by Gates, Moses
Sitting back in the hostel, winding down from our impromptu adventure, I notice a change in both of my compatriots. Steve is no longer so despondent. While not completely mitigating his frustration, the climb has taken the edge off enough to let him leave the city in peace, Cloaca or no. And the flame that’s been lit in Chi is there to stay. I feel kind of proud—I’ve helped create a fellow traveler.
“I can’t stop thinking about it. It still gets my pulse racing,” she writes me later. She doesn’t have to explain further—I remember this feeling well. It’s the same one I had for days after climbing the Manhattan Bridge.
Chi says: I arrived in Rome restless, but I never thought I’d find the jolt of energy in something as obscure as climbing scaffolding. There were equal measures of the romance of Rome, the added danger of a light cover of rain, the glee in meeting two very unsuspectingly entertaining Americans and their absolute inclusion of me into their exploits, and intoxication. I will eternally equate Rome with drunken and rainy excitement of the climbing kind.
But I still insist James Bond is way cooler than Indiana Jones—if only because James Bond would smell much more pleasant than Indy. In this respect, Steve and Moe ARE Indiana Jones.
There’s another reason to celebrate. I do a little research, and it turns out that we haven’t just climbed some random thing covered in scaffolding. The Lateran Obelisk is the oldest in Rome and the tallest in the entire world. The Egyptians constructed the 105-foot monument in Luxor approximately 3,500 years ago. It was brought to Rome by Constantius II in the fourth century and erected at the Circus Maximus. After having fallen sometime during the Middle Ages, our old buddy Sixtus V—who is now my front-runner for best pope ever—had it reerected next to Saint John Lateran, adding the cross on top that we had used to boost ourselves up in order to depaganize it. This was no mean feat. The obelisk weighs almost a million pounds.
Setting a goal and pushing yourself to achieve it is always rewarding, even if you ultimately fail or, as in our case of the Cloaca, even if you don’t know if you succeeded or not. Rewarding in a very different way is learning you’ve accomplished something you didn’t even mean to, just by seizing a random opportunity. I had helped one friend feel better, I had helped another unlock a part of herself, and I had seen a magnificent view of the Eternal City afforded only to a scant few. As I pack up to catch our train, I think back to a year ago and our climb up the Tour Saint-Jacques. I realize that, somehow, welcoming in the New Year with a climb up a landmark in a European capital seems to be becoming a tradition.
SIXTEEN
London, February 2007
I am blessed with good health. Doctor’s visits are a routine thirty minutes. My eyesight has been 20/20 and my blood pressure 120/80 for as long as I can remember. I haven’t had a significant injury since I broke my arm jumping off a picnic table when I was five, and the worst disease I’ve ever gotten was a bad case of poison ivy. It might be genes, it might be good immune system development, it’s probably more than a bit of luck. One time I fell eight feet backward down a hole in the ground onto solid concrete in an abandoned courthouse and didn’t even end up with a busted rib.
Steve has not had such good fortune. In addition to the bone cancer in his pelvis, he’s had strep, staph, enterobacter, and Aeromonas hydrophila infections bad enough to hospitalize him. He’s dislocated his right shoulder four times, dislocated his left shoulder once, broken his hip, broken his ankle, and had two concussions. He’s taken a metal shard straight through his index finger after falling through a collapsing staircase in an abandoned hospital on an island in the East River, and had to have his forehead stapled shut after being mugged in a park in Upper Manhattan. He was once six hours away from having his left arm amputated when he got an infection after cutting open his hand in an underground river, and when he had the bone cancer he almost underwent a hemipelvectomy, which would have removed his right leg along with most of his right ass cheek. For twelve days in 2003 the doctors told him he was probably going to die.
Therefore, I’m not really that surprised when we’re sitting in our hotel about six hours after arriving in London and I hear “Ummm . . . hey, Moe. I don’t think I’m going to be able to go check out that drain with you guys. I’m pretty sure I broke my leg.”
