by Gates, Moses
The third thing I notice is what looks like a lady washing her clothes in the river a bit farther upstream, near where it exits the tunnel. This I’ve got to investigate. I walk along the bank until I come to the tunnel. The lady has left by the time I get there, and I glance into the darkness of the tunnel. I, of course, have forgotten to bring a flashlight, but I can still make out two more pipes outflowing into the river in the small part I can see. The smell of sewage is present but not overwhelming. It’s definitely not as bad as a sewer or even a combined system. But then again, you don’t wash your clothes in a sewer. I bend down and dip my finger in the water. Great: now I can say I’ve touched the dirtiest river in the world. I’m glad Steve isn’t with me, as I’d probably find myself dragging him up the hill to the nearest hospital, where he’d have to rely on Bolivian medical care to deal with the six different infections he would have picked up on this excursion.
After this, the rest of the trip is relaxing and outdoorsy. I meet up with my brother to walk the Inca Trail and see Machu Picchu, I climb a mountain in southern Peru, I spend a couple days paragliding in Chile. It’s nice. I think about crumbling concrete rooftops, drag parties in the rain, and stale-smelling underground rivers the whole time. And I can’t wait until I’m back home, running through the subways again.
TWENTY-TWO
U.S.A., 2007
I get to New York in late March, spending my last week of vacation on a stopover in Mexico City with my friend Sara. Sara lived in Toronto, but we had been friends-with-a-mutual-crush for a while, and were both free of other romances when we arranged to meet up in Mexico City. I was still shaken from Natalia’s admonishment, wasn’t confident about the situation at all. After all, emotional availability isn’t usually a prerequisite for a fling halfway around the world from home. How bad must I be, how closed off, that even that situation was beyond her comfort zone? After that day I had started to think about the other kinds of boundaries I had. Flying into Mexico City, I thought about Sara shaking her head and telling me I was closed, and the thought filled me with despair. I don’t know what had changed about me in the month between Natalia and Sara, but something must have. Perhaps just the introspection itself was enough to shake some emotional barrier loose. There was no admonishment this time. In fact, Sara and I ended up spending most of our time in Mexico City in bed together.
After I get back to New York, I work nonstop on the tour buses through the summer, and come within one class of finally finishing my master’s degree in urban planning. Sara and I continue to see each other when we can, and in the fall we arrange to take six weeks and go on a road trip across the country.
About halfway through the road trip we’re at the Grand Canyon, where I gleefully bypass the guardrails and go clambering out onto the rocks above the cliff. “Is he on drugs?” a nice middle-aged, middle-American lady asks Sara as she takes a picture of me sitting with my legs dangling off the edge of the canyon. I’m feeling pretty proud of myself as I clamber back to the parking lot. Guardrails, “Danger” signs, these things don’t exist for me anymore. I’ve left all that behind.
Walking back to the car, I get a text from Steve.
“Just got down from the Brooklyn Bridge. Beautiful.”
Fuck.
It turned out that, once again, the boundaries aren’t real. Steve had broken up with Molly for good that summer, and was out boozing and reminiscing with Miru’s sister, SeungJung, about this and other relationships gone by. This night of heavy drinking was taking place only about a five-minute walk from the Brooklyn Bridge, and the combination of the proximity, the alcohol, the melancholy, and a willing partner had given both of them enough impetus to say “Fuck it,” walk over to the bridge, and climb the cables up to the top of the stone tower. There were no police, no alarms, no need to swallow a memory card and fake mental illness. There was nothing other than a great view and one more seemingly impossible thing checked off the list.
EDGE OF THE GRAND CANYON.
© Sara Power
I’ve gone on to climb the Brooklyn Bridge half a dozen times since then—the first time solo as a present to myself on my thirty-second birthday, the other times with an array of the international urban adventure crew who’ve come to town, often just for this purpose.
There’s no secret to the climb: you wait until nobody’s around, head up the cables, scoot around the security gates, and away you go. Reaching the top is exhilarating, but for me has always been a little anticlimactic. There’s a difference between discovering what’s possible for yourself and having someone else pull back the curtain for you.
After Steve and Molly break up, Molly heads abroad for a few months before leaving New York for good. This breakup is actually significant for me also. Because after my road trip with Sara, I have another trip planned. To Europe. With a single-for-the-first-time-in-four-years Steve Duncan.
Paris, December 2007
Steve and I start our trip by traveling through Ireland and England, popping manholes, running through the underground, and otherwise having a blast before heading back to Paris after a couple of weeks. One evening we meet up with Eric, my old peeing-in-the-street buddy from the last trip, and a couple of his friends for a night in the Paris Métro tunnels. As usual, there’s no need to break in or twist ourselves in knots trying to squeeze through a fissure or scale a barrier. We simply head to a nondescript door, where Eric pulls out a huge key ring and leafs through the keys until he finds the right one. Once again I am baffled by his resourcefulness.
“Jesus—why aren’t you a jewel thief?” I ask.
“Why would I be a jewel thief?” he answers. “I have a very good job.”
