Nine Feet from the Ground

A minor catastrophe of errors involving a dog, a gate, the Chicago Fire Department, and a hint of pride and hubris.

10:56am

I’m running through my house, horrendously late for church, knowing in the back of my mind I’m forgetting something. As I rush toward the door, I see what I’ve left out of my morning fervor:

The dog.

I’m dogsitting this week, taking care of a tiny dog named Sowi who belongs to two dear friends. Sowi stares blankly at me by the front door, her indirect stare into the middle distance over my shoulder revealing her IQ that is as low as her body is to the floor. I’m not used to having a pet in the house, my morning routine living alone down to a perfectly automated science, and now remember the dog needs a morning walk.

Thus we’re out the front door and into the crisp Chicago morning. A stiff breeze turns the twenty-nine-degree morning into something that feels far worse on my exposed hands.

*click* The front door locks. I reach a hand into my coat pocket, finding only my phone. I’m locked out. The dog poops.

11:03am

I call the property manager and ask if there’s a spare key. A garbled voice tells me the master key to the building is missing, likely taken by AirBnB guests who ransack the building most weekends.* They will need to call a locksmith, and I will be billed the $200 fee for the service – $100 for each lock that will need to be opened.

With the fervor of a suburban Midwestern dad trying to save on a heating bill, I desperately seek options to avoid the $200 fee. But as a mirage becomes divine inspiration for a man lost in the desert, so did a passing thought suddenly become my only thought:

“The back kitchen window is unlocked. If I can get over the back gate into the backyard…”

11:08am

I look up at the nine-foot gate in the alley behind my building. Most of my yard is surrounded by brick building walls; however, the gate is a narrow opening into the backyard, connected to a six-foot chainlink fence behind it which borders my neighbor’s yard.

“If I can just get to the top of the gate, I can shift myself down to the chainlink fence and hop down into the yard.”

With a running start and a skip off the brick wall next to the gate, I complete the lift of a lifetime and clamber to the top of the nine-foot gate. I’m so close to victory that the bold red numbers of the clock in my kitchen are visible from where I’m sitting.

11:09am

I stay for a moment atop the gate, looking down on the pavement that is far below me. As a balloon loses air and falls to the ground, so too was my plan deflating, as a number of inconvenient realizations came to me in the following order:

1. The chainlink fence to my left is barbed, unbeknownst to me previously.

2. Said AirBnB guests have taken bricks abandoned near the back dumpster to prop the gate open. Five of those bricks now sit below me scattered on the other side of the gate, ensuring I have no landing spot should I try to jump the full distance down.

3. There is a live electrical wire a foot or two above me.

4. It turns out my childhood fear of heights has not, in fact, disappeared—it has only been dormant.

I’m left reeling for a new plan, Sowi’s blank stare from nine inches off the ground looking into my darting eyes nine feet off the ground.

11:14am

With a growing understanding of my shrinking options, I resolve myself to jump down from the gate. I steel myself mentally to start falling toward concrete, picking a spot between the bricks for planting my feet without demolishing the bones in my ankles. I spin lies to prepare myself:

“You’ve done this before.” (I have not.)

“If you jump outward far enough, maybe you can blunt the impact a bit.” (This doesn’t make sense.)

“Ankle injuries don’t take that long to recover from.” (What am I saying to myself right now?)

As I shift to let myself fall, I hear a faint tearing of fabric and greet my next realization:

5. My coat is caught in the top hinge of the gate, my phone and the remainder of the contents of my pocket trapped underneath the metal arm.

Wind whipping on my face, my reality becomes clear: I’m stuck.

11:21am

My phone rings. The property manager tells me in a voicemail muffled by my coat that the locksmith is ready to come out to the apartment. I yell for Siri to call back, who is delightfully disinterested in calling back the landlord. I shift with a shaky hand to try to grab my phone, but quickly realize the shift of my weight required to grab my phone from under the hinge may cause me to fall off the gate. I grip the metal posts of the gate and strategize again.

11:25am

My mind races as I start to feel a more fully formed sense of helplessness, and I desperately try to take my overanalyzing brain and make it go somewhere of any circumstantial value:

“Should I call for help? No, this is such a minor situation, I am sure I there has to be a way to escape this without the risk of falling.

“But why am I resistant to the idea of calling for help? Why am I seeing it as an embarrassment? Pride, of course. But pride is too easy of an answer. What do we believe about ourselves—wait, no, what do I believe about myself—that causes us to be so prideful that we don’t even call for help? That if we are not completely self-sufficient, people will look down on us? That we might become a burden on others? That if we don’t have complete self-sufficiency to get through any situation in life, we are somehow unworthy to receive love and assistance from others?

