Carnival season is here and with it the urge to dress in costume, flaunt open-container laws and generally upend the natural order of things. And so we found ourselves recently at the Walnut Creek frisbee golf course; with a golf bag full of booze, dressed like morons and about to do the only thing that could embarrass our gangly group further: throw frisbees in public.

By the end of the first hole Devin alone was on the green. Tommy was so deep in the rough that only his tam o’shanter was visible through the rhododendrons. Jeff Senior’s drive had landed him ankle deep in a leech pit; while Jeff Junior hung from a pine bough with his errant disc just out of reach. And Felipe the dog-yoked to the beer cooler and blocking the fairway-refused, as usual, to do anything.

So established, this Montesorri school-picnic atmosphere lingered through the round and reached an apex on the final hole when a freak breeze carried two of our disks over the park’s reservoir, where they landed with a splash next to the ominously roaring dam intake. Jeff Senior, Tommy, Bryce and Devin responded nobly-by turning their backs on the lake to haggle over the scorecard. Meanwhile, Jeff Junior, Tom and Felipe found themselves inexplicably in the icy water and swirling towards imminent conversion to hydropower-all in a daft attempt to resuce $4.95 worth of frisbee.

Safely ashore and the final score was revealed, with Devin taking the round. Costume honors for the day went to Bryce and his Saint Andrews-meets-Salvation Army affair, assembled entirely from the women’s clearance bin. Despite Bryce’s outfit it was the perfect carnival procession: Under the sun, with friends, and sixteen beers deep before the noon whistle.

- Tom Hughes

We took to the sky recently with the Boar’s Head Hot Air Balloon Service, which offers dawn rides from their swank country club on the western edge of town. Besides our pilot, buried to his knees in kegs of propane, our little wicker bento box also held a couple who had driven all the way from Ohio for a romantic anniversary balloon ride with…seven construction workers.

Once off the ground our fleet of three balloons immediately drifted into the restricted airspace around Charlottesville Airport, which wouldn’t have been an issue except that our pilot couldn’t contact the control tower. The pilot’s son, driving the chase van, was incommunicado also. It appeared as if the rapture had finally arrived. It was just us , the occasional commuter jet unaware of our presence, 9 million BTUs of propane beneath a flammable canopy and seven Latitude 38 work shirts that hadn’t been washed recently.

Our pilot was unconcerned:

“You know, ballooning is a lot like life. I’ve been doing this for forty years and I still don’t know where I’m going.”

Then: “Where is the other balloon? Does anyone see the other balloon!”

It was a thousand feet down and directly beneath us, adding to the normal frustrations of the morning commute by hot dogging over a busy intersection.

The sublime breezes issuing from the Blue Ridge then blew us into that other corridor of natural beauty, Route 29 North. If you think this drag looks ugly from the ground, wait to you see the acres of tar-patched roof and open dumpsters from above. Not wanting to risk a dicey landing among the miles of bucolic hay fields east of town, our pilot decided to ditch our twenty-story rig in the bustling parking lot of ACAC Health and Fitness, just as Kid’s Summer Cardio Camp was convening for the day. A rope was dropped to the pilot’s son, who, not surprisingly, immediately began to be dragged across the asphalt by the huge craft.

“I’ll move my car!” yelled a well-meaning mother in the process of dropping off her kid, as our giant shadow engulfed the entire plaza.

Clearly, the ground crew was going to need some assistance. With a pull of a rope our pilot blew off some hot air and the basket momentarily touched down in mom’s just-vacated space.

A composed command issued from the flight deck:

“Would the five gentleman on the left side of the basket PLEASE GET OUT AND HELP MY SON STOP THIS BALLOON!!!”

With Cory, Jeff, Tommy, Devan and Bryce overboard, the unburdened airship unexpectedly leapt into the heaven’s again, almost clipping a parking lot light tower on the way up. As a father with an “Oh, the humanity!” look on his face stared up along with his transfixed and nervously waving three-year old, our anchormen managed to tease the towering rainbow menace over a planting of Dogwood trees to a final touchdown in the empty lot of Carmike Cinema 123.

After almost meeting our maker in front of a strip mall, our experience concluded back at the Boar’s Head with an understandably tense and awkward sparkling cider toast in the club’s English Nightmare-themed Ordinary Room.

It was only eight AM.

We were planning on spending the rest of the day quarry jumping; but after a morning like that we decided we shouldn’t push our luck.

