Sky Scraper

There’s something about towers.  My friend Steve visited High Point State Park in New Jersey yesterday.  He posted some pictures of the tower on top of the highest spot in the state.  It looks like a cross between Monty Python and a haunted lighthouse inside.

His post got me to thinking about towers.  Towers are some of the most moody locations for fiction (and some non-fiction) drama.  There’s inherent danger in a tower.  The climbing of a tower always implies threat.

Fear of falling, as my writing partner Elizabeth reminds me, is evident even in young babies that haven’t learned to walk.  We fear the sudden drop.

I used to watch Ghost Hunters on television.  When they visited lighthouses it was always easy to believe in a haunting.  Historically lighthouses were often isolated locations, very lonely and somber.  The thought of being trapped so far away from others suggests tragedy.

One of the early, great stop-motion animation movie monsters, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, attacked a lighthouse.  It is the most memorable scene in the movie.  One, at most two, would be the victims, yet it somehow seems the most tragic of all.

I’ve never visited a tower open to the public and not climbed it.  Like a mountain, its being there is excuse enough.  And who, at the top of a tower, doesn’t wonder about what it would be like to jump?  Nature constrains us, thankfully.  But the spooky possibility remains.

Being next to something incredibly large always causes me to shudder.  Reminded of my own insignificance, that large object (it matters not what—ship, mining equipment, or tower) suggests my own insignificance.  No matter the expansiveness of my imagination, hopes, and dreams.

Some writers talk of towers reaching kilometers into the sky.  In science fiction the question is what would be needed to erect such an incredible building.  I’ve heard famous novelists discussing the logistics.  I shiver.

If I’d been there with Steve, I would’ve climbed that tower.  I would have gazed to that far distant horizon visible from the top, and I would have trembled.