The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (27 page)

Following Otter's directions, we parked near a railway overpass and quickly suited up in waders and headlamps, trying to look as casual as possible as Garrett and Explo argued over the entry's precise location. When they found it, Explo stage-whispered, “Action!” Garrett pulled out a T-shaped metal key and inserted it into a hatch in the sidewalk. It opened with a rusty shriek. “That's how you pop a lid,” he said. In an instant we were piling down slippery rungs into a dank and pitch-black hole. Garrett descended last, and I heard the manhole cover slam shut with a funereal clang.

We walked for what seemed like hours along an eight-foot-high tunnel. The experience encompassed an almost laughable agglomeration of stock phobias—darkness, rats, germs, drowning—but Otter was right: It smelled merely musty, not toxic, like wading down an underground stream, and soon I was swept up in the general enthusiasm of the company. As we started sloshing north, the crew's whoops of delight reverberated—sounding almost Auto-Tuned in the strange acoustics. Garrett told me he had once brought an inflatable raft down here and drifted along with London's effluent flow.

I began to get an inkling of the “radical freedom” Garrett had described in urbex. In his dissertation, he wrote that London's 1,200-mile sewer system has a “noxious comfort.” (The system was engineered after the Great Stink of 1858 by Joseph Bazalgette, who might be surprised that he's become an urbex hero, given the honorific J-Bizzle.) Garrett sees the sewers as a zone of total self-reliance and personal responsibility. It was true. In a city said to have 200,000 security cameras, we were unmonitored and completely alone. The compass app on my iPhone was utterly useless, spinning in disoriented circles.

Otter had originally calculated that our journey beneath London, well over 15 miles, would take about 30 hours. But we missed a crucial turn somewhere in the warren of tunnels and soon reached an impasse, our way blocked by a Dantean lake of sewage. Explo wanted to backtrack, and Helen wanted to sleep in the sewer, but logic and exhaustion won out. We popped out into the middle of a quiet side street as a rosy dawn broke over London. We had, by some space-time wormhole, emerged only a few blocks from Garrett's flat, and we stripped off our hip waders before crashing on his floor, filthy and beat, a chair wedged against the broken door.

 

We continued on, like caffeinated vampires, sleeping by day and exploring the city after dark. Midnight was the new noon. One night we popped a lid on Fleet Street, where London's largest subterranean river flowed beneath the city, and we descended into the Fleet chamber, a massive tidal gate and storm outflow with gorgeous cathedral arches of brick. Almost no Londoner would ever see it, or even be aware of its existence beneath their feet. I glanced nervously at my watch, as the journey was timed with the tide on the Thames. Garrett cracked a beer.

When we came out dripping from the underworld, a double-decker bus rolled past, but the driver paid no attention to our extremely conspicuous group emerging from a manhole at 2
A.M.
We circled around the city again, Garrett, restless, looking for something. He spied a 10-story construction site surrounded by chain-link and scaffolding. There was a small gap in the fence, just big enough for Garrett to haul himself effortlessly through. Wary of security guards and cameras, I followed as silently and elegantly as a bear clambering into a Dumpster. We made our way up an internal stairwell to the roof and onto the ladder of a massive construction crane. Finally we were sitting right next to the control cabin 150 feet up, feet dangled over the void, London glittering to the horizon. Garrett pointed out landmarks, famous and less so: Big Ben, the Eye, the Shard, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Gherkin, King's Reach Tower. The names sounded like constellations or rock-climbing routes. In fact, he had summited most of them.

The risks were as real as in mountaineering, of course. Explo had nearly fallen from a church steeple when a rusty ladder rung broke off in his hands, and Otter had once broken his arm in a sewer. A few weeks earlier, there had been a rumor that a Russian explorer had died falling through a skylight while crossing a rooftop. Predictably, the explorers downplayed the risk. “The percentage of us who actually die is pretty low for what we do,” said Explo. The urbex ethos precluded suing property owners over injuries, and Garrett described the acceptance of risk, and a sort of dance with it, with a term he'd appropriated from Hunter S. Thompson:
edgework.

