The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  We continued on, like caffeinated vampires, sleeping by day and exploring the city after dark. Midnight was the new noon. One night we popped a lid on Fleet Street, where London’s largest subterranean river flowed beneath the city, and we descended into the Fleet chamber, a massive tidal gate and storm outflow with gorgeous cathedral arches of brick. Almost no Londoner would ever see it, or even be aware of its existence beneath their feet. I glanced nervously at my watch, as the journey was timed with the tide on the Thames. Garrett cracked a beer.

  When we came out dripping from the underworld, a double-decker bus rolled past, but the driver paid no attention to our extremely conspicuous group emerging from a manhole at 2 A.M. We circled around the city again, Garrett, restless, looking for something. He spied a 10-story construction site surrounded by chain-link and scaffolding. There was a small gap in the fence, just big enough for Garrett to haul himself effortlessly through. Wary of security guards and cameras, I followed as silently and elegantly as a bear clambering into a Dumpster. We made our way up an internal stairwell to the roof and onto the ladder of a massive construction crane. Finally we were sitting right next to the control cabin 150 feet up, feet dangled over the void, London glittering to the horizon. Garrett pointed out landmarks, famous and less so: Big Ben, the Eye, the Shard, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Gherkin, King’s Reach Tower. The names sounded like constellations or rock-climbing routes. In fact, he had summited most of them.

  The risks were as real as in mountaineering, of course. Explo had nearly fallen from a church steeple when a rusty ladder rung broke off in his hands, and Otter had once broken his arm in a sewer. A few weeks earlier, there had been a rumor that a Russian explorer had died falling through a skylight while crossing a rooftop. Predictably, the explorers downplayed the risk. “The percentage of us who actually die is pretty low for what we do,” said Explo. The urbex ethos precluded suing property owners over injuries, and Garrett described the acceptance of risk, and a sort of dance with it, with a term he’d appropriated from Hunter S. Thompson: edgework.

  As if to demonstrate the concept, Garrett climbed out onto the 100-foot jib of the crane, angled like a fishing rod high above the city. There was no ladder, nothing between him and the black cabs cruising the street far below. His movements along the fog-slicked struts were as deliberate as a stalking cat’s. Edgework.

  For Garrett, the thrill of urbex is as much about metaphysical exploration as it is physical adventure. The theoretical DNA of much of his work traces back to the concept of “psychogeography,” defined by the French situationist philosopher (and noted alcoholic) Guy Debord in 1955 as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Debord encouraged a practice called dérive (“drift” in French), which entailed wandering through an urban landscape guided only by shifting feelings, unmoored from the duties and associations of daily life. This means of spacily rebooting the urban environment is taken to its logical extreme with urbex.

  The canonical text of the urbex movement is a book called Access All Areas, a work that’s meant as both a spiritual and practical guide to a hobby that counters a consumer culture filled with “safe and sanitized attractions that require an admission fee.” Its pseudonymous author, Ninjalicious, was a 31-year-old Canadian named Jeff Chapman, who had first written about his exploits in the 1990s in a self-published zine called Infiltration. Chapman died of cancer in 2005, just weeks before his book was published, lending his life’s work an aura of unimpeachable, almost Christ-like authenticity.

  Garrett sees his work as restoring the true spirit of Ninjalicious, pushing the urbex boundaries beyond the trendy venues: derelict and abandoned buildings, which he considers easy prey. The urbex term for derelict structures is derp, exemplified by the postapocalyptic photography nicknamed ruin porn. “The roots of urban exploration are actually in infiltration, and we’ve forgotten that as a community,” said Garrett. “We’re bringing it back to its core. We’re seizing it from those fucking ruin fetishists.” Garrett calls for a more radical set of tactics for what he calls “live sites”: places in active use. He sees this kind of unsanctioned access as the best means to regain freedom in a society that is utterly cordoned and securitized. As a sort of calling card, he carries sheets of stickers that read EXPLORE EVERYTHING, which he affixes everywhere he goes.

