Laurel Highlands
Pennsylvania
July 1991
We first arrive for our hike at a cabin owned by one of Scott’s hunting acquaintances. Apparently the cabin has not been used for quite a while because just outside the bathroom door, I stumble across a very old mouse. So old that it’s actually just a mouse-shaped heap of dust with a few bones and teeth and a wisp of vapory skin.
After we proclaim to each other, “Wow, neat!” for a while, I use the toilet. This is moments before Scott announces, “Oh by the way, the pump isn’t turned on so you’d better not use the toilet.” Hmm… Okay, thanks.
John is looking at the large topographic map tacked to the wall in the cabin while Scott and I pack and repack our day packs, and compare knives. We decide to hike over the ridge toward the old Laurel Hill turnpike tunnel. “Can we remember this terrain?” I ask. In response, John pries the nails out of the wall and folds the map down to pocket-size. “No problem.”
Checking one last time to make sure we have enough water, we exit the cabin and hike down a rocky road and through brush until we are on a ridge. Looking down the north side, we see an unused road. This should take us to the tunnel, so we shimmy down the hillside. Once on the road, the view east yields distant mountains as the paved surface fades to dust. In the other direction, not more than two hundred yards, is a gaping, dark hole, the mouth of the abandoned turnpike tunnel. Look at that! It has the appeal of an after-hours amusement park with the keys in the ignition. As one, we aim our feet toward the tunnel, picking up our pace.
We try to recall when this tunnel had last serviced the Turnpike. Our best guess is 1971, two decades ago. Then, the trucks rumbled and cars whizzed through at 75 miles per hour. Now, three weekend hikers stand motionless in this orifice, a mouth yawning open with twenty years of boredom. We stare at the gravel and dirt on the roadway by the faded double yellow line. All around us are rusted electrical boxes and piping, mounds of unidentifiable debris, highway driftwood and wind-blown wreckage from long-gone rushing vehicles.
John says, “Let’s go,” and we begin our hike into the tunnel, three abreast.
The temperature immediately drops ten degrees and the air smells musty, what you’d expect from a room largely ignored for two decades. There must be things in here which are twenty years old! Besides us. We walk along musing about what might lie ahead, what might these twenty-year-old things be.
“What are we doing?” Scott asks.
“We’re hiking into the tunnel, three abreast,” I say.
The light begins to fade at about two hundred feet. Two parallel yellow centerlines lead into the darkness. Occasional piles of plaster lie in dusty heaps, long ago fallen from the ceiling. Here and there are small puddles where the roof has leaked. Hanging open on hinges on the filth-covered tile walls are electrical boxes, rusted so much we wonder that they can still hang. Looking up, what plaster left on the ceiling is peeling, and there are inexplicable, regularly-spaced holes, about the size of basketballs.
What lies ahead? Looking past the piles of crap the light fades completely. It is impossible to see anything. No matter how hard we squint, nothing. We wonder how long the tunnel has to be for the opposite end to be in total darkness. What is the “length-threshold” of a tunnel. And for that matter, why would the other end be dark?
The closer we think we are coming to the answer to this question, the more elusive the answer becomes. As we physically move farther into the darkness, away from the light, away from the outside world, we are psychologically moving closer to each other, exposing more of ourselves.
“Anyone can call this off at any time, no macho shit here, guys.”
“It’s not too bad, although I’m not sure why we’re doing this.”
“Why, kinda because it’s there, y’know, like the mountain that must be climbed? This is the tunnel that must be… whatever. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually gone exploring. I’ve lived my life with few mysteries like this. I mean, c’mon, exploring something mysterious is an activity I pretty much left back in my childhood. What did I know from danger then?”
Danger? The tunnel grows darker and danker. At this depth, we can barely make out the double yellow line at our feet. The place smells from rot and mildew. The cool and wet air makes our necks sweat. Our footsteps, even though we wear hiking boots, echo off the smooth walls. We hear an occasional “scritch scritch” which might be the skittering of a critter with more legs than the three of us combined. Or it might be the sniffle of a troglodyte. Nothing lies ahead but the hint of a dim glow. Maybe a trick of the eye. When we look back, the tunnel has curved down into the earth and it looks the same as what’s ahead. Maybe a glow, maybe not.
Without a word, we stop, all three at once. After a moment, someone says, “Why did we stop? What’s the problem here?”
“What are we afraid of? What could possibly harm us in here?”
“That’s easy. Slimy things, piles of stuff to turn our ankles, snakes and rats with teeth even bigger than Scott’s… Y’know, derelicts, wide, deep holes in the floor, cave-in, bats. I don’t know what all else, but there’s plenty to be afraid of.”
