Tag Archives: Climbing

Last night I climbed to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge and planted a pair of white flags

Last night, while everyone was asleep, I snuck out of my house in Astoria and rode my bike over to the Brooklyn Bridge. My goal was straightforward: to climb all the way up and plant a pair of white flags at the top. And I did it. Everybody’s talking about it, on the Internet, on the news.

I’d been meaning to climb to the top of the Queensboro Bridge ever since I saw Batman: The Dark Knight Rises. But upon executing my plan, I figured that the Brooklyn Bridge is definitely more iconic, and thus a better target for mass media attention.

At first I wanted to just keep it to myself, my own little joke, I’d hear people talking about who could have pulled off such an incredible feat, and I’d laugh to myself, ha, you fools, if only you knew that it was me, that I’m standing right here.

But the spotlight is too great to ignore. I find myself compelled to confess to the world, to the Internet, that it was me. I did it. Nobody else. If anybody else comes forward and says that it was they who did it, they’re lying, and I’m telling the truth.

My reasons are myriad. I originally got the idea when I saw a post on reddit a few days ago celebrating the anniversary of the moon landing. I thought about the flag that the astronauts placed on the surface, and I remembered how I read something somewhere that said that by now, the unfiltered solar radiation would have bleached all of the pigment away. So that’s why, if you look closely, it’s not a totally white flag, it’s an American flag that I whitewashed, for the whole moon effect.

Pretty cool, right? So yeah, there was that. But I also raised the white flag to represent surrender. As in, we as a society finally have collectively surrender, to everything bad in the world, right, like foreign wars, right, and the Illuminati, they don’t want you to hear about these flags, right, and the media, man, we’ve got to, like, stand up, OK, like to the media.

No I’m just kidding, it’s not about anything political. I just wanted to show everybody that I’m capable of climbing up to the top of a New York City bridge. I tell people all the time, stuff like, “I really could do it, I’m in great shape, I’m not even trying to mess around here, I could totally pull it off.” And people don’t want to listen to that sort of nonsense.

No, they want to see it. You’ve got to speak with your actions instead of your words. Which is why I did it. And nobody even saw me coming, or tried to stop me. I’m like that guy who climbed to the top of the New York Times building a few years ago, or the two guys that copied him later that week. I hope people start copying me. I hope I started a trend here, of people climbing up to bridges and planting flags.

Well, I guess I don’t have anything more to say, not really. Just know that it was me. OK world? It was me, Rob G. I climbed up to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I planted those flags. It was like one giant leap for a man. Me. Literally. On my way down, someone knocked over the ladder I used to reach the very bottom, and so I had to jump down like twelve feet. It was a giant leap, and I’d never attempted anything like that before, but I remember watching some YouTube video a while ago of some kids in the Midwest that used a rolling technique to safely jump from the roofs of their garages. And so I executed those giant leaps from memory. And it worked. I did it. Me.

I’m going to climb to the top of the Queensboro Bridge

Whenever I cross the Queensboro Bridge, I always get this urge to get off my bike and climb to the top. It looks so easy. Batman did it in The Dark Knight Rises. He’s just standing on top, staring at the city, planning out that whole part where he makes that line of gasoline that goes all the way from the base of the East River to the top, where it’s shaped like a flaming bat. I want to do it too, minus the flaming bat. It doesn’t even look that tall. Like, if I could just get past my fear of heights, if I could just focus on one step at a time, like a ladder, or not one step at a time, but one rung at a time, I’m sure I could be standing on the top in no time.

A couple of years ago there were like three guys that climbed to the top of the New York Times building. The whole thing is wrapped in these bars, something to do with green energy, I’m not really sure. But it’s also shaped exactly like a ladder. And so first, this guy who’s famous for climbing buildings, he did it. And then some other guy did it, and then another guy, until they had to remove the bars from the bottom floors.

So there’s definitely that urge. Sometimes the urge is barely there. Sometimes it’s all I can do to block it out of my head. When it’s at it’s strongest, I’ll look up from right underneath and picture myself doing it, where I’d start, at what pace I’d have to climb. I look at gaps in between some of the larger expanses of cable and steel and imagine how I’d realistically be able to make it across.

I’m confident that I could make it to the top, no problem. But will I ever get the chance? New York’s a pretty tightly guarded city. There are cameras everywhere. I don’t doubt for a second that if anything ever goes even the slightest bit off on one of the bridges or tunnels, the police must know about it almost instantly. One time I was riding my bike across and there were these weird graffiti tags spaced about every ten feet apart. I got to the middle of the bridge and there were like twenty cops surrounding this guy with cans of spray paint. If that guy couldn’t get away with his stunt, I doubt I’d be able to get away with mine.

Or maybe I’d be able to at least get started. I’d get like a quarter of the way up before someone notices what I’m up to. I’d have to travel light, so as not to give an impression that I’m carrying any sort of bomb or weapon. The crazier part of my imagination is cooking up some scenario where the police commissioner is staring at a TV screen somewhere, barking orders into a walkie-talkie, “Take him down! Now!” and some lieutenant would be like, “But commish, he doesn’t look like he’s up to no good … he’s just climbing.” But nobody wants to take that type of risk, not post-post-9/11, and so maybe they’d off me, cover up the operation, I’d die in obscurity, not ever having made it to the top.

