Excerpt
from The Mongoose Deception
by Robert Greer
Everybody’s got a song or a rhyme that haunts ’em, McPherson loved to
say, and no song, poem, rhyme, or hymn gave McPherson more comfort than the song
he was currently humming, the old Negro spiritual “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Just two days from retirement, McPherson was at work and humming that song, doing the same thing he’d been doing for the past three decades and thinking that in less than forty-eight hours he’d be forever free from the cold, dank smells of life inside a tunnel through a mountain. Negotiating his way along a Colorado Department of Transportation tunnel-inspection catwalk inside I-70’s Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel, the same catwalk he’d traveled five to six days a week for pretty close to 7,500 days, McPherson found himself smiling and humming to beat the band.
The concrete catwalk, which hugged the tunnel’s north wall and stood four feet above I-70’s two lanes of westbound traffic, was used for everything from inspecting the tunnel’s aging tile walls for cracks to troubleshooting dangerous grout-line water seepage to providing a 1.6-mile-long conveyance along which the tile washers moved their high-powered water-spray equipment once a year.
It was just past 10 a.m., and traffic on the interstate was surprisingly light when McPherson, nodding and swaying to the beat in his head, wrapped up his rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and cleared his throat in prelude to his always slightly off-key version of “Amazing Grace.”
Thirty-nine years earlier, high in the Colorado Rockies sixty miles west of Denver in the spring of 1968, all the elements of a classic The Mongoose Deception duel between man and the earth had been present when McPherson and fifty other miners had gone underground to begin digging one of the largest automobile tunnels in the world, and clearly the highest. The men were on the front end of a bore into the Continental Divide that started at the eleven-thousand-foot level of Colorado’s treacherous Loveland Pass. Known back then, in a reference to the creek that ran above it, simply as the Straight Creek tunnel dig, the job entailed blasting through two miles of mountain, a geologic fault, and a nightmare of fractured and crushed rock to run a road across—or, more accurately, through, as McPherson loved to phrase it—the top of the world.
McPherson, a squat, five-foot-nine, 190-pound fireplug of a black man with a skullcap of wiry gray hair and grainy, sandpaper-textured, dark-chocolate skin, had been a 150-pound wisp of a man when he’d begun his days as a member of a Straight Creek tunnel-mucking team that would spend five years battling a mountain and the sometimes eighteen-hundred-foot-wide geologic nightmare of fractured and crushed rock known as the Loveland Fault.
During the early days of the dig, project delays, worker injuries, and an unending flow of cash to nowhere were par for the course, but McPherson had stuck it out, watching the project move from being the Straight Creek tunnel bore to a hole through the Continental Divide that would ultimately become the continent-cresting, automobile-streaking sky window known as the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel. By the time the dig was finally done in 1973, it had claimed the lives of seven men, and as many as 1,140 people had dug and dynamited their way through a mountain. Along the way, McPherson had worked his way up from tunnel mucker to drift runner to bulk-rock-loader operator, and from there to his present job Robert Greer as the Colorado Department of Transportation’s chief Eisenhower Tunnel attendant and troubleshooting walking boss.
Watching the flow of traffic below, McPherson, minus two toes on his left foot that had been there when the Straight Creek dig had begun, broke into a self-congratulatory short-timer’s smile. Transitioning from humming “Amazing Grace,” McPherson, unmarried, childless, and always a loner, moved quickly into an inner-city skiprope rhyme: Once upon a time the goose drank wine, tried to do the shimmy with a monkey on the streetcar line. The streetcar line broke, the monkey got choked, they both went to heaven on a silly billy goat. After a lifetime of reciting the rhyme, he never missed a word or a beat. Hard hat snugged up and power lamp in hand, he continued walking and scanning the tunnel for burned-out overhead lights, fractured tiles, ventilation problems, and the bane of his existence, eroding grout.
Last night, night before, twenty-four robbers at my door. I got up and let ’em in, hit ’em in the head with a rolling pin. His cadence now on automatic pilot, McPherson scanned the vast catalog of skip rhymes in his head, searching for one that was appropriate for someone just two days away from retirement. Finally he belted out, The white boys had a rooster, they set him on a fence, the rooster crowed for the colored boys ’cause he had some sense. He cleared his throat in preparation for a second verse when, without warning, every light in the tunnel blinked out. A fraction of a second later, the five-foot-thick, rebar reinforced concrete catwalk he was standing on, a 1.6-mile-long virtual seawall, buckled and caved in. Losing his balance as he leapfrogged to a platform of stable concrete a few feet away, McPherson fell to one knee.
“What the shit!” He scanned the darkness with the powerful lamp in his right hand, arcing the light back and forth as warning sirens The Mongoose Deception sounded all around him. Twenty yards ahead of him, a tractor-trailer braked to avoid crashing into a half-dozen pieces of catwalk concrete that had tumbled down onto the roadway. The braking semi jackknifed, and its trailer kissed the tunnel’s north wall, sending a Fourth of July celebration of sparks shooting up into the darkness.
A horn blast erupted on the heels of the now steady wail of the sirens. Five seconds later there was a second horn blast, and five seconds later another. McPherson’s throat went dry as he recognized the blasts and sirens as the synchronized, coded alarm announcing that the Eisenhower Tunnel had been hit by an earthquake.
The tunnel’s walls and the I-70 roadway popped and cracked and buckled as McPherson grabbed a piece of the catwalk’s railing and chanted, Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie, all not ready holler, “I!” For three lingering additional seconds the tunnel walls and the mountain behind them hissed and snapped and groaned. Boulders and rocks the size of small cars, free from a thirty-four-year encumbrance of concrete, rebar, and tile, dribbled down onto the interstate until finally the horn blasts and sirens stopped and the sound of rushing water and the echo of a lone car horn blaring in the distance were the only things McPherson could hear.
As loudly as he dared, McPherson announced to himself, “I’m still alive!” Still hugging the catwalk’s twisted hand railing for dear life, he steadied himself on what was now an undulating platform of concrete rubble and shook his head in disbelief. Before he could screw up the courage to take a step, the backup diesel generators sparked the lights back on. The tunnel was filled with a haze of smoke and dust, but he could see the jackknifed tractor-trailer thirty yards ahead of him, and tunnel lights beyond it to the west. A midsized European SUV had slammed into the trailer, nosing its way beneath the rear Robert Greer end like a rooting terrier. The trapped SUV and squatting trailer sat cockeyed across the interstate, locked together, blocking the lanes in both directions. Recognizing that both the truck driver and the SUV’s driver were at least moving, McPherson exhaled a sigh of relief.
With his view of the tunnel to the west blocked by the semi and a particle-filled cloud of smoke, McPherson turned back to see a drunken conga line of pickups, big rigs, and cars tossed hither and yon on an undulating conveyer belt of roadway that stretched a half mile back to the east portal. A dozen or so dazed-looking people who’d escaped their vehicles were moving through the haze, climbing over stalled cars and trucks and rock, making their way toward the east portal and daylight.
McPherson patted himself down, reassured that everything was still in place. Disbelief filling his voice, he said, “A fuckin’ earthquake. Who in the hell would’ve thunk it?” A cave-in was what oldtime tunnel muckers and drift runners like Cornelius McPherson worried about. Oh, he’d heard people talk about the risk of a quake, and he knew that the geologists and engineers who’d designed the tunnel were aware that the Loveland Fault and plate of rock were primed for an earthquake. The tunnel design team simply never could judge for certain how powerful an earthquake to engineer for. Now ya know, now ya know, now ya know, McPherson chuckled aloud, aware that he’d just lived through the earthquake equivalent of a hundred year flood.