You can't enter the tunnels that way any more. A cage surrounds the staircase and two frowning padlocked doors sit sternly, guardians of the secrets underneath. I explored in the years before everything got closed off, and I still know some clever ways to enter. You can get to some weird places by simply walking down every staircase and trying every door. Check the locked ones. You'd be surprised how many people don't lock up. Then yank the doors. Some locks are just plain weak. Bring water. And a flashlight. If you're lucky, you'll need the flashlight. A frisbee wouldn't hurt either. If you get busted you can always say you got lost looking for your frisbee. That's what I used to do. But I never got caught, not really.

My friend and I slipped through a gap in the concrete wall. I could see the remnants of a door, some rotted wood and grimy plastic, lying on the ground. No one had used this doorway for decades, or at least no designated official. We walked down a hallway flooded a few centimeters deep with slimy water, stepping on planks of wood and bridging our feet between the walls when the planks ran out. After sixty feet we stepped into the tunnels proper.

I've heard them called "steam tunnels." I guess quite a few universities have them. Universities use the tunnels to pump hot water and electricity to all their buildings. At Columbia, the tunnels connect nearly every building on the north side of campus. I can easily pop down into the tunnels in the Chemistry building and emerge in the Engineering building some minutes later. Of course, these tunnels were not designed for cold weather travel between classes by students. Instead, maintenance workers travel the tunnels, fixing, jiggling, and banging on the various valves, pipes, switches, knobs, and assorted doo-hickeys that make the university work. Columbia University was once the site of the "Manhattan Project," a consortium of physicists who secretly developed the first nuclear weapons for the United States government. This fact adds an element of intrigue when snooping around. There is some weird shit down there. The place has history...

History of more than one kind, however. In addition to broken physics equipment, one can find the classic "Vic + Maya" encircled by a heart, the tags of a group from the eighties called "Ad Hoc", quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and of course the oft-scribbled "Columbia sucks", "Barnard sucks". Beer bottles aren't uncommon in certain areas. I'm surely not the first or last student to enter those tunnels. I didn't discover them myself, and probably couldn't have. The legend of tunnel travel is passed from generation to generation of Columbia student. Brave explorer-type freshman hear stories from wise and well traveled seniors and in turn those freshman become the seniors. There is no wilderness in New York, no frontier to suck the energies of the would-be explorer. So instead of traveling out, we go down. I can roam the tunnels for hours, reliving the exploits of the great dungeon explorers, childhood heros like Indiana Jones. Curiosity propels me down dark, dirty passageways, through mucky rat infested water, under low ceilings, and past steam pipes, too hot to touch, that heat the corridor like a blast furnace.

The tunnels have variety. One can casually walk from a normal classroom to a rat infested cave, then proceed to the gymnasium with just as much ease. All one need do is take the right turns. A workers' lounge will usually have a crusty donut and a TV playing at all times of night. Other areas have been completely abandoned, rooms full of junk layered in an inch of dust. The murkiest places I ever explored required stumbling, by flashlight, through mud in areas that clearly became flooded during rainstorms.

On this particular January night, beads of sweat began to form on my forehead as Ilan and I stealthily crept between giant machines. We entered a large rectangular room, about one hundred feet long, filled with ten versions of the same machine, a large metal box with pipes and vents. The boxes slept loudly, snoring chug-a-chug-chug-chug. Chug-a-chug-chug-chug. They generated quite a bit of heat, and my winter clothes had turned my insides into a mild inferno. I'd already taken off my hat and unzipped my jacket by the time we stopped to stash our stuff. I crammed most of my clothes into a backpack and hid it above some pipes, wedged against the crusty ceiling.

"Sssshhhh" my friend said.

"Did you hear something?" I whispered, barely audible. I scanned the room, nervousness rejuvenating my sweat glands.

Chug-a-chug-chug. Chug-a-chug-chug.

"Forget it. I've never seen anyone around here before." I looked at my watch. 1:10 am. "Nobody comes down here at 1:00 in the morning on a Friday."

"Except us."

"True. We're more likely to run into more students than any type of security."

"Maybe they'll have beer."

We each drank some water before continuing. We walked a passageway that curled gradually to the right, listening to the chug-a-chug-chug's fade. The flaming orange of rusted pipes shown brightly in the yellow indoor light. A surprised rat scuttled away, caught drinking from a pool of tepid green water. The tunnel was the kind of place where characters in comic books meet sewer dwelling monsters. If there are urban vampires, they live in places like the tunnels. The constant hum of machinery could never be pinpointed, it seemed to emerge from the walls in every direction, seeping like an auditory ooze. After a few twists and turns, including an ascent up a small ladder, we came to the signature room.

The signature room: names, tags, song lyrics, quotes from literature (in several languages), and even a few Psalms cover the concrete cinderblocks of the room. No wall or ceiling was spared. One of my favorite quotes comes from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
one for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
in the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
one ring to rule them all,
one ring to find them,
one ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them
in the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie…

Reading that quote in the dirty undergound light momentarily transports me to the dungeons of Moria. I think every student who enters the signature room feels a sudden desire to scrawl something. The tagged messages call out, begging you to add your own. Leaving a message is a rite of passage, creating a bond between you and the tunnel travelers of the past. An explorer's fraternity. I left a quote from Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "His was an inpenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines."

My friend and I did a "greatest hits" tour of the tunnels. We shot each other with broken laser equipment under Pupin, the physics building. Leaking barrels of chemicals stacked deep under the chemistry building sparked memories of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie: Secret of the Ooze. I wonder if the nasty chemicals could have transformed us into walking talking kung fu amphibians. We climbed a ladder into some Professor's office and checked our Email on his computer. Ilan stole a welding helmet. Then we went to the main attraction.

Near a go-cart under the engineering building, there is a series of locked doors. I pushed a stack of old speakers against a wall some thirty feet left of the first locked door. Ilan gave me a boost and I crawled through a gap where the wall didn't quite reach to the ceiling. Using a glove, I unlocked the door for Ilan. We were in a nicer section of the tunnels, definitely an off-limits high-risk-of-prosecution type of area. My friend and I arranged a spot to meet up later if we had to run. Confident in my knowledge of the area, I felt I could outrun anyone down there. But still, I was nervous as hell.

We entered a large room, about three stories high, painted a disgusting cream color. In the center of room an enormous cylinder stood like a big fat coffee can. Signs that read DO NOT STORE ANYTHING NEAR THE REACTOR were posted on its sides. A set of metal stairs led to a circumferential platform on the cylinder. Another set of stairs brought us to the top. Cresting the staircase, it finally came into view, a mass of metal polygons jutting into each other, with various pipes and tubes extruding. The device, about the size of a large car, stood on the flat summit of the cylinder, solid as a warship. It shown with metallic intensity. I swear I could see the gateway to another dimension reflected on the chrome hull. 100 percent weird science. Ilan was awestruck. Clearly visible, stickers bearing the radioactive symbol decorated several of the device's panels. The machine obviously wasn't on, so there was no danger of contamination. Or so I told my friend. I had no fucking clue what the thing was. A bomb? A nuclear reactor? A fancy toaster? A time machine?

Ilan found a log book on a small table. Real-life scientists recorded the data for this monstrosity in a black and white checkered Mead "college-ruled" notebook, the same type of notebook in which I took class notes. The most recent entry in the log book, some reading of a pressure gauge, was dated two weeks previous. Withstanding all of my investigations, the device has not yet yielded any information regarding its true nature or purpose. It looks cool, and I usually refer to it as "the gamma ray generator" because I thought I saw a Greek gamma symbol on one of the shiny panels. Now I'm not so sure.