Dean's World

Yeah, f*** that!

Nope. No way. Uh-uh.
I would have recurring nightmares for the rest of my life.

This is awesome. If it opens on schedule I'll probably be there next year.

I spent NY's day 2005 at the Grand Canyon and most of the time the visibility was around 2,000 feet.

I'd like to check this skywalk out, but I gotta see the bottom down there.

I can all but predict that some kids from fraternity row a Phoenix, Tucson or other not faraway university campus, young men characterized in equal parts by arrogance and sophomoric stupidity, will bring their pledges out to the observation deck. The test will be to stand on the rail.

One day a pledge, attempting to prove himself worthy of lifelong fellowship among the assholes, will fall over the edge. A huge outcry will ensue. That chapter of the fraternity will be suspended by the national organization. But only for a while. Some of the fraternity brothers will be rich kids whose fathers can and will buy them the best justice. All will support one another in seamless testimony that will blame the dead pledge.

Then too there will be the occasional but usual suicide. Or perhaps a pair of lovers jumping to their death together to spite their families.

But the day will come when a crowd of people will go out on that skywalk, with the greater of their number as far out as they shall be able to crowd the space.

Then one of them will begin jumping up and down. Rhythmically. Then others will join in. Every landing at the same time. Laughing hysterically, no doubt.

Then the cantilevered steel support, weakened by the rhythmic stresses, will give way. Slowly at first, but accelerating its sag as the now-frightened and screaming vacationers slide outward and downward on the structure. Some will use the rails to pull themselves up to safety. Others, now along the sunken outer edge of the observation deck, will use their arms and legs to hold onto whatever part of the steelwork has not broken loose.

But many will lose their grip and fall 4000 ft straight down to the bottom of the grand canyon of the Colorado river, some perhaps whose bodies shall glance off the rocks of the canyon walls.

What will be the cost of hauling up and out the smashed corpses, both for proper burial and so as not to leave a gruesome sight at the bottom of the canyon, so as not to turn away Colorado river rafters and those who walk the trails on muleback?

Structures of all kinds collapse under various conditions, the unintended consequences of convergences of some equally unplanned forces applied to the structure. Bridges, office towers, skydecks, mezzanines, stadium grandstands, construction cranes, tunnels, fire escapes. Aircraft fall out of the sky. Great ships plunge to the depths of the oceans. Trains derail and collide with motor vehicles.

Yet perpetually putting in their appearance are those who tempt fate by daring acts in which only a parachute, a flotation device, or being somewhere else, can save them.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

I would therefore hazard a guess that it will be quite as safe to go onto as the observation deck of a skyscraper, or the passenger compartment of an airplane.
But with more brown stains on it.
I'll probably go out on it, but I bet I leave a brown stain of my own. I know I'll bring a change of clothes and a lot of wet-naps.