Palling around with Eric, Rosie, and others we know now certainly helps us on the exploration front, but it isn’t the whole story. I feel comfortable in Paris, understand the culture much better. I’m not going to be scared off by a dark tunnel or a fence anymore. Maybe it’s personal, because it’s the first place I’ve ever adventured outside the U.S., but out of all the places I’ve been, the artificial boundaries put in place in Paris are the easiest to recognize and the easiest to overcome.
On top of this, Steve is single. And he’s using this opportunity abroad to practice his newfound singledom on pretty much everyone. In fact, on our last night in town we find ourselves with a nice young American girl whom we’ve just met at an Internet café. It’s now three in the morning and we’re boosting her over a wall into a graveyard.
Steve has started to realize he’s charming and handsome. And while his childhood in an all-boys Catholic school has delayed the development of his pickup skills, the combination of this upbringing and his boy-next-door looks has imbued him with such a nonthreatening “You can trust me” vibe that he can somehow convince a complete stranger that she should join him and his friend in an underground crypt for the night. We know of a quarry network, unconnected to the main network, beneath a cemetery in the south of Paris. I haven’t been there before. Steve has, but wants to get more pictures: it’s one of the last places you can actually find intact skulls. So now we have this girl in tow as we climb over a wall into a cemetery, pop open a manhole, and descend thirty feet on a rusty metal ladder into a bone-filled cave. I consider asking, several times, what the hell her mother would say to her right now, but I don’t want to freak her out.
We climb back out as dawn is breaking and put the girl on the Métro before grabbing a few hours of sleep at our hotel. We’re feeling pretty happy with ourselves. So happy that instead of heading to Amsterdam, as we had planned, we decide to continue the adventure here for another day. And then Rosie suggests we meet her friend Nico at a bar that night. And three hours after that we’re on top of Notre Dame, the sound of the bell I’ve rung still fresh in my ears, watching policeman after policeman climb up the ladder into our narrow refuge inside the spire.
TWENTY-THREE
It all ends up being very civi
l. While back in the U.S., I’d be ready for a “Down on the ground, motherfucker!” over in France, law enforcement seems to take a much less antagonistic view of curious urbanists. The whole thing has the vibe of a necessary if slightly unpleasant interaction between two reasonable parties: they take Nico’s Leatherman but don’t even handcuff us as they lead us out. It’s almost as cool as going up: we’re in the attic of Notre Dame. They take us down a wooden catwalk and a set of stairs, and I notice the huge roof supports are also made out of wood. I wonder how old they are and if they had to be replaced. It looks pretty much like the attic of a regular old wood-frame house, except on a much grander scale. Nico even tries to snap a picture of us as we’re walking through it, but it doesn’t come out. The cops don’t seem to mind. We’re put in a wagon and taken over to the nearest station. It’s right across the street. No wonder we got caught.
We sit on a bench as they try to figure out what to do with us. I’m counting on Nico to tell us what’s going on, but all he can gather is that they’re out making sure we didn’t graffiti up the place. It doesn’t really feel like we’re suspects in a serious criminal investigation—more like we’re sixteen and have just been caught shoplifting at the mall. But still, I’m sweating bullets about the lock we removed to get up the staircase. Everything we’ve learned about France has indicated a prevailing “No harm, no foul” attitude toward recreational trespassing, and if they gather we’re just some harmless drunken tourists, I’m optimistic we’ll get through this without having to involve the U.S. embassy. But if they discover we’ve damaged anything—hence the search for graffiti—consequences could be a lot worse. We’re in a country where the person in charge of historic preservation is a member of the cabinet. I start thinking that damaging Notre Dame would be like some punk French kids coming to the United States and hocking a loogie on the secretary of defense.
After a little while they have us take a breath test. Despite the amount of time since we’ve been drinking and the sobering effects of exercise, adrenaline, and police encounters, I still feel pretty drunk. Not tipsy, not buzzed: drunk. I score a 0.14 on the test. Steve scores a 0.32. Nico scores a 0.68. “My parents are Russian,” he says, and shrugs. I am sober enough to realize they can’t be using the same measurement system as in the States, or (Russian parents or no) Nico would dead.
We sit there anxiously until the chief finally gets there. He’s wearing slacks and a casual button-down shirt, and appears not to have shaved for three or four days. First he takes Steve into a room with him. I sit there trying to figure out how I’m going to sublet my place back home from a French jail cell. Roughly ten minutes elapse and the chief comes back for me.
He takes me in the room and we sit down.
“So,” he asks in barely accented English, “did you get good pictures?”
I contemplate my answer. I have no idea if this is friendly banter or the beginning of a dastardly interrogation. “I’m not a photographer,” I answer.
He takes my name, address, and a few other pieces of information. Then he pulls out a piece of paper.
“OK, so you are tourists, you’re taking pictures, you don’t know you can’t climb the cathedral, you’re very sorry, and you won’t do it again. The report will stay here, you can go. Sign this.”
