Our hole is three feet deep and halfway under the wall when I run into a tarpaulin imbedded in the dirt. I can't tell what it is in the nighttime darkness until I take out my flashlight. Shit, haven't we gotten enough trouble from roots and rocks? What's a tarp doing buried in the ground anyway? The obvious answer snaps into my mind when my flashlight shows a half-rotten shoe sticking out of the worm-infested folds. I freeze, overcome by a sudden wave of revulsion and horror, my mind completely filled with the horrific idea of a body rotting inches in front of me. When I can move again, I reach out and gently pull the tarp, my breath tight in my throat. The shoe tumbles out, attached to nothing, and behind it there is only dirt. My moment of panic is over but my heart's still racing and I stand up and move away from the dirt to where Elinor is leaning against the wall watching for cops and thugs. I get out my last two cigarettes and offer her one, and as we smoke I try to relax and shake off my nervousness. BACKGROUND Around us, Riverside Park stretches down to the Hudson, illuminated only by a faint moon and distant headlights from the occasional car passing on West Side Highway. Nothing visible but shadowy trees, stunted grass, and a ten-foot wall of stone that rises up fifteen feet to the next level of the park. Somewhere underneath us, though, is the Riverside Park train tunnel-- a 2.5 mile long subterranean space that runs North-South along the river. For years it was abandoned, and reporters in the eighties found a huge community of homeless men and women living in it. Then Amtrak bought the tunnel, kicked everyone out, and began running trains again. The most recent reports I've been able to find on it, though, are from 1989. I want to know-- is anyone still down there? When we're done with the cigarettes we go back to digging. We're trying to dig underneath the wall and into the tunnel, which had seemed to me to be an easy enough thing to do when I'd read about it in a Manhattan Spirit interview with a homeless man who sleeps in the park. But we've been digging for more than two hours know, hacking through the rocky earth with a shovel we found in a trashcan on Broadway. Now, we've finally reached the bottom of the wall-- only to find that it's solid concrete two feet thick. Even without the tarp slowing down our progress we'll be digging for a while longer before we can get all the way under the wall. GETTING IN Eventually, I can reach forward through our tunnel and feel empty space; the ground on the inside of the wall is lower, fortunately, so we don't have to dig our way back up. We clear out a little more space, enough to squeeze our bodies through. "Do you want to go in first?" I say to Elinor. "No," she says. "Go for it." I put my flashlight in my mouth, and then push myself headfirst down and into the hole. It's just big enough for my body, and pushing against the dirt with my elbows I slide forward. It reminds me of caving-- crawling into narrow tunnels too small to turn around in, never knowing if the passage will open up into a huge room or if it will just keep on getting narrower and smaller until you have to back up, sliding on your stomach and pulling with your toes. Inside, I find myself on a five-foot ledge. The tunnel stretches up ten feet above me, and in front of me, the edge of the ledge that I'm standing on is actually the top of another concrete wall that drops down fifteen feet to the dirt and gravel floor where the traintracks run. It's huge, maybe seventy feet wide and almost thirty feet high. It's hard to imagine that this whole space is underground; I feel more like I've stepped into a hollow Egyptian pyramid or a cathedral. The sense of other-worldliness is intense, and the whispering trees and faint distant sounds of cars have been replaced with the dead silence of a tomb. A cold wind is blowing above ground, but here the stale, dusty air is completely still. I realize that there's no longer dirt under my feet, but layers of rotting clothes, magazines, shoes, and books. The trash must have once belonged to some poor bastard who lived here, before he was kicked out by Amtrak workers. None of the stuff has been touched in years and it's all a smelly, soggy mess. The tarp that we ran into must have been put down originally to keep the damp off. It's amazing that entering as randomly as we did we still ran into someone's old home; there must have been huge numbers of people here once. "Hey!" Elinor's voice reminds me that the outside world still exists. "I don't want to just stay out here by myself. I'm coming through. Take the knife and my light when I push them through, ok?" I reach into the hole when I see the light from her flashlight and pick them up by touch. After a long moment, I see her outstretched hand and then she's kicking her way through, grabbing my hand to pull herself along. She brushes ineffectually at the dirt smeared into her shirt. I feel like I'm covered with crushed worms and spiders, but no matter; we're in. Elinor gets out cigarettes as she stares around and I put out my hand in a silent request. As I smoke I look down at the floor of the tunnel below; it's too far to jump down and the smooth concrete wall doesn't offer any holds for climbing. "We should have brought a rope," I say. "How the hell can we get down?" "We could use that tarp." "Where could we tie it?" "On those bolts. I hope those wires aren't electrified." She aims her flashlight near our feet, where corroded bolts stick out of the concrete and support dirty electric cables. I crawl back out to retrieve the tarp we dug up. It's a little rotten, a little torn; still strong enough to support us, though. I'm not as confident about the sixty-year-old bolts, but as we slide down to the gravel everything seems to hold. The beams of the flashlights show up in the dusty air and give a silver shine to the two sets train tracks. We step hesitantly and slowly, not talking, afraid to disturb the ominous quiet and unsure what to do next. Elinor breaks the silence. "Which way should we go?" North and South, they both look the same. She helps me out. "Lets go that way. That's North, right?" "Yeah. Lead on." We walk, not chatting, but pointing out features of the tunnel to each other in an undertone like two morticians noting the salient points of an autopsy. We pass a huge pile of trash bulldozed against a wall, evidence of the people that once lived here and the subsequent clean-up by the Amtrak workers. On our right, the wall is a tall smooth slab of concrete, but on our left the ledge that we climbed down from cuts into the wall a little more than halfway up. Pillars and supports