flicker

Here is a photo that I took last fall at the National Bookmobile Conference in St. Louis, MO. Wow! Was it ever hot! It was October and they were having a heat wave! 89 glorious degrees! Late one afternoon when we had a little free time, a real nice outreach person from Indiana, named Marie and I took the subway down to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, to go see the Gateway Arch. It was beautiful! Getting there from the subway was a little weird, but that's another story...anyway, once we were there we decided to go up in the arch! Yep! You can go up in the arch, 630 feet above the Mississippi. So, Marie and I get our little tickets and herd our way down to these very industrial looking stairs. 5 people per stair, and on the opposite wall, is a little metal door about 2 and 1/2 feet by 4 feet, one door per stair. All of a sudden these doors open up and no kidding, it looks like you are going to crawl into a sci-fi egg pod, or a closed-in carnival cage. It's all painted white, and 5 white John Deer tractor looking seats in a semi-circle. I'm thinking, OK...., but in we go with 3 large men. It is so tight in there that you have to round your shoulders and head, and then the door shuts, and rattle, bang, clunk, chuga chuga, up we go on the inside of the arch. Marie gets claustrophobia and starts hyperventilating, big guy to my right claims he's going to pass gas, his friend is high fiving him screaming "don't do it, don't do it" And the curly headed man across from me is wildly snapping photos of himself... It takes about 5 minutes to get to the top of the arch, and the higher up we go, well, that glorious 89 degrees? turns into about 114. I never realized you ascended into hell, until that moment. I don't want to go there.