Tunnel

It is something that I count as a blessing, that I have lived in two worlds. One the waking world that I share with all of you in real time. The other is a slumber world just as waking, but which I share with a whole ‘nother people.

On my way back into town, I began remembering the mountain town that I had visited recently. It was more than just a town, actually. More a small city, with several small suburbs. What made this town unique more than anything else, was how it was built around a mountain.

More of a kind of plateau, or at least a not-so-tall mountain. Think Smoky mountains…or Maricopa mountains, if even that. One of the suburbs was situtuated on the east-north-east of this mountain. Here, the mountain was gouged by a deep gorge, which created the northernmost limits of this part of the city. The rock rose several hundred feet higher on the north side of the narrow defile; and old steel truss crossed at one place, and only one place, connecting the city to a treacherous, narrow cliff-hugging highway which was pressed eastward as it fought its way northward.

This suburb, this village of the larger city, which continued to develop and sprawl and grow to the south, west, and north again on the far side of the mountain — this village was also home to a quary, which mined the armpit where the mountains to the north piled across the gorge creating a vast promintory one hundred or so feet high. This quary was the bread and butter for this blue-collar or no-collar section of city. It defined its character through its people. Very good natured, industrious but not uptight.

The quary itself was positioned in such a way that it seldom received direct sunlight. If the promitory were a hundred feet high, and the mountains across the gorge were several hundred feet higher than the average elevation of the village, then the quary mined a small but deep pit dozens of feet down, a short distance above the water level of the river that flushed the defile. In fact the lower section of the quary often flooded when heavy rains or snowmelt ran into town to visit.

But again, the most unusual part of the village, of the quary, of the city was the tunnel. Originally constructed for some long forgotton reason, a single lane tunnel some mile and one-half long bored into the promitory toward the west. Actually, about halfway it turned toward the northwest, in an anti-chamber large enough to hold three or four of the world’s largest dumptrucks, and high enough to have pierced the top of the promitory, allowing a natural oriel to light the chamber. Still, it was strangely clausterphobic.

Somehow, even though it was primarily used by the quary, it was officially a public road. Anyone could pull up to the control gate and press a button signalling their desire to enter. After a sufficient time cycle, the gate would open, a light would green, and you could drive into and through the tunnel. It was a timed operation, not a monitored operation, so the gate only remained open for so many seconds, and you were expected to maintain a certain speed as you drove through. Failure to do so meant the possibility of meeting oncoming traffic, sometimes very huge oncoming traffic.

The procedure was repeated again at the anti-chamber, for the second leg of the drive.

I remember taking it as often as I could, because it felt much like a time machine. The village was an old community, and a relatively poor community. Small homes, simple construction, and forever plagued by the shadow of the mountains. The tunnel would take you into what seemed like the bowels of the earth, but at the same time seemed as superficial as driving through a slice of bread laying on the table. It was so temporary.

But coming out on the west side, you almost exited onto a modern, wide boulevard. Concrete and steel, glass and chrome office buildings in corporate greens. Symbols of government and the arts. It was an entirely different world. And not even two miles away from the village. However the drive around the promitory was nearly ten miles.

The tunnel always fascinated me, is all.

This got me thinking about the other senior year, the one I only dreamed, but more on that another time.