  Some cities are more suited to this go-anywhere philosophy than others. London’s vast security apparatus, for instance, presents a set of challenges that could be described as Orwell Lite: ubiquitous cameras, by-the-book cops, and a passive-aggressively reinforced expectation of propriety. This can add to the thrill, of course, but when the State kicks in your door, it’s always a bummer. Paris, on the other hand, is spoken of in the urbex scene in the way Okies might have invoked California. “In Paris, they don’t give a shit,” said Garrett. “The quality of life is so much higher there, because people let you get on with what you want to get on with. They’re not in your face all the time about it.”

  Garrett had initially suggested we go there, but given the confiscation of his passport, it was out of the question. Britain had become a prison island for him, and he didn’t want to risk hacking his way out and back in again. But Explo and Helen wanted me to see it, and Otter wanted to go somewhere he wasn’t legally enjoined from exploring, so we packed our gear and contorted ourselves obstetrically into the Twinkie and made for the Chunnel.

  The following midnight I found myself following Explo’s command of Action!, climbing after him over a construction fence surrounding a half-built office tower named Carpe Diem in the central business district of Paris. We found the main stairwell and humped 38 stories up, legs burning, gasping for breath. There were a half dozen explorers in the group, including Patch, a 25-year-old Brit who was currently wanted in London on the same warrant for which Garrett had been arrested. Patch’s most recent job was as a stock manager at a big-box store, but for now he was staying in a squat and planning to return to London in a few months when the heat was off.

  We came out onto the darkened concrete roof and then scaled the metal stairs of a looming tower crane, sweat freezing in the now alpine air. In the sharp wind, the crane swiveled side to side like a giant weathervane. Paris flowed and pulsed 600 feet below us, but it was eerily quiet at that height. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower erupted into a glittering laser-light spectacle to mark the hour. Several people crammed into the operator’s cab of the crane, which—quelle surprise!—still had the keys in it. Someone scrolled through the crane’s commands on its touch screen. I asked them to stop touching the fucking buttons, please.

  Exiting the building site after the long walk down, Explo whispered in a mock video-game voice: “Level Two, complete.”

  It occurred to me then that Explo’s cry of Action! at the beginning of each adventure had a double meaning. It was both a call to arms and a director’s command in the fantasy movie of his own life, in which he was the auteur and hero both. The urbex life is at heart a form of play, a pressure valve to regulate the atmospheric crush of daily life. Explo, at his programming job, might daydream of a manhole in the floor of his cubicle, of some escape from the mundane requirements of society. Once you begin playing this game, the entire world becomes filled with secret doors.

  Some doors hide better secrets than others. One afternoon as we weaved through chaotic traffic, Explo pulled up next to a middle-aged black man with long dreadlocks and an army jacket, sitting on a park bench. “Ça va, Dirty?” he called, sticking his head out the sunroof. They conversed rapidly in French, then Explo popped back down. “That’s Dirty. He invited us to a party later. It’s funny, I consider him a friend and yet I’ve never seen him more than ten meters from a manhole. He’s a cataphile.”

  A cataphile is an aficionado of the vast network of catacombs, quarried over centuries from the soft limestone beneath the city. Nobody knows for sure how far they extend, but more than a hundred
miles of tunnels have been charted, underlying a tenth of Paris—a city of darkness beneath the City of Light. Barely a mile of the catacombs is open to the public, but a wide subculture of the creative and clandestine have used the network for decades. Late that night we returned to the same spot where Explo had spotted Dirty. There was a steel hatch right on the sidewalk, and Explo pointed out the places where it had been repeatedly spot-welded shut by the police and subsequently broken open by the cataphiles. He glanced around, quickly pulled the lid open, and we descended a dark ladder.