Getting all the way up would be easy. And once I got up there, I’d bask in the view. I’d do a Batman pose and pretend like I’m reenacting the moment right before he took back the city from Bane. And then I’d probably just wait, frozen. Because while going up seems easy, climbing back down, that’s got to be tough. Making sure you have a controlled descent. I don’t know why, I imagine climbing up and I’m fine, but I imagine coming back down, and that kind of gets my palms all sweaty.

I’ll definitely do it someday. Maybe I’ll definitely do it someday. Probably. I always think, what’s stopping me? Fear? Of what? Getting in trouble? What are they going to do, lock me up? For how long? I’ll get out eventually, and I’ll never have to think about what it would be like to climb up, because I’d have already done it. And so I won’t have that nagging sensation in the back of my brain, every time I ride my bike to work, come on Rob, just do it, it looks so easy, you’re going to be an old man someday and you won’t be able to then even if you wanted to. You can totally make it up, come on, don’t be a weenie, just do it.

I’m not scared of heights, I swear

The other day I was f’n around online and I came across this video of these guys that climb all the way up to the top of really high structures, like antennas out in the middle of nowhere. The head climber attached a camera to his head, so you got a pretty realistic point-of-view type film, of this guy just climbing higher and higher up to the top.

Let me tell you, just by watching this video I experienced a strong physical reaction. My stomach got shaky, queasy. It’s the same feeling you get if your car goes over a hill really fast, or if you’re on a ferris wheel that takes a dip at the same time as the carriage starts rocking. I was terrified for this guy. This particular antenna that he was climbing was about as high as the Sears Tower in Chicago. Once he got as high as an elevator would take him, he basically had to climb an open ladder. And it just kept going up and up and up. And then finally he gets to a platform, but that wasn’t even close to being the end. Then he had to climb an even smaller ladder, this one was basically just a pole with pieces of metal coming off the sides. It was like a half-ladder, like a ladder’s inverse.

And this guy wasn’t even using any harness or anything. The video said that constantly attaching and detaching and reattaching a harness would slow him down. He had a little clip that he would stick to a rung every now and then so he could lean back and rest. Like he would actually just lean back, his feet on the ladder, but then just releasing the weight of his body against this chord that he affixed his life to, just taking a rest from climbing up this never ending pole, leaning back against the void.

Oh yeah, and he’s carrying his tools up behind him, also attached to some other rope, and the whole pack weighs maybe thirty pounds. And he finally gets to the top, this tiny piece of platform maybe three feet squared, and he pulls up his pack of tools and starts changing some light bulb at the top.

First of all, what kind of a sociopath designed this antenna? Aren’t we at a point in technology or society or civilization or whatever where we can build an antenna with maybe a ladder that’s surrounded by a scaffolding so that this guy could climb without a legitimate risk of falling to his death? And to do what, change a light bulb? I’m no genius inventor, but maybe they could install a light bulb at the top that would attach to some type of mechanical elevator, so when it dies, you can just press a button and it would come down for a change instead of a human being going up.

But whatever, I guess eventually whenever you have tall structures somebody’s going to have to go up and at least make sure everything’s OK. And this is what kills me. That’s an actual profession out there of people who climb up buildings and bridges and antennas. It makes me sick to my stomach. I wouldn’t say I have a fear of heights, but thinking about these people doing this sends my body into a panic.

Every time I think about it, my palms start sweating. What kind of a physical reaction to heights are sweaty palms? How does it make any sense at all? If I’m up somewhere really high, chances are, if I want to survive, I’m going to have to grab onto stuff and hopefully climb down in one piece. How is this easier with slippery hands? What the hell evolution? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have a magnet grip, or maybe Spider-Man’s wall crawling powers?

But what really bothers me is that this is part of the human experience. Every once in a while I’ll get stuck in my head and I’ll think about my life and how comfortable it is, but how outside of my own tiny existence there are people going through all sorts of crazy shit, like free climbing up a giant antenna. And I think to myself, well, I’m a human being, and they are human beings too, so the only difference between myself and person changing a light bulb at the top of the world is, well, there is no difference. It’s really just a matter of elevation. I can very easily picture myself up there, and my imagination is obviously a very good one, because I’m able to trigger these stupid panic responses, like nausea and sweaty palms.

And what if one day I find myself living under a totalitarian regime, and I get drafted as a laborer by the state, and they put me in some worker camp, and they look at me and say, “You. The tall guy. Come on, we’ve got a new job for you.” And the guy pulls out a light bulb and smiles. And as I lose control of my bladder and beg to be spared from this human experience that I desperately do not want to experience, this psychopath smiles even harder, knowing that he picked just the right guy for the job, and he takes out a gun a cocks the barrel back and he says, “Climb.” And I don’t have a choice.

Honestly, shit like this keeps me up at night. I just, I just really hope that I never, ever have to do something like that. Or even watch another video like that again. I should just stop using the Internet. Or leaving the house. Or writing out these crazy imaginary scenarios that only get more vivid and descriptive as I write them out. Jesus Christ my palms are really sweating now. Like my keyboard is soaked. I can’t believe it’s still functioning, because it’s so wet.