered conveyor belt, but there was enough space for me to slide down the outside to the edge, and look down.

Running on the conveyor belts, playing in the service lifts, pulling levers and getting showered with dirty maize... good times. We never got caught, not even close. The ultimate stupidity was something I only did twice: jump across the six foot gap between two silos. If any adult had seen me, I would have been grounded for life. Had I slipped, I would have been "grounded" for sure. Eek!

Length? Pshaw. Tell me how far up it goes.
( bnt what, me worry?, Sat 21 Jul 2007, 11:10, Reply)