by Gates, Moses
Despite tossing and turning all night, we still somehow end up sleeping for twelve hours. But that’s OK: our big constraint isn’t time but water. We decide we’re staying down and seeing what we can find until we run dry.
We spend the day just wandering, exploring the amazing array of spaces that the catas have to offer. The Class Galleries, where for decades each graduating class of the Mineralogical Institute has painted a new mural on the wall of an out-of-the-way stretch of tunnel. The Salle Z, with its huge archways and twelve-foot high ceilings, a welcome relief from watching our heads in the tunnels all day. The Abri Laval, with its tiled floor, and a nameless room that’s painted as a night scene—entirely in a calm dark blue except for a moon and stars (and an F.C.) on the wall. We also run into a mural of the Statue of Liberty during our meanderings. It makes me just a tad homesick.
We run out of food, and water, and dry socks, but still can’t tear ourselves away. It’s only after the lights on our headlamps start to dim that we decide we had better start making our way back to the rabbit hole. Finally, on our backup lights, we feel the cool air of the outside world, and a couple minutes later crawl out onto the abandoned train tracks. We’ve emerged from our entombment after about thirty hours. Steve catches a cab (learning from our last excursion, this time he’s taken both a clean jacket and pair of pants with him), but I want to walk home. The route back to our hotel takes me directly over the amazing area where we have spent the last two days. I don’t need a map. My time spent figuring my way beneath Paris has somehow given me an almost instinctual sense of navigation and understanding of the city streets. I realize Paris has clicked for me: I completely understand its geography. I may not know all the shortcuts, but I know I’ll never really be lost again.
The moment when you realize you truly know something on a deeper level than before is an almost mystical experience. It’s one of those things that make life worthwhile. My goal on this trip wasn’t to spend a certain amount of time underground or walk a certain length of the catacombs. My goal was to get to know Paris: the Paris above and the Paris below. As I turn the last corner back to my hotel on Rue Saint-Jacques—where yesterday I made the exact same turn fifty feet below—I realize I can leave the city with no regrets.
• • •
We end up taking one more short trip into the catacombs with a different friend of ours, David. There’s plenty written about the catacombs—in fact, David has contributed to some of the books—but unfortunately for me they’re all in French. So while our hours spent exploring on our own were great, I’m excited to go with an expert guide who can actually explain to us in depth what we’re seeing. And instead of having to schlep down the train tracks again, this time we’re going the fun way.
“Yes, this is it,” David says, looking at a manhole in the sidewalk. Using a “popper”—basically a piece of metal attached to a strong piece of cord—he yanks the cover up and off. It’s about noon, on a moderately trafficked commercial street. We head down, and David asks a couple of passersby to kick the manhole back into place. Apparently this is par for the course in Paris.
There is only one place we haven’t seen that we want to: underneath the Val-de-Grâce, the church turned hospital where Philibert used to be the doorkeeper. David sets the pace. Throughout the convoluted, hours-long journey he doesn’t glance at the map once.
On this excursion we get one of those surprise glimpses into history that make these kinds of trips so worthwhile. Every time a tunnel was inspected, stabilized, and mapped, notes were carved on the wall, including the initials of the head engineer and the year of the work. Most large tunnels also have the name of the street they run under engraved on the wall—a great help when trying to follow the map.
But on this trip, we’re running into engravings without a year, instead having a one- or two-digit number followed by an R. But David explains: these are also years, just using a different calendar. The French Republican calendar. We already knew that the memorial on Philibert’s tomb was inscribed well after April 30, 1804, the year of his burial, but if we didn’t we’d know now. This is because there was no April 30, 1804, in Paris. Philibert’s burial date would have been written as the tenth of Floréal, Year 12R—or the twelfth year of the French Republic.
Finally, we duck under some cables, navigate a shallow archway filled three-quarters of the way with water, wiggle through a chatière that never seems to end, and emerge into a raw, cavern-like space. A carving on the wall reads “Grande Cour du Val-de-Grâce”—Grand Courtyard of the Val-de-Grâce.
During the revolution, many of the old symbols of Church and monarchy were ransacked and appropriated for more public uses—Notre Dame was looted and then did a short stint as a warehouse, for instance. The Val-de-Grâce escaped this fate. Even though it was built as a church and convent, it was left untouched by the Republicans, probably due to the fact that the resident Benedictine nuns also served as nurses for those injured in the revolution. During the Republican era it was officially converted into a military hospital, which it still serves as today.
REPUBLICAN CALENDAR DATING.
The French Revolution took place shortly after the IGC was formed and the consolidations began. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t stories and history from these quarries that predate this. The stories of the area we’re in reach back to over a century before the formation of the IGC, to Queen Anne of Austria and King Louis XIII (you might know them best as the king and queen in The Three Musketeers). David tells us the story of how the Hapsburg queen conspired with her Spanish relatives against the French king in these old quarries, later building the church above in thanks for bearing a son after twenty-three years of childless marriage, and retiring to this building after this son, the future king Louis XIV, came of age and ascended to the throne.
