Erling Kagge

Under Manhattan

Five Days Beneath the Streets of New York

Translated from the Norwegian by Becky L. Crook

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Erling Kagge, 2012

English translation copyright © Becky L. Crook, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Lars Myhren Holand

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Under Manhattan: en reise til New Yorks indre in Norway in 2012 by Kagge Forlag, Norway. Published by agreement with Leopard förlag, Stockholm and Leonhardt & Høier Literary Agency A/S, Copenhagen.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-018-9

This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA

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FRIDAY NIGHT,
DECEMBER 17th,
2010

#

We extracted waders from our backpacks. The air was chilly and we shivered, but I knew it would be warmer below in the sewers, so I removed my wool sweater before pulling on the pants. I was going to disappear from the earth’s surface once again. That was what it felt like. Steve and I perused our surroundings. We were sitting on the stairs outside an exclusive fashion boutique in SoHo, a neighborhood upwards of Canal Street, on the corner of Greene and Grand Streets. Several manhole covers dotted the street ahead of us, all embossed in iron with NYC Sewer Made in India. We’d tried opening many of them, to no avail. As we squatted in the street, coaxing, struggling, and attempting to pry them loose, a few cars motored past and some passers-by walked down along Greene. One couple looked like they’d just come out of a bar. A hipster with a miniature moustache seemed to be on his way to work. Unwilling to risk discovery, we passed the time on the steps below the fashion boutique, waiting. Finally, the street was still. We jumped up and sprinted to another manhole, each stood on one side of it, inserted our fingers down into the holes and heaved up. It gave way. We pushed the cover to the side. It was one of the smaller models, easy to lift. Steve climbed down first and I followed suit. It was now 3.32 a.m. on Friday, December 17th.

Once I was down in the hole, I slid the cover back over my head. It clanked into place. Suddenly pitch-blackness surrounded us. Five or six feet below, I could hear the sewer babbling. I pulled my flashlight out of a pouch on my belt, switched it on, and continued my descent. The shaft going down was narrow. Steve was waiting for me at the bottom. The tunnel hardly afforded space for two people. It was constructed of concrete, nearly three feet high and just about as wide. The temperature was several degrees warmer due to the sewage, the air was dense, and the stench pungent. Bending forward, Steve disappeared ahead of me on his way toward Canal Street. He had dreamed of discovering this part of the city for a long time. I switched on the air gauge fastened to my right breast pocket. It measured zero for poisonous gases and 20.9 for oxygen. Perfect conditions. I crouched down and began the trek forward, knees bent, back hunched, and arms out in front so as to make my body as small as possible. It was hard going and I had trouble breathing. We moved slowly. The stream of sewage flowed in the direction we were heading. At this late hour of the night, more grey water is flushed down than toilet emissions. ‘It’s a nice time of day to be navigating the sewers,’ called Steve.

The trickle and rush of sewage was an ever-present sound. Added to that was the rumbling of traffic above, along Greene. Each time a car wheel hit a manhole cover, there was a loud clang. The roar of the engine eventually subsided, but the reverberation of the manhole cover continued ringing in the metal overhead.

We had already been underway for four days, but it was the first time I found myself asking: What the hell am I doing here?

The closer we came to Canal, the lower and narrower the tunnel became. Peering far ahead, I could see that the tunnel widened out again. Steve called back to me. I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but I understood his meaning: neither of us had expected the ceiling to be lower than fifteen inches. This wasn’t exactly something to ponder at a crouch, however, so I placed my hands on the tunnel floor and inched forward. I soon had to lie flat on my stomach. Wiggling my forearms and knees, I squirmed forward on all fours. The sewer pipes are periodically filled with muck and water. When the water level sinks again, chunks of excrement are left dangling from the top, along with garlands of toilet paper. Our challenge was to elevate our bodies above the floor while simultaneously avoiding contact with the tunnel’s ceiling. But it was too tight. Above ground, the air was dry and brisk, but down here it was muggy, and the warm steam from the sewage wafted into our faces. The stench burned in my nose. I continued my forward scrabble, the filth alternately skimming my chest and my back. My gloves were sopping, and after a few more feet, my hat and jacket were also smeared with muck.

I should, of course, have brought along waterproof gloves, but it was too late now, and up to this point it’d all gone well. I worried a bit about infections. I’d contracted several small scratches from the previous days’ sewer excursions, clambering around between barbed wire and rough concrete. A few more feet ahead and I could no longer avoid the sewage: both my chest and my back pressed against the roof and floor of the tunnel.

A brown rat, a Rattus norvegicus, inspected me from a few feet away, along the sewage rim. Our heads were level above the waste. I looked into two curious eyes. It didn’t blink. Charles Darwin determined that both the rat and I belonged to the animal kingdom, but beyond that, no one had shown what other subjective experiences we might share, except for sight and sound. But neither the sight of me covered in muck nor the sound of me grunting from exhaustion seemed to faze the rodent.

Down there, with the rat, I observed myself as if from a bird’s-eye perspective. ‘Life is like a sewer, [...] what you get out of it depends on what you put in.’ This is life wisdom from mathematics professor and artist Tom Lehrer. I found myself in a funny kind of situation. The rat finally darted off. I looked further into the tunnel. What else was hiding down there? We had already been underway for four days, but it was the first time I found myself asking: What the hell am I doing here?

1. A LITTLE CONTEMPORARY
ARCHEOLOGY EXPEDITION

© Erling Kagge.

#

All of us are born explorers.

You, me, and everyone else.

Exploration is what propels us forward in our first years. When my three daughters were young, they climbed on chairs, up stairs, and up hillsides before they had even learned to walk. But as soon as they started walking upright, moving around on two legs, they stopped climbing.

An explorer is not something that we become, it’s what we are. A child wonders intuitively what is hidden beyond the next ridge. It wants to discover more space around itself. This is our natural state. The joy and curiosity is there from day one, but it often disappears gradually as we grow older. Parents, schools, friends, and employers all have their own expectations of and ideas about how a young person should develop and act, and these expectations come at the cost of our exploratory nature. This is the price of civilization. I have given in to this many times myself, and have also taught my children to do the same. Every nation is founded on the idea that the majority of its inhabitants should contribute to the gross national product. I work, produce children, and pay taxes. There shouldn’t be too many people who opt out of this system.

