A Terrifying Experience in Paris

This layout is for the Art Journal Caravan year-long project that I'm working on. In it I mention that one of the things I remember is the most terrifying experience in my life while on the Arc d' Triumphe.  But I don't go any further to describe the event because it would take up too much space.  But I definitely remember it and Paris.

In 1993 we, my husband John, my son Jim and I, traveled with my parents to London to stay for a week at Walton Hall, near Stratford-on-Avon. We spent the first four or five days in London and after our week at Walton Hall, we spent two days and three nights in Paris.

One of the days in Paris, John, Jim and I walked from our hotel to the Arc d' Triumple at the top of the Champs-Ellysee's.  To get to the top you take an elevator inside one of the "legs".  Once on top you can see for miles and, disconcertingly, feel the thing move.  We explored the top and looked out. I didn't look out and down - too afraid of heights. If I took pictures I stood five feet or more from the wall and held my camera out and took the picture.

When we'd seen enough it was time to leave.  And that's when I learned that we may have reached the top by elevator but the down elevator didn't come all the way up to the top. The down elevator was at least one "story" below, in the other leg of the Arc. 

To get to the elevator we had to enter the body/"cross piece". We went down a flight of stairs, maybe ten or twelve of them just a little wider than one "normal" person.  Two people, unless they were skinny children couldn't go down side-by-side. That closeness isn't a problem for me; I'm not claustrophic.  

At the bottom of the stair was the problem.  Instead of continuing down concrete stairs, you had to step onto a flimsy square of metal with a pencil thin rail on two sides and flimsy stairs going into the massive maw of the top of an elevator shaft.  I swear that hole was twenty by twenty feet square and blacker than the depths of the deepest, dankest, darkest cave known to man. To make it worse there was a gap between the concrete step and the metal landing that appeared to be at least three-four feet wide. 

I couldn't move. 

John moved around me and just stepped right in and then disappeared down and left of me. 

I couldn't breathe.  

I looked behind me and saw a young Frenchman (in his late twenties probably but he looked like a nice young man) sitting on the fifth or sixth step above me preventing anyone else from coming down until I managed to get out of way.  He kept saying "It's all right, Madame, It's all right." 

I couldn't go back up and out on top; this was the only way down. 

My heart was pounding so hard I figured I'd just die there and they'd push my moldering body onto the refuse below.  

But I couldn't do that; I wasn't ready to die.  

So I got close to the horrid, dark, high, open space and handed my purse and camera, possibly my hat and sweater as well - memory's a little sketchy there, around the corner to John who was waiting to help me. 

Then clutching at the concrete wall (at least two feet thick) I stepped on that flimsy SHAKY metal platform and, still facing the concrete wall, inched around to John and the first step down. Three steps later I see it's not pitch black inside and we only have to go down three flights of ten steps on three sides.  But it was still dark. Photo-gray glasses don't change immediately and large, tall and cavernous rooms lit by incandescent lights don't become fully illuminated. The sensation of height was not as great inside but I did still keep my hand on the wall. We exited at the gift shop and took the elevator down from there.  

Then we went to the Eiffel Tower.

What was really interesting, in retrospect, is that a part of my mind was telling me that the gap was at most half an inch wide and the flimsy metal - the kind of metal frequently used as landings on stairs - looks a little corrugated but not as ripply - wasn't flimsy at all. The concrete wall was, maybe, a foot wide.  But that part of my mind couldn't get past the phobia and it's associated terror.