It’s been about a week since we left the others behind in Italy to their own travels, and headed from Rome through Central Europe to Berlin before flying from Berlin to London this morning.
“You broke your leg between getting off the airplane and now?” I ask Steve, somewhat puzzled.
“Yeah—you know that cancer? It left part of one of my hip bones about this thick,” he says, holding up his pinkie finger. “A bad knock at the wrong angle will crack it. Hey, uh, do you mind seeing if you can get some painkillers anywhere? I’d do it, but I don’t think I can walk.”
It’s tough to explain the relationship between men, friendship, and pain. Emotional pain is easy to deal with in a male friendship; in fact, it’s one of the main benefits of having friends. You know instinctively when to make a joke, when to commiserate, and when to just shut up, let the guy down a few whiskeys, and pretend like you never heard anything the next morning. But physical pain is different, especially for someone like me whose most agonizing memory is along the lines of slamming my finger in a door—not trying to grit out a broken leg without so much as a Tylenol PM.
I feel awkward. Steve is already apologetic about the situation, and I can tell he’s bothered that his frail constitution has cost us a chance to go see a great part of the underground. That’s why we’re here, after all. London is the home of one of the first modern sewer systems in the world, designed by Joseph Bazalgette during the Victorian era in response to the “Great Stink” of 1858, when Central London filled with raw human waste to the point where one could walk from Buckingham Palace to the East End without escaping the smell of shit. The sewers are beautiful, featuring Victorian brick arches that would be at home in a posh house in Soho. Most are actually an infrastructure double dip, also serving as drains to carry the excess storm water runoff into the Thames River. This system incorporated many of the old tributaries of the Thames, which had already been submerged to varying degrees over the centuries. The group of London explorers we know are currently on a “lost river” kick, which involves examining old maps, heading to where these rivers used to be, looking for nearby “lids”—hatches or manholes—that lead down into the sewers, and then navigating underground until they’ve found the submerged waterway. This is the main reason we’ve put London on the itinerary: Steve is an underground rivers geek of the first magnitude. He can tell you every underground stream in the five boroughs of New York City, when it was buried, and probably what manhole cover to pop to find it. Plenty of nights when I’ve called him up, looking for a bridge or tunnel adventure, I’ve gotten, “Hey, actually do you want to go pop a couple sewer manholes? I’m looking for this stream that got submerged in the 1800s and I think I know where it might be.” Steve’s dream is to get a doctorate in history and become a professor of subterranean urban hydrological development.
Steve’s shared academic obsession with lost watercourses is how we’d gotten in touch with the Londoners. So far they’ve had some success in finding many of London’s lost rivers, and in their quest have found a lot of less historical but no less rewarding parts of Bazalgette’s system. We’d just gotten an e-mail from two local drainers with the message “Found a new drain mates! You have to come check this one out, it’s huge!” Huge drains are kind of like the burger and fries of the urban exploring world. Not exactly rare, but very satisfying.
I know Steve doesn’t want me to see how hurt he is, and it seems like sticking around and making him feel obligated to put on a brave face is just adding to his misery. But what kind of person tells a friend, “Hey, sorry about the broken leg and all, but I’m off to see the town. Chin up, guv’nor!”? I have no idea how to navigat
e this scenario, so I’m pretty happy when Steve suggests I go try to find some drugs, which lets me leave the room but still be helpful. Luckily, in West London, drugstores are both open late and sell codeine over the counter. Steve somehow manages to not down all the pills in one gulp and follows the instructions to the letter when it comes to dosage and timing. When I tell him I’m pretty impressed by this restraint, I get a grim reply: “Yeah. I’m used to this.”
The next day Steve somehow manages to hobble out of the room, and we take a cab to the Lord Wigram Ward of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. There they give him real drugs, stabilize his leg, and luckily have an Internet connection. Steve finds a cheap flight on Air India back to New York. I get him to the airport, watch the stewardess wheel him through security, and I’m companionless in London for the next three days. I take the first day just to walk around and sightsee, resolving to get going on the exploring tomorrow.