This wasn’t the first time I’d travelled far toward a singular goal, searching for meaning in life. I had sailed to West Africa, pursued the sun across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Panama Canal, and to the Galapagos, heading further through the Pacific Ocean to Antarctica, around Cape Horn, and to the Falkland Islands, and from the Caribbean back to Norway. To the world’s outer edges. Together with Børge Ousland and Geir Randby, I cross-country skied from Ellesmere Island, Canada to the North Pole. Just after this expedition, I decided to go in the opposite direction. I wanted to be the first person to ski alone to the South Pole. By the time I arrived at that pole after fifty days, without having seen or spoken to another person, I’d already decided to be the first person to reach all three of the earth’s extremes: the North Pole, the South Pole, and Mount Everest. A little more than a year later, I stood atop the world’s tallest mountain.

An explorer is not something that we become, it’s what we are. A child wonders intuitively what is hidden beyond the next ridge. It wants to discover more space around itself. This is our natural state.

The view from 29,000 feet above sea level was overwhelming. The experience was a valuable one of camaraderie and the pleasure of being in nature. All of the meticulous planning and the struggle to reach the top made it even more worthwhile to finally get there. But the feeling of elation on top of the world’s tallest mountain doesn’t last very long before you start asking yourself: How in the world am I going to get down from here? How am I going to keep going?

When Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911, as the first person to do so, his thoughts were in quite another place: I have never been so far from my goal. (Amundsen’s dream since boyhood had been to be the first to reach the North Pole.)

Voyages of Discovery

In my experience, happiness is something that I might come across anywhere, at any time, and even in totally unexpected ways. For me, happiness is rarely a state of mind. When I’m on an expedition, it could be the warmth returning to my body, or when I’m full after eating, or when a good thought surfaces. But the cold, the struggle, and the sweat also serve to remind me how difficult it is to understand what it is that I actually want. Pain and uncertainty go hand in hand with the joy of being on your own voyage of discovery.

Classical voyages of discovery—or perhaps rediscovery, which most of them actually were, since there were always people standing on beaches, observing newcomers like Columbus, Cook, Magellan and Erikson as they ‘discovered’ the new worlds—are about travelling as far as possible from your starting point. Outward, forward, and maybe even upward. With the purpose of uncovering something that heretofore was just a blank space on a map.

So one day I flipped my usual ambitions on their head. Turn it around, I thought. Don’t travel in a single direction, or up and out. This time, stop, head downward, go underground where the sun never shines. Find your own way. Experience freedom by escaping from the daily grind. Look for happiness and joy where not many people have thought to look before.

I wanted to see myself from another perspective and to get to know New York more intimately by discovering its sewers, viewing its structures from below. To disappear down into the shadows, so that each time I resurfaced I would take in the billboards, the din, and follow the bustle of Christmas preparations. From north in the Bronx to Manhattan, through Brooklyn and Queens and out to the Atlantic, part native and part explorer, underground in what I imagined to myself as the city’s subconscious. That part of the city that no one considers as long as water flows from the tap, foundations stand solid, waste vanishes down toilets, and subways follow their routes, but which is essential for the life that takes place above ground. I wanted to experience how this city, which I like more than any other, appears from below, with a perspective shifted by 180 degrees. What’s down there? What is New York like inside out? Is there a system? Does anyone live down there, in the belly of the city?

And could I start to understand those things I’d encounter on my journey by revisiting Aristotle, listening to Lady Gaga, and reading Dante Alighieri’s classical work The Divine Comedy, about his sojourn through the underworld?

I had good reasons for bringing Dante along on my trip. Dante’s journey also begins when he is halfway through his life. He realizes he is lost. Together with his companion and guide, Virgil, Dante travels through the abyss and further on, through purgatory and paradise—the two really undertook some serious existential travel. At the very beginning of the tale, there’s a scene I can’t forget. Dante imagines himself as a drowning man. He pulls through by the skin of his teeth, but as his feet finally reach solid ground and he sits gasping for breath he does not look on ahead, but rather backward, toward the direction from which he came—toward the sea and the unpredictability that he’d just escaped. As I sat reading the scene, I could very well recognize the feeling. Life can sometimes seem too safe and predictable—your comfort zone can become your world. So I was long on safety and coziness, but as befalls most men at some point in the middle of their lives, I was desperate to leave it all behind. I felt a gnawing restlessness and turmoil throughout my whole body, and I wanted to feel present in my own life again.

Many of my expeditions have taken place in pristine, clean and sunny environments. The white expanses of the poles, the vast blue, glittering oceans and Everest, getting closer to the sun than I had ever been. Now I wanted to descend into the dark, man-made dungeons of New York.

My site was not chosen at random. The city has always been good to me. I’ve fallen in love there, seen the best art, formed lasting friendships, and indulged in every way. New York has given me highs of all kinds.

It is the city of all modern cities. That small, compact island of Manhattan sprouts continually upward, never outward, to accommodate its many inhabitants, and it also houses a little-known, man-made wilderness beneath its surface. Of course New York rarely scores high on lifestyle surveys. The air quality isn’t the best, everything is expensive, social inequality is vast, and space is limited. Yet despite all of that, I get the impression that it’s the place people most want to live. Preferably right smack in the middle of Manhattan even beneath it.

Steve Duncan

My original intention was to go solo. But then I read about the American Steve Duncan, aged 32, and his trips beneath the city. His experiences would undoubtedly make the journey both safer and more interesting. Steve is a legend among a small group of urban explorers: people who go around discovering the cityscape and its man-made reality. I called him up and we agreed to meet some months later, in August 2010. I flew to New York and we walked for sixty blocks under Manhattan. The trip took most of a Saturday.