Swearing at building timbers all morn leaves little wind in the bellows for midday society with work-fellows, which is why it is commonly remarked that the only silence deeper than a Highland County, Virginia dawn is a Latitude 38 luncheon. It was into one of these chasms lately that R McDermott Esq., Company Explorer-at-Large noisily interjected with a proposed amusement for our next hobby-exploration: The mapping of an underground watercourse lying in the far west of the Commonweal. Most of the company was taken aback by the proposal, but Commandant Erkelens came to his feet with vigour and let out a strong “Huzzah!”

So it would be, then.

A fortnight later, as the Commandant and company lured several idle townspeople to the service of the expedition by enticing their appetites with a morning feast, I, in order to confirm the expedition’s overland route, set off astride my gaily-coloured motorbike, with forty horses at my beck, for the Allegheny Mountains. I took my breakfast at a certain “T. Bone Tooters” and my humor atop the scandalously named “Confederate Breastworks State Historical Site”. But, alas, the smile fell from my mouth like so many wooden teeth when I regarded from these breastworks the path before me and the pursuing corps, over endless ridge of terrible Allegheny, sleeping above their captive valleys like so many giant steel rails extruded from Carnegie’s roaring northern blast-furnaces.
The description furnished me by McDermott regarding the locale of the river’s subterranean emergence was imprecise to say the least, and could have, quite truthfully, described any wilderness glade between New Netherlands and Mission San Diego. But upon tying my steed to a handsome Walnut some hours later (Since such time I have learned tethering is not necessary for petroleum-horses) I became filled with gratitude that He had led me unerringly to the watercourse that, single among many in this unpeopled waste, terminated with fearsome suddenness at the base of a rocky defile, of no apparent source. As agreed upon earlier, I then set several hundred hectares to conflagration to direct the corps to my position at the dark canyon’s entrance and then reclined in such a position as my breakfast would be absorbed into me with the least protest as I waited for the general body of the exploration to arrive.

Being accustomed only to bone-crushing labours at house raising, the company, upon arrival, was in a state of agitation after the long idle transit, and demanded we set about our dire enterprise at once. Had a Catamount or other vile forest creature been afoot in those environs in the following moments, it would have spied the expedition’s dozen members standing in the milky pool where the buried waters emerged, dressed in bathing costumes and vainly discussing recent trends in the price of wool or the coming World’s fair; in short, any subject at all to postpone entrance below the rocky mantle piece from which the muttering current emerged into the light. As fitting his character, the Commandant presently took leave of this chatter and disappeared into the waters and then into the mountainside itself. Upon seeing this unnatural sight a distraught Tommy, our excitable draftsman, lay into a nearby Pine with the aim of fashioning the Commandant’s coffin; but before he had driven even one wedge into the resinous giant we heard an unmistakable baritone emerge from within,

“Come quick then, all is clear!”

At this command we tumbled into the watery entrance like so many prairie dogs in path of a Buffalo excitement, and soon emerged onto a rocky shelf with a brooding low ceiling; the one world we had known all our days now only a weak glimmer behind us. Our electric lanterns were no match for this country, and served only to cast a sickly pall across the frightened faces of the outfit. We were able to deduce from the combined efforts of all our lanterns that we were in a high-ceilinged vault with the river running off to our left, and thus seeing our course set off upstream over a series of rocky insults for the headwaters.

Within a quarter hour’s time, though, the enterprise had fallen to pieces. The Commandant was nowhere to be seen, apparently having returned to the surface to begin a lucrative speaking tour regarding his discoveries. Our several guests, not used to our brand of discipline, wandered away over numerous perils like so many drunkards on wage-day. In kind was a cocksure Tommy, who took leave down a rocky cleft in pursuit of a second stream on a lower tier of the cavern. Meanwhile steadfast Cory, ever the voice of reason, protested that we could not possibly reach the head of the stream, doubtlessly in the Orient, before our lanterns lost their vigour and our bodies their vital heat. Surveying this dissolution of order from above was a Devil-may-take-it McDermott, seated on a precipice with lower limbs dangling, casually cleaning his pipe stem and reaping great humor from man’s endless folly. The sight of this disarray caused in myself a swoon of such sudden force that the quill pen slipped from my hand and was carried off by the waters. For this reason I have little in the way of impressions of our journey beyond this juncture save that we made it back to the surface through some brand of miracle; emerging from this earthly womb, whereas formerly strangers, now a dozen brothers and sisters birthed from the same calamitous undertaking.

