I came across a story about a prominent person attempting to use the “up” escalator at the United Nations headquarters in New York, on September 23, 2025, and the very moment this prominent person stepped on the escalator, it ceased to work. Some of us wondered if the prominent person had broken the escalator.
But at least it wasn’t the down escalator.
In 2013, journalist Megan Blake was blogging about foodscapes for her website, GeoFoodie.org, and she titled one of her stories, “Metaphor of the down escalator: Zimbabwe and the decent into food insecurity”.
Her first two sentences hooked me:
“What, you may ask, does a shopping mall in Hong Kong have to do with the food situation in Zimbabwe? Well, I’ll tell you.”
I got pulled right into the story, like a hungry trout who’s taken the bait.
As it turned out, her essay barely mentioned the shopping mall, or escalators… but focused instead on the inflation, unemployment and starvation plaguing Zimbabwe in 2013. Quite depressing. Read it at your own risk.. Hint: the politicians are not heroes in the story.
Apparently, things haven’t gotten any better in Zimbabwe since she wrote that story.
The least depressing thing about her essay was the intriguing photo she used as an illustration. I presume this fascinating set of crisscrossing escalators is not located in Zimbabwe.
Maybe it’s the shopping mall in Hong Kong?
I’ve never been to Hong Kong, or Zimbabwe, so we will all be better off if I stick to writing about something I know something about. Which is down escalators.
I’ve been living in the isolated rural community of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, for the past 20 years, and as far as I know, there’s not an escalator within 100 miles. So I’m writing from memory. In particular, I’m writing from my memory of a family trip to San Francisco when I was about 10 years old. The first and last time I rode an escalator. A four-story department store had six escalators — three going up, and three going down.
My cousin Ronnie and I rode those escalators for about four hours straight. Up and down… up and down… up and down…
Although I might be writing from memory, it’s a vivid memory.
One thing my cousin and I discovered fairly quickly: if you are riding the down escalator, you can turn around and face uphill, and start climbing the steps, and you stay in the same place instead of continuing to ride down. With a bit of extra effort, we found we were able to walk up the down escalator.
We could continue to play on the down escalator until some older, overweight lady in a brown wool coat would come riding down in our direction with a scowl on her face. At that point, my brother and I would politely — and sheepishly — turn and ride down the escalator like decent human beings. Fun was over, temporarily.
As Ms. Blake suggested in her essay about food insecurity in Zimbabwe, a down escalator can be used as a metaphor.
And a damn good one, these days, considering that some of us feel like we’re trying to walk up the down escalator. At the moment — to carry the metaphor forward — we don’t see the older lady in a brown wool coat riding down towards us, but it’s just a matter of time.
And it probably won’t be an older lady. It’ll probably be Little Mike Johnson or Adam Shifty Schiff, wearing an expensive blue suit with an American flag pin stuck in the lapel.
It’s not just us humans who are riding the down escalator. From what I’ve been reading and hearing — if you can trust anything you read or hear these days — around one million animal and plant species are currently threatened with extinction, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
That’s not one million animals and plants. That’s one million animal and plant species.
Bumble bees. Polar bears. Green sea turtles. Corals. Asian elephants. Right whales.
All riding the down escalator. Some of these species are not able to turn around and ‘walk up the down escalator’. The right whales, for example, do not have feet.
The golden toads of Costa Rica recently became extinct. We might have hoped the toads would be able to keep jumping up the steps of the down escalator, but how long can you keep jumping before you just pack it in.
First the golden toads. Then the bumble bees.
Who’s next? Humanity?
Or can we manage to stay in the same place?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.