I told him about my idea: to cross New York through a network of tunnels in different neighborhoods. The plan would be to navigate from the deep innards of the city, through sewage, water runoff, garbage, and confined air, out toward the salty water of the ocean. Since the tunnel systems were not always connected, we would occasionally have to surface and continue above ground.

According to Steve, exploring the underground is akin to opening a clock and examining all the gears and mechanisms that make it tick.

Steve had never heard of anything like this, and he accepted at once. His dreams of rediscovering the city’s subterranean history had taken root during his earlier studies at Columbia University. According to Steve, exploring the underground is akin to opening a clock and examining all the gears and mechanisms that make it tick.

Steve’s dream began like this: one evening he couldn’t get into the mathematics building. The doors were locked and he’d been out too late. Finally giving up, Steve asked another student if there were any alternative entrances. The student said yes, and pointed, instructing: ‘Go in that direction and you’ll come to the main tunnel. Take that, and follow the steam pipes.’ Steve followed the student’s tip, but first he just stood peering into the university’s unlit tunnels. Should he go in? He had always been afraid of the dark and had to struggle with himself to face the inky blackness. ‘If I were able to go into the tunnel and further on into the dark,’ he thought to himself, ‘I’d have something to really be proud of.’ Thus began Steve’s deep interest in life underground, or, as he calls it, each city’s microcosmos. After that incident, he switched majors and began studying Urban History, but he thought it was more exciting to observe the course of history with his own eyes and to be able to touch with two hands what he was studying. Steve has decided to use the next years to inform the outside world about what he’s found hidden below the city’s streets.

‘I love the idea—though I’m not alone in this—to be one of those people who knows the city’s ancient maps,’ Steve told me in his laid-back Maryland accent, ‘and to be someone who has really been there and has really experienced it, until one day I can say, like Robert Frost, that I “knew the brook, its strength / And impulse, having dipped a finger length / And made it leap my knuckle.”’

I prefer to travel alone or in a small group. This is the Norwegian ideal, but this was New York. As our December trip drew near, I quickly began to understand that it would be different. On some parts of our journey, Steve and I would travel alone, but we would have company on other portions. A New York Times reporter, Alan Feuer, had heard about the trip from his boss a few days before we were to start. ‘Alan, listen,’ his boss said. ‘A Norwegian explorer and another guy are planning an expedition through the underground. I thought of you immediately. You interested?’ Alan accepted immediately. He said it was like getting an assignment for a wilderness-exploration party from the nineteenth or early twentieth century dropped in his lap. Also, Jacki Lyden from NPR was going to make a radio program about the trip, and Brent Baughman would accompany her to record sound.

Andrew Wonder, Liz Rush, and Will Hunt are all urban explorers and also wanted in. Andrew is a photographer and planned to film parts of our journey. Liz is Steve’s girlfriend. For their first date, Steve took her to the top of Manhattan Bridge—a slick move that apparently worked. She later told me: ‘When we reached the top, twilight was falling, and I knew this was the start of something—I fell in love with both Steve and the amazing city.’

Everyday life is sometimes short of one of life’s most vital emotions: excitement. ‘I know of an Englishman,’ wrote Johan Wolfgang von Goethe on one occasion, ‘who hanged himself so he wouldn’t have to knot his tie every morning.’

Will Hunt was writing a book on urban exploration. In his brown horn-rimmed glasses and elegant scarf, he looked more like he was on his way to a café. He had a penchant for philosophy, too: ‘I’ve always thought that guys like Steve view the city the way a surgeon views a human body: with a single piercing glance, they’ve mastered the city’s anatomy. For them, the physical environment is a kind of photographic negative of itself. The city’s surface is stripped away, and that which was suppressed and marginalized comes to light.’

Steve assured me that he and I would be the only ones to complete the whole trip. For me, the two of us were the primary explorers on the trip. I paid little attention to the others who came and went. ‘The others are going to psych themselves out,’ Steve said to me. He wasn’t putting anyone down, he was just predicting that no one else would want to go the whole way. The next days would prove him right.

The Cycle of Civilization

Everyday life is sometimes short of one of life’s most vital emotions: excitement. ‘I know of an Englishman,’ wrote Johan Wolfgang von Goethe on one occasion, ‘who hanged himself so he wouldn’t have to knot his tie every morning.’[1] Though I’ve never been that extreme, there are times when each day seems to blend in with all the rest. Hope, love, joy, and anger seem to flatten out when life becomes habitual. Excitement is absent. The days are all the same. The challenge— assuming an average Norwegian life expectancy—is that I have about 30,000 days to seek my own path. And at this moment, being fortunate enough to have about 12,000 days left, I’ve already long since learned that the greatest luxuries in life are time and good health.

Steve and I continued planning our little contemporary archeology expedition during the fall of 2010. I like making preparations. It’s exciting. Travelling is like falling in love, and can be almost all-consuming. We decided we would start the trip on Monday, December 13th, 2010, at Van Cortlandt Park and 242nd Street in the north part of the city, and then walk south through the sewage system beneath the Bronx, down beneath Broadway toward Harlem. We chose the date for two reasons: that’s when Steve would be finished with his semester, and I wanted to see New York decorated for Christmas each time I popped up out of the sewer.

I enjoyed imagining the contrast between the plain, dingy atmosphere under the city and the lively, circus-like bustle up above. Within the space of a few hours, we would experience an entire cycle of civilization. Above ground there would be lavish party preparations, hectic Christmas shopping, and restaurants bursting with parched and famished guests, while just below, the end product of civilization—forgotten bits of trash and excrement—would be streaming past. It was a cycle we hoped to experience first-hand.

On Packing a Bag

The art of packing a bag for an expedition is about knowing the difference between those things that one absolutely must bring and those things that one might just prefer to take along. It’s the battle between need-to-have and nice-to-have, where need-to-have always wins. The future and the past are also of little importance on an expedition. Old habits should be left at home. Underway, one’s thoughts are confined to the joys and dangers of the journey; these consume all your attention.

We didn’t determine ahead of time how many days the trip should take, or exactly which routes we would follow. Our backpacks contained everything that Steve and I would need: sleeping bags, thin air mattresses, warm jackets, tools for opening and marking the manhole covers, air gauges, wading pants, and a small stove and pan apiece.