London in 2007 is dangerously close to an Orwellian surveillance world. Cameras cover the financial district, also known as “The City” or “The Square Mile,” along with signs proclaiming things like “Do Not Engage in Anti-Social Behavior.” Now, I certainly don’t consider my mission—a climb up the old stock exchange tower under renovation on Threadneedle Street, in the heart of the Square Mile—antisocial behavior, but I figure the London cops probably would. So I’m nervous. After pacing back and forth by the building for a while, I hit the pay phone. Thirteen digits later, Steve is on the phone in his hospital bed on the East Side of Manhattan, exhausted and doped up on morphine but still ready with a pep talk.
“Hey, no, you should definitely go for it, Moe. I’m pretty sure it’s a good idea. It’ll be totally chill. Hey, c’mon, you should totally do it.”
I leave the phone with a new resolution. Unfortunately, while this pep talk was going on, two road workers have parked themselves right in front of the spot where I planned to jump the fence. Fine, I’ll take a walk around the block. After an hour they’re still there. More walks around the block for me. Another hour later, they’re still there. Steve’s pep talk is wasted as I manage to navigate the night bus back to the hotel.
• • •
I have one more day in London, and figure I’ll take the time to see Stonehenge. But since I don’t want too much time to kill between seeing Stonehenge and trying the climb again, I take in a couple museums in the morning and head out on an afternoon train. Big mistake. It turns out Stonehenge is in the absolute middle of nowhere. And in the winter it closes at four p.m. I roll into the nearest town with a train station, Salisbury, about nine miles away, at three forty-five.
Well, I’m not about to just turn around and take the train right back. I figure something like Stonehenge, out in the countryside, probably isn’t surrounded by a metal wall. If I can manage to get out there, I can at least see it from the road. I have two problems: how to get there, and how to get there before dark.
It turns out there’s a smaller city, Amesbury, about three miles from Stonehenge. A few pounds and a twenty-minute bus ride later, and I’m in a little shop reminiscent of what you’d find in a regular U.S. roadside gas station, just with a significantly outsized dose of quaintness. I pick up a map of the town. It doesn’t extend as far as Stonehenge, but I do see a line on the edge labeled “Old Stonehenge Road.” That seems promising. I head out, hoping I can make it before dark.
Old Stonehenge Road eventually turns into a highway. I’m on the south end of it, between the road and a field. As the sun is setting, I can just make out the giant rocks off in the distance. Stonehenge sits in a field on top of a hill. The hill is in the crotch of a Y, with highways forming the Y. By the time I reach it, it’s grown dark, and I realize there is no way to get there without crossing the highway. I look across the highway. There’s a barbed-wire fence on the other side. By itself it would be no problem to navigate—it’s not more than chest-high, consisting only of three strands of barbed wire running horizontally between the fence posts. The problem is that there’s no gap between it and the road, and it’s only about five-thirty—prime rush-hour time. I can’t believe it. An hour and a half on the train, twenty minutes on the bus, and at least an hour walking, and my choice is: being stopped within spitting distance of my goal or playing Frogger with highway traffic in the dark. This time I have no pay phone around, no pep talk, nobody to push me along on that last step. I think about it, waiting for breaks in traffic and resolving to go when the gap is just a little bigger. Several minutes later I’m still standing by the side of the road.
I start to think about how I’ll tell this story to people back home—think of how I’ll reply to the inevitable “So then you just turned around and walked back to the bus station?” This leads me to suck it up and take a step out into the highway. I quickly see a car coming and step right back. I force myself to imagine that look on someone’s face when they are unsuccessfully trying to hide their disdain for the person across from them. I think about how this is just like going around the red sign at the end of the subway platform, something that’s as simple as putting one foot in front of the other, albeit very quickly. I look around, see no headlights, and dash across. I end up doing a sort of front roll/flop over the top strand of barbed wire, ripping my jacket and jeans but keeping my skin—and pride—intact.
