inlooking #013: Underground America

20230704: asbestos, independence, speed

I’d love to write this newsletter more than quarterly, but I’m not sure I can tear myself away from other work often enough to make that come true. For now, it remains driven by my publications. One of which you can read about below.

1. Underground

2. The panorama

3. Talking to people

4. Bruce Chatwin’s hill

5. The contour of the story

6. Into the heart of the matter

Going underground

In March (as I alluded to last time), I went to New Mexico and slept underground—not because I was spelunking or on the lam, but for this story in Alta Journal, on an abandoned 1960s nuclear missile silo that’s been repurposed as an Airbnb.

I did not sleep amid the asbestos dust and detritus pictured above, which lie at the bottom of the silo, but in the converted control center, about two stories under the high desert. It’s a small space, tough to capture on my phone (Scott Baxter, who took the photos for the article, did a much better job than I), but here’s a panorama of the main room to give you an idea. (The pictures here are mine. Click them to embiggen.)

I slept well. Spending the night underground is a pretty singular experience, putting you at an odd remove from time and the world (as I describe in the piece).

Also at an odd remove from the world are the people preparing to meet the (presumably imminent) apocalypse in places such as this. The whole endeavor of prepping for the apocalypse struck me as a weird exercise in pessimism and self-fulfilling self-sabotage: Many people have invested a lot of time, money, effort, and social and ethical energy into getting ready for a cataclysmic event. But an investment that only pays off if the cataclysm comes to pass seems to me a rejection of the antecataclysmic world. In order to see a return on your investment, the sensible thing would be to cheerlead the things that push us closer to the brink and, eventually, over the edge. And in their way, preppers are doing just that, putting their considerable energy into their vision of the next world, rather than trying to make the current situation as solid and sustainable as we can.

Sources say

I was lucky, in writing this piece, to come across a couple of people with really trenchant takes on this particular phenomenon, and who were kind enough to give me quotes. One was artist and filmmaker Jenny Perlin, whose feature-length documentary on apocalypse preppers, Bunker, “investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, and follows the process of building and selling these structures to the wealthy and not-so-wealthy alike.” Jenny has a fantastic eye for these places and the people who inhabit them, and while her process is very different from mine, it also allows her to dig deeper, in some ways. (I also really enjoy Jenny’s newsletter. Highly recommended if you, like me, enjoy interesting people thinking interesting thoughts.)

Another person who lent me some quotes was social geographer Brad Garrett, whose book, Bunker: Building for the End Times, has been called (by Robert Macfarlane, no less) “a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege, and apocalypse.” Brad has been exploring things underground for some time now, and while it would seem he’s pretty thoroughly plumbed the depths (so to speak), I know he’s been investigating some really interesting aspects lately that often go overlooked. I look forward to seeing the projects that come out of it.

HBD USA

Another thing about missile silos: They bring to mind a period of American history in which we were aggressively projecting our military power around the world in a very particular, very overtly threatening way. Not that most periods of American history aren’t marked by similar attempts at power projection. But the development in the 1950s and 60s of intercontinental ballistic missiles (like the Atlas F that once stood in the silo where I slept) gave us new ways to push destruction around the world, and marked a revolutionary change in geopolitics. (The Air and Space Museum does an interesting job of contextualizing these changes in terms of speed.) Sleeping in a disused missile silo felt like a weirdly patriotic gesture—even if it was a type of patriotism that doesn’t necessarily line up with my own. So, since it’s the 4th of July, Happy Birthday, America. For whatever that’s worth.

Elsewhere

A considerably older country is Wales, which serves as the setting for On the Black Hill, a wonderful novel by the writer and traveler Bruce Chatwin, best known for his 1977 wanderlogue (“travelogue” doesn’t seem to do it justice), In Patagonia. This was the travel book that launched a thousand modern travel books (just as The Liar’s Club launched a thousand modern memoirs).

(As an aside: If you’ve resisted reading either or both of these books because of their overweening presence in the literary landscape, know that you are not alone. But know also that both are great pieces of writing and of self-exploration, and well worth your time. As is this 2017 portrait of Chatwin by Hanya Yanigahara.)

I was entranced by On the Black Hill, not only for Chatwin’s plainspoken style here and the detail with which he renders the (early-20th-century) life of the twin Welsh farmers who are the book’s subject, but also because of Chatwin’s commitment to the contours of his story. The lives of Lewis and Benjamin Jones are not bent to a three-act structure nor fit into any neat dialectic, but simply unspool as lives do: with bumps and joys and disasters and triumphs and dysfunctions all rolled together into a hairy ball of yarn(s). Books like this seem more and more rare, to me. (Please send word if I’m wrong about that). I’m always grateful when I come across one.

Speaking of speed

I have been taking some notes lately on my heart, which has fallen into the unfortunate habit of suddenly taking off at a mile a minute—rather, at 100-200 beats per minute, a condition known as supraventricular tachycardia (or SVT), which seems to be caused by bad electricity (more or less). Some people have this condition without even noticing. That’s not me. My episodes last anywhere from five minutes to four hours or more, and leave me truck-hit and exhausted and fatigued for the rest of the day or sometimes more. So I will probably let a gang of “cardiac electrophysiologists” run a couple of wires up through my thigh and abdomen and chest and into my heart at some point (probably not til autumn), where they can burn out the faulty circuit. I’ll be happy to (hopefully) get past the SVT, but the thought of people poking around in there (while I’m awake, apparently) is somewhat terrifying. I’m sure it will make it into some of my writing, at some point. (There are, of course, many books about the cultural and scientific history of the human heart, if you’re interested in more on that.)

And so, in closing: ❤️

Til next time,

Wallace