the tunnel

It looked safe. No trucks had passed for a while. Everything was still, apart from the drone of insects.

I brought my bike to a stop. Ahead was a cartoonish stretch of darkness, a gaping maw thirty feet round, punctuated only by the smallest pinpoint of light: a Road Runner tunnel, impossibly become real.

After struggling up an hour of switchbacks I’d hoped for a tunnel, but not one like that. The first forty feet of jagged rim were lit by faint sunlight from the entrance, but beyond that, nothing.

Once inside my eyes would adjust. But if a truck approached, would it see me? I looked down the mountainside of switchbacks – nothing in sight. That was good, but it was only one side of the tunnel. The quicker I sped through, the better.

Starting with clenched teeth, I accelerated into a gulf of damp, cool air. As the light behind me diminished, the sharp star ahead prevented my eyes from adjusting, making the darkness even more impregnable. I hadn’t expected that.

Still, I’d already begun – the end could not be that far. This was China, lazy China, which had already made me ascend several miles of switchbacks before granting me a low-effort shortcut at the peak. I sped up, the chilled blackness wisping away my body’s heat.

The light was not getting larger.

Anxious about trucks from behind, I turned my head, but the complete absence of peripheral cues left me veering. I jerked back. How close had I come to the rocky side – four inches or four yards?

At that point it struck me – too late – that what I was doing was the act of an utter fool. At my speed, a single stone or pothole would spill me across the asphalt, potentially wrecking my bike. Rats probably skulked in the darkness; at any point I could run over one of them. Or worse (this was China, inscrutable China, where I didn’t even understand what all I didn’t understand), a gang of thugs could be crouching along the walls, waiting with chains or planks to knock me, unsuspecting, from my bike. A host of terrors began to sweep past me almost tangibly as I sped through the pitch-black hollow.

The light was not getting larger.

Or was it? Frozen forward, my eyes inhaled the light; my pedals pumped with fervor. The thought that I was not alone, that others were watching me eagerly with eyes adjusted to the darkness as I neared them, crazed me. A chilling slipstream hissed across my ears as the humid air drenched me in a cold sweat. There was no asphalt below, no rocky tunnel above – only the single point ahead and the soupy, weightless dark of space through which I hurtled.

Finally the exit grew into a bright disc, and then a wider diffusion of warmth. The road rematerialized beneath me; I emerged. The sunlight did not explode around me in victory. Instead it touched me lightly – a mild letdown, like the calm insect buzz along the open road.

I was on the other side. My shirt began to dry in the sun. The road had been smooth; nothing had accosted me. In the mountains ahead lay the Great Wall.

And on the way back home I would have to pass through the tunnel again.

I looked back through the darkness at the small bright point where I had started, and shivered.

And then I smiled.

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copyright © 2004, michael w. hobson