The beauty strikes The heart of Saturday night.
To suggest that the last few months, two or twenty or forty eight (depending how ya want to count them) have been uber intense would be an easy underestimation all day long. Perhaps Im dipping into the unrelatable, but there’s this thing about mines.
Gold, silver, copper: drift mines.
To get up in the morning, unwrinkle a topo map, lace up your boots, pack an extra bulb, two sets of batteries and actually seek one out. Adventure, risk, adrenaline, you know the routine.
When you find the tailings crumbling down the side of the mountain beneath the pines, the heart rate gets elevated, you can climb faster even though you are exhausted and the true path to wonder gets illuminated.
Standing at the mouth of a drift, that could be a minor form of sheer terror.
You don’t know whats in there or how many different ways you could meet a death that will most certainly be served alone, in total darkness, with no quarter. Crushed by a cave in, asphyxiated by invisible poison gas, impaled on 100 year old blunt, rusted iron, slip helpless down a might as well be bottomless shaft, make enough wrong turns to be lost under ground for all of your last days alive, eaten by zombies, or shot by a land owner. This all flashes as you take that first step into the darkness.
You search for the 24 guage rail or a fragment of steam pipe to hopefully guide you into the belly of the beast. After the first 100 meters, when the graffiti peters out, the daylight outside grows dim behind you and the ringing in your ears rises to make you aware of the silence, a certain comfort sets in.
You can walk in there for miles sometimes, and if you are lucky, the fear subsides and perhaps foolishly, the constant danger just becomes comfortable. When you are lucky, survival flows eminently. There is this odd thing however, about the light at the end of the tunnel. Most people view that light at the end of the tunnel as a positive thing. Most people arent stupid enough to go wandering around abandoned gold mines. Because, well, they are fucking dangerous places. So dangerous, in fact, that most of the entrances are sealed, in one way or another.
Dynamited for the permanent cave in, boarded up to impede the casual explorer or in many cases, barred with lengths of ancient steel. Cages at drift entrances that don’t look much different than the average prison cell. These are exceptionally effective at keeping people out, but they are absolutely expert at keeping people in.
So its always with great anxiety, after a few hours in a mine, that Ive learned to greet the light at the end of the tunnel. Will I be able to stroll out? Will I be met with bars drilled several feet into concreted walls? I just survived all this danger, will I have to turn around and repeat it all just to get back out the way I came in, will I get back out at all, I was after all, pretty lucky to have made it this far.
And so, thats my experience with the light at the end of the tunnel. Much of the time, its the brewer of an anxiety that has no measure, the light at the end of the tunnel can go fuck itself in the ear with the tortuous optimism it can recklessly dangle in front of dilated pupils, especially when your calves are burning from climbing, your nose is burning from that sulfur smell, your shoulders are burning under the weight of your pack, your hands are burning from the fresh cuts in them, your eyes are burning from trying to see through the darkness, you’ve creeped yourself out to the core deep inside a steam-age hole in a mountain and you just want to go home.
Gold mines were my adventure in the 90’s, I still cling to the lessons in fear I hauled out of all the holes I was lucky enough to walk out of. So the last few months. Yes. They have been a grand adventure, measuring high on my list of all the grand adventures I have been on, climbing into the stupid risks of abandoned gold mines included. Up until recently its been a big party in the blackness of the new exploration, an unfurling of the wonder of discovery, each step more exciting than the last, each decision more filled with risk than the sum of everything that preceded it. But then, there’s the light at the end of the tunnel, and my learned reflex to it.
A few nights earlier, I had seen a drawing of what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like. I knew what it represented. It got me excited, made me levitate off the fifth floor for just a second, but it was just a hint. And that was good.
I was not prepared for the email couple days later that I opened to discover the light at the end of the tunnel, full on. It brought with it lots of emotion, as these things tend to do, but I was not prepared for the beauty: of the thing itself, of the possibility of change it represented, of my reaction to it.
So I sat, lost in the idea of the most beautiful thing in the world and in some moment of clarity slowly became aware of the fact that the fear was gone. Monumental, yeah. Definitely. Overwhelming, yeah. Certainly. Awesome? Absolutely.
The next question quickly became, what do you do when you conceptually have the most beautiful thing in the world sitting in front of you, but its top secret and you cant show anybody? Or its too specific and nobody would understand? Or that its just so far on the other side of the edge that it defies explanation?
Ive asserted for a long time that the loneliest people on earth (who are all about to die) are the few Apollo astronauts who stood on the moon and looked at the Earth.
There is nobody that has seen such beauty and nobody who took such risks to see it. The End. The most hardcore of the hardcore. The hardcore-est. The small few that make you realize the word elite has lost all its meaning and impact. Their entire lives must sound like the charlie brown teacher as the rest of us bland earthlings drone on about our concerns, failures, achievements and accomplishments while silently in their head the universal retort for everything, every fucking utterance that another living being can provide them is “well, I stood on the moon, motherfucker, whatever”. Apollo: the most elite fraternity and the loneliest men alive, nobody will ever relate to their perspective, not even the shuttle pilots who would walk in their wake.
I dare not compare myself to these men, but considering their plight, knowing they carry the ache of unimaginable beauty gained by conquering nothing short of the most grotesque quotient of danger, considering the burden they awake with every day makes the task of yielding to the most beautiful thing in MY life certainly some kind of cake walk in comparison.
But I had to show someone. Someone else had to know.