It’s always a good feeling, a liberating feeling, to carry everything I need on my back. I can eat and sleep wherever I want, whenever I want, and I’m not dependent on anyone else.

[1] Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria.

2. VAN CORTLANDT PARK,
242nd STREET, BRONX:
NORTH OF THE NORTH POLE

© Steve Duncan.

#

As a lawyer, I would probably start this chapter with a disclaimer discouraging people from trying something like this themselves. But as an explorer, I say, go ahead!

A good rule of thumb for those who plan to walk and crawl around in sewage pipes is to have an idea how you can get back up before you climb down. It can take a while to find the perfect manhole. In large cities there are countless manholes, though this fact had previously escaped my attention. The real challenge, though, is that they all look alike from down in the sewer, even by the light of a head lamp: a narrow, grime-covered ladder, usually rusty, ascending through a small shaft of stone or brick, and, settled on top, a dirty, grey, circular cast-iron closure. Manholes are often in the middle of the street. Along Broadway—the enormous street that stretches nearly the entire length of New York, and which we planned to follow through the Bronx—the unending traffic made it impossible to attempt opening one of the hatches. The risk was too great for getting a tire in the head or incurring gruesome injuries.

‘You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself,’ stated Buddha. After several weeks on my fifty-day walk to the South Pole, completely alone with myself and the frozen landscape, I began to feel as though I were part of it. The surroundings and the weather became an extension of myself. ‘Here, I can hear and enjoy the silence, and it feels good to be alone in the world,’ I wrote in my journal on the fourteenth day, amid the endless white of snow and ice. As the landscape around me and the landscape between my ears melded, I could sense a deep peace. Eight days later, on day twenty-two, I continued writing: ‘At home, I only seem to appreciate “big bites.” Being down here teaches me to value small pleasures—a nuance in the color of the snow, the wind as it lays itself to rest, a warm drink, the patterns of the cloud formations. The stillness.’ I had become part of Buddha’s proverbial path.

Rushing is the opposite of exploring. Stress rarely engenders happiness, nor does it lead to surprises. It can certainly be essential at times in achieving one’s goals, but stress stirs up the feeling that one is living on autopilot: I perform and act, but hardly ever reflect on what I am doing. In New York, it was a challenge for me to avoid stress, even when I found myself underground. When you’re wading through slick excrement, clambering over barbed wire, avoiding being hit by an impending train or subway in the dark or a car that might come barreling past at the very moment you open the manhole cover, there’s a lot to think about. All this on top of preferably having a good time. Following Buddha’s idea of immersion into one’s surroundings is, I found, essential to achieving this aim.

The Nice Thing about Freezing

There are several manhole covers in the asphalt along Exterior Street, a small side street stretching south from 230th Street and Broadway. We ambled down Exterior, sometimes on the paved sidewalk, sometimes in the street. We were on the lookout for a suitable manhole that we might exit from later. Tall brownstones built as public housing defined the area. The buildings were owned by the city. Several parking lots were enclosed by barbed wire, and further down the street we could see an auto-repair shop. It was dark; only the street lamps shed a few pale beams onto the street. It was snowing. And it was chilly, maybe below freezing and with an additional gust of wind. In a way, it’s easier to keep warm in the middle of Antarctica than it is in New York on a cold night. When you’re in the city, you move around much less, the damp air is rawer, and you tend to dress inadequately. In New York, the wind barrels down through the streets, creating wind tunnels between the tall buildings—particularly in Manhattan, with its grid system and almost completely symmetrical road network. If a blast of wind sweeps down a street, there is little to stand in its way. I took off my pants on the street corner, dug a pair of long underwear out of my backpack, and pulled them on. Jacki had a good laugh as I stood on the pavement with bare legs and feet, but it was just something that had to be done. The nice thing about freezing is that it feels so good to warm up again afterwards. I knew it would be warmer in the sewers, but we were still some hours away from our descent.

Each time a car passed, we had to act like we were busy with something else. One of the challenges of manholes in busy streets is that every car that rolls across wedges them further and further in, making them harder to loosen and lift up. They jam quickly and become almost impossible to budge. We went from one to the next, struggling to pry them open with a crowbar. The manhole covers leading to sewers in this part of the Bronx all have the words BB sewer stamped clearly on top, making them easy to locate. The first five were stuck tightly, but then we found one that we were able to open. Steve fastened a red thread to the edge and let it dangle to the base of the tunnel below. This was our plan for avoiding confusion as to which hole we should come out of when we—hopefully—returned later that night.

We decided to start the expedition in Van Cortlandt Park, which is located on 242nd Street, directly east of Broadway in the Bronx. From our start, we would follow a water tunnel to the sewage system to begin our journey.

From Ape to Man

The park appeared ill-maintained. Fallen branches and trash lay scattered about. At the park’s north end, we could make out a white mansion dating from the time that the Bronx wasn’t the Bronx, but a rural, almost untouched area no one had heard of before. For most New Yorkers, 242nd Street is so far north that it might just as well be north of the North Pole.

In Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, which is an attempt to define the essence of New York, the Bronx is discussed as the Third World. The main character, a banker and self-designated ‘Master of the Universe,’ takes a wrong turn from JFK airport to Manhattan and ends up in the Bronx. His lover is in the car with him. Thus begins a very unhappy tale. Nearly paralyzed by the fear of finding themselves in the Bronx, they are forced to stop the car when their way is blocked by a tire. Two black men appear and offer to help. Increasingly desperate, the banker and his lover decide to flee. He pushes the gas pedal to the floor and hits one of the two men, but instead of stopping to check on the man, he opens full throttle and drives away. Later, back at the love nest, his girlfriend praises him for his heroic actions. She credits him for their escape and dubs him ‘The King of the Jungle.’

The Bronx also held an exotic fascination for me, but on this night, as so often happens, I discovered that most places are much nicer than people who have never been there before think.

