Culvert
April 1 2014


The culvert tunnelled under the road,
enough asphalt, gravel, earth

to silence the world.

Like a diving bell

in the ocean's crushing depths,

a hard metallic case

our blinkered senses.

It was heavy corrugated steel
like a buried Quonset hut.
With massive bolts, dripping rust,
and a claustrophobic echo
that amplified each whisper
but made it hard to hear.
So even if we'd had the nerve
to share our fears
we would have been spared;
boys, of a certain age
practicing their manliness.

We hopped from rock to rock
negotiating the bottom
of standing water, fusty mud.
Shivered
in the dampness and dark,
intent on the circle of light
beckoning us on.

In spring thaw, water poured through
like an angry Colorado,
a black churning torrent

it was too small to hold,
backing-up above, gushing-out below;
a drowning machine
that kept its bodies
to itself.
So even in summer, well out of flood
the danger thrilled us.
Like a long rickety trestle
and an oncoming train,
we were tempting fate
in its own subterranean lair.

Ran out the end
with our sneakers soaking wet,
laughing giddily
and talking too quickly
in voices light as air.


I really have no idea where this poem came from. The image of this culvert came to me, seemingly out of nowhere. Maybe it was thoughts of spring (despite the unseasonable blizzard, freezing temperatures, and 4 feet of snow!!) that led me to the culvert under the causeway I canoe through in summer; that led me to my previous life as a whitewater kayaker, with its memories of scouting rivers in the high water of spring, low-head dams (relatively benign-looking "drowning machines"), man-made obstacles, and unexpected sweepers. I remember the transgressive feeling of walking through culverts that may not have been explicitly foridden, but should have been. I remember them searching Mackenzie Falls last year (the year before?) for a dead body, the predictable result of young men testing themselves: the fatal combination of bad judgement and male bravado.

Anyway, once I came up with "tunnelled under" I liked the sound of it too much to let it go, and carried on to see where it might take me. Although I didn't set out in that direction, the poem ended up being about the universal rite of passage in a boy's life: the testing, the physical challenge, the social pressure of dare and double dare.

I like the subterranean location. It evokes Dante's circles of hell, the river Styx, buried alive. The cold claustrophobia of being underground is a special category of fear, more innate and primeval than the oncoming train, the fear of heights.

I think the ending works well. There is this sense of decompression that plays nicely off the image of the water bursting through the culvert; there is the implied contrast between the lightness of the warm bright world with the dark dank subterranean weight of the steel enclosure. The boys have given into their fears, the urgency of speed over-ruling dry feet. I usually despise adverbs. Yet here, both the second and third last lines end that way; and both (so far) seem to work!