GULF SHORES, Ala. — When John Mullen, editor of The Islander, asks you to volunteer to do an assignment, ask what it is, before saying “Sure, I’ll do it.”

When he asked me to go up on the Adventure Ropes Course at LuLu’s at Homeport Marina, I should have gone over and checked it out.

Instead, with my Nikon camera in hand, I stood in line to get a harness and tag line attached to my body.

Then I was hooked into the structure’s frame’s track and told to “have fun.”

Have fun? I’m not necessarily afraid of heights, but I’m not comfortable walking on a rope 35 feet above the ground without rails on each side of my body to hang on to, even though the worst that could happen is that I’d fall, and end up dangling like a piñata with everyone on the ground pointing, laughing and taking photos.

However, I did proceed up a narrow rickety set of wood steps to the first platform. Well, that wasn’t too bad!! I thought maybe I could stop here, tell John that I’d done it and go back down.

Well, maybe I’d go a little bit further. After all, John said the view is better from the top. Hey, wait a minute … how would he know??

Let’s see now … how do I get up there? There’s a flat staggered rope ladder to walk across, then more of those narrow crazy stairs. I knew I could handle the narrow stairs, (I’d done it already to get where I was) if I could just make it across this horizontal rope ladder.

Behind me, a young man asked me, “Well, whatcha gonna do, Mister?” I asked him if he was scared. He said, “No way. I’ve been higher up at Dollywood. That’s in Tennessee, you know?”

I asked, “How old are you?”  He said, “I’m six!”

I pondered, “Hmmmmmmmm. OK.” I walked the rope ladder. And up the narrow moving stares. Now I was three stories above the ground.

The platform had no rails around it, had a big round frame post in the center of the platform and about a two-foot-wide platform to stand on.

Hugging the post, the track that your lifeline was hooked into allowed others to go around you at the post.

Some people were coming the other way, so I waited. Now my 6-year-old buddy and several of his friends were crowding MY platform while we waited for people coming from the opposite direction to pass.

As if my platform wasn’t crowded enough, those passing from the other direction made me uncomfortable, but it didn’t seem to bother my buddy or his friends.

A young lady, 18, stalled for a while on the platform. She told me she was scared, but her sister had challenged her to go up with her. Just to make her feel better, I told her I was scared, too, and it was OK to be scared, but, of course, I really wasn’t.

Yeah, right!

Well, that’s what I kept telling myself. I decided to stay on my platform for a while, and take photos of people walking a single strand of rope across to the middle section.

From the middle section there were options. You could walk across a narrow beam, walk another single strand of rope to the opposite side or walk a double moving beam.

Another option is to walk out to the edge of a beam, hanging out over LuLu’s “beach,” and look down.

NO WAY!!

Talking to people passing me on my perch, I found, in general, the older folks were more nervous than the younger children. I guess there’s some truth in the fact that young children have not learned to be afraid.

At 66, I decided, I was too old to be doing this. Of course part of it was that I was carrying a very expensive camera that I was concerned about dropping.

I waited there ’til sunset because John had told me to get sunset photos and photos of the beach. The sun set a bit too far north, and behind the Intracoastal Waterway bridge and clusters of trees. The structure wasn’t quite high enough to see across the Island, but the view was nice and you could hear beach music playing from down below.

It was time to go down.

GULP!!

I followed a brave little 5-year-old across the ropes, along a beam and back down the rickety moving stairs. My new friend saw me hesitate as I proceeded down, and turned back to tell me, “Don’t be scared, Mister. This is the easy part.”

My first feeling when I touched mother earth was to kiss the ground, but I didn’t want to brag about my accomplishment. After all, the 5-year-old didn’t do it.

Was it fun? Well, it was a challenge. Would I do it again? I doubt it, but then again, one never knows what John will have in store for me for my next assignment.

Capt. Mark Robinson is a retired merchant captain who lives in Gulf Shores and has a farm in Robertsdale.