The Water Tower

Roswell, New Mexico 1980
I was at the Roswell Job Corps, which was, and is, located at the old Air Force base at the edge of town. Besides being re purposed for a training center for 500 youth, and the University of New Mexico-Roswell campus, the old military runway had been turned into a public airport. All airports have a revolving light to mark its position at night and this small airport was no exception. Pretty much right between the Job Corps barracks and the control tower was a beautiful, 100 foot high, red and white water tower, the kind that is very round on the top, so that when you climb the ladder, you are for a moment, crawling upside down. I know this because a few friends and I would sometimes sneak away from the Residential Advisers, who thought we were asleep, and climb this water tower. It had a wonderful catwalk around the circumference of the giant globe of a water tank and we would sit out of the wind, for it is always windy that high up, and smoke pot, and talk about Dungeons and Dragons or what we thought the universe meant. Sometimes we would climb to the very top and ride the giant spinning light, but that was pushing it, even for us.
One evening a few other corps members, maybe three, went with us, mostly because they did not believe that we were so crazy. Once we got there, they all refused, but stayed at the bottom and watched as Joseph, then Dana, then I began the long climb in the darkness. What I did not know is that Joseph had stepped to the side, onto one of the girders, and to play a prank of Dana, he whispered to him, “Hello Dana”. This startled my friend so much that he let go of the ladder and fell straight down, his feet slamming into the top of my head. While that slowed Dana enough that he grabbed the ladder and stopped his fall, it had the opposite effect on me. I was hit so hard that my hands were ripped from the ladder and i plummeted. I was moving so fast that I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop in time. I also knew that below me was a concrete pad, and right at that moment I realized that I was going to die. How I came to all these conclusions still bugs me; it was just that I was falling faster than just me letting go, I had been thrown down.
It was then that I heard the man behind me, maybe just a few inches from my ear, and he yelled, “Grab the ladder, now!”
It was clearly a command, and it terrified me. It was so impossibly close and falling at the same rate as me, that I reached out to the ladder with both hands just to get way from it. When my fingers made contact the pain brought my focus back to my fall and I did everything I could to slow myself down. I came to a fair stop at about ten feet from the concrete pad and my hands would not hold be any longer, because of the punishment they had taken in slowing me. I fell the rest of the way.
One of the teenage girls witnessing from the ground had fainted, and I could hear both Dana and Joseph yelling hysterically from the darkness above. The others had fled and were no where to be seen. I yelled to my friends that all was ok, but we all got into trouble for our evenings efforts, losing our town privileges for two weeks. Although my hands were bruised and swollen for months, nothing was permanently damaged.