What Goes Up Must Come Down

One night my freshman year in college at Virginia Tech my friends and I had gone into town for a night of the usual...a stop in at Greek's Cellar, maybe a trip to Steve's Dogs for the best chili dogs on the planet, and, of course, a visit to Top of the Stairs (if you don't know these places, you were obviously not in Blacksburg in the 80's). Suffice it to say that there was much beer consumed before we called it a night. We made our way back to the dorm and for some reason, my friends felt the need to walk me to my room. I'm sure that was just their way of being good companions and had nothing to do with my level of inebriation.

In any case, I remember us being in the hall outside my room for some reason...maybe I couldn't find my key. I was feeling tired, so I sat down on the floor. Then three guys we didn't know walked past us with a glint in their eyes and a purposeful stride. I immediately bounded up off the floor and started walking with them asking where we were heading. For some strange reason, my friends' civic duty seems to have ended there as they let me wander off with these strangers. Turns out that they were headed to Cassell Coliseum, where the Hokies play basketball. Interestingly enough, they were not going into the coliseum, they were interested in climbing the exterior of the building all the way to the roof.

A word of explaination...Cassell Coliseum is a somewhat shallow, upside down parabola (see picture above) with these massive flying buttresses off to the side (see picture below). The theory was that if you stood back far enough and ran fast enough, you would have enough momentum to get you past the breaking point and could walk up to the roof. Well, I mean to tell you, my three new best friends and I did exactly that. A good running start, making sure to stay on the buttress, and before we knew it, we were on the roof. Oh, the sights we could see...the laughs that we had just knowing that we had gone where few others had dared to tread. It was all joy and happiness until the moment we realized that we had to get down.

In all fairness, I really don't remember how the other guys handled getting down or if they had any trepidation at all. For myself, I was pretty much scared shitless. There seemed to be no way to get down without plummeting to my death. When it finally dawned on me that I would have to get down somehow, I realized that the only way was to carefully make my way back down one of the butresses. So, I started down the only way that seemed to make sense...backward. This was all well and good and seemed to work well until I reached the aforementioned breaking point. Suddenly, I started sliding down toward the ground at an alarming rate. In an effort to slow my descent, I grasped the sides of the buttress with my hands and kneeled down on it. Both my hands and my knees began to hurt, but I did make it to the ground without losing life or limb. I checked myself over and saw that my hands were a bit torn up and the knees of my jeans were completely ripped out. Ah well...a small price to pay to bodly go where no man has gone before.

Afterward: I never did see those three gentleman again...course, then again, I probably wouldn't recognize them if I did.

After Afterward: I have since heard that the university has installed security measures to ensure that no crazy students attempt this stunt...guess I'm not so unique after all.