The subway lines along Broadway are elevated one story above street level where they run in the Bronx. The houses are only a few stories high. The subway runs frequently, and rumbles loudly as it passes. I had never been so far north in the city before, and until I had studied the map, I hadn’t even been aware that Broadway stretched so far. At the same time, it felt like I’d been here before. Of course: I recognized scenes from car chases in action films, where the heroes, bandits, and policemen pursue one another in frenzied chases, weaving wildly beneath the subway lines, full speed ahead.

It kept snowing. Both Steve and I knew what this could mean. We hardly knew each other but I could tell he was worried. A troubled look crossed his face as we discussed our plans. Outside of urban areas, precipitation is absorbed by the earth, but in New York, soil is almost non-existent. Nature has been usurped, and each hour that it snows increases the danger of cumulative runoff in the sewers. The draining water swells in the constriction of the underground pipes. But the snow would have to melt and become water before it could flood the pipes, so we figured we had a bit of time. We agreed to risk it.

I ambled away from the others and the police car. It wouldn’t be good news for any of us to be arrested, but as a foreigner I risked having my US visa revoked. I thought I might be able to melt off into the darkness if the police got too inquisitive.

Arriving at 242nd Street, opposite the yellow-and-red neon signs of Mr. Lee’s Chinese Kitchen Taco, we walked briskly toward Van Cortlandt Park. All of the expedition participants had gathered—Jacki, Brent, Will, Andrew, Alan, Steve, and I—with the exception of Liz, who was at home studying for an exam. It was just past midnight and there was no one else in sight. There’s so much light in New York that large parks are often the only places from where it’s possible to see the stars, but on this evening there was a low cloud cover, so we couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. Now and then our path was lighted up. A number of permanent, rusted barbeque grills were distributed throughout the park. After three hundred feet we heard a car engine and turned. A police car drove toward us. We stopped. ‘What’s our official story?’ someone asked, as the car got closer. We knew we weren’t allowed in the park so late at night. ‘Say that we’re filming a documentary,’ said someone else.

We had already nearly been arrested earlier in the day while doing reconnaissance around a bridge and water tunnel at Highbridge Park. There are lots of rules and regulations in New York, and it was our plan to break several of them. No major offences, mind you, but Richard Ford, unfortunately, was right when he wrote: ‘Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing just to know you’re alive.’[2] A white police car with large NYPD letters across the side pulled up and two uniformed officers peered out at us. One of them rolled down his window. Both grimaced in their short-sleeved shirts as the cold air hit them. ‘You’re aware that the parks are off-limits at night?’ said the one closest to us with a stern expression. I ambled away from the others and the police car. It wouldn’t be good news for any of us to be arrested, but as a foreigner I risked having my US visa revoked. I thought I might be able to melt off into the darkness if the police got too inquisitive. According to Steve, the police in New York are not concerned, first and foremost, about well-educated white folks in parks, tunnels, and bridges at night. But if we’d been junkies, dark-skinned, or had been wearing turbans, it might have been a different story.

The officers didn’t exactly look like they wanted to get out of their car and into the frigid air to win an argument. That, at least, is one advantage of the cold. Andrew explained that he was a student who had to turn in a completed film project at the New York University the next day. The police officer was silent for a moment. He looked at us and was curt: ‘All right, but you gotta wrap it up.’ We nodded and hurried into the grove of trees north of the walkway. So far, so good.

You Can’t Trust Sewage

We continued without a pathway. At our left, a small bird-preservation area suddenly took me by surprise. I wouldn’t have known what it was, had it not been for a tiny, discreet sign providing information about the space. It made me happy, the thought that someone had initiated something like this here in the Bronx.

After walking across uneven terrain we finally arrived at the water. Our way ahead was blocked by a six-foot-tall fence and a gate locked with a chain. On our right was a solitary lamp post with no bulb. It was dark and we wanted to avoid using our flashlights, which might alarm others or attract the police. The fence was easily scaled. On the other side, we headed toward the water’s edge. Further on, we stopped at a wall above the water and the tunnel and looked down. In the dim light, we could see that the water level was high. Judging by the sound, large amounts of water were surging through the tunnel below. Steve broke off some branches and attempted to measure the water’s depth. It didn’t work. I started feeling anxious that we didn’t have much time. The police could return at any minute and then it would all be over for the evening. Steve extracted a rope and tied it around his waist. Holding on to the other end, we lowered him down so he could examine the situation.

You can’t trust sewage. We knew that a rapid flow twelve to fourteen inches deep would make for difficult walking conditions, and any more flooding could easily cause us to lose our footing. The first sign that a flood wave is coming is silence, followed by a powerful gust of wind through the tunnel just ahead of the surge. The sewage flows into an enormous water-treatment plant, which removes undesirable objects and treats the remaining fluid before it finds its way into the Atlantic Ocean. Being swept like a passive morsel down through a tunnel, with no control over direction or speed, wasn’t really part of our plan.

Steve beamed his light toward the shadows, stood and contemplated for a while, and then asked us what we thought. We asked him the same thing. I was not really interested in postponing our departure and waiting for a change in the weather. It could get worse in a few hours. We agreed to make an attempt. Jacki and Brent would stay with Will. Steve had persuaded him to spend the night waiting at the marked manhole in Exterior Street in exchange for coming along with us through a subway tunnel later on. Those of us who remained—Alan, Andrew, and I—dropped our backpacks down to Steve before lowering ourselves into the darkness.

[2] Richard Ford wrote about the importance of doing something wrong in ‘Wildlife,’ Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. I like Ford, but wasn’t familiar with this citation until Morton A. Strøksnes told me about the article.

3. THE BRONX SEWERS:
PARADISE IS WHERE I AM

© Steve Duncan.

#

I was relieved when I could feel my feet touch the bottom of the tunnel entrance. Finally, we were on our way. ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’[3] read the inscription above the gate to hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. But I was more interested in what Dante’s guide, Virgil, had to say before they started out: ‘Here one must leave behind all doubt; here every cowardice must meet its death.’[4] It was good advice.