Certainly the entire course of the Peloponnesian War could have been recounted with the amount of India ink spilled on this record of just a single day; so I will bring us to a swift conclusion by informing the reader that we were safely reunited on the surface and, after wildly upsetting the local suspension bridge with our boisterous celebrations, made a safe return to Charlottesville and our awaiting parade and private audience with Mr. Jefferson.*

*On Friday, October 1st 2010 we spent a great day with great friends exploring “Aqua Cave”, a partially submerged cavern in Highland County, Virginia. No woodlands were torched during the course of the day, and in fact we even picked up some trash on the way out.

Photos by Ross McDermott and Joey Conover

“Adventure Days,” a semi-regular series of strenuous exploits in the out-of-doors, was recently instituted by The Dear Leader as an opportunity for the common working man to regain his vigor by momentarily relaxing his burden and lifting his eyes to the wonders of our uncommon Commonwealth. In other words, sometimes Jeff just needs everyone out of the house while the insulation is blown in.

Our first destination was a given: Quiz any adventurer in Central Virginia about the best place to get away from the general public and explore an underappreciated example of elegant design and master craftsmanship and most will reply,

“Well, if you don’t mind getting dirty, wet, a bit frightened and possibly contracting Tetanus, then probably a Latitude 38 jobsite.”

But that’s their response only because they are blissfully unaware of the death trap known as the Crozet railroad tunnel.

By the grace of the maker alone, a younger and more naïve Latitude crew made it through the abandoned tunnel once before; we saw fit to return on our inaugural Adventure Day because this festering, mile-long borehole under Afton mountain is soon to be converted into a slick and sanitized recreational path; providing families and fitness enthusiasts with a rare opportunity to escape the sunny Virginia climate and exercise in an inky granite tomb.

And trust us, potentially home-buying public- It is dark in there. The comforting view back out the tunnel mouth doesn’t last for long, first becoming bent and distorted like a religious apparition by hanging tongues of water vapor before being snuffed out completely less than one hundred yards in from the entrance. Fortunately, we were accompanied this time through by A Rouge’s Gallery of C-ville Notables who wisely provided petrol-soaked torches to light the way as well as to touch off any lurking pockets of flammable rock gas- a quick incineration always trumping a helpless suffocation among spelunkers.

Speaking of incineration and suffocation, work started on the tunnel in 1850, at a time when OSHA was a village in Wisconsin and the field of “Worker Safety” concerned itself primarily with how the upper classes could remain safe from their workers.  The grey matter behind the operation was Honorary Latitude 38 employee Claudius Crozet, a decorated French military engineer who relocated to central Virginia, no doubt drawn by the pleasing year-round climate, cultural amenities and world-class shopping at Barracks Road (then Barracks Rut). But a life of wine-tastings and schmoozing at Friday’s after Five wasn’t in the cards for ole’ CC, who was quickly approached by the Blue Ridge Railroad Company to construct a line across the mountains to the Shenandoah valley, a region that in 1850 was still best reached by birth. In addition to being a brilliant engineer, Crozet apparently also had a flair for the dramatic, and so hired two gangs of Irish workers to build the tunnel that would be the crux of his route. From the west side chipped and blasted a group from Northern Ireland, and from the East dug a Protestant group from County Cork, working towards each other’s throats at the achingly slow rate of 19 feet per month. They holed through deep under Rockfish Gap on Christmas Day, 1856. During the subterranean holiday fracas that no doubt ensued Crozet excused himself to check the tunnel’s alignment and…

Triumph!

The two excavations, each half a mile in length, were off by only six inches. In contrast, when a replacement tunnel was dug in the 1940’s using state-of the art surveying and measuring tools, the two sides missed each other by six feet. Yet another argument in favor of leaving the awkward tool belt at home and “jus’ eyeballin’ it” on the jobsite (Kidding!).