  From down a stone side passage came the sound of echoing laughter, the smell of hash smoke, and the flickering yellow light of a carbide lantern. Dirty held court before a half dozen visitors, dripping candles affixed around the room. He told me he had come down for a party 62 days ago and just decided never to leave except to resupply and use the facilities. (There are no bathrooms belowground.) He warned me to “respect the catas.” The tunnels were originally begun as quarries but have served over the years as smuggling routes and ossuaries. During World War II, the Nazis and the Resistance had neighboring catacomb bunkers, each unaware of the other’s existence. Explo pointed to an inscription carved in a stone monument dedicated to the memory of Philibert Aspairt. Like J-Bizzle in the sewers of London, Aspairt is a legend of the catacombs. He went missing while exploring down here in 1793, but his body wasn’t found until 1804. We were having a party in his tomb.

  Dirty led us down a narrow tunnel, which opened up into a large gallery. The leave-no-trace ethic of place hacking doesn’t exactly apply in the catacombs; rather, they are a vast work in progress, just like the city above. Graffiti pieces and stencils covered the walls. More ambitious artists had carved relief sculptures into the stone itself, and one had spent what must have been weeks installing a graffiti mosaic out of thousands of tiny tiles. There was a lending library stocked with moisture-swollen paperbacks and a huge lounge table carved from a block of stone. In places along the tunnel, side shafts had been dug, called chatières, literally “cat flaps,” connecting branches or forming new chambers. All this work had been done in total darkness, 50 feet below the streets, all for the delight and edification of the relatively small group of adventurers who might find their way there.

  After we made our way out, I sat in a sidewalk café in broad daylight, drinking a café au lait and eating a perfect galette au chèvre, refusing to acknowledge to gawkers that I was aware I was covered head to toe in beige catacomb mud. So much of urbex is an exquisitely crafted inside joke, done for its own beautifully pointless sake, like the explorer who put a necktie on a statue in the pediment of the Panthéon, 120 feet above the Latin Quarter. He did tag a photo of it on Flickr, of course.

  That day we napped on the grass beneath the Eiffel Tower, its riveted latticework swooshing into the blue heavens. Surely it would be the greatest climb in all of Paris, I observed. Explo agreed, were it not for the heavily armed soldiers patrolling its base. But he said he knew somewhere else just as sublime.

  At the stroke of one, the spotlights that bathed Notre Dame Cathedral in a noontime glare were finally flipped off, and a group of singing drunks gathered along the Left Bank brought out their congas. This provided excellent cover as Explo, Helen, Otter, and I crossed the Pont Saint-Louis to the Île de la Cité and clambered around a corona of iron spikes 40 feet above the Seine. We crossed a shaded park and scaled another spiked fence, careful not to snag backpacks heavy with camera equipment and enough mountaineering gear to assault the Matterhorn. We spoke in whispers as we pulled on climbing harnesses, and looked up through the darkness at the soaring Gothic buttresses and pinnacles of the irreplaceable monument of world heritage we were about to climb.

  I felt a twinge of conscience. Or rather, something more than a twinge. They warn you in journalism school—or so I hear—about the risks of going too deep with the subjects of your work, of losing grasp of the dispassionate objectivity necessary to report a balanced story. Garrett had already dealt with this ethical quicksand by surfing gleefully across it, unashamed of his decision to “become a part of the culture under study,” as he put it. I stood before the same quagmire. It wasn’t really about breaking the law, as I’d already done that many times over in two different countries. Standing there at the base of the 850-year-old cathedral, I felt conflicted between my deep desire to climb it and my equally deep desire to not be splashed across the French tabloids as the idiot American who snapped off a gargoyle.

  But Explo was already halfway up, and he soon anchored a climbing line to belay us from above. I let the tide of Action! bear me along and started up the rope using special spelunking ascenders attached to my harness. I promised Explo to omit a few salient details about our route from this narrative; suffice it to say, nothing was harmed in the climb. But the intimacy with the building was startling. I passed so closely by a carved gargoyle I could see the furrows of its brow. Atop the first roof, we found ourselves in a long gallery of flying buttresses, which spanned outward like the landing struts of some alien spacecraft. Each buttress framed a 50-foot arched stained-glass window, darkened from within, and as we climbed to the next level, I pulled myself up next to one. I spun slowly on the rope, and for a heart-stopping instant my shoulder rested gently against the glass. I was so close I could see the seams of lead that connected the thousands of pieces of colored glass, the end result of centuries of labor at the hands of nameless artisans. I felt in that moment I would rather fall than damage it.

