Forever Odd

year.
        Nevertheless, flood control in desert towns usually consists of a network of concrete V ditches, weather-carved arroyos, and culverts feeding either a natural dry riverbed or one engineered to carry water away from human habitations. If not for the fact that Fort Kraken, a major air-force base, backed up to Pico Mundo, we would be served by an equally low-tech and imperfect system.
        For six decades, Fort Kraken had been one of the nation’s most vital military resources. The flood-control system that benefited Pico Mundo had been constructed largely to ensure that the runways and the vast facilities of the base were protected from Mother Nature in her most thunderous moods.
        Some believe that under Kraken lies a deep-rock command-and-control complex that was designed to ride out nuclear strikes by the former Soviet Union and to serve as a governmental center for the reconstruction of the southwestern United States subsequent to an atomic war.
        Following the end of the Cold War, Fort Kraken was downsized but not decommissioned as were many other military bases. Some say that because a chance exists that we may one day face an aggressive China armed with thousands of nuclear missiles, this hidden facility is maintained in readiness.
        Rumors have it that these tunnels serve clandestine functions in addition to flood control. Maybe they disguise the venting of that deep-rock complex. Maybe some of them double as secret entrances.
        All this may be true or it may be the equivalent of the urban legend that claims pet alligators, flushed down toilets when they were babies and grown to full adulthood, live in the New York City sewer system, feeding on rats and unwary sanitation workers.
        One of the people who believe all or part of the Kraken story is Horton Barks, publisher of the Maravilla County Times . Mr. Barks also claims that twenty years ago, while hiking in the Oregon woods, he had a pleasant dinner of trail mix and canned sausages with Big Foot.
        Being the person I am, with the experiences I’ve had, I tend to believe him about the Sasquatch.
        Now, in search of Danny Jessup, trusting to my unique intuition, I turned right and followed the service walkway upstream, through ordered patterns of shadow and light, toward one kind of storm or another.

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    SIXTEEN
        
        A BOBBING TENNIS BALL, A PLASTIC BAG PULSING AS IF it were a jellyfish, a playing card-the ten of diamonds-a gardening glove, a cluster of red petals that might have been cyclamen: Every object on the gray tide was luminous with mysterious meaning. Or so it all seemed to me, for I had fallen into a mood for meaning.
        Because this water poured into the flood-control system not from Pico Mundo but from a storm far to the east, it carried less flotsam than it would later if the volume increased and the downpour washed in from city streets.
        Tributary tunnels fed the one in which I walked. Some were dry, but others added to the flow. Many were about two feet in diameter, although several loomed as large as this passage by which I had entered.
        At each intersection, the walkway ended but resumed on the farther side. At the first ford, I considered taking off my shoes and rolling up my jeans. Barefoot, I might step on something sharp in the water-a concern that kept me shod.
        My new white sneakers were at once a mess. Terrible Chester might as well have peed on them.
        Mile by mile, as I moved eastward, barely aware of the gradual incline, I found the subterranean structure increasingly impressive. The pleasurable curiosity that arises from exploration gradually matured into admiration for the architects, engineers, and skilled tradesmen who had conceived and executed this project.
        Admiration began to ripen into something almost like wonder.
        The complex of tunnels proved to be immense. Of those large enough to provide human passage, some were lighted, but others were dark. Those that were illuminated either dwindled away as if to infinity or curved gracefully out of sight.
        I saw no terminations, only the openings to new branches.
        A fantastic perception arose that I had ventured into a construction that stood between worlds, or linked them, as if uncountable nautilus shells intersected in myriad dimensions, the fluid geometries of their spiral passages offering pathways to new