I’m always somewhat scared before an expedition begins. I lie awake at night, worrying. But as soon as I take the first steps, the fear releases its hold. It is important, because fear can lead to passivity. Nevertheless, I am always somewhat apprehensive throughout the journey. The feeling is essential for remaining vigilant and alert to danger. Too much self-confidence can lead to mistakes. This trip was no exception.

I shone my flashlight into the tunnel. It was murky and hard to see for more than five or six feet. We walked in and looked around. The beam of my flashlight revealed a world of compost and decay. We were surrounded by everything that society wants to get rid of: dirty water and waste, tampons, and garbage that had been flushed down drainpipes from the thousands of homes above our heads. There’s a particular hierarchical structure of topography that is repeated in classical as well as contemporary literature, but especially in film. High up above are the heavens, which we associate with everything good. Deep down below are hell, horror, death, and uncertainty, or else a place where, like Alice in Wonderland, you can slip away and disappear from daily life. The well-illuminated level is ruled by order, predictability, and good weather. At the opposite end is a different weather system, and secrets lie undiscovered. In Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ the underground is the last alternative where one can escape from society’s expectations: ‘Better jump down a manhole,’ sings Dylan, for ‘You don’t need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows.’

In the sharp gleam of the flashlight, I could see how the tunnel had undergone a refinement process since its construction. Thanks to the countless floods that for more than a century filled the tunnel up to its arched roof in water and waste, the bricks were polished.

This filthy stream was originally an open river that ran through the Bronx. At the end of the 1800s, the river, Tibbetts Brook, was covered up and routed underground. Slowly but surely, the city took over the wilderness. Today, nature has nearly been supplanted. There’s something poetic about all of those city rivers throughout the world that have been unceremoniously eliminated from the earth’s surface and buried below asphalt, rarely to be seen again. I miss them, even if I don’t often realize it. The tunnel had scarcely been built with the intention of being beautiful, but it was beautiful nonetheless. A new landscape had been formed for those who were fortunate enough to witness it. The material that was used for construction was red brick, painstakingly laid in a circular pattern 360 degrees around us—walls, floor, and ceiling—everything crafted in the same stone for as far as we could see ahead of us.

In the sharp gleam of the flashlight, I could see how the tunnel had undergone a refinement process since its construction. Thanks to the countless floods that for more than a century filled the tunnel up to its arched roof in water and waste, the bricks were polished. They emitted a soft red glow and were richer in color than other bricks. In addition, they had a soft, pale-golden sheen, a bit like velvet.

When I took up the back of the line, I could see the beams of light from the others in the darkness ahead of me. It was almost like being out fishing on the ocean at night, watching the headlights from fishing boats bobbing in the dark.

We headed south, toward Broadway. As long as we were below the park we mostly waded through water, but as we got close to residential areas and to the sewage pipe that runs along Broadway, the water became a mixture of run-off, soapy water, and garbage.

‘We love New York,’ I shouted, and we heard the echo ahead in the direction we were heading. The water level wasn’t high enough to be worrisome. The snowfall, which could inhibit our itinerary, hadn’t melted yet. We walked in pace with the flow. The floor was uneven in places, and I stepped carefully to avoid tripping. I had only brought a few extra pieces of clothing on the trip, so a plunge into the sewer on the first day would have been both impractical and uncomfortable.

Steve was the first to report a leak in his supposedly waterproof waders. Soon after, I also began to feel cold water seeping into my pants. I was soaked. On our climb into the tunnel we had both most likely scraped a couple of holes into our pants. Alan, Steve, Andrew, and I took a small break up on a ledge. Steve said that he was freezing. ‘Steve,’ I said, ‘the water is cold, but remember it will all get warmer as soon as we get into proper sewage.’ Steve nodded. He later told me that he appreciated this kind of optimism. There was nothing we could do about the holes in our waders. And so I adhered to my philosophy which states that whatever I can’t change, I must, like a good stoic, attempt to accept.

The Root of All Wisdom

The depth of the grimy water varied with the ground surface and with the amount of garbage and other refuse that formed small dams. Sometimes we walked through water that came up to our ankles, at other times it reached our thighs. Andrew’s waders barely went up to his thighs. Each time the water level rose, it seeped in. When you find yourself below ground, wandering through sewage, there’s not much point in complaining because no one is going to be very interested. So Andrew kept quiet and chuckled at himself.

We took turns going first. Each of us wanted to see as much as possible, and I don’t think that any of us was in a hurry to go quickly. When I took up the back of the line, I could see the beams of light from the others in the darkness ahead of me. It was almost like being out fishing on the ocean at night, watching the headlights from fishing boats bobbing in the dark.

I was walking behind Alan when he suddenly slipped and fell on his back. He was sopping wet. That was a little baptism for you, I thought. I didn’t know him well and wondered whether he would regret coming with us, now that he was coated in grime.

One of the most common questions people ask me is if I ever have regrets when I’m on an expedition. I try not to expend energy on these kinds of emotions, because it’s wasted time. Or, as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his book Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, in which the title also constitutes the book’s main theme: ‘Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; [...] laugh at all the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret it either way; [...] Believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret it both ways. [...] Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; [...] This, gentlemen, is the root of all wisdom.’[5] Alan carefully picked himself up, looked down at the squalid, indeterminate mess that now coated his clothes, shook his head, and smiled.

Negative Beauty

While underground, I had to concentrate to find beauty and worth in my surroundings. Beauty was by no means an absolute in the sewers, but I was determined to look for it, and in this frame of mind I managed to glimpse it emerging now and then.

I have always been most intrigued by expedition narratives in which the descriptions touch on the positive experiences of what isn’t there. When I read about George Mallory, one of the legendary pioneers of Everest in the 1920s, I understood for the first time the extent to which long journeys have been about just this idea. Mallory and his colleagues didn’t go to the Himalayas first and foremost because of what they would find, but rather because of everything that wasn’t to be found at those heights: heat, oxygen, predictable weather, and safety. It must have been nearly impossible for those boys to distinguish exhaustion from happiness. The presence of one assumed the other. If climbing Everest had been a cakewalk, they probably wouldn’t have bothered, and would have chosen a different mountain.

