Decked in flannel and scarves, with expensive camping gear in tow, a bunch of fools led by Steve Duncan and Erling Kagge (a Norwegian mountain climber) blazed an intrepid trail through tunnels, sewers, and other underground spaces beneath Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Lucky for us all, they had the fine privilege of documenting their romp in a full-length Times article, with a day-to-day diary and a slide show to boot (**EDIT: and an NPR bit, too!!)
The author of the article, who went along on the guided trip, had me in conniptions by the first paragraph:
It must have been the third or fourth day — time, by that point, had started to dissolve — when I stood in camping gear on Fifth Avenue, waiting as my companions went to purchase waterproof waders at the Orvis store. We had already hiked through sewers in the Bronx, slept in a basement boiler room, passed a dusty evening in a train tunnel; we were soiled and sleep-deprived, and we smelled of rotting socks. Yet no one on that sidewalk seemed to notice. As I stood among the businessmen and fashionable women, it dawned on me that New Yorkers — an ostensibly perceptive lot — sometimes see only what’s directly in front of their eyes.
Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to post pics from the slide show here, so you'll have to take a look yourself. I'm not sure which is worse: the fact that one of the travelers wore white sneakers (Photo 4) while exploring a dirty old train tunnel, or that the group took an artsy fartsy snapshot (Photo 7) of a woman who's been ACTUALLY LIVING in an Amtrak tunnel for several years as some kind of supremely offensive and exploitative relic. Actually, the worst part has got to be the guides' stupid, ironic expressions of rugged hardship and struggle in Photo 10, as if it were not indeed their own privileged choice to explore the most putrid parts of NYC as an enlightened project of "urban spelunking."
New Year, same old shit.
In a way, this reminds me of when Michigan State University students used to play live Dungeons & Dragons games in the steam tunnels underneath the school. The difference is that they weren't blogging about it. (I know quite a bit about the tunnels, because my dad showed them to me when he worked for MSU in the early Seventies. In other words, I got playing in filthy abandoned tunnels out of my system when I was FIVE. What's their excuse?)
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