Hidden in Plain Sight

Throughout New York's subway system there are nooks and crannies that go generally unnoticed by the crowds of commuters. The above is a nestled doorway directly off the track on the north end of the north-bound local R/W platform at 34th Street. On the other side of that same platform are a couple of old doors with new locks -- a sure sign of something old and important/dangerous. Part of the charm of the tunnels that make up the transportation system here is the fact that they are man-made, for largely utilitarian purposes, yet over such an extended period of time that some of its crenelations are actually lost. Others, like this door, are mysteries that simply get overlooked a-thousand-plus times a day.

Open your eyes. The underground is everywhere.

Silo, Sweet Silo

Nothing exciting to add here as to design, per se, but just had to post this: MissileBases.com.

Some Thoughts On Caves

I recently stumbled on a cache of diagrams detailing various Jamaican caves.

Here's Volcano Hole, which looks quite formidable:
The entrance is a vertical shaft that drops 100 meters. This sort of drop serves as a pretty simple barrier between the surface world and the subterranean one, and presents an interesting access challenge. Going down is easier than going up.

Here's Bottom pasture Cave 2:
This looks like a lair. You've got a capacious and obvious entrance, and a second, smaller entrance (exit?) that is easy to conceal. The rear of the cave is extremely confined, narrowing down to sub-one-meter dimensions and going on for a long way. Crawling around back there would make one very vulnerable, and it ends in water.

Here's the St. Clair cave:

This one is topographically interesting, but also illustrates two hazards worth mentioning (and incorporating in your imaginary cave systems) - animal-borne pathogens like histoplasmosis and dangerous gas mixes. The air down there might not be fresh. It might kill you, and if it doesn't, the bat funk eventually might.

One last example, the Vaughensfield cave:

The plan of this cave is very typical - it isn't a crenelated mess of twisting passages - it is a straight line gradually descending into the earth. The occasional vertical shaft pokes through into the forest above, providing some murky light (and perhaps a point of ambush or escape for small, limber creatures that live in the cave).

Urban Subterranea

When I first moved to New York I lived in Park Slope, which has come to be a rather desirable and expensive neighborhood. At the time it was well on its way up, but I was living with my girlfriend in a windowless, 10'x6' room in a basement apartment. Yes, the rumors are true: In New York you can rent and live in a closet. Actually, this was probably more along the lines of a converted pantry, as it had inner closets and such, each rather narrow and the opening of which meant you had just robbed yourself of at least 20% of your maneuverable space. We were subleasing, of course, and it was one of those subleases that reach back so far along a chain of people that the "property" probably fell under some 18th century law that qualified it as a commune, or coven. In New York, "underground" has many implications.

The F train is the one that most readily runs to Park Slope, and it is famous for being the last of the horse-drawn subway trains. (I once heard a very coherent monologue -- from an otherwise very messed-up and deranged homeless man -- on the F platform at Broadway-Lafayette about the history of the F train, by way of explaining or perhaps excusing the train's lateness that evening. It was coherent, that is, apart from being SHOUTED AT THE VERY TOP OF HIS LUNGS.) One day not long after moving into my pantry, I rode in the front car of the F on my way home, late at night, from a rehearsal or some such thing. On the older train cars, the only window at the front of the train is a small square one, at average eye level, fit into the front sliding door. Very often, this window is blacked out, presumably either to prevent ogling at the outside world or to trick people into thinking there's more train to walk through and laugh merrily at them as they break the rules by sliding yet another between-car door open and plunge to their grisly death. I place even odds. At any rate, this window wasn't blackened, and I slouched into the door and observed our forward progress.

Before too long I realized that I was looking at really very old structures. It seemed almost anachronistic, as I listened to my headphones and saw steel girders giving way to a wooden crossbeam here and there, and the concrete walls growing knottier with age and disintegration. The train lights carried detail after detail into view, and I realized that we were in the section of the train that runs from Manhattan to Brooklyn, under the East River. Under the East River. There's a school of thought that says we take our lives in our hands every day, that even getting out of bed, much less crossing a busy street is risking a chance of death. When I realized just how old the tunnel through which I was hurtling was, I was thrilled. For the first time it occurred to me that there are centuries-old hidden tunnels and chambers and disused passages laced throughout New York's famous bedrock and, odds are, no one person knows everything of what's down there.

I'm very pleased to be joining the enterprise here at Subterranean Design. It's a little like discovering an enthusiasm I had forgotten I have. From time to time I'll be contributing information about Manhattan's underground network -- probably a bit of research, but hopefully quite a bit of personal exploration. The modern world has hidden depths, and it should be great fun to sink to their levels.

