How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Extension Ladder

I’ve been living in Bowling Green, Ohio for about a week now, and will be here the rest of the summer sub-contracting for a painter. Writers lead transient lives, or at least, my wife and I do, following degrees or money from Indiana to Alaska, to Kentucky, to Africa, to southern Ohio,with lots of detours along the way. The last two days I’ve been painting long wooden strips on the exterior of an apartment complex. It’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, besides teaching. I set my own hours, work alone, and listen to lots of albums straight through, a luxury I could previously afford only on long drives. But, on my first day of work, I did not think the job was so wonderful. Actually, I thought I might have to quit.

One of the strips I’m painting rises up into the peak of the roof, which is a solid ten feet above the second story windows, and the first time I had to climb the extension ladder to paint the tip I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. Here’s a picture I’m slightly embarrassed to show, since the center peak doesn’t look high at all:

When I started telling people I was going to be painting for the summer, they all asked the same question—you’re not afraid of heights, are you? Haha. To be honest, yes, I am terribly afraid of heights, but I really hadn’t pictured any ladders in my job future. So I just told everyone, including my future employer—nope! Once or twice I said, only falling from them! which I thought was pretty funny and clever in a 1950’s cocktail party kind of way.

On that first day, I climbed halfway up the ladder, one rung past where the ladder extends until it sagged like a rubber bridge, than I paused, clinging to the ladder and pressing my body against it like a baby animal clinging to its mother, before hanging my paint bucket from a rung and gingerly climbing right back down. Luckily, I work alone, so no one was there watching my little spectacle. Like I said, from the ground the peak didn’t look so high, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of helplessness on the ladder, and the fact that if the ladder did, by freak accident, collapse, there would be nothing I could do to prevent my fall.

After a few minutes, I convinced myself to climb back up and hang the paint bucket two rungs higher. This job was accomplished one pain-stakingly slow rung at a time, and by the time the paint bucket was elevated, my knees started shaking uncontrollably, and I returned to the freshly mowed lawn. At this point, I seriously considered phoning the job in...calling my boss, saying I couldn't do it, etc, etc. But on my third attempt I made it all the way to the top, and told myself that if I could paint the peak, I wouldn’t have to climb that high again until I started the other side of the building. And the job got done.

I didn’t think I would ever be able to climb the ladder without picturing the ladder separating at the extension and me cracking my head on the concrete ledge before waking to a life of paralysis, but by the end of the day, I was actually enjoying myself. I still couldn’t stop picturing my body tumbling through the air with paint spilling all over my face and into my mouth gaping in shock, and I kept thinking of a line from the Conrad Hilberry poem, “Storm Window,” about a man installing a storm window on a ladder, where he writes: For years, he has feared falling./ At last, he falls. That was my unpleasant mantra.

The second day was when I stopped worrying. Painting a section, climbing down, moving the ladder a few feet, then climbing back up—nothing to it. I was outside working alone, listening to music on a day warm enough to paint in a T-shirt. It was like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy and the crew are tarring a roof with a bucket of beer, and it’s obviously the best day they’ve had in a while. (To be clear: I’ve had lots of other good days.) I listened to Kings of Leon Come Around Sundown, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, as well as Greetings from Asbury Park, The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle and Born to Run, before ending with Bob Seger’s Stranger in Town and Night Moves.

Yes, time to read and write has been reduced, but I’m trying to fit in about two hours before I go to sleep. Today I’m finishing Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is beautiful and devastating, and reminds me a lot of my own boyhood obsessions and the way dreams unfold. It’s inspired the book of poems I’m continuing to shape, revise, and add to. And last summer I wrote one of my favorite pieces while at work (a chapbook), thirty odd pages composed a few lines at a time from a farmer’s market, so maybe I’ll start bringing a pad of paper to work and see what happens when I start following after a few lines.