I can’t believe it. I look at the paper, scanning for something that might reference the broken lock. Unfortunately, my French-language education consists of one semester in the eighth grade and some weekend trips to Montreal. In just about every other country on earth you’d have to be crazy to sign a statement some cop puts in front of you that you can’t even read. But France is different. I just can’t see the chief smirking and leading me off to a cell after I unwittingly confess to vandalizing a national landmark. So I sign. The chief dismisses me, and I sit out in the lobby while he talks to Nico. After another ten minutes, Nico comes out. He’s followed by the chief, who says, “Voilà,” tosses the pen over his shoulder, and lackadaisically strolls into the other room. It is the most French thing I have ever seen.
Steve is waiting down the street. “They even let me keep the pictures,” he says with amazement. “The chief said he wanted us to have a nice memory of our vacation here.” Dawn is breaking, the Métro should be running by now, and I can think of nothing better than a hot shower back at the hotel.
“OK, cool,” says Nico. “So there is another church near my house where we can do a climb. You want to go?”
So much for the shower—it looks like we’re taking a victory lap first.
Steve says: If Moe had rung a bell two-thirds of the way up, I would have never have forgiven him. But we had made it to the top. I’m pretty sure the cops already knew we were there anyway, because it took so little time for them to get up to the spire. I was really excited about being at the top of this thirteenth-century cathedral. Later I learned that the spire wasn’t part of the original thirteenth-century cathedral, instead being added as part of the nineteenth-century reconstruction by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Still, it was awesome. That spire was like God’s penthouse suite.
• • •
About a year later I see an online video about touring Paris. Toward the end there’s a short segment on the people who built the underground cinema and repaired the Panthéon clock. It starts with one of the members, a loquacious bald guy, talking to the reporter about the cinema. Again, it turns out that in Paris secrets are hidden in plain sight. After months of operation, the cinema eventually had to be abandoned once it was discovered. Nobody went looking for it—the police just accidentally stumbled across it one day.
“The funniest thing is, they thought our couscous maker was a bomb,” he says with a mixture of incredulousness and pity for the authorities’ obvious stupidity.
“So they thought you were making a bomb, when all you were doing was making couscous,” the reporter replies.
“No, no,” the bald guy replies, to the puzzlement of the reporter.
“They didn’t think you were making a bomb?”
“No, they did think we were making a bomb. But we were not making couscous. The couscous maker was purely decorative.”
And the French wonder why they get made fun of.
The segment goes on to feature shots of the catacombs, and more of the reporter talking with the bald guy, before a final scene shot at night from a Gothic rooftop. I recognize it immediately. They’re on the roof of Notre Dame. They have the keys. In Paris, someone always has the keys.
TWENTY-FOUR
Amsterdam, December 2007
Three days after getting arrested on Notre Dame, I’m in Amsterdam Centraal Station, preparing to catch a train to the airport, where we have a flight booked to Stockholm. I am all set to go, having finally gotten a good night’s sleep at a friend’s place, one of the charming houseboats that line some of Amsterdam’s canals.
Steve, on the other hand, has been up for a day and a half and has spent last night going on a four-drug bender with the local pimp. I meet him at the train station at noon after a morning walk by the Amstel River.
Steve has a problem when I meet him at the station. He has too much cocaine. He can’t remember how he came by so much cocaine, but he’s pretty sure the Dutch pimp and “at least two” trips to the ATM have something to do with it. I conservatively estimate he’s been taken for about five hundred bucks by his new buddy.
There are two solutions I can see to this particular problem. Solution number one: cut your losses, throw the cocaine in the garbage, and head to the airport. Solution number two: keep the cocaine with you on an international flight and hope no drug-sniffing dogs come by. I am praying Steve does not take solution number two. Unfortunately, he informs me he is definitely not going to take solution number one.
Luckily, though, Steve sees two other solutions I haven’t thought of. Solution number three is to snort all the coke before we get to the airport. This becomes
my backup plan once it becomes apparent that I can’t convince him to throw away the drugs. I tell him to go do this in the bathroom of the train we’re taking to the airport. However, Steve opts for solution number four.
“I’m sorry, ladies, this is going to sound a little strange, but I have too many drugs. Would you like some?”
Solution number four is to try to give the coke away to the two Dutch college students sitting down the train carriage from us. They decline, so he falls back on solution number three: snort all the coke. He does not go to the bathroom for this, as I suggested, but instead dumps it out on the girls’ tray table and, not even bothering to roll up a euro note, pinches a nostril and inhales it in one go. I consider telling him that snorting coke next to strangers on a train at twelve-thirty in the afternoon is not, in fact, acceptable behavior even in Amsterdam, but I’m so terrified he’s going to try to take the coke on the plane that I figure I should just keep my mouth shut. It’s a good thing Steve looks absolutely cherubic with his blond hair and delicate features, and the drugs actually enhance this look by dilating his pupils so much that his eyes sparkle. The girls tell Steve he’s “the most charming creepy guy” they’ve ever met and give him half of their pink-frosted donut. I cannot imagine what would have happened if I had tried this little trick. I haven’t showered, shaved, or changed clothes in three days and currently look like a cross between a hobo and an Albanian mobster.
For a moment I consider just ditching Steve and letting him find his own way to Stockholm after he’s done playing Scarface, but it’s a bit too late now, as we are already off the train and at the station, where Steve is smoking a joint on the platform. I pray that this chills him out enough to not offer cocaine to random strangers in the airport.