As if to demonstrate the concept, Garrett climbed out onto the 100-foot jib of the crane, angled like a fishing rod high above the city. There was no ladder, nothing between him and the black cabs cruising the street far below. His movements along the fog-slicked struts were as deliberate as a stalking cat's. Edgework.

 

For Garrett, the thrill of urbex is as much about metaphysical exploration as it is physical adventure. The theoretical DNA of much of his work traces back to the concept of “psychogeography,” defined by the French situationist philosopher (and noted alcoholic) Guy Debord in 1955 as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Debord encouraged a practice called
dérive
(“drift” in French), which entailed wandering through an urban landscape guided only by shifting feelings, unmoored from the duties and associations of daily life. This means of spacily rebooting the urban environment is taken to its logical extreme with urbex.

The canonical text of the urbex movement is a book called
Access All Areas,
a work that's meant as both a spiritual and practical guide to a hobby that counters a consumer culture filled with “safe and sanitized attractions that require an admission fee.” Its pseudonymous author, Ninjalicious, was a 31-year-old Canadian named Jeff Chapman, who had first written about his exploits in the 1990s in a self-published zine called
Infiltration.
Chapman died of cancer in 2005, just weeks before his book was published, lending his life's work an aura of unimpeachable, almost Christ-like authenticity.

Garrett sees his work as restoring the true spirit of Ninjalicious, pushing the urbex boundaries beyond the trendy venues: derelict and abandoned buildings, which he considers easy prey. The urbex term for derelict structures is
derp,
exemplified by the postapocalyptic photography nicknamed ruin porn. “The roots of urban exploration are actually in infiltration, and we've forgotten that as a community,” said Garrett. “We're bringing it back to its core. We're seizing it from those fucking ruin fetishists.” Garrett calls for a more radical set of tactics for what he calls “live sites”: places in active use. He sees this kind of unsanctioned access as the best means to regain freedom in a society that is utterly cordoned and securitized. As a sort of calling card, he carries sheets of stickers that read
EXPLORE EVERYTHING
, which he affixes everywhere he goes.

Some cities are more suited to this go-anywhere philosophy than others. London's vast security apparatus, for instance, presents a set of challenges that could be described as Orwell Lite: ubiquitous cameras, by-the-book cops, and a passive-aggressively reinforced expectation of propriety. This can add to the thrill, of course, but when the State kicks in your door, it's always a bummer. Paris, on the other hand, is spoken of in the urbex scene in the way Okies might have invoked California. “In Paris, they don't give a shit,” said Garrett. “The quality of life is so much higher there, because people let you get on with what you want to get on with. They're not in your face all the time about it.”

Garrett had initially suggested we go there, but given the confiscation of his passport, it was out of the question. Britain had become a prison island for him, and he didn't want to risk hacking his way out and back in again. But Explo and Helen wanted me to see it, and Otter wanted to go somewhere he wasn't legally enjoined from exploring, so we packed our gear and contorted ourselves obstetrically into the Twinkie and made for the Chunnel.

The following midnight I found myself following Explo's command of
Action!,
climbing after him over a construction fence surrounding a half-built office tower named Carpe Diem in the central business district of Paris. We found the main stairwell and humped 38 stories up, legs burning, gasping for breath. There were a half dozen explorers in the group, including Patch, a 25-year-old Brit who was currently wanted in London on the same warrant for which Garrett had been arrested. Patch's most recent job was as a stock manager at a big-box store, but for now he was staying in a squat and planning to return to London in a few months when the heat was off.

We came out onto the darkened concrete roof and then scaled the metal stairs of a looming tower crane, sweat freezing in the now alpine air. In the sharp wind, the crane swiveled side to side like a giant weathervane. Paris flowed and pulsed 600 feet below us, but it was eerily quiet at that height. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower erupted into a glittering laser-light spectacle to mark the hour. Several people crammed into the operator's cab of the crane, which—
quelle surprise!
—still had the keys in it. Someone scrolled through the crane's commands on its touch screen. I asked them to
stop touching the fucking buttons, please.

