Out the window of my dorm in freshman year, I could make out not just the Ithaca College campus spread out before me but Cornell University’s campus in the east, Cayuga Lake in the north, and the neon orange Wegmans sign in the west. The view was one of the few advantages of living in West Tower, a fourteen story residential hall erected beside the appropriately named East Tower. Another good thing about living twelve stories closer to the stratosphere was the cool breeze that came off of the lake. To this day, I miss the fresh, sweet smell of a northern current. However, the positives pretty much end there.
Floors four and above were most often reached by taking one of two dimly lit elevators that I was quite sure hadn’t been inspected since the ’90’s. They made disconcerting groans and bellows when in use and often jerked erratically when more than two people were standing in them. I had only taken the elevators a handful of times during the beginning of my first semester in West Tower. But one fateful night in late September swiftly put an end to our relationship.
Nearing midnight, I stepped into an elevator with four other people and a terrible sense of foreboding. But that was fairly ordinary whenever I got into an elevator and I often tried to ignore it in an attempt to overcome my claustrophobia. Unfortunately, we only managed to scale five floors before it came to a roaring halt. My immediate reaction matched a suburban octogenarian watching kids step on his precious lawn: loud, violent, and somewhat epileptic. The people with me definitely didn’t expect this. One patted me on the back dolefully, as if sympathizing. Another just eyed me quizzically, unsure of what to do. All the while, I stood perfectly still and tried to stave off hyperventilation while a mechanics team worked to fix the issue. Safe to say, I was determined to never step inside an elevator again.
And thus my close relationship with the stairs was born. They wound up through the core of West Tower and let off on a series of landings accompanied by a blue door with the floor number painted on it in bold white.
It is often said that the more you do something, the easier it’ll become. I persistently told myself this every time I took the climb and I can confidently say that it never got better. The heavy thud of my footfalls punctuated each laborious step and resounded like the steady beat of a drum. The muscles in my legs always tightened and ached if I didn’t take a breather every few landings, a nasty collection of bile would gather in the back of my throat by the time I reached the sixth floor (and always the sixth floor), and I’d be hot and sweaty by the time I got back to my room.
I would like to think that taking the stairs has somehow made me a better person. I want to romanticize and dramatize the benefits of the situation, but I don’t think that’s possible. I guess I only truly learned one key thing from this experience, one I’ll be sure to remember for the rest of my life: Live on the ground floor.
