Ode to Virility

It's taller than 10,000 hot dogs. But hollow inside.

Will Ferguson

SOME PEOPLE HAVE skeletons in their closets. I have a shiny blue jumpsuit.

Blame it on Moses, but I was once a professional space cadet, dressed in Buck Rogers garb and spouting techno-babble at Tour of the Universe, "the world's first large-scale simulator ride," an attraction so fantastic it could only have sprung from the fertile (dare I say fecund) imagination of Moses Znaimer Himself. It's the part I usually omit on my resume: Was employed as one of media guru Moses Znaimer's space cadets. My only defence in taking such a job is that I was a student at the time, which is to say, I plead poverty.

If you visited the CN Tower in 1986 or 1987, you may have run into me--unless I had my space helmet on with the visor down (the better to nap with). Tour of the Universe was set in a Toronto spaceport in the year 2019, complete with customs clearance, space inoculations, boarding passes, security checks and long, unexplained delays.

Passengers would descend in a special "time machine" (i.e. elevator) into the "very depths of the earth itself!" (i.e. the basement) where they would be "entertained" by out-of-work actors -- are there any other kind? -- before boarding a Shuttlecraft to the outer moons of Jupiter, where they would inevitably hit an asteroid (same damn asteroid every time) and be forced to return to earth.

The journey itself was excellent; Znaimer and company had purchased a pair of authentic flight simulators that rumbled with every asteroid bump. Alas, the rest of the attraction, the part involving people in costumes, had a strained "let's all pretend we are in the future and having fun" desperation about it.

I worked in Customs for awhile, and then Security, and was later bumped to Medical, where I was soon reassigned after parents complained that the shrieks of pain I emitted when I demonstrated the laser inoculations were scaring the children. I eventually ended up in the Spaceport Lobby--the worst assignment possible--where my signature "bit" was convincing entire groups to chant, "Will deserves a raise!" loud enough for the administrators upstairs to hear.

The "captain" of our Jupiter-bound flight was actually just a video loop of an actor who would appear now and then to address the passengers. He was called, ahem, "Capt. Moses." Hello, my name is David Moses and I will be your captain today. It was the same video, the same actor and the same captain on every flight -- so I decided to have some fun.

When the tour groups were about to board the Shuttlecraft, I would go on the PA system and announce, "Ladies and gentlemen, your pilot today will be Capt. Anderson, one of our finest . . . Hold on." I would then pretend to listen to a message from my headphone. "What? Moses? They're going to let him fly again, after what happened last time? The man was drunk, it's lucky they didn't hit an asteroid and die!" And then, to the crowd: "Not to worry, your captain will be Anderson. I assure you, Capt. Moses is a menace to space travel and will not be your pilot."

And then later, when Capt. Moses appeared on the video screen, there would be a moment of stunned silence followed by laughter (albeit, nervous laughter). I think I got fired at some point.

It goes without saying that being a space cadet was the strangest job I've ever had -- and not just because of the uniforms. (What is it with jumpsuits anyway? Why do we always assume that in the future everyone will be dressed like that? Is the world of tomorrow really going to be one extended ABBA reunion?) No, the strangest thing about Tour of the Universe was that although I worked at the CN Tower, I was stuck in the basement.

Now, the whole point of the CN Tower is its height. The soaring views and architectural vertigo, the windows dabbed with nose smears, the sense of freedom: I was far removed from it all, which is a shame because the CN Tower is ripe with superlatives. Guinness World Records recognizes it as the world's tallest free-standing structure, but that's only the start.

The CN Tower also boasts the world's highest bar, the world's highest public observation deck and the world's highest revolving restaurant, as well as the world's highest graffiti, courtesy of local schoolchildren who were invited to paint their names on the final crowning piece, which was then heli-lifted to the top of the tower when it was completed in 1976. The CN Tower even has the "world's highest wine cellar," which is surely an oxymoron of some sort.

The oddest fact about the CN Tower? It's hollow. I discovered this first-hand in my film student days when I made a documentary about a charity stair climb. The film crew and I (i.e. me and Dwayne) took an elevator to the top and then went down a few flights of stairs to get footage of people staggering toward the finish line. ("Keep it up! You're halfway there!" Dwayne yelled cruelly to the runners as they passed.)

In between shouting encouragement to participants, we noticed a small stairwell service door had been left unlocked. When we peered inside, we saw a narrow metal catwalk, several service lines snaking past, and below that . . . darkness. It was the tower turned inside out, a straight plunge into nothingness, the Elevator Shaft of Infinity. It was, in the words of my crew, "the perfect place to dump a body."

Stranger still, the CN Tower sways. As much as two metres at the top in a high wind, which only underlines what an incredible engineering feat the structure is. A few years ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers included it on its list of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, alongside the Panama Canal and the England - to - France Chunnel.

"Today's modern wonders are more than simply awe-inspiring," declared the ASCE. "They are functional, operational masterpieces that have revolutionized civil engineering and benefited humanity. They are a tribute to the universal human desire to triumph over the impossible."