turn the ledge into a series of galleries; we can see that some of the galleries lead to niches further back, but the flashlights can't pierce the shadows of the support beams and for all we can tell the openings could extend five feet or fifty. GRAFFITI Graffiti is scattered throughout the tunnel, and as we walk we pass clustered sections where old tags are covered over by newer scrawls, and huge colorful productions are layered over that. Even when there was a community down here, these productions would only be seen by a couple hundred people each yearÑas remote as any spot in New York City. Now there's even less of an audience, but people are still painting. I look at one dated 1999; it's twenty feet long, an explosion of color, signed by Chip, Nace, and Sace. This, I think, is why I like exploring; like the view from a mountaintop, only a few people will ever see this, and now I'm one of them. The most amazing productions, though, are the ten-foot tall murals by Freedom Chris and Smith. One is an oversized version of the Mona Lisa, another a Dali-style clock dripping down the wall, others are huge portraits of sad faces. These works are more than ten years old and yet they're almost completely unscathed, despite the bulldozing of the tunnel by Amtrak and the fact that younger taggers often try to build their own fame by painting over the works of more well known artists. The Mona Lisa is one of the few that has been touched; someone tagged over the bottom half of her face, as much as could be reached without a ladder. But the newer tag has been painted over with matte black and the words "Where's your respect, toy?" TRAIN GOES BY We walk maybe a mile along the tracks before we turn around. The graffiti's still fascinating, but it's almost five in the morning and we don't know how far the tunnel goes or where we'll be if it ends. We both know that we'll be coming back. On the way back to our hole, we hear a train coming. It's just a low rumble at first, coming from all around us, and I look at Elinor to see if I'm just imagining it. We both stop and look down the tunnel, and it's only when we see the glow from the headlights shining around a curve that we realize what it is. The realization comes at the same moment for both of us, and we sprint for a wall, turning off the flashlights as the light and noise of the train fills the space around us. I crouch down in the dirt next to the wall, pulling a hood over my head and hiding my face, hoping that my dirty clothes will seem to be just another piece of trash. A few feet away I see Elinor sprawled against the wall like a dead thing. Then the train is suddenly here, completely filling my senses; bright headlights arcing past, quick-flash exposures of heads silhouetted through the windows, a roaring of metal against metal, and the smell of dust and steel. For the short moments that the train passes the tunnel is bright as day; we're exposed, we'll be seen, there's no chance that these people can pass fifteen feet from us and not know that we're there. But the bright-lit faces just stare straight ahead and the train rushes North like a fancy car on a bypass through the bad section of town. And then they're gone, uptown, across the river, and out of the city, and we're left with the clattering echoes in the darkness. When it's well past, I stand up. My eloquence fails me. "Holy shit," I tell Elinor. "That was loud." THE OTHER ROOMS We make our way back to our starting point and climb up the tarpaulin to the debris-filled ledge with our hole. We decide to walk north along the ledge before we go back to the surface. We climb over concrete braces and edge past huge riveted beams that leave streaks of rust on our hands. After we've walked a few hundred feet, we find a sleeping bag laid down over a bedroll just in front of us. It's obvious that it's been used recently, and I find myself looking over my shoulder for the owner to appear out of the darkness. "D'you think we're intruding?" I ask Elinor, trying to sound casual. "Yeah, sort of," she says. "On the bright side, we're not Amtrak workers, but I'd just as soon not have to explain that to whoever's bed this is." I agree and we step over the bedroll and walk on. I don't normally mind the idea of being caught red-handed but here, if someone is upset that we've accidentally intruded on their sleeping area, I'm in the dark with nowhere to run, and that worries me. I have the knife in my pocket and the leather handle is comforting, but the feeling of vulnerability still tightens my back. If Elinor's worried about running into someone dangerous, though, she's hiding it well. She suddenly drops down on her knees to look through a narrow space between girders. "Here kitty, come 'ere, that's good, come on..." I peer over her shoulder and see two cats, wary and fierce-looking, standing immobile and staring at her. I move for a better view between girders and suddenly realize that I'm looking into an entire room built into the side of the tunnel: clothes are hung on a line stretched from corner to corner, a dingy table is sitting next to a battered chair, and an antiquated radio keeps company with a couple more cats perched on the table. All together there are more than ten cats, all staring at us warily, their eyes gleaming wickedly in the light from our flashlights. We stand for a moment, all staring at each other. "Wow," says Elinor, "look at all those cats." And thinking about all those scared cats I suddenly feel the weight of all the darkness behind me like a rising tide. This person who lives here, who is he? The cats are well-fed and at home; they're not running, like wild animals, but are huddling back into the room, as pets will when frightened. But who would choose to live here, in this nocturnal room where the walls are concrete two feet thick? If you died here you wouldn't need a tomb; the stone and dirt would hold your bones forever and the rats would carry off the ephemeral flesh. "Hey, Elinor, let's go," I say. Elinor loves cats and obviously wants to make friends with these, but she either hears the urgency in my voice or shares a bit of my fear because she gets up with only a regretful glance and starts back south to our hole to the surface. When we get to the hole, Elinor goes through first. I hand through the flashlights and knife and then I squeeze through, pushing with my feet against a half-buried cooking pot. I'd stopped noticing that the tunnel air was dusty or stale, but when I finally stick my head out into the New York air, it's the purest, sweetest, cleanest thing I've ever tasted; I can smell the open space, the fresh breezes, and the light of the first fingers of dawn.