WHAT ARE YOU HERE FOR?
I’ve been trying to ignore the parking attendant, but his tapping at the window has become outright aggressive and he’s really yelling now. I roll down the window and he squints suspiciously at Pia and me. He looks entirely unfriendly.
“We’re here to ski,” I say, lying through my teeth. The parking attendant glances through the back windows, no doubt noting the lack of skis and the presence of two pairs of snowshoes. He looks back at me and I flash what I hope is a winsome smile.
“Right,” the attendant says, unconvinced. “Planning on doing anything else?” I’ve had my foot on and off the brake for the last few moments, inching the car forward, because maybe he’ll leave us alone if he has to walk to keep up with us. No such luck. He knocks at the door. “Hey, stop driving. Planning on doing anything else?”
“And then we’re going tubing,” I say. This is also a lie. I gesture through the windshield at the tubing hill. “After we’re done skiing we’re going right there and buying tickets and going tubing.”
“Okay,” the attendant says, “skiing and tubing. Not doing anything else other than that?”
“Snowshoeing?” It’s Pia, coming in hot with the earnest truth. A gloating smile spreads across the parking attendant’s face. He knew it.
“Then you can’t park here!” he crows, triumphant. “Can’t park here if you’re not going skiing!” He points to a letter-sized metal sign about a hundred yards away by the entrance where we turned in to the lot. “Parking is for Donner Ski Ranch customers only. And you’re not Donner Ski Ranch customers!”
The jig is up. “Fine,” I scowl. “Where should we park?”
“Not here!” the attendant exults, his eyes crinkling at their corners with glee.
We finally find dubiously permissible parking another quarter mile down the road, at a small lot blessedly devoid of parking attendants just doing their jobs. We strap on snowshoes and start up the hill. Thirty feet below us is a five-hundred-yard tunnel dug through solid granite, pitch black and glazed with ice, one in a series of tunnels that took Chinese laborers almost two years to excavate. These are the Donner Summit tunnels, blasted by hand some century and a half ago; below us is Tunnel 6, the Great Summit Tunnel. We cross a gently sloping snowfield, cut downslope, and suddenly greet a cavernous maw punched into the mountainside. The tracks that once ran through these tunnels are long gone. While we walk through the tunnel, our snowshoes crunching on the glossy ice, our headlights barely pushing through the darkness, I feel a profound sense of awe.
The Chinese railroad workers who carved these tunnels could only have been superhuman. There were two phases to carving this tunnel—first, holes were drilled and filled with explosives; after the blast, all the debris had to be carted away by hand. The drilling was impossibly hard and astonishingly strenuous. The men worked in teams of three. One held a star drill—several feet of hardened iron with a simple four-tooth cutting face at one end—while the other two hit the back of the drill with sledgehammers. Every two hits, the one holding the drill would rotate it by a quarter turn. They drilled holes two and a half feet deep, packed them with black powder, fuzed and tamped them with clay or sand, and then blasted.
Men died doing this.
The tunnel walls are pockmarked with straight cylindrical scars, the remnant interiors of drill-bores. I reach up and feel the edges of the rock with my fingers. I take a picture that comes out entirely uninteresting. The granite is sharp and chill. There’s an exhibit at the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento on the star drill. Guests are invited to try their hand at drilling a hole with a star drill and sledgehammer into a granite block. The exhibit has been there many years; the efforts of countless guests have produced only a shallow divot in the stone.
Almost all the Chinese workers who toiled here are unnamed, uncounted, unremembered. Firsthand accounts from these workers are lacking, and secondhand observations by the men who witnessed their labor are soured by racist notions of Chinese industriousness, the happy and hardworking Other. What remains, however, beyond any structure of sovereignty and narrative, are these tunnels: geological testaments to the work of human hands, stone remembering the activity of life. Outside, beyond the mouth of this godforsaken tunnel on this blasted peak in Sierra high country, snow is falling, collecting in drifts deep enough to swallow a man whole. It is colder than I have ever known. Looking up, I am struck by a conviction about this place. The feeling of being near to something holy.
We are standing in an impossible place, the flat darkness of a mountain’s interior: cathedral of labor, monument of iron and stone.