Me and King Kong
by Will Durst

Clarity is the first thing you achieve when you climb out a window onto scaffolding rimming the 72nd floor of the Empire State Building in New York. As you crawl out of a perfectly good building, you know why the foremen who shepherded you up in the elevator all wore the goofy grins of frat boy anticipation. As your little fawn legs lurch towards the railing, its suddenly crystal clear why everybody politely laughed when you brought up the insurance factor. As a tiny breeze rocks you maybe two inches tops, you realize why the scaffolding is populated by frisky puppie people still wrapped in that prenatally issued self delusional blanket of immortality. As your face warms, you are aware what an adrenaline rush really is. And as you blink away the tears looking out over lower Manhattan poking up into a clear blue sky without any tourists or barbed wire security fences or digitally remastered Stanley Kubrick orgy figures in the way, its easy to understand one of the perks of working as a skyscraping restoration specialist.

The scaffolding is pretty much just a bunch of planks tied together and hanging down from the 108th floor by means of two strings. Alright, cables. You know that feeling you get in the lower stomach (read: groinal) area when you look over the edge of a roof. Well on the outside of the 72nd floor of the Empire State Building, that feeling has taken over your entire body. I had butterflies in my hair. There were helicopters below us. Not just landing; their entire flight path was below us. If the people on the ground are supposed to look like ants, I guess these were the bees buzzing from one rooftop to another pollinating the capitalist system.

The masons and apprentices on the scaffolding delighted in telling us horror stories. At least they were horror stories to us. More like absurdly droll anecdotes to them. With his typically mischievious grin turned malevolent around the edges, restoration specialist and apprentice instructor Dennis Holloway confided how sometimes the wind at street level may be 20 miles an hour, but closer to eighty on top of the building. He went on in his best campfire ghost story voice to say it was not uncommon for the scaffolding to be blown eight to ten feet away from the building. And if you were parked at one of the major corners, the scaffolding on the East side might roar out with a gust, twist around 180 degrees and deposit itself with a thud on the Southern side. And then he laughed and everybody else shyly nodded as if to say, "Yeah, that one was cool."

Pitying their green gilled visitor, these urban mountain goats graciously assisted me help place the last cornerstone of their ten year restoration of the world's best known office building.A project requiring 550,000 linear feet (110 miles) of grout, and 15,000 cubic yards of replacement facing limestone dug, cut and transported from the original quarry in Indiana. This is a continuing effort, with enough old buildings in New York to keep the restoration masons busy for a couple of hundred years. Right around the same time this building, the one that defeated King Kong and temporarily stunned yours truly will be about ready for another major gussying up. You would think an experience like this alter my fear of heights. And you'd be right. It made it worse. I now get vertigo when forced to walk on a thick shag rug.