  Three hours and three pitches brought us to the peak of the south transept, 180 feet above the Seine, which flowed past inkily as the drunks still drummed on the far side. My hands were black from the lead roof tiles. Carved saints and angels and a demonic bestiary of gargoyles peered from every nook, and the central steeple pierced the night sky. I’m not a believer at all, but I felt something akin to what I’d always imagined to be the intended reaction to a great cathedral, some visceral mix of awe and fear.

  Over by the bell towers, you could see the corralled viewing platform where the public is allowed. No doubt it’s great. But as the urbex ethos has it, buying a ticket, and obediently going the way you are told, is the exact opposite of the point. So there we were, at 4 A.M., witness to a sublimity almost nobody else would ever know. As it happened, the French Resistance had rung the cathedral’s bells this very night in 1944, to signal the liberation of Paris. It was not nearly the same scale of freedom, of course, but it sufficed. As the first glow of dawn began to fade out the stars, we rappelled down, scaling the fences and dropping back onto the waking street.

  Returning to London, we found Garrett trying to bring some order to the chaos that had spun out of his life. He had gotten his door replaced, though it would likely be months before the State got around to compensating him for it. But his fate was far from clear. Since he couldn’t leave the UK, he would likely have to cancel a talk he was scheduled to give for Google in Arizona (topic: “Exploring the World Around Us”), and his job offer from Oxford might be threatened by his tenuous legal status. For all he knew, he’d be deported after his court hearing in a few months. But his spirit, to all outward appearances, was unflagging.

  Garrett wanted to show me one final site, the gargantuan art deco hulk of the Battersea Power Station, with its four chimneys reaching 340 feet. Battersea is the iconic structure on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals, a great ruined dinosaur skeleton of industrial civilization. It’s been derelict since the early ’80s and the subject of an endless string of redevelopment boondoggles. Most recently it had served as a parking lot for hundreds of police vehicles during the Olympics.

  Waiting for a security patrol to roll by, we squeezed through a hole in the fence, sprinted across a weedy no man’s land, and clambered up stairwells through the pigeon-flapping blackness. The power station’s control room was the size of a basketball court, a steampunk fever dream of endless dials and switches and levers, like an analog nerve center for the “city of tomorrow” of yesteryear. The
sense of touching unsanitized history, of being able to measure time in the accumulation of dust, was enormously powerful. Garrett threw levers back and forth, flipping dead switches in some sort of Doctor Who fantasy. “This is what they won’t let you do in museums,” he said.

  We climbed higher and emerged into the rainy night, onto the scaffolding surrounding one of the chimneys, and scaled it to its top, halfway up the southwest stack, which was big enough to swallow a double-decker bus. A wavering reflection of London slid by on the surface of the Thames several hundred feet below, and trains maneuvered by at tilt-shift scale. The city looked like a misty diorama.

  But an explorer can never rest, least of all Bradley L. Garrett, PhD. “Everyone’s bored here; everything’s been done,” he said, fretting that all London’s mysteries had been plucked. “We’re just sort of waiting for the next big thing.”

  People tend to age out of urbex, to get respectable and lose the spark of curiosity that called them to explore in the first place. There are very few people who do it after 40, he told me. He hoped he could avoid that fate. He looked forward to the 20-mile super-sewer project, scheduled to be finished by 2025, and to the Crossrail tunnel, both being dug beneath London. And even if he were deported, banished from this island that had offered him such incomparable visions, there were always other options, other places. He’d heard of a secret Soviet subway system beneath Moscow. And the colossal sewers of Tokyo. Or the Second Avenue subway line being dug beneath Manhattan. He had always fantasized about piloting a tunnel-boring machine. The world was full of hidden possibilities.

  STEVEN RINELLA

  Dream Acres