Subterranean Mushroom Farming for Pros

Edible Geography has an excellent post on the Li-Sun Exotic Mushroom Farm in Australia, which can serve as a good start to investigating what a large underground food production operation looks like.

Logistics: Li-Sun grows at least eight varieties of edible mushroom, and several varieties of medicinal mushrooms as well.

The tunnel for which these mushrooms have been so carefully developed is 650 metres long and about 30 metres deep. Buried under solid rock and deprived of the New South Wales sunshine, the temperature holds at a steady 15º Celsius. The fluorescent lights flick on at 5:30 a.m. every day, switching off again exactly 12 hours later. The humidity level fluctuates seasonally, and would reach an unacceptable aridity in the winter if Dr. Arrold didn’t wet the floors and run a fogger during the coldest months.

Based on the pictures of the racks they're using, it looks like you can fit ~84 mushroom logs per 5' square area devoted to growing, including room for walkways. It says logs are "made by mixing steamed bran or wheat, sawdust from thirty-year-old eucalyptus, and lime in a concrete mixer, packing it into plastic cylinders, and inoculating them with spawn", but for the sake of argument lets just say you'll be using some decaying vegetation from your nearby forest, used straw from your farmworkers' bedding, bat guano you collect from the pigeonholes your local bats roost in, and plenty of night soil from your growers and the other denizens of your subterranean community. The article also mentions that (at least in the case of Shiitake mushrooms, which he says are the most troublesome to grow) a log is crops after a week of exposure in the light, then goes dormant for about 3 weeks, then is productive again for 3-4 weeks. Let's imagine that every log produces half a pound of mushrooms over a productive week (I made that up, but its maybe believable). Thus, a single log of shiitake produces about 2 lbs of mushrooms over a 2-month-or-so span of time if my productivity guess is somewhere close to reality. Meaning a 5' square growing area produces around 20 lbs a week on average if it can be kept productive.

Of course, that space calculation only applies to growing space, which must receive light somehow for part of the day and be kept at the proper humidity. You'll also need a fully dark place to keep your dormant logs, but as these can be packed without regard for growing space and the logs are dormant for only 3/8 of the growing weeks, you can probably get by with 1/10 as much dark space as growing space, if you put in some nice shelving to keep things organized.

Of course, you'll also need a master mushroom grower and some obedient workers who can harvest the mushrooms, keep the floor properly wet, and rotate growing logs to and from the dark as appropriate. If you're using a humanoid tribe as your crew, your shaman or medicine man may already possess the requisite growing knowledge or be willing to learn it (otherwise you'll have to bring in an outside specialist, which is definitely going to cost you more of the profits). While your males form your war-party and go raiding, hunting, and trading, your females and younglings can be kept reasonably occupied tending the farm.

Economics: Not only are mushrooms a good food source, but some varieties have noteworthy medicinal, hallucinogenic, poisonous, or (depending on your locale) magical effects. You'll want to balance your growing operation to provide as much cheap food as possible for your growing crews and their families, while maximizing the trading possibilities for your surplus crop. Probably this means growing quite a few more edible mushrooms, but special mushrooms can bring a much higher premium for particular clients willing to pay for them. Here's a list of possible client preferences:

• Demonic cults will often be interested in hallucinogenic mushrooms for their ceremonies


• Assassins may be willing to pay a premium for particularly potent poisonous mushrooms, but you'll have to balance that against the dangers of growing them


• Wizards and witches often have need of particular mushrooms as spell components - at first these will probably be special orders but as you gain a sense of what varieties they require you can expand this part of your growing operation


• If your growers can function in complete darkness, they can grow so-called 'shriekers', which emit a high-pitched noise when light falls upon them. These are useful both around the perimeters of your community (where intruders using light are likely to trigger them, and as trade items for other dark-dwelling denizens.


• Check with your local sages or shamans to find out more about the local varieties available to you

Happy growing!

Dangers of 'The Game'

Gold mine, Uploaded to flickr by ˙Cаvin 〄 on 29 Dec 08

From The Seattle Times comes this cautionary tale of amateur delving gone wrong. Thanks to Steve Lawson for pointing this one out.

Setup:

The brain trust perched on the dry lake bed seemed able: about 60 bright, adventurous minds from Seattle's high-tech community. Microsoft VPs. Inventors. Start-up founders. Multimillionaires. Serious geeks.