“But can we receive love at all if we believe we are sufficient and able to resolve everything on our own? What is the purpose of love within that belief that we can fully complete life on our own, other than vanity or taking in love as a validation of our ourselves, stroking our ego? And reversed, if we think we need to be self-sufficient, deep down we probably believe that others need to have that same self-sufficient to be living rightly in the world. And then what does love and service for others become, deep down in our souls, other than some destitute concept of pity for other people who are not so lucky as to be able to fully manage life’s problems by themselves.**

“Just call for help, you prideful bast—

“Oh shit, I think I’m falling forward.”

11:29am

I have just made the discovery that I can still, in fact, have panic attacks from heights if you leave me on a ledge long enough.

11:31am

I grip the top of the gate for dear life, feeling as though my center of gravity is half a mile in front of the gate. Vertigo courses through my body, the gate feeling as though it, too, is about to fall forward. I slow my breathing down and feel the urgency to take action to get someone to help me before I injure myself.

“Help. Help.” I pan in a voice only marginally above normal talking volume. Pride and resistance to help is something you’ll hardly conquer while you’re standing still on the ground, let alone perched nine feet above a potential leg injury.

11:42am

I have been distracted for over a half hour and did not think to myself that frostbite could be a risk. Two of my fingers are becoming frostbitten. I start to finally yell louder for help.

11:47am

Two bystanders suddenly appear in the alley and rush to the gate. They’re trying to steady me and get me to breathe, while I’m trying to swing my legs back to the other side of the gate, where the bystanders can help me down. I struggle as my feet sit frozen in my Sperrys and I assess the loss of circulation to my leg when I started tensing up with panic.***

I nearly fall, and feelings of panic wash in again. The ultimate pride-killing decision is made with three presses of the buttons on a stranger’s phone:

9-1-1.

11:56am

As we wait to hear distant sirens, I tell the two bystanders (thanks, Matt and Kiara) that I feel awful they had to get dragged into this to help. They assure me they’d rather miss whatever they were doing than have to come scrape me off the pavement in an hour. What a delightful thought.

12:03pm

55 minutes and two fingers with frostbite later, I’m coming off of the fence, hoisted down by three firefighters in a scene I’m sure could find a home on r/AccidentalRenaissance. I give them my ID to show them I’m not a home intruder. The battalion chief tells me real home intruders “don’t fuck up this badly.”

12:08pm

Wedging the kitchen window open, I’m tossing the dog back into the kitchen and scurrying across the stove and onto the kitchen floor. The journey home is complete as Sowi licks my face, completely unaffected by (and having likely already forgotten) the events that just transpired.

***

Looking from my kitchen window, I realize the entire situation was a mild problem at best, and was surely a comedy for the firefighters who pulled me down. With my legs hanging down, I was never more than about five to six feet off the ground—the jump down wouldn’t have been comfortable, but it certainly was not the threat to my ankles that I had believed. I was unlikely to fall off the gate, my fear of heights and the vertigo it creates giving me the sense I couldn’t reach my phone or free my jacket off the hinge. Much of what I experienced was a vision of panic, an anxious interpretation of everything happening around me. This mental debrief with frostbitten fingers in a bowl of water feels rather embarrassing for myself, “the prideful bastard.”

But I do remember that anxiety and panic have a remarkable tendency to cloud everything around us, causing everything to feel as though the severity of whatever we’re in is so great that we cannot move without injuring ourselves. It blinds us from managing what could be a “mild” situation and causes it to spin into a critical emergency.

And if we don’t need to handle everything ourselves in a state of self-sufficiency, then we can accept that our anxiety clouds our vision and remains largely out of our control. We don’t need to be afraid of others helping us out of what seems like a crisis, even if the stakes of what we’re dealing with are fairly low.

You’re rarely stuck as high up as you think you are. But it’s okay that you do think you are. Just remember to ask for help in the middle of it all—life is a lot better if you let people help carry you back down.

 

Some Footnotes:

*to the moment of writing this, I am still ignoring what this could possibly mean for the safety of my home.

**I am fully aware that this is not actually of any “circumstantial value” I was seeking with my thoughts at the time.

***I’m also tensing up further realizing the locksmith would love nothing more than for me to swing my legs back outside the gate—that’s a $200 cash out for them.