By Kathleen Merryman
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com

Last Wednesday, I posted this on our Tall Ships 2008 the blog. Since then, every time I looked at the Eagle’s mast, I said, I should have made it up and over.
Here’s the back story:
All my life, I’ve been afraid of heights.
It’s a legitimate fear. Lots of people have it. But I’ve come to use it as an excuse. I’ve depended on it to keep me off of steep, narrow mountain trails, driving the Going To The Sun Highway in Montana’s Glacier National Park and scampering to the tall parts of tall ships.
Reporters can do that. Photographers can’t.
Janet Jensen, who shot the glorious pictures you saw of the U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle, is, as she puts it, “not fond of heights.”
I had no idea. Any time she needed the advantage of height for a shot, she shimmied into a safety harness and, accompanied by a cadet, climbed up the ratlines and over into the tops.
She does it, she said, by using her professionalism to stifle her fears.
Reporters can take notes from just about anywhere, and I prefer deck level.
Lt. Chris Nolan, the Eagle’s third officer, assumed I would, and probably should, climb the rigging. To do so would give me an idea of how cadets turn a challenge into a favorite part of their duty aboard this ship.
So, on the evenings I was aboard the Eagle, about an hour before sunset, he reminded me that I should go up. Every evening, I managed to become engrossed in a compelling interview until the sun went down. Until last Tuesday.
There it was, a big red ball, sinking into the Olympics. And there he was, Lt. Nolan, smiling, telling me I could do it: I could climb the ratlines to a metal platform 60 feet above the deck.
I snapped and cinched myself into a harness under the tutelage of senior cadet Ron Vyas, 21. “You can do it,” he said.
The rules are simple, he said. Never put two feet on the same horizontal line at the same time. Never hold onto a line. Trust only the cables running from the deck to the mast. Attach the harness clip to the rigging any time you stop.
“You can do it, ma’am,” Vyas said with the kind of gentle reassurance one does not expect from a 21-year-old.
He even had me believing it.
With Seattle’s skyline coming to light behind me, I stepped onto the ship’s rail and started climbing the ratlines at about one fifth of cadet speed.
The ratlines form a tall, skinny triangle made of cable and line. Thirty feet up, I clipped on to get my bearings. Around 40 feet up, the courses narrow, which meant my ladder changed shape.
“You can do it,” said Vyas, who was helping me.
Nolan, who climbed onto the platform from the other side, looked down on us. “You can do it,” he said.
I began to believe them. Very slowly, clipping on at every advance, I went up until my head was just under the triangular platform.
Sailors call the platforms “tops.” That’s short for “fighting tops.”
In the age of war under sail, snipers of the Royal Marines would climb the ratlines, stand on the tops and shoot at sailors on the decks of enemy ships.
Back then, some tops had “lubber holes,” hatches in the deck of the tops. Landlubbers could climb the ratlines, then just pop into the top.
The Eagle’s tops have no lubber holes. The platform is the tricky part. The lines look as though they require a climber to bend backwards and climb over the edge of the platform. There’s a turn in the route, which would be no problem at all to negotiate say, 3 feet off the ground.
Sixty feet in the air, it stopped me.
“You can do it,” Nolan and Vyas told me. “You can clip on.”
I did not believe them. I made it up, but not over.
Lt. Mike Keyser of the Eagle hates heights, too. But he has made it up and over at least five times.
“Try again,” he said. “You can do it.”
Sunday, I tried again. At the festival I ran into Tacoma police Sgt. C.P. Taylor, who said, “You can do it. You know you can do it.”
Police community liaison officer Bert Hayes, whom I’ve known for several years and like, said, “And if you can’t, you’re sniveling whiner.
“Carpe diem,” said Taylor, urging me to seize the day.
Or, if you’re on the ratlines, anything that’s metal.
That’s what I did. Bos’n’s mate Ken McSherry allowed me onboard and said he’d take me up and over.
He did. We made it to the top, over the edge and onto the platform.
It and the rigging were the same. But trying to come close to the Eagle’s standards made all the difference in me.
I may be a sniveling whiner, but I made it up one set of ratlines, over the fighting top and down the ratlines on the opposite side.