Death Elevator

For as long as I can remember, I knew I wanted to go to college at the University of Iowa. When I was accepted, I eagerly signed up for freshmen orientation during the month of July.

My tour guide at orientation was a tall, wiry college student with frizzy brown hair. She had obviously spent many hours in the sun, but was more of a weathered brown than bronzed gold. Two pencils stuck out of her head, keeping her hair in a loose bun.

With a large group of other incoming freshmen, I stood outside the Iowa Memorial Union and listened as our tour guide pointed vaguely in the direction of Market Street.

“If you go up Market Street back to the dorms on the east side,” she said, “be careful of the hill. In the winter time, I’ve personally seen more than one person fall down the hill.” She said this with the significance one might give to witnessing a drive-by shooting.

I remember the comment because I’d already climbed up and down the hill several times that day. If I were a mountaineer or even a hiker, I probably would have enjoyed it. As it was, I was more of an indoor girl—shopping and reading were my two main hobbies. The temperature was hovering around 95 with 99% humidity, and I shrieked each time I saw my increasingly frizzy hair in the reflection of buildings as we passed by. I made a mental note to avoid that hill.

The following August, once I’d moved into Burge Hall, I quickly realized that to get to the English-Philosophy Building from the east-side dorms, you must go up and down that hill. As an English major, it was unavoidable.

The first week of classes, my roommate and I would arrive at our dorm at the same time, both huffing and puffing, “I … hate … (gasp) that (sputter) hill!”

After about one week, however, my body quickly adjusted to climbing up and down it several times a day. The trick was to bend over at the waist in a 90 degree angle to keep your equilibrium so you didn’t topple over backwards. Going down the hill was trickier because inertia and gravity tended to make your feet pound the pavement faster than you really wanted to go, and before you knew it, you were at the bottom of the hill barreling into the intersection with no way to stop. The hill became an adventure.

Around December, with the first snowstorm, that adventure became a little more life-threatening. After one night of sleet and decreasing temperatures, the ground was covered by a thin layer of ice.

My best friend Natalie and I were tromping our way to class one early Wednesday morning. We approached the top of the hill chatting and laughing about daily events, what happened the day before on General Hospital, where to hang the posters we had stolen from the video rental store the week before, and how the girl who lived next to me really needed to stop playing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”—I don’t care if her name was Caroline, enough was enough.

When we got the corner of Clinton and Market, all conversation ceased. Our steps became tentative and we both silently wondered how we were going to get down this hill without killing ourselves.

There was a small group of people gathered next to the parking ramp. “Um …” one girl said. “How do we get down?” We stared down the sidewalk to the bottom where the street lay waiting.

Next to us, a car drove by slowing, brake lights lit up. As the driver began going down the street, the tires locked, and the car began plummeting to the bottom of the hill. The brake lights flashed on and off, on and off, as the driver began pumping his brakes to gain some traction. We all watched in silence. Then the driver applied his horn as a warning as the car slid half a block and into the middle of the intersection. No other cars were around, and the driver straightened his wheel, applied some gas, and took off.

The small crowd at the top of the hill all released the breath we’d been holding in anticipation of an accident and turned back to the business at hand. “Well,” the first girl said, “here goes nothing.” She and her friend both began sliding down the hill. Encouraged by their progress, a handful of others followed.

Natalie and I looked at each other. I distinctly remember Nat shrugging at me and we both set off. Within two steps, we were holding tightly onto one another’s hand (if I go down, I’m taking you with me) and no longer picking our feet up, choosing instead to just hold as still as possible and hope gravity would deposit us safely.

All was going smoothly until someone called, “Erica!” At the sound of my name, I tried turning around to see who was calling me, upsetting Nat’s equilibrium in the process. Down she went!

She shrieked, and in the next second, down I went, shrieking all the way after her. She was still clinging onto my hand, and, like a game of Red Rover gone bad, we slid down the hill, Nat her on her back and me on my side, both of us shrieking the whole way.