“I don’t think you’ve left anything out…”
It is at this moment that we hear the noise of thunder. We turn to face each other and instinctively reached out to make sure we were all there, that in that moment we hear the thunder, no one has vanished. How could that happen, that loud noise makes things disappear from inside tunnels?
The rumbling becomes louder but it is too consistent, too continuous to be thunder. This is hardly a relief as we now realize that the roar is the unmistakable throaty bellow of internal combustion engines, a lot of them, without mufflers, the kind that are mounted onto the frames of motorcycles, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, glossy black Harley-Davidson hogs, the kind of glossy black machines driven by the nastiest, dirtiest, most unreasonable mutant greasers, punks who eat puppies and have kitchen forks stuck in their ears and cheeks just for the fun of it, and haven’t slept for four nights because they like being irritable. And here we are, three volleyball players taking a stroll in an old tunnel thinking, “Eeah, I hope I don’t accidentally step on a turtle.”
“What do you think they’re doing?”
“More importantly, do you think they’re coming in here?”
We look for a place to hide in case they do enter. I can just picture it. “Hey Moak, hey Spike, we’re gonna have our family reunion down by the abandoned tunnel. Let’s get the hogs cranked up and go beat the crap out of some volleyball players.”
There is a ledge built into the wall on each side of the road, each just wide enough to stand on, but no doubt the killer bikers would have their lights on and would have no trouble spotting us. Unquestionably, they would then pull us off the ledge and beat the crap out of us. Because they like being irritable.
I suggest we play it cool. “There’s no way they are expecting anyone to be in here, right? When they come in, stand three-across in the middle of the road right in their path, put your arms up in the air and act insane. Y’know, surprise them with a round of the Albanian National Anthem. I think our presence alone will surprise them, but if we act crazy, we’ll definitely shock them. Maybe then they won’t beat the crap out of us.”
“Yeah,” John says, “they’ll be so traumatized, they’ll think they’re imagining things. Then they’ll beat the crap out of us.”
“You’re probably right. Hell, these guys are so mean they carry keys they don’t even need!” By this time, we understand that we have no viable recourse but to appeal to a higher power. (What might that be? The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission?)
But wait. The engine roar begins to fade. Hey, they’ve turned around at the mouth of the tunnel. They’re retreating. We squint at each other. “Well…?”
Scott suggests, “Probably just having a few speed trials at the closed road leading to the tunnel. No good reason for them to actually come in here.”
The Crisis is over. We have survived the Tube of Death. For now, all is well again. Nobody’s gonna beat the crap out of anyone.
The temperature drops another five degrees, we feel a little more pressure on our ears, the humidity increases as does our pace and heart rates. The air makes us think of dead people’s weather inside a crypt.
Having survived what surely had to be the biggest challenge this hike could present, we move on. The only pickle we can get into at this point is to face the question of own courage and audacity in challenging this tunnel. “If we could only see a little better, this whole thing would be a lot easier,” I said, trying to keep the tension out of my voice. I mention to John and Scott that I have a flashlight and matches in my pack. “All right,” Scott says, “this guy comes prepared!”
Even though we feel no air flow, the matches won’t light. The flashlight is barely bright enough to be seen if you are staring directly at it. “I guess I should have checked the batteries. How long do they last, by the way?”
Scritch, scritch.
Our pace has slowed to a shuffle, our enthusiasm waning like the light from the tunnel entrance. In fact, when we turn around, the tunnel entrance is gone. We have progressed to the point where the descending bend in the road now obscures the light of day from both tunnel entrances. Or exits.
We now have a total absence of visual contact with the great warm, sunlit outdoors. “Hey, big deal, we’re going to walk through a tunnel. You guys wanna turn back? This is stupid.”
“No, this is fun,” Scott says. “This is really neat. Let’s keep going, we’ll protect you.”
To boost my courage, I try an approach of reason. “Let’s think about this. What are we really afraid of here? What’s the worst thing that could happen to us?”
“Well, besides land slides and all that stuff we said before, not to mention the bikers, I don’t know. Maybe it’s something about the dark that goes back to cave days. Maybe there’s something about taking on this kind of danger when we don’t have to.”
When we were kids, we are compelled to take on adventures. Remember? “All the kids did it!”
We had lots of escapades in those days. Whatever came along, we were ready. Riding our bicycles down huge hills was exhilarating, climbing and jumping around construction sites was a quest, an abandoned house was an invitation. Smoking was cool, but the adventure of not getting caught was emancipating. A copy of Playboy that you and your buddies sneaked into the woods was a whole new promise of adventure: venturing to the nether regions, exploring new caves.