The subterranean wilderness had obviously been designed for functionality and not for aesthetic appeal, but it nonetheless contained its own beauty, which was a negative beauty by virtue of everything that did not exist.

That’s how it was underground in New York. The subterranean wilderness had obviously been designed for functionality and not for aesthetic appeal, but it nonetheless contained its own beauty, which was a negative beauty by virtue of everything that did not exist. A sojourn in this place was not particularly comfortable. It smelled foul, and the air up ahead would only get worse. There was never a quiet moment. We were barraged by noise the entire time, from far away or nearby. There were almost no colors. The absence of usual colors such as yellow, blue, or green made it so that I began to distinguish more easily all the variations of brown and grey that dominated our surroundings. The humidity and steam hung like a fog in the tunnel because the air was cooler than the water, which was warmed up by the decomposition of the sewage.

One finds neither peace nor safety in the sewer. You can hardly see just ahead of you. And this is precisely where beauty is to be found—although it’s not always easy to see it. ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see,’ [6] wrote author, anarchist, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau once. A mountain framed by blue sky is regarded as a thing of beauty, and the same can be said for a symmetrical face, or a painting of cows on a green, flowering meadow. The walk through the sewer offered an opposing view of that which characterizes conventional beauty in everyday life. Despite the fact that nature had been supplanted and had mostly ceased to exist, I was able to view the sewage system below the Bronx as something other than ugly, with the exception of the human excrement, in which I was never quite able to perceive beauty. The architectural structure of pipelines below ground is very much like a living organism: tunnels are built and extended, pathways are rerouted, new building foundations are laid, new pipes are joined to the old, and the underground terrain is altered, all of this without much public notice.

The beauty that I found in New York’s underground reminded me of the first time I saw an older Rembrandt painting. I stood in front of the portrait Man with a Falcon on His Wrist in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. Taking time to observe the coarse brushstrokes, I stared at the dark-brown painting, perceiving how the face, the strange background, the bird, and the hat altered beneath my gaze. Details emerged that I hadn’t noticed at first glance. It was almost like gazing into a bonfire and watching how the flames recreate themselves from one moment to the next.

I rarely seek out those things that I am certain are beautiful because I already know exactly what to expect. It doesn’t require any effort, and you aren’t surprised. Rembrandt is another matter. His paintings require a response from the viewer. There’s so much art that is too obvious. A lovely landscape is sometimes only that. It doesn’t display tension, and nothing happens to me when I look at it. In the sewers below the Bronx, I had the opposite experience.

The Raccoon in the Sewer

When it is dark as night the whole day long, it’s almost as if time stands still. We padded off and soon came to Broadway. It got warmer. The sewage flowed in from the north, from a pipe joined to our own, and we could hear the cars passing overhead, atop the manhole covers. Each time a wheel hit one, we heard a clang followed by a ringing that resonated in the air before dying out again. Over and over again.

Apparently, people in the Bronx go to the bathroom a lot in the night, and the amount of sewage that we had to wade through increased. But it wasn’t annoying. The stench was sharp, but the filth blended with dirty water, garbage, and run-off. I actually consider the smell of dirty diapers to be much worse. As I walked, I looked down into the sewage. The filthy water flowed more quickly than our walking pace so that it came from behind, wrapped itself in eddies around my legs, and continued sailing downward, out toward the treatment plant and the ocean, in the same direction that we were headed. Toilet paper, excrement that had been churned into small pieces, an empty bottle, indistinguishable bits and pieces, and here and there a condom. The toilet paper was almost completely intact. I had witnessed the same thing up in the Himalayas: nature breaks down countless elements, but toilet paper survives the winter intact and manages to stay that way for years.

But nature wasn’t completely absent. Suddenly, Alan spotted a raccoon. The fact that he was sopping wet had apparently not dampened his humor, and he called us over. Here in the city, wildlife is usually something seen on television, with the exception of poodles, squirrels, cats, and especially rats, which are everywhere. The raccoon was large and healthy. He seemed somewhat surprised by our visit and scurried off into the tunnel, disappearing.

Steve and I were the only ones to have brought four-gas meters on our excursion. I had bought a new one for the trip, and Steve had taken his old one along. Both meters measured for poisonous carbon-monoxide (CO) and hydrogen-sulfide (H2S) levels, kept track of available oxygen levels, and had an LEL (Lower Explosive Limit) sensor to measure flammable gases. Steve’s meter was partly broken, however, and couldn’t measure the oxygen levels. According to Steve, though, this wasn’t a problem. He let Alan carry the four-gas meter. If the meter indicated an absence of explosive gas in the tunnel, he planned to test out oxygen levels by lighting up a cigarette. If the cigarette extinguished by itself, it would mean a lack of oxygen.

After about two or three hours, the alarm around Alan’s neck began to sound: a clear, shrill beeping noise. We all jumped. The alarm beeped in short intervals. Alan looked at the gauge and checked the various measurements.

I stretched out my hand in front of me and couldn’t see it. Not even my upper arm. It was almost like I’d ceased to exist.

Steve asked Alan to check the batteries. They proved to be almost empty, which accounted for the alarm. Should we continue? We discussed it back and forth. I dimmed my flashlight so as not to blind the others, and beamed the light to and fro across the grime-covered faces of Steve, Alan, and Andrew, who emerged partially with each flash. Should we climb out of the tunnel here? But everyone wanted to keep going. Not only were we deterred by the prospect of giving up, we also thought it could be dangerous and careless to climb out in the middle of a congested street. We decided to stay close together and to make do with a single meter.

Wandering through a tunnel is like walking in a monotone landscape, like being at sea far out from land, or in the midst of a thick fog. It’s always difficult to know just how far you have come. Without variation in your surroundings for orientation, it’s hard to have a sense of cardinal directions or time. Marlow, the narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness[7], who had originally dreamed of reaching the North Pole, reflected on something similar as he sailed along the coast of West Africa at the beginning of his journey: ‘Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places [...].’

