"Men asleep on a girder" by Charles C. Ebbets is a photograph that has always fascinated me- in the same way as the more famous "Lunchtime atop a skyscraper" by the same photographer. It is amazing. I just cannot get my head around it at all. Here is me sitting at home letting fear keep me from walking a mile without running home in fright and I look at these guys lying on a strip of metal hundreds of feet up in the air. No safety net. One wrong move and they are dead.
I think it says a,lot about thought. What were they thinking? Well I'm sure it wasn't fear or they wouldn't be able to be there in the first place. I'm sure also they didn't play out in their heads what could go wrong or that would have stopped them doing it too. They just got on with it regardless of the obvious danger.
I don't have to do it. I couldn't do it. Yet looking at the photographs tonight I just can't help playing out all the "what if" scenarios. What if you got up and felt really faint? What if you went to work that morning with an ear infection and suddenly your balance went? What if you had a bad cough and went into a fit? What if someone pulled you by error and knocked you off balance? So much to do with equilibrium and so many horrible scenarios you could think up if you gave it enough thought- which I am certainly doing.
I was thinking other day about something really stupid I did in my late teens- standing on the railing of a balcony seven floors up in a hotel in Spain and the look of alarm on my friend's face as he tried to get me to come done- didn't speak to me for a few days after he was so pissed off. And to add to that while we were on holiday we were told someone had been mucking about on a balcony, fallen and died- another stupid tourist. So I have known how exhilarating it can be to face that sort of danger- though on a much lesser scale. My mind has changed though. When I was young, single and carefree without worry of consequence unlike now I could probably have done that. But surely those guys were not all young and single. It all comes down to mindset.
I'm not sure what point I am trying to make here but I suppose like the film "Unbreakable" there are opposite sides of the spectrum with everything. Whether it be good versus evil, unbreakable versus fragile or anxiety versus fearlessness there are always extremes on both side. These guys are my extreme and at the same time they are the kind of people I would most like to be. They are my Nemesis I suppose and yes I am jealous of them.