Any day in the neighborhood could bring a new exploit. Now in the tunnel, we look at the changes brought on by the passing of twenty-five years. As kids, our fears, if we had fears, were of monsters of whatever shape, style and hue. Also bikers. Now, as adults, we know a little more about things with hairy eyeballs and dripping teeth. We know there aren’t any real monsters. “Yeah, but there are still bikers.”
“What if we come upon a skeleton?”
“So? What’s so scary about bones? Hell, you’ve got a whole bunch of ‘em stuck inside you.”
“What if we run into a wall? What if we get to the other end and it’s blocked off and we can’t get out?”
“We turn around and come back.” We’re convincing ourselves that these dangers aren’t that daunting.
We talk about John having a responsibility to his family. “I’ve got a wife and kid I have to consider. How could I die and abandon them just because, on a whim one day, I felt like doing a little adventuring?”
Die?
We agree that that attitude is what classifies us as adults, and not reckless kids. There probably isn’t anything in this tunnel to kill us, but nonetheless, Scott soon says, “Uh, guys, I think I’ve had enough of this. Let’s turn back.”
“I know I said that if any one of us wanted to quit, we all would,” I say, “but you’re not serious, are you?”
“Well, yeah, I am.”
“There’s a reason the three of us came together,” John points out. “Earlier, Coach wanted to call this off and Scott pulled him through. Now it’s the other way around. Let’s stick it out a little more, okay?”
Tension mounts as we move forward. Soon, even John is breathing heavily, eyes darting. It is his turn to suggest that we turn back. “How about we go back, climb up over the mountain to find the other end of the tunnel and then we can start at that end and make our way through in the other direction.”
Fine. Good idea. No sweat. Let’s go. Just like those little metal hockey players in the old tabletop Air Hockey game, we spin around and make our way back toward the opening. As the wedge of sunlight grows larger, so does our courage. We idly wonder why we turned around, but we keep going toward the egress. And finally, we are outside again, sunshine on our faces.
With barely a moment to gather ourselves, John presents the topo map and a compass and lays a course through the trees up over the mountain. As we trammel through the weeds and trees and brush, we come upon an abandoned service road with a storage tank at its end. We find a tree stump that was all but powderized by vermin and weather. At the ridge is a wide swath cut for a power line which makes it impossible for us to forget that most “natural areas” have been imposed upon by civilization. We follow the swath and find many round holes drilled into the ground. They are about the size of English muffins and some are open and some are sealed. “Core samples,” says Scott. “Engineers have to keep an eye on the moisture content and integrity of the rock and soil above the tunnel, to make sure it doesn’t collapse in. These are left over from the days when the tunnel was operational.
Farther on, we come to an observation tower. I am itching to climb it, in spite of my fear of heights. Fortunately for me, the daunting fence and signs make it clear that this tower is off limits to civilians. We sit on a rock eating fruit and trail mix and guess at the height of the tower. Scott relates some of his Dating Club stories.
More bushwhacking brings us down a hillside, over a wire fence, past some paving machinery and construction vehicles and around piles of gravel and rock. “Behold! There it is!” The other end of the tunnel is in sight.
Before we get there, our path to the opening of the tunnel is partially blocked by two thirds of a deer skeleton, including a nearly-intact skull with antlers. We examine the torso, jabbing at it with a stick. “Scott, do you know how we can tell this was a male?”
“Well, let’s see. The hip bone is kind of narrow…” He pokes around the bones with his toe. “The rib cage seems large… No, how can you tell? The hooves?”
“No, dummy, by the antlers.”
A close approach to the tunnel reveals tons of rock salt piled into the orifice, leaving barely a torso-sized opening between the mound and the ceiling. “This must be why we couldn’t see any light at this end. The opening is too narrow to let much light in.”
“What do you think? Should we try it?”
“Are you kidding? This is why we’re here. If we can get past the salt, we know we can get through.” Sure. How did we know that? (We know a lot of things we don’t know.)
We shimmy up the mountain of road salt and find that the space becomes increasingly smaller as we climb farther into the tunnel, narrowing so much we must crab walk to get through. Past the crest of salt, it suddenly becomes so dark we can hardly see anything. We inch our way down the nether side of the mound to the pavement. Inside again! Immediately it is damp and cold and as soon as the three of us are standing on the roadway facing our walk, we hear the “scritch, scritch” once again.
We begin our walk. Vision soon adjusts to the subdued, shadowy light and we are able to see a brightening far ahead, at the other end of the tunnel. Unlike our faltering steps on our first try, our pace is brisk and confident.
Like being in a dungeon in a dream, it is difficult to figure time inside this underground passage. Maybe we walk for fifteen minutes to get to the east end of the tunnel, maybe forty-five. As we emerge, Scott announces blithely, “Hey, P O C. Piece of cake.”
Yep, we are kings of the mountain, at least from the inside.
Yeah. Scritch, scritch.