Still, while tales of subterranean royal intrigue are all very romantic, the most interesting thing we come across is much more mundane. It turns out we get to see where the queen’s other dirty business ended up. In a small room we see the bottom of a well—a well that David tells us was dug as repository for the queen’s chamber pot.
EIGHT
Amsterdam, January 2006
We’ve got a couple days left before our flight back, and after our marathon trips we’re pretty catacombed out. So we decide to hit Amsterdam, mostly just to relax and see a new city. Stumbling around on our last night, we see a bar that looks friendly and not too touristy. Each beer comes in a different-shaped glass. I order two beers of the coolest-shaped glass variety, for which I have to leave my ID as a deposit, and we sit down at one of the large wooden tables.
I have just read The Game, a popular book about a society of “pickup artists.” It’s been years since I’ve been single, and the last time was in college, where I lived in a hippie Jewish cooperative house that threw parties where making out with the person next to you was treated as just slightly more forward than shaking hands, and the merits of non-monogamy was a regular conversation—in short, not a place where you had to try too hard. So when a friend insisted I borrow the book shortly after I separated from Leigh, I figured, sure, I could probably use a few pointers. While it’s very, very heavy on dudespeak, which can make it a tough read for someone such as myself, who had grown up in a household where Free to Be . . . You and Me was a present on my fourth birthday, the basic point of it is fairly universal, involving how to make yourself a generally more attractive person. But there’s also a bunch of advice and pointers about how to interact with girls and quickly get them to like you—aka “game.” I decide I am going to impress Steve by putting my newfound “game” to work on the cute Dutch girl who is part of the group that has sat down next to us. I am normally way too shy for stuff like this, but the combination of alcohol and a foreign country serves to ease my trepidation. I mentally review some of the pointers and lessons from the book. “Here, watch this,” I whisper to Steve.
To my utter amazement the shit actually works. I read her palm, making up some stuff about how “intuitive” and “driven” she is. I guess the number between 1 and 10 she’s thinking of (if it’s not 7 it’s 4. If it’s not 4 it’s “Wow, you know how unusual you are?”). I stop paying attention to her and charm her friends for a while with stories about New York until she’s nudging me to pay attention to her again. This girl is into me. I slowly see what the book describes as a “doe-eyed deer” look come into her eyes. She tells me she has a boyfriend. As we leave, about five beers into the night, I somehow gather up my nerve and tell her to kiss me good-bye anyway. She does.
Steve’s response to this is to jump into an open construction ditch in the ground. I’m confused. I wait for him to stop monkeying around and climb out. “What was that all about?” I ask.
“Arghhhh. God damn it!” he responds. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?” I reply.
“Get that girl to kiss you?”
“Dude, why are you so upset? You have a totally hot girlfriend.”
“Moe, I had to beg Molly to go out with me for, like, six months. That girl is just as hot and you made out with her after two hours.” I suppose this explains the frustration, but not why he responds to it by jumping into a hole in the ground.
But Steve has not even come close to working out his issues. As we walk through town we come to a building covered in scaffolding, which Steve starts climbing up without even pausing to look around for cops. I don’t really want to follow, mostly because I’m pretty drunk, but I feel obligated. We’ve been equal partners on this adventure so far, and I don’t want to end it by being the one hanging out on the ground waiting for Steve to finish the last climb. So I start up the scaffolding.
And it’s wonderful. Everything is easy. There’s no freezing, no nervousness affecting me physically. It turns out there really is something to the expression “Dutch courage.” I can’t imagine why I haven’t done this before.
Climbing while inebriated is something I really shouldn’t recommend, but I will anyway. Now, I’m not talking about drunkenly trying to scale a rock wall at Yosemite or anything, but in those instances when the mental barriers are significantly greater than the physical barriers, the combination of booze and adrenaline can be magic. The mental barriers are washed away, while the physical barriers are still a long way away from being truly tested. I don’t always like doing it—as with all drugs, it can serve as a cheap shortcut for something that would be much more satisfying if accomplished naturally—but there have been so many times I’ve indulged, I can’t in good conscience make judgments.
Still, I can understand the disapproval. The first time I let it slip to my grandmother Ethel that I had done this, I received the following admonishment by e-mail: “You know, Mose, I hope you have gained some common sense since this. Are you trying to give your poor grandmother a heart attack? You know you should not drink and climb, just like you should not drink and drive.”
Steve ends up on one tower while I end up on another. We hang out for a bit and then start the descent. We’re both exhausted when we get down. I notice the church is actually called the Mozeshuis, or “Moses House,” in Dutch. It feels like a sign.
Steve seems to have gotten whatever it was out of his system, and we walk down the street for a bit, heading into a bar on the corner.
“So how the hell did you do that?” Steve asks after we sit down.
“I just climbed up after you. It wasn’t that tough. You aren’t that much better of a climber than me, you know.”
“No, you idiot, I mean the girl. How’d you get her to kiss you? You know you acted like a complete asshole to her half the time.”
