Underground

At some point in the last few years of high school, late junior, maybe even senior year, Becky had this plan. A photo essay. I think all of the Mort acolytes in the photography classes had a final project of some kind and Becky, rather than a tour of Guatemalan sweater vendors and street musicians at Saturday Market or the tedious inevitability of a series on her grandmother’s hands, invited Karen and I to take part in this adventure-slash-photographic essay. The Plan. At Lower McCleay Park under the bridge of Upper Thurman, there was a trail that led up into the forest. I would walk there sometimes with various friends, sometimes with Joann. The trail led up to an odd mossy stone structure whose roof had long since disappeared. Kids—freaky ones that freaking freaked me out—would say that every Halloween, there was a witchcraft mass there and black cats would be sacrificed. I would venture to guess that mainly there were just a lot of vaguely odd sketchers getting stoned. Before the trail though, just beneath the bridge, the stream that tumbled out of those woods went below a huge and tightly spaced wooden grate. From there, it plunged into a tunnel: essentially a huge sewer pipe. This tunnel, it was thought, ran under Portland to the Willamette. Becky, Karen, and I—daring souls that we were—were going in and down. Becky would take pictures as we scrambled. It would be dark, strange, wet. A daring hair raiser? A parable of loss and recovery? A metaphoric plunge into a trickling unconscious? D: all of the above.
Becky, Karen, and I parked in the lot under the bridge. We had a few flashlights each, relatively sturdy shoes, and our usual 80s grasp of 60s hippie-wear all about us. Looking back, I think costumes of another sort would have been more appropriate. To evoke the binding strictures of oppressive conformity, K and I sprawled out on top of the jail-bar-like slats of the grate. The wrinkle of my blue flannel shirt pressed by the parallel bars undoubtedly told of society’s pressures as well as our heroic rebelliousness. Then it was time to go down. It took some squeezing, but we fit through a gap between the wood structure and the carved out ground, and we climbed down some rock under the vast cage-like grate. More pictures. My favorite was when I pressed Karen to be in a ‘meaningful’ pose. Slouch like the world makes you sad. Hang your head at the weight of it all. Let your hair cover your face. You are an allegory. I had just figured out that word, allegory. Literal, historical, typological, and the inexorable mystic swing into the divine. And I took to calling Karen, ‘Allegory’ after that. I even painted a t-shirt that proclaimed her as an ‘Allegory’ whenever she wore its sloppy too brightly colored letters. The thing is, in the moody, world-weary pose, communicating the sadness of an uncaring universe, on Karen’s black vest, she still had her chipper, ‘Hug Me! I Gave Blood!’ sticker. This was overlooked in the high drama of the photo shoot. With the introductory photos taken, we went in. The cement tunnel was round, not quite tall enough that I could stand up straight, smooth along its interior, and one had to walk in an awkward straddle because of the small steam of water running down the center floor. As we walked the bright blank white diminished behind us, and soon it was impossibly black. If I stretched my eyes wide, and concentrated intently, I could still see nothing. There was a complete, whole, and entire absence of light. The sound was water running, and the unsettlingly loud echoes of our voices. Despite being deep underground, in a small tunnel, far from anyone, my voice sounded like a bad a.m. radio with the volume all the way up inside a tin box: everyone could hear me, everyone knew. We trudged along, talking some, laughing at stupid things, turning on our flashlights, but their light was fearsomely feeble: shining out ten or twenty feet ahead revealing only exactly more of the same: cement pipe, dark water, circle of abyss. I have no idea how far we went or how long it took, but we came to a place we had heard about, ‘B Wetz’. At this point, the round tunnel dropped off a small ledge, and the new lower drain went on, but about waist deep full of water. Scrawled on the wall in crude graffiti was the place-name, ‘B Wetz’. We stopped there, and like backpackers surveying an alpine ridge, we ate trail mix and took snapshots. I knew people who said they had gone on from there, but not us. That was all there was. We all were ready to go back, and we began the slog. The air was dank and only gave way stintingly. My muscles ached from walking splayed out, my battery was dying. Eyes ached from trying to see. It was a long while before the small disc of gray white showed, and longer still until we got out. Coming to the forested brightness, the air’s density gave way ethereally; it was scented with doug fir and sap. Green as pea shoot Sundays. The open space released the clanging echoes from around my head. It was warm and it was spring. We shimmied out and skipped like third graders on the path back to the car. Put all our bags and flashlights and things in the trunk. Sat on the bumpers in the sunshine looking up. Almost directly under our feet, somewhere down there, was that pitch-dark hollow concrete passage, the small slip of water sliding by.

Camper Van Beethoven - 'She Divines Water'

Photos by Rebecca Clements