Oh, pioneers! How bravely you ventured into uncharted territory — with bears and mountain lions lurking in abundance, and not a single Walgreens in sight.
Today, inspired by your expeditions, American tourists do not merely gaze upon the dazzling beauty of Eero Saarinen’s 630-foot-high (and 630-foot-wide) monument to your adventurous spirit, the Gateway Arch. We climb to the top — or, at least, we ride up there, seated in a little pod and transported by tram, rather than take the 1,076 stairs. It’s as if the daring segment of your DNA evolved, in us, into a form of lazy curiosity.
“You’re going to get sick!” warned a St. Louis friend, after I arrived in town for a family visit, claiming the ride was claustrophobic and disorienting. “Why would you want to do that?”
I had no idea, especially after doing a little “research” on the Internet, an invention that might have kept Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery at home. (I Googled “Gateway Arch” and “scary,” and turned up 14,200 references in .06 seconds.)
But just thinking of what Lewis and Clark went through — all the gnats and mosquitoes Lewis wrote about alone — it seemed like the least I could do while in St. Louis. Also: Once my sister-in-law told my 9-year-old niece that the three of us were going up, there was no backing out.
One horror the Corps of Discovery never had to deal with is the insanely long waiting line. According to one of the National Park Service rangers who work the Arch (part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial), more than 3 million people make the trip each year, and summer is the busiest season, so the wait can be more than three hours.
So while it was quite tempting to linger in the charming and wonderful Museum of Western Expansion — which is underground, beneath the Arch, and pays homage to American Indians, trappers, explorers, miners, soldiers, etc., and which echoes with the voices of creepily fascinating animatronic figures (“I felt wind and cold the likes of which I never felt before,” Sgt. Robert Banks, an African-American officer in the 10th U.S. Cavalry told me, about the winter of 1870) — we instead took a brief but satisfying spin, then got in line. We could always come back to the museum another day, but my niece’s softball league game at noon would only happen once.
It turns out that the trip to the top is not scary at all, but it is slightly absurd, in a quaint, 1950s futuristic way. In the loading zone, amid audio and video presentations, you’re issued a pod number, photographed (copies are available in the lobby when you get back down), and are instructed by a disembodied female voice to line up in front of your corresponding numbered elevator (1 through 8) when it is time, like earthlings who have decided to surrender to the aliens up in the mothership. You half-expect Woody Allen, dressed in his “Sleeper” jumpsuit, to pop out when the doors open onto your pod, which is 5 feet in diameter, seats five humans in Saarinen-style metal seats, glows with fluorescent light, and is slightly stuffy. Fortunately, it travels at a speed of 3.9 m.p.h., and gets you to the top in about 4 minutes.
When the pod stops, you’re just a short climb on a steep metal stairway (here, you get the feeling for the first time that you’re really inside the arch) from the low-ceilinged, obviously arching, slender space that is your destination. If you don’t get close to one of the narrow (7-by-27-inch) horizontal, waist-high, flying-saucer-style windows, the experience is basically that of standing in a strange hallway crammed with tourists. So you have to be pushy if you want to take in the view (mighty Mississippi to the east, the Old Courthouse where Dred Scott’s case was heard, and the St. Louis skyline to the west), which is especially spine-tingling when you catch a glimpse of the shadow of the Arch on the ground below.
No one is rushing you up there, however, so you can wait until the Girl Scout troops and large men in socks and sandals have cleared out. And, if you feel like it, you can also board the pod for the trip back down (which seems faster, and makes a hollow humming noise I didn’t notice on the way up) just a few minutes after you arrive.
I was lucky to have willing companions, but the average visitor to St. Louis may find the locals generally unenthusiastic about such a touristy to-do item, perhaps because it doesn’t involve the Cardinals. That’s the only reason I can imagine, now that I’ve done it. But unlike most Cardinals fans this season, I can say that I’ve seen inside the team’s new home, the sold out Busch Stadium, albeit from an unusual angle, and from more than 630 feet away. And it was a glorious view.
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ernunn@tribune.com
