Ladders in the Fog

Fog was everywhere, and seemed it would last forever--so thick it was, I couldn't even see my feet as I stepped on indefinite matter. Yet I could not just stand still. I had to move, and I walked around aimlessly. When I stumbled into a ladder, I began to climb. Since the ladder was nearly vertical, I didn't know what it leaned against. Someone's house? Some building? Why was it there? I saw no paint buckets, building materials, or scaffolding anywhere, but as I said, things may have been there except the fog obscured them.

Who owned the ladder, who stood it upright, or for what purpose, I didn't know. Still, I felt I should climb it. I thought if I could climb above the fog, perhaps I could see things more clearly. But the ladder seemed impossibly high--was it a firetruck ladder used in cities? The kind it takes a front and a back driver to negotiate the corners? That might account for its interminable length, but I hadn't noticed any apparatus it was attached to. Still, there might have been. The gray fog had covered everything, swirling like waves around my feet.

How long I climbed the ladder, how many minutes or hours, I couldn't sense. It must have been for hours, even days. It was impossible to know where I had begun. It was impossible to know where I was climbing. It was impossible to know when I would reach the top, or what I would find there. There was only the ladder, my aching feet and legs, and the fog. Yet I continued in my ascent; not to climb from where I was scared me more, and the thought of backing down through the thick fog conjured up such demons in my mind that I imagined them chasing me up, and hurried up the rungs.

Then suddenly the fog lifted. I paused and looked around, and saw other ladders, and people climbing up them just like me! Some were below me, some above. But Some were nearly beside me. And I noticed one fellow who seemed to be stuck on his ladder, with his leg through a broken rung. He was no more than a few feet away, and down a few rungs. I couldn't tell for sure, but he didn't seem injured. When the rung broke, he had slipped and fallen through, but not far. His ladder caught his foot on the rung beneath.

He looked at me imploringly. "Give me a hand here, guy," he said. I reached down to try to help him, but he was out of reach by a few rungs. I backed down on my rungs and reached out, caught his wrist, and pulled him up. He twisted his leg free and took a deep breath. He didn't seem injured. "Thanks," he smiled. "I don't know how long I've been here. You're the first one I've seen this high up, but this damned fog-- ."

I was glad for him. The fog seemed to be lifting further, and our ladders seemed to rise up parallel as twin towers, straight up. I looked forward to the company as I continued upward. But my fellow climber, instead of continuing his climb, couldn't seem to get past the broken rung and gave up, then started down. "Hey," I shouted, "aren't you coming up?" He just smiled and waved me off as he lowered himself rung by rung, and was soon a speck in my view.

Further up the ladder I was nearly killed by another person--a young woman, I think from her scream, who flashed a blur of green and white through space only inches away and in a second disappeared below, sickening me. I didn't know if she had fallen from her ladder, or heaven forbid, had jumped. Or maybe she had risen to the top and could go no further, had reached her destination. I shuddered, took a breath, and thought of retreating downward, since the fog had simply lifted higher, but I still could not see the top. I felt compelled to continue my climb, at least till I could sense the top, the end.

Maybe there is no end, I thought. Or if there was, what did I expect to find there? Would it be worth the tiring climb? As I looked around, I saw the forest of ladders and climbers of the ladders stretching to the horizon, as far as the eye could see. Some were on the way up, some just looking around at this level or that, and some seemed to be climbing down. Sometimes there were two, three, or more people climbing the same ladder, it appeared. On one distant ladder I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. Two climbers seemed to be fighting, flinging their legs out and around like boxers, trying to scramble over each other to reach the next rung. A thick-set fellow in a waving, colorful tie bounded down to the fight from several rungs above and, with one well-aimed heel to the jaw of the climber nearest him, kicked the challenger right off the ladder! He went back up, and the surviving climber seemed reluctant to follow too closely behind. He crept up the rungs more slowly, more warily now.

Then, as I regarded the ladders' endless stretch, I saw for the first time some ladders' tops! They just stood erect like all the others, leaning against nothing, or nothing I could see. But they ended, at various heights. They clearly had an end. I couldn't see enough to say if they had climbers on them anywhere along their visible length, or if anyone had mounted or tried their length. They just stood among the others, going nowhere.

Did all the ladders ultimately end like these? I shuddered. Was there nothing beyond their tops? Surely not, I thought. Ladders had to go somewhere, didn't they? Else why have them? And just the effort of climbing them so laboriously, for so long, surely had to have some meaning. Else why do it? And there was the fog, high, high above it all, hiding the tops of many ladders. There had to be something there, above that fog. There surely had to be.

I looked up again at the long, straight rails of my ladder, stared at the endless rungs above me, and felt as if my destiny converged, as the rails, at the vanishing point in the fog above. Again I began to climb the rungs, peering high as intently as I could, up, up into the inscrutable fog which continued to lift, rather than disperse, the higher I rose.