Exiting the building site after the long walk down, Explo whispered in a mock video-game voice: “Level Two, complete.”

It occurred to me then that Explo's cry of
Action!
at the beginning of each adventure had a double meaning. It was both a call to arms and a director's command in the fantasy movie of his own life, in which he was the auteur and hero both. The urbex life is at heart a form of play, a pressure valve to regulate the atmospheric crush of daily life. Explo, at his programming job, might daydream of a manhole in the floor of his cubicle, of some escape from the mundane requirements of society. Once you begin playing this game, the entire world becomes filled with secret doors.

 

Some doors hide better secrets than others. One afternoon as we weaved through chaotic traffic, Explo pulled up next to a middle-aged black man with long dreadlocks and an army jacket, sitting on a park bench. “
Ça va,
Dirty?” he called, sticking his head out the sunroof. They conversed rapidly in French, then Explo popped back down. “That's Dirty. He invited us to a party later. It's funny, I consider him a friend and yet I've never seen him more than ten meters from a manhole. He's a cataphile.”

A cataphile is an aficionado of the vast network of catacombs, quarried over centuries from the soft limestone beneath the city. Nobody knows for sure how far they extend, but more than a hundred miles of tunnels have been charted, underlying a tenth of Paris—a city of darkness beneath the City of Light. Barely a mile of the catacombs is open to the public, but a wide subculture of the creative and clandestine have used the network for decades. Late that night we returned to the same spot where Explo had spotted Dirty. There was a steel hatch right on the sidewalk, and Explo pointed out the places where it had been repeatedly spot-welded shut by the police and subsequently broken open by the cataphiles. He glanced around, quickly pulled the lid open, and we descended a dark ladder.

From down a stone side passage came the sound of echoing laughter, the smell of hash smoke, and the flickering yellow light of a carbide lantern. Dirty held court before a half dozen visitors, dripping candles affixed around the room. He told me he had come down for a party 62 days ago and just decided never to leave except to resupply and use the facilities. (There are no bathrooms belowground.) He warned me to “respect the catas.” The tunnels were originally begun as quarries but have served over the years as smuggling routes and ossuaries. During World War II, the Nazis and the Resistance had neighboring catacomb bunkers, each unaware of the other's existence. Explo pointed to an inscription carved in a stone monument dedicated to the memory of Philibert Aspairt. Like J-Bizzle in the sewers of London, Aspairt is a legend of the catacombs. He went missing while exploring down here in 1793, but his body wasn't found until 1804. We were having a party in his tomb.

Dirty led us down a narrow tunnel, which opened up into a large gallery. The leave-no-trace ethic of place hacking doesn't exactly apply in the catacombs; rather, they are a vast work in progress, just like the city above. Graffiti pieces and stencils covered the walls. More ambitious artists had carved relief sculptures into the stone itself, and one had spent what must have been weeks installing a graffiti mosaic out of thousands of tiny tiles. There was a lending library stocked with moisture-swollen paperbacks and a huge lounge table carved from a block of stone. In places along the tunnel, side shafts had been dug, called
chatières,
literally “cat flaps,” connecting branches or forming new chambers. All this work had been done in total darkness, 50 feet below the streets, all for the delight and edification of the relatively small group of adventurers who might find their way there.

After we made our way out, I sat in a sidewalk café in broad daylight, drinking a café au lait and eating a perfect
galette au chèvre,
refusing to acknowledge to gawkers that I was aware I was covered head to toe in beige catacomb mud. So much of urbex is an exquisitely crafted inside joke, done for its own beautifully pointless sake, like the explorer who put a necktie on a statue in the pediment of the Panthéon, 120 feet above the Latin Quarter. He did tag a photo of it on Flickr, of course.

That day we napped on the grass beneath the Eiffel Tower, its riveted latticework swooshing into the blue heavens. Surely it would be the greatest climb in all of Paris, I observed. Explo agreed, were it not for the heavily armed soldiers patrolling its base. But he said he knew somewhere else just as sublime.