Over the next 28 hours, the race to save Shelby Logan propelled these would-be rescuers across 275 miles, from the arid moonscape of the desert to the neon glare of the Las Vegas strip. They would scuba dive, rock climb, sing karaoke with a drag queen and fire automatic weapons. They would decode the Declaration of Independence inside a prison and befriend a white rat named Templeton, whose shivering little body carried a message.

If this sounds ripped from a Hollywood movie, it essentially was. The race to save Shelby Logan was conceived as a weekend fantasy to be played on the proportions of the big screen, by invitation only.

It was the latest in an annual run of what was simply called The Game. An adventure scavenger hunt. The ultimate test for the Renaissance man or woman. Or just a really good excuse to turn off your Blackberry, forget work, ignore spouses and have a hell-raising good time.

Gear:

Among them was Bob Lord, a then-37-year-old software engineer who'd worked for Microsoft before launching, then selling, his start-up Internet search company, XYZFind. This was his first Game, and when he kissed his wife and three kids goodbye in Palo Alto, Calif., he brought a wet suit, walkie-talkies, laptop, GPS device, extension cords, reference books on compact disc and clothes for any kind of weather.

Note the conspicuous lack of Torch, Rope, or Pole

The Leadup:

The adrenaline kept pumping: a 3-mile race through the pitch-black desert on ATVs; a gun club where a lucky geek on each team fired a 50-round clip from a machine gun; then a gay nightclub where an unlucky geek had to dress in drag and sing "It's Raining Men" on stage. Teams rode the Big Shot, a breathtaking 160-foot plunge from the top of the Stratosphere Hotel, and sprinted down the Fremont Street Experience in old Vegas as clues flashed on a four-block-long screen overhead. At a tattoo parlor, a player on each team was supposed to volunteer for a piercing (extra bonus for a non-ear piercing!) or tattoo (The Game), but the tattoo artist took $50 bribes to hand over the clue.

The Delve:

THE MORNING sun was parching a desolate landscape of sagebrush and broken beer bottles when Bob Lord climbed out of the Team Plaid van on a dusty parking lot in the desert foothills southeast of Las Vegas. This was the 17th clue site, and Lord and other players had slept little in 28 hours, which may partly explain what happened next.

Lord and other players didn't know it, but this was the Argentena Mine complex, a warren of abandoned openings left over from a 1927 silver-mining operation. All Lord had were a set of GPS coordinates found at the previous site — a cemetery in the ghost town of Goodsprings — and instructions: Walk exactly 1,133 feet on a precise compass heading and find something called 1306. It was Lord's job to follow the directions. But, wanting to scout the route first, he veered off course to climb up a small hill, then used recalculated bearings he'd figured out using trigonometry on his handheld computer.

The clue also had an unusual message: "1306 is clearly marked. Enter ONLY 1306. Do NOT enter others." To Lord, this was just another clue, perhaps a head-fake from Game Control. Enter 1306? What could there be 1306 of in the desert, he wondered. Parking stalls? Telephone poles?

Lord led the way until his recalculated bearings pointed directly into an opening. He flashed back to the video dropped from the helicopter: This must be the right place, he thought.

The "NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!" spray-painted in fluorescent orange was no deterrent. Again, Lord flashed back to an earlier point in The Game: "NO!" had been part of a previous clue. Absorbed in his own musings, Lord missed one other salient clue: the number 1296 spray-painted in blue next to the opening.

Followed closely by other team members, Lord walked into the opening nearly 100 feet, until the only light was the LED screen on his GPS.

His team members heard him slip. Bob? they called. Bob?

Nothing.

Bob Lord didn't die, but his fall down a 30' mine shaft crippled him for life, led to lawsuits for The Game's organizers, and has had tragic effect on the rest of his family.

For delvers, the lessons are obvious. Don't go anywhere without the proper gear. Lighting is fundemental. Belaying with rope is also a good idea in unknown delves. Test the ground in front of you before moving onto it.

The Cave of the Seven Sleepers

The Cave of the Seven Sleepers is a man-made ritual complex in Turkey, near Ephesus, where seven dudes (and a dog, if you prefer the version in the Koran) were entombed alive during the persecutions of Decius. They went to sleep and woke up 200 years later, which is a pretty cool story.

Click on the image for a larger version. I imagine a setup like this: Forbidden catacombs, sealed off by a cruel emperor ages ago. Intrepid explorers expect the restless dead, but when they crack the seal, they wake up a bunch of confused guys speaking an archaic version of the local language and marveling at tempered steel and bullseye lanterns.