Anita's Notebook

When I was a kid I visited the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis which is a giant silver structure that looks a bit like a futuristic sculpture and a bit like half of the McDonald’s logo perched next to a river.

From the outside it’s a pretty awe inspiring sight because it rises so high into the sky that when you’re next to it you have to crane your neck to try and see the top. I remember standing on the green grass next to the Gateway Arch while waiting for it to open that day and thinking that I was going to be in for a spectacular time looking out the windows of the ‘observation deck’ way at the top.

However I have to say that the main thing I remember from that day is the strange tram ride to the to the top of the arch. Well maybe strange isn’t the exact right word to use in describing the experience…

The Gateway Arch is a curved structure that’s pretty slim overall so getting people to the top via a normal elevator isn’t feasible. Instead you have to take one of these:

(photo by Bill Roberts)

It’s a small circular pod that looks to have been designed to fit a single person but instead is crammed with five people on each trip to the top.

(photo by jshyun)

Imagine stuffing yourself and four other people into a washing machine drum, that’s pretty much the experience.

I had no idea this would be the case when I climbed the stairs up to the pod but at the first glance inside I knew this would be an unhappy exercise in claustrophobia.

I was a pretty small kid so the chair wasn’t too small for me to sit in but despite that my knees still touched those of the people on either side of me. There we were, three people from my group and two from another, all of us uncomfortably hemmed in and hunching over because of the curved ceilings pressing in on us.

The doors shut and we all smiled nervously at each other as the clicking metal pod went up in jerking movements and sometimes swung back and forth like on a ferris wheel.

Each one of us did our lame attempts at conversation but mostly we just sat silently, wondering how often these things broke down and how fast the oxygen would run out in such a small capsule.

I feel bad for the people in ’07 who were suck in those little pods for several hours when a cable broke. They no doubt experienced some of the scary things that were haunting the minds of me and my fellow podmates on the ride up to the top of the arch.

I can’t say I’d ever do it again, didn’t seem worth all the trouble and waiting to get to the small crowded ‘observation deck’ where you had to lean far in to see the view as the arch swayed back and forth in the wind.

It’s one of those things what makes from an interesting story afterwards but wasn’t actually any fun to be in. Well at least I got a story out of it :).