Tunnels

Tunnels

    The recent opening of the Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland, now the world's longest and deepest tunnel, made me begin to think about out digs under the earth.  Twenty years in the making, the Gotthard tunnel exemplified the efforts we humans undertake to go underground, from running drugs to transporting people and goods, and from mimicking ants to mining for minerals.  Even our salt tunnels run for miles and miles underground, with some now being used as repositories for everything from films and documents to what might possibly be storage for spent nuclear fuel.  And then there are the unknown and little explored tunnels, the ones discovered only recently, from the world's largest natural cave located in Vietnam (a labyrinth of offshoots that mirrors that of the Cu Chi tunnels) to the ones still being explored in Poland and elsewhere (thought to be built by the Nazi Germans).

    Now comes the audio version of the above story that originally appeared in The New Yorker, a verbal history of what some people gave up and buried and others still search for, the unknown tunnels in southwestern Poland.  As described in article by writer Jake Halpern: ...starting in 1943, the Nazis began building a series of underground bunkers beneath the Góry Sowie, or Owl Mountains, in Lower Silesia.  All told, there were seven facilities, including the one beneath Książ Castle.  Historians believe that the Nazis intended to connect these facilities with tunnels; and some treasure hunters, such as Tomasz Jurek, insist that the tunnels were completed and then sealed off by the German military in the last days of the war...The German historian Franz W. Seidler, in his book “Hitler’s Secret Headquarters,” writes, “The enormous scale of this project defies the imagination.”  The total floor space of the facilities exceeded a hundred and ninety thousand square metres, which is almost forty times as large as the White House.  The project’s engineers estimated that it would take 6.3 million workdays to complete.  Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s Minister of Armaments and Munitions, wrote, in his memoirs, that Hitler and other Nazi leaders were worried about their survival “to an insane degree.”  Reflecting on the Riese project, he complained that Hitler used far too many resources to build “that huge bunker,” noting that it “consumed more concrete than the entire population” of the country “had at its disposal for air-raid shelters in 1944.”...No one knows exactly what the Nazis were planning.  The few surviving documents indicate that Riese was intended to be a bombproof refuge for the Nazi élite.  Seidler estimates that it would have been capable of accommodating twenty-seven thousand people. Bella Gutterman, an Israeli historian and the former director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, at Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, has studied the Riese project and believes that it also was designed as a place to manufacture and store aircraft...That is the extent of what’s known; all other records and blueprints appear to have been destroyed.

    And still our discovery of tunnels continues (note the Roman catacombs and now the discovery in Greece of an equally elaborate and ancient set of tunnels).  For many, as depicted in the article, being quickly forced to leave your home resulted in many objects being hidden in yards and grounds nearby; local residents in many such areas still report discovering small packets of what families once considered their valuables, the departing families hoping that if and when they returned that their items would have remained hidden (of course, many families never returned).  In the audio version of the story, families of today still remark that it feels a bit eerie to live in such homes knowing their history, even as they continue to find such small buried "treasures," memories dug in deep and hoping to be retrieved only to emerge for someone else as a puzzle.  

    But suppose your life wasn't one of underground tunnels and fleeing a home, but rather that of watching your home --your entire town-- being buried before your eyes?  This became a story in my local City Weekly paper about the mining town of Bingham Canyon, once home to 15,000 miners and their families and now completely gone, buried under a true mountain of dirt, dirt that had been removed to create one of the world's largest open pit mines, that of the Kennecott Bingham Canyon mine now owned and operated by Rio Tinto (the link takes you on a virtual tour).  Said the article's author Stephen Dark: In the largest human displacement by a mining corporation in Utah history, former mine owner Kennecott Copper squeezed out the communities, buying up homes and businesses for cents on the dollar so the mine could expand.  Since the late 1990s, the foundations of Bingham City have been buried beneath a mound of waste rock so high it all but eclipses the snow-capped mountains behind it...The corporate-driven demise of these two communities, protracted over years as far as Bingham Canyon was concerned, a few tension-filled months in Lark's (another town buried) case, left only those who had lived there to mourn their passing.  "They took my memories," Halverson (Kennecott retiree Eugene Halverson) says. "They buried Bingham. I used to be able to go to the top of the mine and see where things were." With no trespassing signs keeping people away, "Now, I can't even go up there. Just seems like they took everything away from me."  "You miss out on so much companionship and love and feelings," says Stella Saltas, the 88-year-old mother of City Weekly publisher, John Saltas.  She was born in Bingham and had to join the forced exodus from the canyon in the early 1990s...Rio Tinto began dumping waste over the former city and Main Street in 1997.  Retired Kennecott employee Gary Curtis recalls driving one of the first haul trucks to start the down-canyon dumping on his mother's birthday.  "I don't know I really realized the ramifications of it," he says now.  "You can't take away people's memories, but you dump that rock in there, you've buried history, I guess."  By then, the last holdouts in Lead Mine, which stood at the bottom of the canyon, had gone.  Stella Saltas lived there in her final Bingham years, the location of her home and her father's precious garden still partially visible from the road through a chain-link fence.   "Little by little, they did it, till you're about the only one left," she recalls.  "I wanted to stay there, that was home, I loved it," she says.  Her feelings for Bingham, wrapped up in memories of daily coffee with her own mother on the latter's porch as hawks and eagles wheeled in the sky, are "something you can't explain."

    In an oblique way, I am witnessing this in my mother, now once again disoriented as she moves from assisted living facility to hospital to skilled nursing and likely back to her facility, her actual "home" buried somewhere in her mind, her sense of loss acute but her struggle to put the stories and pictures together fading as surely as a bulldozer burying a town.  In time it will likely all be gone, my brother and I now seemingly hoping for time while she still displays clarity (in one recent incident, the occupational therapist working with her began asking simple questions while she rested in her hospital room --what month was it, what year, what was her birthdate, etc.-- eventually asking her what time was it; my mother's answer, a point to the clock and her saying with exasperation, "It's right there."  Even the OT cracked a smile as he realized that my mother's former teaching days had come roaring back).  For many of us, the closest we can come to relating is to a time of moving, our once-filled rooms now empty and our former home now only a glimpse in the back window of a car.  But in those cases, we have something to look forward to, something to look ahead with excitement.  But for those not wanting to move but being forced to, or not wanting to lose their memories but also being forced to, it must be beyond what we can imagine...disappointment, certainly, but also fear and depression and bitterness.  And just as with tunnels and buried cities and memories, time will just pass and wait.  Discovery may or may not come; the only thing sure to come will be mystery.