Recently in World Category

AFTER RETURNING FROM driving my college-bound daughter to Boston over this holiday weekend, I have this fact to report: There are two hundred and ninty-four stone steps up top of the granite tower of the Bunker Hill Monument. I know this by reason of good old fashioned shoe-leather journalism. I read it somewhere.

Actually, I read it on the several warnings prominently posted around the Washington Monumentesque oblisk that stands atop the highest hill in Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston where a long time ago some men made a stand that changed the world. The fact that all those signs were so clearly posted to dissuade the timid and at risk from venturing to the top,. . . now THAT, my friend, is what you call "journalistic verification."  There are 294 steps to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument because they said so.

Of course I climbed them. Am I a patriot or what? And I even counted for awhile. When I saw the bright number "10" painted white on the front of the tenth stone step, followed by "20" on the twentieth, I figured I'd trust the arithmetic of the National Park Service to count by tens. By 50 these tens began to matter in a disinterested, you know, observational or theoretical manner. If I feel like this after 50, what will I feel like climbing four more fifties with spare stairs to go. By two hundred and 40 I was looking for those white painted step numbers like a blood hound on a death march. I am breathing like a man on a good run and eager to have it over. Give this dog his bone.

The higher I got the more I marveled at the people coming down this crowded spiral staircase of stone that allows only two people to pass each other. Little kids with parents. Old people -- people 20 years older than me -- and they're, like, still alive. They were puffing and sweating, but they were happy, and more importantly, not dead! I fear I resented their happiness for selfish reasons. They were happy because gravity had become their good friend. They were on a downward spiral and loving it. I, on the other hand, was practicing my slow breath (you know, like the guy who starts the slow clap in teen movies of a certain vintage) which I was prepared to do when I met the other survivors on the top.

And when I got there, I gotta tellya, I never saw so many people with bursting lungs trying to breathe slowly. Who were we trying to impress? Ourselves, certainly, but I swear I saw an 80-year-old woman take the last step in a crouch with a big grin on her face and she was as winded as the average 30-year-old breathing slowly through clenched teeth as if it were a conversation with his blonde attractive (not that that is important) girlfriend. No one seemed to know what to say, including me. Maybe there are no words.

But that would really suck for writers, wouldn't it?