As we walked down toward Harlem, increasing amounts of sewage spilled from small pipes or larger tunnels protruding from the walls. Some of the pipes looked clogged. Crusted excrement in various shades of brown hung in bulging formations from the openings. Other pipes contained a steady flow. The influx of sewage had become so extensive that the tunnels and pipeline systems had been expanded to include multiple parallel sections of tunnel. It was a sewage superhighway. The beautiful brick stones that had dominated farther north had now been replaced by concrete.

We switched between tunnels for the fun of it. At one point I found myself walking alone in a tunnel. I decided to turn off my light. It was an endless, permeating darkness down there, much darker than anywhere I have ever been. I stretched out my hand in front of me and couldn’t see it. Not even my upper arm. It was almost like I’d ceased to exist. For a few moments, I was encapsulated by complete silence. ‘You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf—then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as well.’ This is not my own description. It is Marlow’s, depicting what it’s like to be in the jungle. But I understood it. Emerging from the tunnel, I could see the conical lights from the others’ head lamps ahead of me in the darkness. I followed the three deep shadows that constituted Steve, Alan, and Andrew. After a while, we were careful to stay in the easternmost pipe. We knew that the pipes would diverge up ahead and one of them would take us down along Exterior Street, heading east. We didn’t want to risk missing the tunnel crossing and branching off in the wrong direction.

Blank Spots on the Map

Navigating underground is no easy task. There are few maps of the area, compasses aren’t much help, and no one really knows how many tunnels exist below New York. Much less how long they are, or where they all lead. Although the system was built by humans, there doesn’t seem to be anyone with an overview. This is one of the things that Will likes. He informed me that he’s set aside several years for researching and understanding urban exploration. The underground, he argued, is ‘the last frontier in an over-mapped, Google-Earthed world.’ Or: it’s one of the last bits of Earth that hasn’t been discovered or regulated. That means that there are still blank spots on the map. I like that thought. Throughout history, leading voices in each generation have asserted that there’s hardly anything left to discover, and yet some new terra incognita always pops up. When Roald Amundsen and his men reached the South Pole—the first people ever to reach the last place on earth—The New York Times summed up the event as follows: ‘The whole world has now been discovered.’ They couldn’t have been more mistaken. There will always be mysteries tucked beyond the horizon, or below the surface of the ocean, or even beneath the office building of the city’s largest newspaper.

Sometime later, a little side tunnel curved off to the left and sloped gradually downward, from Broadway. According to our calculations, this must be Exterior. We were relieved. Not because we had been afraid, but because there was always the chance that something might go wrong. We would arrive at our end point after only three hundred more feet through the tunnel. I was glad that we had managed to avoid danger, but I also felt a bit melancholy. When we spotted the red thread dangling in front of us, I knew that the first stage of our journey had come to an end, but I still looked forward to what was to come. We shouted up, and Will answered from above. He had been waiting for us for four hours, together with Jacki and Brent. There weren’t any cars in sight. We climbed easily up the rusty ladder and out into the winter night. I greeted Will and noticed the mist that had accumulated on his glasses.

It felt good coming up out of the sewage pipe, but I immediately missed the sense of excitement and uncertainty from below.

Voltaire Was Right

Just down the street, on Broadway, and opposite the Astral Fitness & Wellbeing Training Center and a run-down gas station encompassed in a fortress of barbed-wire fencing, we came across a twenty-four-hour Dunkin’ Donuts. We went in to celebrate with a cup of hot chocolate. The employees were cheerful and bopped around in matching hats and collared T-shirts worn over long-sleeved sweatshirts. There weren’t any other customers, so we kind of just took over. Lining the wall were four oversized freezers filled with enormous, brightly colored cakes. We put down our backpacks and for the first time I took a clear look at the faces of my companions. Holy smokes, were we nasty! Steve, Alan, Andrew, and I peeled off our soiled clothes and gathered around some pink tables. The stench from our clothes competed with the sweet smell of the cakes. Steve and I tossed our damaged waders into the trash bin. I half-expected some manager or other to approach us, demanding that we contain our belongings or leave immediately. But New York isn’t like other cities. At least not this Dunkin’ Donuts, anyway. We sat there, disgusting and stinking to high heaven while a smiling employee mopped away the shit around our feet. Maybe I’m naive, but I think New Yorkers are simply more open to what it means to be different than many other people are.

The hot chocolate tasted heavenly, and as I leaned back, I thought about how rarely I manage to enjoy life exactly where I am, at the moment that I am there. But on this morning it was different. If I could have chosen to be anywhere in the world, I wouldn’t have chosen anywhere other than precisely this café, sitting there on a flimsy metal chair at some pink tables. ‘Paradise is where I am,’ wrote a philosopher—I think it was the French philosopher Voltaire—but unfortunately this is not so easy to achieve. I am a bit more akin to Woody Allen, who said something like, ‘When I’m in Paris, I dream about being in New York. And when I’m in New York, I dream of being in Paris.’ I often experience this same longing, but not just then. On this morning, Voltaire was right. Sitting there at Dunkin’ Donuts felt just like being in paradise.

[3] John Ciardi, Inferno, Canto III, line 9.

[4] Allen Mandelbaum, Inferno, Canto III, line 14 (The original translation uses the word ‘hesitation’ but the author here changed it to ‘doubt.’)

[5] The citation from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: A Fragment of Life is from the translation by Alastair Hannay, Penguin Classics (1992), but the quote (and the translation) has been slightly altered, or ‘Norwegianized’ by me to say ‘the root of all wisdom’ instead of ‘the sum and substance of all philosophy,’ as was originally translated by Hannay.

[6] Henry David Thoreau was an author, poet, and anarchist, and was concerned with civil engagement, the right to refuse to pay taxes, and non-violent protests. Walden is his main work, but I got the citation from a Christmas card I received from an American friend. The original quote is actually, ‘The question is not what you look at, but what you see,’ and is taken from Thoreau’s Journal, August 5th, 1851.

[7] Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was originally published by William Blackwood & Sons in 1902.