The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (28 page)

 

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.

FROM
Outside

 

M
Y TWO BROTHERS
and I, along with a buddy of ours named Dan Bogan, own a shack at a place called Saltery Cove on Southeast Alaska's Prince of Wales Island. The shack is about 36 feet long and 12 feet wide, with the warped shape and discoloration of a cardboard shoebox that's been soaked in the rain. A partially uprooted old-growth hemlock leans menacingly over the back corner, and the front deck sits about seven feet above the shoreline on wooden pilings that are in various stages of decay. The tidal fluctuations in this area are so wild that the shack might be 200 yards away from the water's edge in the morning and then be at risk of becoming oceanic debris by lunchtime. When friends come to visit, they often scrutinize the engineering as though reluctant to commit their full weight to the structure, let alone sleep inside it. While doing so, they're prone to asking questions like “What made you guys buy this place?” with a weird inflection that seems to betray a hint of pity.

My usual, flippant reply is that real estate cliché about location, location, location. The appeal of our shack isn't so much the structure itself, but rather the bare-bones nature of its locality. Surrounded largely by the Tongass National Forest, it's a place where black bears gnaw mussels from the rocks in what might be described as our yard and killer whales pass by so close that you can hear them even with the door closed. But in truth that's only half the answer. The other half is more difficult to explain and also a bit masochistic: Saltery Cove is a place where everything—the weather, the ocean, the mountains, the people, the trees, the animals, even the buildings—seems capable of kicking your ass in a very physical way. And in today's increasingly tame and virtual world, where our primary sensations tend to be delivered by our Wi-Fi connections, a good old-fashioned ass kicking is something worth paying for.

 

Another way in which the cabin kicks my ass is through my wife, Katie. She often regards my purchase of the shack with that eye-rolling sense of dismissal that people will use when confronted with the subject of their spouse's past girlfriends or boyfriends. Not that Katie, a publicity director for a high-profile publishing house in Manhattan, entirely disapproves. Rather, she just feels that the expense of maintaining our “second home” is grossly incommensurate with how much time we spend there. When I try to justify the costs to her, I point out that it's not so much a second home as a first shack, and also that it could someday prove to be a good investment. When those justifications fail, I hit below the belt and tell her that I'd intended for it to be my primary place of residence but had willfully sacrificed that dream in order to stay close to her—my true love. That usually does the trick.

The purchase occurred during my late 20s, well before I'd met Katie. It was a time when I was more or less aimlessly bouncing around the country with little or no responsibility. In 2003, this landed me on Prince of Wales Island. I went there with my brother Danny to fish salmon and halibut with one of Saltery Cove's eight full-time residents, Ron Leighton, a man of mixed Native Alaskan and Irish descent who'll tear your head off for tangling an anchor line and then send your kid a birthday present even though the nearest mailbox is an hour's boat ride from his house. Ron's résumé includes a tour of duty as a door gunner in Vietnam, a career as a detective with the police force in Ketchikan, Alaska, and a parallel career as a halibut long-liner. He and Danny originally met when Danny traveled to Saltery Cove to do some environmental survey work through his job as an ecologist at the University of Alaska. Ron offered to put him up and show him around during his stay, and they struck up an unlikely friendship. Then, about a year after my own initial visit (a trip that included meal upon meal of self-caught shrimp, crab, and halibut), Ron called Danny to tell him that the shack across the creek from his house had been put up for sale by its owner.

The price was $80,000, nonnegotiable. Danny recognized that this was a lot of money for one guy to pay, especially for a place that might get knocked into the water by a hemlock and float away. Twenty grand, on the other hand, seemed reasonable. All he had to do was find three other guys who felt the same way. He called me in Rhode Island, where I was living in a short-term rental that sat so close to the water, I could watch movies in my living room at night while holding a fishing rod baited for eels and cast into the bay. I'd just sold my first book for what seemed like a staggering sum of money, and since I was still a few years away from adult responsibility, I knew I'd end up blowing my windfall on outdoor gear and alcoholic beverages. That I could take permanent possession of a setup similar to the one I was now enjoying—albeit 3,000 miles away—was an irresistible notion. Our brother Matt and our buddy Dan were equally intrigued. The four of us mailed in our checks.

Danny and I were the first ones to plan a visit. To get there from his house in Anchorage, where I'd been staying for a couple of months, we ended up flying into Seattle and then transferring planes to Ketchikan, a town with an airport that happens to be on a different island from the town itself. We collected our bags and then dragged them down a long ramp toward a ferry dock. After crossing to Ketchikan, we dragged the bags up another ramp and waited in the rain for a cab. Since this was our only chance to stock up on provisions, we made the rounds to the grocery, hardware, and sporting-goods stores. By then it was too late to get a floatplane, so we booked a hotel and caught a shuttle to the docks at dawn. There we loaded our supplies into the plane and flew over Clarence Strait toward the jagged and serpentine coastline of Prince of Wales Island, a landmass half the size of Hawaii's Big Island but with three times as much coastline.

Danny and I will forever remember the month that followed as the summer of trash. When we climbed off the floatplane to behold our new treasure, we were greeted by a two-acre parcel of garbage to which we now held the deed. There were steel barrels of chemicals such as kerosene, water sealer, and gear oil made useless by the intrusion of rainwater that had dripped through rust-perforated lids. Dozens of empty barrels, concealed beneath layers of moss, gave the landscape a bumpy look that reminded me of a rash. Elsewhere we found Styrofoam blocks as big as bathtubs, a mound of fiberglass insulation the size of a car, enough rotted lumber to build a rotted house, and what would eventually turn out to be 150 gallons of crushed beer cans. Two sheds made of plastic sheeting had simply collapsed over time, burying piles of junked fishing gear, inoperable chainsaws, rusted hardware, busted-up shrimp and crab traps, and coils of cracked plastic hose. When we opened an outhouse toward the back of the property, near the national-forest border, we found that both the hole and the structure had been filled with household garbage.

The only thing more staggering than the volume and variety of the trash was the fact that it had all come in on boats and planes, presumably over the course of many decades. There was no economically feasible way for us to get it out of there and into a landfill, so we did the only thing that made sense. In a weird moment of clairvoyance, I had packed along my flame-retardant military flight suit, and this became my uniform for the next month as Danny and I built infernos of burning trash with smoke plumes rivaling those seen on news broadcasts dispatched from Kabul.