But enough with tales of sturdy workmen and captains of industry almost lost to us in the depths of time-we have a group of the same lost in the depths of Crozet tunnel as we speak! Torches lit and dripping hot kerosene down our forearms, we discovered that the first quarter mile of the shaft was navigable by canoe. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a canoe. But we did have each other-specifically each other’s shirt collars and pant’s legs, which were stretched and pulled low as we grabbed out at our fellow man to arrest plunges into the thigh-deep, wall-to-wall pool of stale rock drippings. Suddenly the expansive echoes were stolen from our voices and the culprit loomed up out of the darkness- a huge bulkhead wall across our path, the only way ahead appearing to be a belly crawl through a body-sized drain pipe streaming rusty water. As Staff Photographer McDermott set up shop capturing unflattering portraits of rear ends attempting to enter a confined space, shivering bystanders noted numerous spray paint tags claiming this space for “CORY”, “KOREY” and also “COREE”, giving us further proof (as if we needed it) that one of our newest co-workers isn’t being entirely forthcoming about his leisure time activities (or his spelling abilities).

At this point, a source close to the author (this phrase takes on a fresh meaning while crawling through a cast iron pipe) informed me that the wall (along with an identical one at the tunnel’s far end) is a remnant of a daft 1970’s scheme by the city of Waynesboro to use the interior of the defunct tunnel as a storage vault for a huge quantity of pressurized natural gas, to be purchased on a low market and stored for a rainy day. When the proverbial rainy day arrived, however, workers realized that it probably wasn’t rain but rather natural gas falling outside, as the entirety of their investment had escaped upward into the surrounding rock, luckily not destroying Interstate 64 and the Blue Ridge Parkway, both of which run directly overhead. After a stern reprimand at City Hall, the responsible party transferred to BP’s promising new deepwater drilling division.

Beyond the wall we found ourselves in a disconcerting acoustical funhouse filled with the mid-Atlantic’s largest lode of unredeemed beer cans (ME-VT-CT-MA-CA-IA-$28,034)., As past footfalls and conversations ricocheted overhead we slowly spread out; exploring at our leisure the hand-hewn walls and dynamite drill holes, all the while stumbling over the fins of rock that lay across our path like giant fallen dominos. It was then, in the deepest bowels of the tunnel,  most of us lost in reflection, some of us just plain lost, and all of us at our most emotionally vulnerable, that Tommy, somewhere up ahead in the murk, innocently banged an admiring hand against some rusting hulk of Americana lying on the tunnel floor. Before the trembling vibration he had set in motion could reach even his ears, it escaped into the void and was forgotten about, only to return a minute later, wildly distorted by the half-mile long chamber, sounding like what can only be described as the building roar of C and O Ghost Locomotive No. 24- straining into the tunnel entrance with a load of West Virginia coal, Kentucky bourbon, Barnum and Bailey circus lions and a Pullman car full of cigar-chomping Midwest dignitaries bound for Washington. Now, I would like to imagine that upon hearing this shrieking thunder announcing our demise everyone fell to their knees in horror, but I suspect it might have just been my gullible self. I was about to run ahead and show our Show-Me State friend a thing or two but reconsidered, remembering that if not for his generous loan of a pair of water shoes I would have been facing a barefoot imaginary death inside Afton Mountain (for the second time, but that’s another story).

Apologies, as the above was certainly neither here nor there; but, then, neither was our group until with great relief we spotted the first glimmers of the western tunnel entrance ahead and soon emerged into the spectacular light of day, all of us immediately taken with the beauty of the spring forest. Far above, a symphony of water dripped from the decorative stones of the tunnel facade; nearby, saplings swayed in the honeysuckle breeze like Radio City Rockettes; and Jeff, to this day, maintains that he saw a chipmunk dressed in a tiny pair of engineer’s overalls beckoning to him from a distant tree limb. Perhaps the copious radon fumes we had all just inhaled played a role in this spectacle, but, suffice it to say, nothing allows one to experience the Virginia countryside in a new light quite like spending two hours inside the Virginia countryside with no light.

In closing, while an outing to the Crozet railroad tunnel can hardly be recommended for a first date (Please give me a second chance, Tammy), it was an ideal destination for the first of hopefully many Latitude 38 Adventure Days. Inside Crozet’s masterpiece we found new friends (and promptly lost them in the darkness); and we took a welcome break from our hard-knock world of swaying scaffolding and potentially lethal power tools to explore a place infinitely more dangerous. But most importantly, we were again reminded of the bounty of Latitude 38’s eponymous parallel. Joey managed to best summarize the journey before it had scarcely begun, as our group set off towards the tunnel with the beautiful Rockfish Valley spread out far below us-“This… is why we live in Virginia.