If you want to walk from the Bourbon Barrel to The Office Bar, you have to go through the underpass. The railroad yard divides Pocatello in half, and the Center Street underpass is the main way to get from one side of downtown to the other. Cars can drive on the two-lane street that dives down under the railroad tracks, but pedestrians have to walk through enclosed tunnels that run parallel to the street, one on either side. These tunnels are cold, winter and summer, and narrow enough that if you stretch out your arms, you can touch both walls.
From inside the tunnels, you can hear cars on the other side of the wall because drivers like to honk their horns as they zoom through the underpass, but when you’re deep in the middle of one of the block-long passages, all you hear is water dripping. The buzzing, fluorescent lights are dim and often broken by vandals. If a train goes by while you’re in there, you can feel the vibrations through the soles of your feet, which is odd, because the train is overhead, not underneath you.
Walking through the tunnels is bad enough during the day, when you’ll probably have to quick-step past a snoring drunk or a steaming pile of shit. (Sometimes the pile has a scrap of toilet paper stuck on top like a little sailor hat.) After dark, the tunnels are even worse. Once you go in, you can only walk fast, hoping to clear the other entrance before you meet up with someone you’d rather not meet up with. You never run into anyone you know in the tunnel; it’s always a weird-looking stranger.
Occasionally, spotting a silhouetted figure coming at you, you get so spooked that you turn around and race back the way you came, retreating into the First National Bar or one of the other Center Street sanctuaries. Then you sit in the First Nash and drink a beer while your heart slows down and the person you thought was a rapist comes out of the underpass and walks by the window and you see that, yeah, he looks a little demented, but then so do you after your run for cover. And now you feel pretty silly, but you know you’ll probably do the same thing again next time.
From inside the tunnels, you can hear cars on the other side of the wall because drivers like to honk their horns as they zoom through the underpass, but when you’re deep in the middle of one of the block-long passages, all you hear is water dripping. The buzzing, fluorescent lights are dim and often broken by vandals. If a train goes by while you’re in there, you can feel the vibrations through the soles of your feet, which is odd, because the train is overhead, not underneath you.
Walking through the tunnels is bad enough during the day, when you’ll probably have to quick-step past a snoring drunk or a steaming pile of shit. (Sometimes the pile has a scrap of toilet paper stuck on top like a little sailor hat.) After dark, the tunnels are even worse. Once you go in, you can only walk fast, hoping to clear the other entrance before you meet up with someone you’d rather not meet up with. You never run into anyone you know in the tunnel; it’s always a weird-looking stranger.
Occasionally, spotting a silhouetted figure coming at you, you get so spooked that you turn around and race back the way you came, retreating into the First National Bar or one of the other Center Street sanctuaries. Then you sit in the First Nash and drink a beer while your heart slows down and the person you thought was a rapist comes out of the underpass and walks by the window and you see that, yeah, he looks a little demented, but then so do you after your run for cover. And now you feel pretty silly, but you know you’ll probably do the same thing again next time.
Whenever you come out of the underpass –walking fast—you look up to see if someone is leaning over the iron railing above you, maybe getting ready to spit or drop his beer bottle on your head. This has never actually happened to you, but you’ve heard about it happening to someone who knows someone you know, and you believe it could happen.
Once a year some student group decides to clean up the underpass, and they take buckets of paint—red and white if they’re from Poky High, orange and black for the University—and cover up all the graffiti with slogans about their school. Two weeks later, though, the tunnel walls look the way they always do: Iron Maiden and Rams Rule and Monica + Brandon 4 Ever and I Will Suck Your Cock and Jesus Saves. Three months later, even these messages are scraped and scarred and stained by dribbles of piss.
Once a year some student group decides to clean up the underpass, and they take buckets of paint—red and white if they’re from Poky High, orange and black for the University—and cover up all the graffiti with slogans about their school. Two weeks later, though, the tunnel walls look the way they always do: Iron Maiden and Rams Rule and Monica + Brandon 4 Ever and I Will Suck Your Cock and Jesus Saves. Three months later, even these messages are scraped and scarred and stained by dribbles of piss.
Parade routes go through the Center Street underpass, and you walk downtown early so you can get a good spot to watch the Homecoming Queen’s float and the Pocatello Chiefs’ trolley. You hang over the railing and try to beat some little kid out of catching the saltwater taffy that the District Four representatives throw at the crowd. You look at the people who run alongside the parade—drill team moms and uncles with video cameras—and you think about spitting or dropping your beer bottle and what would happen if you did.
You realize that you always say, “Go under the underpass,” when you give directions to the west side of town, but that’s not exactly what you mean, because the underpass is already under: under the railroad tracks, under regular street level. You remember last spring when it got warm suddenly for one day and the snow on the hills melted and ran down into town. The underpass filled up with five feet of water and some fool drove his truck into it and had to stop and swim out his window. And you think about someday when the railroad tracks will be rerouted because the underpass is too old. It’ll be torn down and the tunnels filled in and drunks will have to find somewhere else to take a dump, and you hope that day doesn’t come until you’re too senile to care about the underpass or remember hurrying through it on your way from the Bourbon Barrel to The Office Bar.
[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]
