CLAIRE KAEMMERLING On Elevators We were at the AMC Theatre in downtown Fort Worth, and since I never go downtown the same way twice I could not tell you how we got there. I can find my way to Sundance Square every time but I can not tell you street names or which way to turn; I just follow my instinct. I came home for a visit, and my mom talked me into tak– ing her to a movie. 1he girl who took our ticket was short, and it was her first day ofwork-so she told us-and my mother kept saying that over and over: to the woman who answered our call from the elevator, to the policeman who came to let us out. "It was her first day, she didn't tell us how to use the elevator." Anything to shift blame, anything to forget that she, my mother, was the one who decided to "try out" the elevator and if it didn't work correctly to ask for help. We got on the elevator at the street level, and you could either go one story up or one story down. Oddly enough, there was an escalator, but only to go up. We were going down. 1he elevator moved about three feet and then it stopped, and I don't know when or how we decided we were stuck, but when the inner doors opened to show that the outer doors would not, my mother's face went ashen and she began to pace though she had nowhere to go. The first hydraulic elevator was installed in 1878. I imagine that the elevator we were stuck in was hydraulically powered, because the encyclopedia tells me most elevators in buildings under five stories are. My mental image of the mechanics of a hydraulic elevator is still a little fuzzy, but the passenger (or freight) car sits on top of a plunger, which rests in a cylinder buried in the ground. Pressurized water fills the cylinder when the elevator needs to go up, and is released from the cylinder when it needs to go down. Where they keep the water, I don't know. Another cylinder, side-by-side? More wasted space? I once walked through the home of a woman named Kathy, an octogenarian and survivor of Hurricane Katrina. She took me through 24
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