I explained to my brother that at long last, I had the most beautiful thing. I suggested, with a certain urgency, that he drop what he was doing and come bear witness to the magic I had going on. He explained he had some work to do for his day job and I insisted that Joe Kittinger had to break the speed of sound without an aircraft testing a parachute deployment system so that Neil Armstrong could take one small step for man, see the most amount of beauty that man would ever know and then make it back to Earth alive, to be tortured by the isolation of that knowledge for the rest of his days. The conversation went in this circle for some time before he agreed provide some critical companionship and would do the interview from my house.
Tonight’s interview was Mr. Toast for the NPR radio show that he produces.
ISDN brought worlds together, Mr. Toast extolled the virtue of collecting cereal boxes and I scrolled compulsively through the folder of scans that I had trying to come up with a strategy of how to show them to my bro without exploding his head.
We made it to the usual sushi spot with his interest now off the chart.
He had been hearing me talk about this for a long time. The only person who has been in the loop longer has been the guy Ive been working on this project with. I figured it was time to provide him with a proper security clearance and laid my phone down on the bar.
Talk of Kittinger, Glenn, Aldrin and the hardcore elite spun into a conversation about the arctic circle and the people that go there, what they are made out of and why. Things got really interesting when we shifted from the north to the south pole and after my usual stream of frustration about access to Antarctica as a civilian and he recounted a story about a researcher who spent winters there.
For many scientists who are lucky enough to spend time in Antarctica, there are no weekends. No days off. No convenience of emergency medial treatment and sporadic resupply which is entirely ruled by the weather changing on the thin side of a dime. Time there is always limited and always bracketed by some outside force.
So there was a guy, doing weather research at an Antarctic station. His shift was a twelve hour day, seven days a week. During the winter you have what basically is perpetual darkness. The arms on a clock spin around, the work is endless, you can spiral into the abyss without a marker or two.
Well, at this weather station, Saturdays were celebrated. Celebrated as a reminder of life back in the world, celebrated as a marker to reset the cycle, celebrated as a stake on a reality that may or may not apply. And such it was that every saturday, Looking For The Heart of Saturday Night was blasted beneath the satellite dishes, radio antennas and over the horizon arrays throughout the hallways of a weather lab on the bottom of the earth. Every Saturday. Impetus for fun, Essential for sanity, Critical for survival. This went on for years until, back in the world, this scientist suffered his first seizure which immediately disqualified him from ever going back to the south pole ever again. He could have attempted to pull a Kittinger and not tell anyone that the pressure fitting in the right glove of his flight suit was malfunctioning, avoiding having the mission cancelled, but he didn’t, the burden on his colleagues would have been too great if he needed urgent care which circumstances as simple and common as a white out would prevent. So he never went back. Fantasy passion boarding pass: revoked.
The story really made me sad because I know that guy is lost. And I suspect I know exactly how that guy is lost and there’s probably nothing worse. When you live for the lust that fuels a passion and it gets ripped out of your hands like that… Nothing worse. So he had this song, which was his light at the end of the tunnel, a fantastical marker of another week down in the life of the hardcore of isolation and now in the mundane daily life of tying shoe laces and filling a car with groceries playing that song can only stand for the obscene paradigm of the magic of the melancholy tear in your eye. Trust that this can only be the case.
Lucky for him, he did have the memory of the most beautiful thing. In his world. Perhaps not so different from Kittinger’s memory of that eternal lean forward in the open door of a hundred thousand foot gondola, or Armstrong’s memory of that first puff of dust swirling up and around the stitching covering the lead weight in his boots. I pondered this for some time.
Our conversation continued on this track through dinner, which in our usual fashion, went on for two or three orders too many of the best fish in NYC.
The same fish, maybe not so ironically, that served as a small part of foundation fuel for what I was about to show him.
The Spacelord himself made mention of two concepts, two ideas which find their way into my daily life more and more and more these days. One: you get what you give. Two: there it is. Having been the lucky recipient of point one, with a Voila, I passed my phone to my bro with the instruction to scroll right.
It was confirming to watch him react the way I had been bouncing off the walls all day. I opened an email. I paced my house. I tried to sit still. I tried to focus. Just. Too. Excited. Set a new personal time record at the gym that night. Motivation is everything.
This is insane.
Yes, its going to be.
No, really.
I know.
Texts were sent, invitations declined, more drinks were ordered, a proper celebration would have to wait for another day. It might have been premature anyway. And really, this was no celebration. It was all just offset.
A shift in energy having the knowledge. A deep plunge into the ether of amazing combined with the shrill shock of being in it virtually all alone.
It was nothing new, if anything its been the foot note for everything Ive cared about in my adult life. The loneliness of all the good things, some days, I don’t know, its just a big bite to chew on. Way out there beyond the edge, it can make you think.
You dont have to leave the atmosphere to have an earth shattering memory (although it must help). You dont have to free fall for four minutes. You dont have to climb half a mile down into a hole. We all have an edge. Those of us with this disease keep pushing past it and the line of demarcation is constantly getting adjusted further and further away from convention as you venture farther and farther past where it once was. Some people probably call it desensitization. But it’s really not. It’s just a redefining of maximum capacity for the extreme passion. The problem is, the further you go beyond that line, the lonelier it gets, way out there. The longer you have to walk back, the emptier you feel when you return. And sometimes, in the numbing emptiness, you never know what will flash you right back to inception, on the far side of The Edge. 
Just like that: Poof.
The light shining through the end of the tunnel this time, perhaps, is different. Its real, its beautiful, its awesome.
The two people along with me on this one, in every way, have been epic. Change, sometimes, somehow, its not so scary.