where we could stretch precariously over a twenty-foot drop and grab the metal pegs that served as the ladder for the first hundred feet of the climb. (The power company had undoubtedly designed this obstacle to prevent drunken fools such as ourselves from attempting the suicidal climb. Clearly, they underestimated our stupidity.)
While still in the tree, Joey Burrell decided he was too drunk to try crossing to the metal pegs, so he turned back, becoming the first to earn the penalty. But soon the rest of us were clinging to the tower leg, like newborn raccoons afraid to follow their mother up a tree. Trey Matheson was highest, followed by his brother Dooley. Then Paul, Adam, and, last of all, me. I went last because something told me I might have to make a strategic retreat. I didn’t want to, but I wasn’t so deluded as to think I might not get into trouble.
For most of the climb, I stared only at the ladder rungs, focusing on the few square inches where I would place my free hand, then release the other and reach up again, finding the next rung—again and again and again. I heard birds and bats flying around me, but I didn’t turn to see them. Mosquitoes bit me, sucking my blood without interruption as the wind whipped my shirt, tearing at my body. I sweated continuously, soaking my clothes. The boys above me chattered and laughed, and the Mathesons whooped like madmen every minute or two. All this I ignored to keep my Zen-like focus.
Two-thirds of the way up—at about four hundred feet—I made the mistake of looking out over the river. A paralyzing wave of vertigo hit me, and it was all I could do not to vomit. My vision blurred. I became vaguely aware of the lights of faraway towns and farms, and the great glittering serpent of the river running beneath us. From six hundred feet in the air you can see thirty miles. At only four hundred feet, I was incapacitated.
Adam soon realized I was in trouble. He stopped climbing and offered to come back and follow me down, discarding any thought of the climb as a test of manhood. But since we were already two-thirds of the way up, I decided to go on. I didn’t want to suffer the penalty and risk arrest for indecent exposure; nor did I want to suffer Paul and his preppy cousins ragging me for all eternity.
I made it fifty more feet. Then my nerve broke.
It was the signal failure of my life. While the Mathesons hooted with derision from above, yelling “Pussy!” at the top of their lungs, I clung to that ladder like an arthritic old lady asked to scale the Matterhorn. This time Adam insisted on escorting me down. Shivering in terror, I told him I would descend only if he pushed on to the top. Besides, I whimpered, we were on a ladder. How the hell could he help me get to the ground? Adam said he would tie one end of his belt to his ankle and the other to my left arm, so that if I slipped, I’d have an instant to catch myself before the belt broke and I went into free fall.
I wasn’t going to put my brother in that kind of danger. When Adam saw that I wouldn’t change my mind, he finally started up again. My subsequent descent was a triumph of courage over abject terror. I was still two hundred feet off the ground when I saw the others “summit” the tower. And once they were on the platform, six hundred feet in the sky, I learned just how crazy the Matheson cousins were. Dooley, the seventeen-year-old, climbed onto the top strut where the aircraft warning lights were mounted. There he stood up like a gymnast on a balance beam. There was nothing to hold him, not a safety rail, not a belt . . . nothing. A single gust of wind could have plucked him off that tower like a dandelion seed. Watching him dance along that strut like a drunken court jester nauseated me. Dooley Matheson was willing to throw away his life to try to get back at my brother for a basketball loss that could never be erased. That, I thought, is what makes McEwans superior to Mathesons on the evolutionary scale.
Then, to my horror, I saw my celebrated brother prove he was just as crazy as Dooley Matheson. As