This is it. I stand up, quickly assess myself for any injury, and start to climb up the hill that leads to Stonehenge. As I climb, I keep thinking that there has to be some sort of catch. But there isn’t. Once again, there’s no physical border, nothing real keeping me from where I want to go. I simply get closer and closer until I’m touching the massive bluestone megaliths that make up the complex. I have the place all to myself and it is amazing. No tourists, no fences, nothing but history and me. I take a few minutes to just wander around and marvel, softly touching the rocks. They’re smoother than they appear—much too smooth to try to indulge my initial instinct of trying to climb them. They’re also slightly warm to the touch, contrasting with the cold winter evening. I figure a couple of pictures are in order.
As I take the third photo, I see someone walking toward me. The guards must have seen my flashes go off. I’m not that surprised; I can’t imagine that they leave the place completely deserted after hours.
“Hello,” I say, deciding the best course of action is just to play the dumb American tourist who doesn’t know you can’t just walk right in.
“You know we’re closed, mate,” the guard replies. He can’t be more than nineteen years old. “I’m going to have to escort you out. This way, please.”
A few other teenage guards join us on the way out, and I surmise that this must be the local after-school job for the youth of Amesbury. I want to ask if they take their girlfriends here, or have clandestine midnight parties every once in a while. What I really want to do is ask the guards to take a few photos of me before we leave. But in these kinds of situations where you seem to be getting off the hook, the best course of action is just to shut up, count your blessings, and get out of there as soon as possible.
As they take me out through the gaudy tourist entrance, I’m happier and happier that I went the way I did. There’s a huge difference between walking up under your own power, seeing your goal appear off in the distance, and being rewarded with getting to wander it unmolested—and rolling up in the SUV with the kids, forking over fifteen quid, going through the turnstiles and past the souvenir shop, and snapping your photos from behind the ropes. Until the guard showed up, I could almost believe it was a hundred years ago, with Stonehenge untouched by postcards, tickets, and official paths. How many people get a place of such historical importance freely to themselves to interact with, even if only for a few minutes, in this day and age?
• • •
I get back to London from Stonehenge at about nine-thirty. I’m already pretty happy with myself, but there’s still a reason I stayed one more day. I catch the last Underground f
rom my hotel near Earls Court and am in the Square Mile, walking down Threadneedle Street to the old London Stock Exchange building at one a.m. I don’t call Steve this time. I don’t even hesitate like I did at the highway. I’ve been having a pretty serious conversation with another partner—a partner by the name of Jack Daniel’s. A quick look around and I boost myself up and over the wooden barriers. Sometimes it pays to just take the shortcut.
Once I get on the scaffolding, I’m reminded of the unconscious cultural assumptions our brains make. In the U.S., scaffolding is almost always erected according to the same pattern each time, so scaffolding climbs are usually pretty simple affairs: you find your way in, circle around until you find the ladder or staircase, and head on up; the ladder or stairs will be in the same place on each level. But this is different. There are various bits and pieces of scaffolding kind of scattered around the building—on different stories, in different locations. I can’t figure out how to get more than a few flights up. I’ll find what I think is a ladder up to the top, it’ll dead-end after two flights, and I’ll have to head back down and find something else to try. I’m conscious of the fact that there’s probably some form of security patrolling the place, and as a result I feel like I’m in one of those 1980s video games where you have to navigate around a simple maze while avoiding running into one of the bad guys wandering around. Finally, after about twenty minutes of drunkenly climbing around the scaffolding, I get the bright idea to try the building itself. I maneuver through an open section on the third floor, find an internal fire staircase, and twenty-six flights later I’m on top of London.
ON TOP OF LONDON.
I’ve chosen a great focal point. The old London Stock Exchange is right on the fulcrum of the old part of the City of London and the new part of the City of London. To the east is the brightly lit postmodern skyscraper city. To the west is the centuries-old classical London, anchored by Saint Paul’s Cathedral. I take in the three hundred years of progress in one of the world’s greatest focal points of civilization just by turning 360 degrees. Nothing antisocial about that.
