Me and the Otis Company. By Laura Munson I like to think of myself as a level-headed person. Calm in crisis. Rational in an argument. I can multi-task with fluidity and be proud of the results. I generally go into group problem-solving situations with instant leadership tendencies. I’m happy to sit in the Exit seat. …
Me and the Otis Company. By Laura Munson
I like to think of myself as a level-headed person. Calm in crisis. Rational in an argument. I can multi-task with fluidity and be proud of the results. I generally go into group problem-solving situations with instant leadership tendencies. I’m happy to sit in the Exit seat. The driver’s seat. Take the lead on the trail on foot or horse. So you might think this incongruent: I can’t stand elevators.
Sure, I spent the good part of an afternoon when I was five in an elevator in the John Hancock Building in Chicago, trying to find my way back to the apartment my family was occupying for the weekend. But it wasn’t like I was stuck, necessarily. I just couldn’t reach the right button. My older brother and sister and I had been to the pool, and on our way back, they exited the elevator, and before I knew it, the doors closed and I was being sucked back down a thin shaft in one of the tallest buildings in the world. I remember thinking, “Uh-oh. This is bad.” So I kept jumping up, and hitting the buttons I could hit, (including STOP ELEVATOR) waiting as the elevator doors opened and shut, opened and shut, opened and shut. I went back up as far as I could reach in fits and starts. And back down again, floor by floor for every failed jump and push. Finally, a teenaged girl entered at one of the stops, asked me if I needed help, I told her “yes, I do,” gave her the floor number, and after peeking under door after door, I finally recognized the emerald green rug, the glass and chrome table, an orange quilted chintz floral sofa, and pacing espadrilles and Gucci loafers. We knocked. My father opened the door, and there were my siblings, sitting on that chintz sofa, slumped over in the we’re in trouble pose. My mother stood, facing them, her face red. She looked up and said, “There you are,” and hugged me, thanking the girl. I remember feeling really badly that my siblings had gotten into trouble. I remember feeling like it was my fault that I hadn’t followed them faster out that elevator door. I remember crying and saying I was sorry.
Elevators never really bothered me though after that. They weren’t necessarily happy places, but I was oblivious to them. They took you places; great places. City places. They were simply transportation.
And then college hit. There was a small elevator in the English department that brought you, sardined with self-important future writer types, (wink) up the ten floors. I got in, one minute perfectly happy to be on my way to learning about Proust, and suddenly went cold, wet, pale and other more high-brow adjectives that one co-ed chose to point out. And I shouted, “Don’t let the doors close,” and pushed past them all, back into the foyer. Either I was allergic to English majors, or I was having a latent reaction to something from my past, because very suddenly, I was claustrophobic. And not just in elevators.
I’d never liked tight places. Had momentary distress on rollercoasters when those metal bars came over your head and locked you in to place. Really didn’t enjoy standing in back-to-back humanity on the spiral staircase in the Statue of Liberty with no way up and no way down unless I screamed “Emergency!” which as a pre-teen, I wasn’t about to do. Or chair lifts which stopped, high above any reasonable jumping-off place, and just swung there, who knew, indefinitely. I’d suffer through situations like that, laugh it off and say, “I was a breech baby. I have an innate sense that I am stuck and that I need to get out. ” But I’d never had it like it hit me that day in college. I must have tried three times to get into that elevator. But even when it opened up empty, I couldn’t get myself into that evil steel chamber. So for four years of college, I walked the ten floors. Said I liked the exercise.
When I spent a year in Italy, it didn’t help that my family lived on the 8th floor. But I wasn’t about to put myself into that cage. The stone steps that climbed around it were just fine by me. And when I delivered flowers from a delivery truck in Boston after college, I was happy to have the doorman call up to the recipient, and tell her that if she wanted her flowers, she’d have to come down and get them herself. I did everything I could to avoid taking crowded buses and subways. I started to become keenly aware of where Exit signs were and ensure that I had a bottle of water with me, because if I was trapped, Lord knows I’d need water. And maybe something minty, like Halls, or Altoids, and maybe some herbal calming pills, and later, maybe some hardcore pharmaceutical tranquilizer like: Lorazepam. Just in case. Ask me if I have a bottle of Lorazepam in my purse. Ask me how many I’ve taken. The answer might not impress you. Think: placebo.
I was ashamed. I’m still ashamed. And I ask myself: just in case of what? It’s not that I’m scared of small places. It’s that I’m scared of myself in small places. I’m scared of the story that I tell myself when I’m in them: that I can’t get out, and I need to get out because if I don’t there’s no fresh air, and I’m going to get hot, and it’ll be hard to breathe, and I’m going to feel faint, and my heart’s going to race, and I’m going to…to…what…die? No. I’m not going to die. So what’s the big deal? What is my problem? For shame.
One night in the early 90s, I was travelling from Chicago to Boston in a freak March snow storm that hit hard. There were 64 airplanes that sat on a runway two miles out from the gates at O’Hare. I was in one of those planes. Not a particularly large plane. They ran out of food and water. I, of course, had water, and truth told, I hoarded it. It was a blizzard and one of the planes, in turning back, had spun out and blocked the runway for the rest of us. We waited there for 12 hours. Over and over I thought, I’ll say I’m having a medical emergency, and they’ll have to let me off. But I instead talked to the people around me, met a charming girl from India who wrote down a bunch of recipes in my journal that I still have. Got to know an older businessman with kids my age who told me great stories about a trip they took to the Galapagos. Comforted an academic who was to be, that night, honored at an awards ceremony at Harvard. This was before cell phones and other glowing screens. People either slept, or read, or talked. When I walked out of that airplane, I felt like I had been cured of ever being claustrophobic again.
And then I moved to Montana. And after 17 years of living in Big Sky country, so open and free to roam in endless terrain, I’ve got it worse than ever. I’ve been to therapy for it. I know how to wrap my mind around it: I’m safe. I’m contained in my body. Nothing can imprison me if I don’t let it. We even took a long look at my breech birth. I know all the mental-ese, and devoutly try the spiritual-ese…and still, I duke it out internally when I’m in the small planes that fly in and out of our valley, and when I am faced with an elevator, I stand there and try, and try again, people looking at me strangely as the doors open and close, open and close…and then I turn around and ask for the stairs. I don’t care how many flights I have to walk up. Sometimes they don’t let me take the stairs. And I have no choice. So I push that button—I am the right height now for all the buttons—wait for the doors to pull open, take a deep breath, and cast myself out to the non-infinite non-sea of that little sturdy box that unfairly I have called fickle instead of faithful, carting people up and down all day long, year after year, with groceries, and heavy equipment, and briefcases full of important deal making moxie. I suspect that one day, I will be thankful for the ride. Old bones, and old lungs and old heart. And then I will know better than to think that there is such a thing as being stuck, or that there really ever is a good way out. Or that there really ever is a place where you are not free.
But for now, no. I’m not going up, but thank you for asking. I’m taking the stairs. And no, I’m not proud of it. Maybe freedom starts in giving yourself a break for who you are and what scares you. Especially when what scares you is not outside you. It’s just plain old you. That’s good news, right? It means there’s room for growth. I am dedicated to that growth.
