Stuck In An Elevator or How To Survive a Creative Block Part I

One time I got stuck in an elevator for 13 hours. No joke. My friends often give me a hard time for being an exaggerator, but this is 100 percent true. And to make it worse, it was a small elevator, maybe 4‘x5’. I’m going to give you the abbreviated version of the story. In the interest of protecting the innocent, I have changed the names of my band members. Now you should know that we were three pretty big guys. Two of us were over six feet tall. One of us, Dandy Fenton was over 300 pounds. The other guy, Krandon Bees, was shorter, but weighed about as much as I did (approximately 220 pounds). So there wasn’t a lot of room to move around.

We were in Victoria, Texas for a couple of weeks to record at the church where one of my bandmates was an interning. It was a pretty big church, and it had a huge youth room that also had all of the gear my band needed to start recording. We were pretty jazzed about the opportunity to have free access to the equipment and to get started on recording some new tracks.

On a Wednesday night after all of the students and church staff had gone home, my band and I began unloading our instruments and gear into the youth room. The room was on the second floor and we were fortunate enough that the building had a small freight elevator. So we brought in all of our equipment and began to set things up. It was around midnight and we were hungry (we were hungry a lot) and decided to make a run to Whataburger before we started tracking.

Now there are moments in life when you make a decision that in hindsight you know was quite stupid. My stupid decision came in deciding not to take my cell phone with me. My drummer made the same stupid decision. Our thought process simply being, “We’re just going to Whataburger. We don’t need them”. Famous last words.

We got to Whataburger just fine and had our fill of fast food and giant Texas sized soft drinks. Then we made sure to grab a refill, and headed back to the church.

It was our laziness that sealed our fate. Make no mistake about it. Had we even exerted the smallest bit of effort, we could have avoided all of our troubles. But, feeling lazy when we returned to the church, having been filled up like plump little piglets, we made the decision to use the freight elevator as opposed to simply walking up a flight of stairs.

We made it about two or three feet off of the ground when the elevator stopped. There was the flickering of lights that one might associate with an elevator stopping, and then a few half nervous jokes. My drummer made the comment that it would probably start again in a moment after it reset. (I don’t know that elevators really reset. It’s just something you say.) But the elevator didn’t start moving. We were stuck. And as we assessed our situation, we discovered that not only were we stuck, but there were several factors that assured we were going to be stuck for a while. These included: 

• No air conditioning. This doesn’t seem like a big deal if you live in Colorado. In South Texas however, in mid summer, it’s quite a terrifying prospect. 

• The panel on the ceiling of the elevator (you know the one – it’s what everyone in the movies uses to escape situations like this) was bolted shut, and made of steel. There would be no theatrical escapes. 

• We could not open the elevator door. Again, you see this in movies a lot. It works really well with doors that open from the middle. Not with freight doors that open from one side. 

• The emergency call box didn’t work. Yup. That’s just bad luck. 

• We didn’t have our cell phones. This is where hindsight is 20/20. 

• The church offices were not located in the same building as the sanctuary and youth room. They were located across town in an office building. The building we were in would not be used again until Sunday morning. It was Wednesday night. 

There are many details about that night that I won’t mention because this blog would double or triple in length. Those may or may not include spooning each other on the floor in our boxer shorts (because it was hot and the floor of the elevator was cold) while we tried to sleep. If you are curious about the rest of the night, ask me about it sometime.

Long story short, we were finally rescued the next afternoon around 13 hours later, when another youth intern randomly brought a group of kids to the church to work on something in the youth room.

As I look back on it, the whole predicament raises some interesting questions. Namely - have you ever been stuck? I mean stuck in any way, not just in an elevator? Maybe your car was stuck in the mud or snow. Maybe you accidentally got locked in a room. Maybe you felt trapped in a relationship. I think it’s safe to say that most of us have experienced that before. It’s an incredibly frustrating place to be.

As a creative, have you ever experienced a creative block? If you have, you know that it is equally frustrating, having the desire to create but being unable to actually get anything out. It’s similar to being stuck on an elevator. Feeling trapped and claustrophobic. Sometimes it feels like creatively you are stuck in a box and don’t know how to get out of it.

In my next blog, I will let you in on a few lessons I learned through my elevator experience, and how to apply those to a creative block.