Pulling A Nail

For as long as I can remember I have had a terrible fear of heights. It seems a complimentary phobia given my short stature, but for whatever cosmic reason I have always avoided separating myself too far from the ground. On a bleak afternoon in February, I forced myself to the very top of a fifteen foot ladder and faced the one thing that I fear most. I knew at that moment that my life will be forever changed by the action I was about to undertake.
It was my senior year of high school in suburban Chicago. I was enjoying a year filled with athletic achievement and scholastic recognition, not to mention a cream-puff schedule. One of the classes I was enrolled in, Building Trades, was a unique, two-hour, experienced based program that drew students from two local high schools together to learn the entire process of building a home. The course, taught by my wrestling coach and close mentor, involved the complete construction of a single family home from the pouring of the foundation to the application of hard wood floors and trim. At this point in the course, our classes had completed framing the first two floors and the roof was almost finished. This brings me back to the driving sleet of a Chicago February and my unlikely placement at the top of a shaky ladder.
This particular day involved several menial tasks, such as building a set of stairs for the basement and pulling arbitrary nails from various places on the home’s exterior. As the daily tasks were assigned to each student, my coach skipped over my assignment and asked me to meet him in the garage. It was there that he told me, in an almost hushed tone, that it was up to me to finish off the final roofing task; I was to prepare the plywood roof for the professionals who were hired to apply the shingles and for some reason I was the only man capable of such a task. He instructed me to the top partition of the family room roof, where I would find a single, rusty nail that was foolishly driven into the wrong plank. It was imperative, he told me, that I exercise caution as I climb because the conditions outside were quite unforgiving.
Unaware of how much this task would test my will, I marched the metal ladder to the second floor and began my ascent without much thought to the process. I was too eager to please my mentor to reflect on my own reluctance to climb tall ladders. It was considered an honor to be chosen to complete the most difficult task of the day and I was preoccupied with the praise I would receive from my classmates if I were to complete the difficult task successfully. Once high above the ground, with the freezing rain pricking my face in a comical consistency, my great fear of heights clouded my ability to rationalize the task at hand. The nail was an arms-length from the top rung of the ladder and my outstretched hammer failed to meet the required distance for a successful removal.
I found myself higher in the air than I have ever wished to be, forced to navigate a slippery rooftop with a growing audience below. Word got around the building that I was at the top of the treacherous roof and before I could look down a second time, all fourteen members of the class had dropped what they were doing so they could watch the crazy boy on the ladder.
To be continued...