Tunnel Visitation
In the IRT Subway Speakeasy, a young poet played a Japanese
bamboo flute. While D.L. admired black nylons straying from
a neighboring table, the poet’s candy-apple choppers whispered
lascivious instructions. The evening’s crystal stemware of
chilled notes lobbed the Dionysian-on-the-lam into the legendary
Minoan labyrinth at Knossos. He yielded to temptation, whipped
out his camera, and began photographing that Earth-Mother-of-all-later-human-channels-unto-rock.
Each flashbulb carried him closer to the sewage tunnels of
the Indus Valley. He was soon thirty-five thousand years from
the music. His must be the oldest photographs on record. D.L.’s
Nikon began impressing lost snippets from the Hebrew Bible.
Fortunately, his lenses read in both directions. From what
D.L. could determine, Joseph of the Technicolor Rainbow Dream
Coat hadn’t been thrown into a cistern after all, but had
been held captive at the Dothan Station instead. This journey
started to sound like modern-day hostage taking in the Middle
East. So that’s what it was like to have an ayatollah for
a brother! As for everybody involved, that Joseph incident
would become a pretty expensive ride on Pharaoh’s Subway.
D.L. wasn’t so sure he wanted to know any of this.
Just as he turned about, he bumped into
Dante Alighieri. At least this wasn’t Dante’s Station, the
Black Hole! D.L. counted his blessings. No, this station was
Virgil’s, that satanic sorcerer who’s capable of burrowing
through entire mountains in a single night. As usual, Virgil
was the tour guide. This evening was getting too thick with
poets for the photographer’s blood. If D.L. had been thinking
clearly, he’d be snapping portraits of both Italians and would
thus possess history’s only known photographs of them. Instead,
he was interrupted by a friendly hiss - Zimm, the lovable
newspaper editor and poet from Upstate. The night was definitely
dripping with poets.
"Hey! This way!" he whispered, motioning to a side
corridor. The impoverished journalist had been sent to rescue
the lost protagonist. "This 1810 French canal tunnel
was never used," he said, leading D.L. along a narrow
towpath. "The boatmen united in their fear of its endless
darkness. You might be interested in knowing," he continued,
"of a similar situation that arose on the Sandy &
Beaver Canal in southeastern Ohio. After hearing splashing
in the permanent night, no one dared enter that tunnel. Not
even an offer of eternally toll-free travel could induce a
barge to pass through." In the echoes, D.L. heard English
clergymen prophesying the fruits of damnation to anyone who
dared venture into the London Underground, circa 1863.
D.L. could tell they were coming back toward the surface.
In a four-hundred-yard tunnel beneath the Thames River, they
passed Marc Isambard Brunel’s historic digging machine. "He
spent eighteen years here, launching the modern subway movement,"
the editor explained.
"Let me get a shot of it," D.L. said.
"We don’t have time," Zimm retorted. "I’ve
got to be at the office in another two hours." He set
a wicked pace, and D.L. had trouble keeping up.
In this stretch of history, they feared the newly constructed
tubes would cause buildings to collapse. A few more steps
put even that behind them.
A few more steps, indeed, brought them
up to 1912. A clutch of astonished engineers was too engrossed
to notice the time-travelers. The excavators had just broken
into a totally unknown subway all of three hundred and twelve
feet long. In 1870, it seems, Scientific American editor Alfred
Beach had built his private line under lower Broadway. Its
fountain, wind machine, and voiture were still in place.
"Let’s go back and check that out," D.L. suggested.
"D.L.! Come on! The world already has photos of that
discovery."
Their spiral to the surface continued.
While feathering his own nest on the elevated, Boss Tweed
opposed the underground efforts.
As a burly foreman constructing the Moscow system in the 1930s,
Nikita Khrushchev grasped the full power of moving ahead by
snuffing entire shifts of workers in cave-ins and underground
drownings.
In Tokyo, muscular young oshiya have been hired to cram more
riders into each car during rush hour.
"It’s a good thing Khrushchev didn’t know about Tokyo!"
D.L. mused.
"Hurry up, will you?"
"OK! I’m coming!"
They circled again, betwixt Stockholm’s masterpiece and New
York’s disgrace, superstitions and dreadful truths.
D.L. wondered how good Minoans were at Subway Hitchhiking.
Why couldn’t Brunel dig at Virgil’s speed? What connection
did the Catacombs of Rome have with subway construction? D.L.’s
world had quickly shrunk in time and space. Simultaneously,
expanding like a Milky Way.
Jnana Hodson was born in Dayton, Ohio,
and is a graduate of Indiana University, he continues in the
tradition of spiritual renaming, which may be seen in both
Biblical and Native-American examples. In his case, the name
Jnana (commonly pronounced Ja-NAN-a, Sanskrit for the path
of intellect or discernment) was bestowed when he dwelled
in a Yoga ashram in eastern Pennsylvania. As a professional
journalist, he has also resided in Upstate New York, in two
additional quarters of Ohio, in desert-expanse orchards of
Washington State, in the Mississippi River ribbon of eastern
Iowa, in the harbor city of Baltimore, and finally in former
textile-mill towns of New Hampshire. All along, his writing
has grown out of spiritual exploration, often, seeking the
unique cadence of each place that he has dwelled, and at other
times, delving headlong into confrontations and paradoxes
that entangle present-day romance, sexual attraction, and
intimacy, not infrequently, as mythology has long demonstrated,
landscapes and loving overlap. Experimentation - a desire
to discover, by trial and error, structures and language to
synthesize the details he employs - is a central concern in
much of his poetry. Tunnel Visitation is a 725–word excerpt
from Back Track chapters that just didn’t quite fit into his
1990 novel, Subway Hitchhikers (Fithian Press, Santa
Barbara).
Email: Jnana Hodson
Return to Table of Contents