It wasn’t long before we slammed into another girl who had been carefully edging her way the street. Like a chain reaction, down she went, sliding after us. It wasn’t long before she hit a boy—but he was ready. Observing our ascent, he had grabbed a tree on the side of the road and was holding on for dear life. His expression of utter disbelief as we slid by him is engrained in my memory until the day I die.

After about twenty feet of sliding, Natalie managed to get a grip on the ground beneath her and pulled us both to a stop. We were both nearly catatonic in the middle of the sidewalk on our backs, panting, rather like the little brother in A Christmas Story. I had an image of some bully jumping into the frame while we lay paralyzed, but was distracted when Nat seemed to find her voice.

“I … don’t … believe that just happened,” she finally croaked.

I had nothing to add to the conversation. Her remark pretty much summed up the situation.

After that experience, we decided we needed a new route to get to and from the EPB. The following day, we discovered behind our dorm, sitting parallel with the hill was a parking ramp. We could leave Burge by a back entrance, walk about 10 yards, and enter the parking ramp at street level. Then we could either walk down three flights of stairs or ride the elevator down three floors, and exit the parking ramp at street level, thereby omitting the hill completely.

It was brilliant, and we weren’t the only students who had discovered this.

The first time we tried this, our experience was less than what we’d hoped. We’d eliminated the hill, but traded it for a foul-smelling elevator with suspicious liquid puddles on the floor and fishy smudges smeared over the windows and buttons.

The alternative, however, was falling on your ass in front of dozens of students and flailing downwards half a block, so we made the best of it and quickly adapted, even forgetting what the conditions were like in the ’vator.

We were reminded again, when our friend Sara rode on it once with us.

“What the hell is that smell?” Sara shrieked when we entered.

“Oh, we’re pretty sure that’s the smell of death,” Natalie said cheerfully.

“Watch out for the plasma on the floor,” I added helpfully pointing at the puddle.

“The plasma?” Sara looked horrified.

“Well, we don’t know for sure that it’s plasma,” Natalie said hurriedly, to ease her mind.

“It just seems like the most logical conclusion, since we’re pretty sure someone had to have died in this elevator to make it smell like this.”

Sara shook her head and stuck out her hand to push the ground level button. “Wait!” Nat and I shouted in unison and she snatched her hand back in fright.

“Don’t ever,” Natalie said sternly, “ever touch anything in this elevator.”

“Do you want to get a herpe?” I cried. “Look around!! Does this place look sanitary?”

All three of us scrutinized the dirt-smudged windows, crumpled wrappers, and what looked like a mass of leaves leftover from autumn in the corner.

Finally, Sara said, “No. This place looks like where garbage comes to die.” She looked at me. “You’re wearing gloves. You push the button.”

I looked horrified. “I’m not ruining my gloves by touching that button. Forget it. Move out of the way.”

She moved and I deftly kicked the button with my boot. The elevator chugged to life and we slowly began to ascend. “I see that Taebo is really working out for you,” she said wryly.

“Your backpack is touching the wall,” Nat told her matter-of-factly. “You’ve definitely caught the plague now.”

Sara looked around the conditions surrounding her and then turned to face us. “Who’s idea was this? I hate you both. I’ll die before I ride this death elevator again.” The doors dinged open and she stomped out, narrowly missing a girl and her boyfriend waiting to get on.

Nat murmured to me under her breath, “Well, she’ll probably die anyway. Do you see that clump of … whatever it is on her arm? That will definitely get her, if her infected backpack doesn’t first.”

“This death elevator is nature’s answer to medical breakthroughs. Survival of the fittest,” I replied as I followed her out and we struggled to catch up with Sara.

From behind me, as the doors began to close, I could hear the boyfriend say to his girlfriend, “Gross! Don’t touch anything in here.” From the other direction, off in the distance, I could hear the descending shriek of another sacrifice to the hill.