Gosh. And you thought the CN Tower was just a really big antenna.

Something as spectacular and as superlative as Toronto's tower naturally inspires equally spectacular and superlative descriptions, what I like to call "hot dogs to the moon." You know, the sort of statistical comparisons that are so bizarre, so removed from reality, that you can't even begin to visualize what they mean, let alone find them useful. The Acme Wiener Factory produces enough hot dogs every five weeks to stretch to the moon and back two and a half times.

The CN Tower is rife with "hot dogs to the moon" type numbers, many of which seem to involve (a) elephants and (b) football fields. I'm not sure who decided that football fields would henceforth be the standard unit of measurement for Really Big Stuff, but the tradition has continued proudly at the CN Tower.

Fact:

I had a friend named Josie who worked as an elevator operator at the tower, and it almost ruined her. Statistics like these tend to stick in your brain like a mental virus, burrowing through grey matter and gnawing at the synapses.

Years later, Josie can still reel off CN Tower data in much the same fashion as an ex-Hare Krishna who can't escape a mantra. (CN Tower guides really ought to be "deprogrammed" after working the elevator circuit.) The last I heard from Josie, she was a radio host north of Montreal and she said that in moments of weakness, often while on air, she finds herself starting to slip into the spiel: "We are now ascending at a rate of 5 1/2 large elephants per hot dog."

There are only a handful of numbers that we share as a nation: 24 Sussex Drive. '72 Summit. War of 1812. Group of Seven. Twenty-pack of Timbits.

I would like to add another: 1,816. This is the height, in feet, of the CN Tower: the largest free-standing whatchamacallit in the world and as such, the epitome of Stunt Architecture. Hockey players and beer aside, the CN Tower is one of the very few areas where Canadians can really lord it over the Americans, which is why this figure is given in feet and not in those tricky base-10 metric numbers that our neighbours to the south are having such a hard time figuring out. (To impress the rest of the world, the number is 553, metres, not feet.)

Please note: I said "free-standing structure" and not "tower." The truth is, and even now I am loathe to admit it, there are towers taller than the CN. The Americans have TV towers that are higher, but you can't go up them and anyway, they cheated: they use guide wires.

Still, if you say "free-standing structure" fast enough and with just the right amount of breezy confidence, it still sounds impressive. Don Harron said the CN Tower was built "to teach Canadian men humility," but I say, no. It is an ode to Canadian virility, not a lesson in modesty.

At Tour of the Universe, the spaceport and launching pad were supposedly 1,816 feet beneath the surface: as far below as the tower rose high. The Shuttlecraft simulator was "blasted into outer space" from inside the shaft of the tower itself -- engines throbbing, floor shaking, lights flashing, speed increasing, faster and faster and faster and faster until . . . you suddenly burst out from the top and soared towards the heavens in a euphoric dreamland of zero-gravity. Who says Toronto isn't a sexy city? I mean, other than everybody.

Which is why it came as such a disappointment when I took my family to the CN Tower only to discover that Moses Znaimer's "jaunt to Jupiter" is long since gone. The world of tomorrow has been packed up and put away, the future has been shut down. Tour of the Universe, 1985-1992, R.I.P.

So I took my wife and toddler up the tower's turbo-charged elevators instead, a heady rush of acceleration that hurtles you to the observation deck in 58 seconds flat. When we arrived at the main level, we saw people standing in mid-air. This was the tower's famous glass floor, which allows you to walk out at cloud levels and look straight down. It's a breathtaking and dizzying effect.

Things not to do when you have a sleeping child strapped on and your wife is afraid of heights: walk out onto the glass floor at the CN Tower and say, "C'mon honey, it's fine."

"Get over here!" she screamed from the sidelines. "You have our child on your back!"

"But it's perfectly safe," I said. I then jumped up and down a couple of times just to, you know, demonstrate how safe it is. "See?" I said brightly. "We didn't fall through."

Things not to do when you are standing on a glass floor more than 1,000 feet in the air with your child strapped to your back and a spouse who is yelling at you to come back: jump up and down.

When my repeated hopping failed to reassure her, I started quoting statistics. "Look, right here in the pamphlet, 'The Glass Floor is strong enough to withstand the weight of 14 large hippos. Fourteen hippos, honey. Fourteen!" But it was no use, and the gnashing of her teeth and the boiling of her blood eventually forced me to abandon my gravity-defying frolic.

It was only then that I noticed the view. We tend to fixate on the tower itself and forget about the panorama it offers: a fisheye look at the city, Lake Ontario laid out like a great swath of fabric, the arc of the shoreline, the curve of the earth and there, in the distance, a faint rise of mist: Niagara. You feel as though, if the light is right and you squint your eyes just so, you might even see the Rocky Mountains. Perhaps that is why the CN Tower is such a Canadian icon: in a country as big as ours, it takes a tower this tall just to get a decent view.

Maclean's Magazine
October 21, 2002