I don’t really know how to respond. I don’t want to tell him I learned it in a book. I delay by taking a slow sip of my beer, affording me a bit of time to plan my response.
“Dude, I wasn’t an asshole. I just acted like I knew I was cooler than her. Really, that’s it. Just pretend like you’re the coolest guy in the room. You probably are the coolest guy in the room anyway.”
Steve thinks for a minute and then busts me. “Oh, come on. I don’t show people I’m cool by reading their palms and shit.”
“Yeah, but that’s just so I have an excuse to talk about feelings and personalities and stuff like that. You’ve got to break the ‘Hey, what’s your name? Where’re you from? Come here often?’ kind of mold.”
“Yeah, you know, I guess that makes sense. I dunno, I love Molly, but sometimes I wonder if I’m wasting the years I should be doing this stuff on one girl.”
“Yeah, I get that. I mean, I remember being in the exact same situation a couple years ago when I was about your age, thinking the exact same thing.”
“What? You’re great at this. I mean, you just got some totally random Dutch girl to kiss you. And you haven’t combed your hair in about a week and a half.”
“Nah, this is kind of recent. I haven’t really been single for that long.”
“Oh, yeah? How long were you going out with your girlfriend for?” Steve asks.
“Awhile,” I reply. “And, uh, it was more like a wife than a girlfriend.”
“Wait, you were married? When was this?”
I realize that despite spending countless hours sharing adventures on two continents with this guy, I haven’t ever mentioned the first thing about my personal life. I remember reading somewhere that women bond by talking and men bond by doing. I don’t know how often this particular rule actually holds true, but I do think that anyone seeking to prove it could do worse than looking at the last six months of Steve’s and my friendship.
“Uh, well, actually up until the middle of last year.” I don’t mention that I’m still technically married—that if I had happened to misjudge our climb and drunkenly plummet from the church tower, Leigh would be the one inheriting my student loan debt and the beige pullout couch I picked up off the sidewalk.
“So why’d you do that?” Steve asks.
“What?”
“Get divorced. Well, actually, wait a minute. This is kind of blowing my mind. Let’s start with why you got married.”
Why I’m getting divorced is easy. Leigh has decided she’s fallen in love with a coworker almost two decades her senior and who is, most creepily, a dead ringer for her dad. To be fair, if this hadn’t happened it would eventually have been something else—Leigh and I had been unhappy with each other for a while without either of us really realizing it—but the overall repulsiveness of this particular situation made it easy to finally effect the split.
But why I got married is tougher. There was never any romantic reason, any real spark between us. When we first met in college we were great friends, but I never thought of pursuing a relationship with Leigh. She pursued one with me, though, and we eventually started going out. And from there I just gave into inertia and insecurity. I got married because I was scared—because I needed security, stability, support. Because I just didn’t know what else I was supposed to do, because those same invisible boundaries that kept me off the places I wanted to go also kept me in a place I didn’t want to be—at least, not at that time and not with that person. I ended up traveling down a life path I just didn’t know how not to follow. I was going to grow up, get an office job, and marry a nice, nonreligious Jewish girl. So I married the first one I came across who made me laugh.
As I lay out the story to Steve, I realize it’s my first time telling it, even to myself. I realize how constrained I’ve been, and how free I am now. I don’t just have the whole city to explore. I have the whole world. I have churches to climb, chatières to crawl through, strangers to kiss. There’s tourist season and a semester of grad school to get through back in New York, but that’s a matter of months. There’s no doubt in my mind what’s coming after that. I look at Steve. “So where’re we going next?”
NINE
New York City, 2006
New York has the largest and greatest variety of bridges in the world. Cantilevered bridges, arch bridges, swing bridges, lift bridges, drawbridges, and our seven huge suspension bridge masterpieces. We have bridges for trains, pedestrians, automobiles, bicycles, trucks, and aqueducts. We have bridges that are overused, underused, and completely abandoned. We have bridges built as engineering marvels from before the Civil War, bridges built as engineering marvels a century after it, and plenty of simply good, functional, plain old bridges. We have four of the former longest suspension bridges in the world, two of the former longest steel-arch bridges in the world, the former longest cantilevered span in the world, the former longest vertical-lift bridge, the largest vertical-lift bridge, the strongest steel-arch bridge, two of only four retractile bridges in the country, and arguably the most famous and recognized bridge in the world. I’ve always thought New York, not Pittsburgh, should be nicknamed the “City of Bridges.” I’ve walked numerous times across almost all of the nineteen different bridges that lead into the island of Manhattan. I’ve never been on top of one. But that’s about to change.
Steve pours us a drink at his loft, and we plan out our approach. Our goal is the Manhattan Bridge—a tall, slender structure north of the Brooklyn Bridge that carries seven lanes of traffic, four subway tracks, and two bike and pedestrian paths between downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Chinatown. We’re due to meet up with Dsankt, an adventurer and photographer currently in town, to make the attempt. Dsankt runs the website Sleepycity.net, which details his adventures in storm drains, subways, catacombs, and other assorted off-limits places around the world.
