On top of a smokestack

I climbed up the steel ladder on the side of a 100 foot tall concrete smokestack.  When I got to the top there was a manhole frame on it and the lid was hanging off the side by a hook.  Ray Lu was right behind me on the ladder, so I climbed off and sat on the lip w/ one leg over each side.  We were thinking about pulling it over and we had a steel cable hooked on to the frame between us.  Ray gave it a couple tugs to make sure it was on tight and just then John Frauenhoffer, a structural engineer, popped his head up over the side and warned us to be careful about how we pulled on the cable.

We went down and at the base of the tower was a heavy metal frame w/ gears and pulleys and apparently some power source that we were going to use to pull the cable that would pull over the smokestack.  We released a lever and the pulley slowly started to turn.  I laid my hand on the cable and was letting it slide through, appreciating its smoothness, when it occurred to me that if it snagged my I would get pulled into the gears, so I let go of it.

Later I was at a family gathering at Uncle Floyd’s old house.  There was a crowd inside and I had gone outside for something and wanted to get back in without barging in the normal door into the kitchen.  There was a small porch roof over the front door and a wall about three feet to the right of it, so I put my hands on the edge of the roof and pushed against it to walk my feet up the wall until I got almost level with the porch roof.  Then I gave a big jump and grabbed the peak of the porch roof and pulled myself up.

There was a window directly over the porch roof and it opened easily.  Inside the window someone had stored big garbage bags full of shredded paper, floor to ceiling.  I pushed my way in between the bags and when I got through I was in the attic space between the older and newer part of the house.  I started across the board floor and noticed there was mud on the floor sticking to my shoes.  I assumed it must have come from the last flood.  This space was only tall enough to stand in the center because the roof sloped down on either side.  Along both sides were pipe frames with hangers that lots of clothes had been hung on evenly spaced, like they had been put there to dry.

I walked by them and at the far side on the right was a steep, narrow stairway that turned back on itself, two flights to a story.  I hurried down them and ended up in the basement.  For some reason I didn’t notice the first floor door when I went by it, but as I turned back up I saw it there and knew it would open into the middle main floor room.