Listing Through Life

When I walked out of Cardinals Nation restaurant, I noticed something very strange — the rain had stopped and the sun was poking through the clouds. More storms were forecast later in the day so I had to make hay, as it were.

I went back to my room and exchanged the Little Red Chair for THE Red chair, then headed for the Arch. Here’s the view from Luther Ely Smith Square, immediately next to my hotel.

I walked under the arch and took the photo on the left. It turned out pretty good, but I was disappointed that I didn’t get to the grass on the top. I returned the next morning and practiced until I got it right, but the sky wasn’t as interesting.

The visitor center at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, under the Arch, opened at 9:00. My ticket to ride to the top was for 9:20, which gave me about 15 minutes to tour the Museum of Westward Expansion. Since I didn’t read any of the displays, that was plenty of time.

My turn came and I packed into one of the tiny tram cars for the ride up the Arch. I was with a friendly family of three who had no idea what to expect. They didn’t even know we could get out of the cars at the top.

The wind was gusting up to 45 mph, and the Arch swayed noticeably and constantly. It didn’t bother me, but a lot of people got out on top, turned around and rode back down on the next available elevator. I stayed up top about 15 minutes.

It wasn’t until later that I realized this was essentially a photo of people’s backsides.

Note the sign that says we’re 630 feet up. The girl in the orange jacket found me and my chair far more fascinating than anything out the windows.

The Old Courthouse and my hotel (the Drury Plaza Hotel at the lower left) from the Arch.

I would have stayed up top longer, but I had a long drive ahead of me. I walked down the curving steps to the landing for my assigned car and took this photo looking back up.

I was stuck with two couples on the way down. The five of us were crammed in the car tightly, but the trip was shorter.

Outside the Arch, I descended the steps to the bank of the Mississippi where I found this monument to the founders of St. Louis. Note the working dredge boat on the river.

It was so windy this morning, that the chair almost blew into the river.

On the previous evening during a brief stretch of sunshine, I took a photo from the top of the steps, right under the Arch. The first bridge on the left is the Eads Bridge, built in 1874. At that time, it was the longest arch bridge in the world. It’s still being used for cars and passenger trains.

With my convention registration, I got a free pass into the City Museum after hours. I’d heard the place was unusual. That’s an understatement.

Much of it was closed off. The first floor was mostly cave, with dark passageways and no directions and lots of things to trip over. There were paths to walk along. There were also holes to crawl through and slides to slide down and tubes to climb up — all with no way to tell what was at the other end. I stuck to the paths.

The part of the first floor that wasn’t cave was taken up mostly by a walk-through whale.

And a cast-iron pig thing.

As I was walking through the dark caves in the City Museum with no idea of where I was or how to get back to the light, I heard two women in the distance, their voices echoing down through the chambers. One said that she’d just gone down a ten-story slide.

That sounded like fun. But I had no idea where it was. I wandered about alone in the dark some more until I came to a narrow iron staircase. A hand-painted sign on the wall said the slide was up the stairs. I climbed. And climbed. In places, the stairs were so narrow I almost had to turn sideways. Police tape blocked off mysterious hallways. There was nobody around. I could see towers of spiraling sheet metal here and there, some of them ending in mid-air several floors up in space.

I finally could go no further up. I crept along a narrow walkway and found a guy standing next to several buckets that were catching rain dripping through the roof. It had the feel of a huge construction project long abandoned. The guy pointed to the start of the slide — an opening about three feet square. I sat on the edge, about to launch myself into the unknown. The ceiling of the slide, made up of cage-like bars, seemed awfully close. I asked if I should lay flat on my back. The guy said I could sit up if I wanted to.

I took off. For the first couple floors, my shoes kept catching on the sides. I tried to find a better position and painfully smashed my left knee into something. I laid back and stretched out, and I took off. The final several floors went by in a hurry. I landed at the bottom, dizzy and glad I’d survived — but almost tempted to do it again. Almost.

Here’s a shot from the bottom. The slide is the spiral back in the corner. The others are shorter slides and decoys to make me think I was spiraling to my death. For the record, the chair went down the slide too. I thought about getting a photo on the way, but it was pitch dark and at any point in time, I could only see about five feet of the slide. And I was moving too fast and trying not to die.

One section of the second floor was filled with pieces of masonry recovered from buildings that were torn down. There was no attempt to explain any of this. Or if there was, I didn’t pay any attention to it.

This pencil picture was not an easy photo to get. At the beginning of the evening, there was a line of people in this room, waiting to sign up for a chance to meet an NFL player. I went back later when the line was gone and waited several minutes until things were clear. I put the chair on the pencil, took this photo and reached for the chair. I had just pulled it out of the way when a drunk woman came flying up from behind me and landed on the pencil, missing the chair and my hand by inches.

The pencil is 76 feet long and weighs 21,500 lbs — the equivalent of 1,900,000 regular pencils. It’s filled with 4,000 pounds of graphite and the eraser is real rubber — it writes and erases.

Here’s a shot from the eraser end taken earlier in the evening.