On Campus Tunnels

One of the best ways to identify a new and booming city is cluttered infrastructure. Cables, pipes, and power lines are particularly infamous for clumping like spiderwebs in a fast-growing city. The only alternative to putting these cables above the ground on poles is...to put them under the ground in holes. Instead of just burying a small pipe, worker-accessible tunnels are usually built around them, to allow repairs and expansion. Gutters are another popular thing to bury. Nobody wants a river rushing down the sidewalk across their whole city, so they put in pipes to carry water; pipes that have to be big enough to remove rainwater even when several inches per hour fall.

So what looks like solid ground often isn't, especially in a place with established infrastructure; and nearly always when you see no other infrastructure. Look around. Are there large buildings with no power lines going to them? Then they're fed by buried cable. If there are enough large buildings around, it's cheaper to make a tunnel than to constantly dig up cable for repairs and upgrades. University campuses are well-known for their ubiquitous 'steam tunnels,' and the downtown urban areas have them as well. I'll borrow a picture fromULiveAndYouBurn's site. Steam tunnels generally look a lot like this:

That is, concrete with a lot of pipes and a little bit of room to walk along it. These days many are secured pretty closely; there is legitimate fear of someone stupid getting in and getting hurt, and paranoia about terrorists sabotaging infrastructure. However, with a little bit of caution and knowledge of the local system, you gain the opportunity to find some really neat places that very few people know about:

Off the Beaten Path, taking a break after class.

First drain

First Drain
Note: This is stuff I did in June. Pardon the shifted tense, I hope explained consistency will make things less, not more confusing.

At home I used to go out walking or biking, and would frequently wind up exploring one little stream or another. As a farming area, pretty much the only terrain features were these ditches. I began to explore a small ditch here that runs through campus. This ditch is one of the environmental-reclamation projects the city is pushing to avoid erosion, runoff, habitat loss, water pollution, deforestation, and cancer. It winds through the long dimension of campus, hardly drawing any notice at all to itself.

The stream's stealthiness is helped by the fact that it's only visible far away from the busy sidewalks. It's either shrouded by trees and ten feet or more below sidewalk level, or literally underground and out of sight. Today I was hiking along the sunny creek bed near the track when I came upon what looked a lot like a dead end. A concrete apron juts out, with a bridge and log spanning the stream above it. Atop the bank and ahead of me lay a road I know well, but the stream I walked along seemed to appear from the ivy.

Clicking this picture will open a larger version. The photos in this entry are from my old camera.

Of course streams can't dead end. It seems obvious when you think about it, but even as I started right at it it didn't really sink in. All streams come from somewhere, and all water has a path downhill. I keep a small pen-light with me (Thanks Uncle Brad!), so I walk on in to check it out. The stream went right under a road and lot in a long culvert. Picture a concrete room, 8 feet wide and high; stretched out to a few hundred feet long, and then the short walls left off. A box culvert is made of two or three of these buried under a road or something heavy, to let a stream go through and support the road without building a real bridge. All of the paths in a culvert will travel together, carrying the stream. Out of sight and out of mind, the water continues along, flowing and dripping in darkness. The water is only deep enough to get the soles of my shoes wet, occasionally getting up to an inch deep, and there's a small side tunnel for later...


In the middle the afternoon on a busy campus, in summer, I managed to find a quiet dark world that few people see. I'll soon add the pictures of graffiti in this tunnel.

Flâneur

Flaneur

The word means 'To stroll,' with the idea of 'strolling (through the city, to experience it).' To me, it means that I look at, explore, learn about, and experience the city around me. I also take pictures to show people why I do the crazy things I do.

Originally applied to Parisian citygoers, the idea has been captured by writers describing society and life in the years since the word was coined in the 19th century. Charles Baudelaire called it "Botany of the sidewalk," looking at the effects of cities on society, and vice versa. No city would be possible without many complex, interconnected systems that represent years of engineering, countless hours, and millions of dollars; but these systems are entirely out of sight, only noticed when they inconvenience us. Most people in the world depend on these invisible arteries for water, power, and heat, for the removal of waste and water; and without their tireless performance modern life would be fundamentally different.

As we have transformed the face of the world, our changes have changed our lives and attitudes. The very ideas of freedom, space, distance, and location are affected by our networks of systems that make the modern life possible. The effects of living in cities are rarely noticed, because we've known them all our lives. Having the natural human interest in the effects of something so deeply ingrained in the world, I try to learn about the systems that support the life I unconsciously live.