Light Shines Through

Men laid money against this one. Real bets, on whether two holes dug blind from opposite sides of a mountain would ever find each other. The man they were betting against was Claudius Crozet, a French-born engineer who'd crossed the Alps with Napoleon, if you believe the old guidebook. Under Rockfish Gap he drove four thousand two hundred seventy-three feet of railroad tunnel, seven hundred twenty feet down at the deepest, from both ends, with hand tools and black powder, and it took eight years. In its day no railroad tunnel in the United States ran longer. One man held the drill and turned it after every blow. Another swung the hammer, hard and fast as he could. Irish hands did it, living in one-room shanties at either end of the mountain. In eighteen fifty-three they struck, and won better pay. They stopped for their holy days, too, and Crozet counted that against them. It would pay to hire enslaved men, he wrote, because those days, "and their practice to stop work when any one, even a mere child, dies, causes a considerable loss of time." So he rented thirty-three men from their owners. The contract barred them from the blasting, so they cleared the broken rock instead. That wasn't mercy. It kept the property safe. April sixth, eighteen fifty-four. An iron pin broke, loaded rail cars ran loose and smashed into a handcar, and two of those men were killed. I can't give you their names. The Attorney General of Virginia ruled the railroad owed the slaveowner for his loss, and twenty-four hundred dollars went out. Nothing was said about their families. Crozet stopped using enslaved labor after that, to avoid the risk of paying again. That same year the cholera came, and it killed Irish workers and their families in numbers nobody knows. At least fourteen more died in accidents, with no death benefit for anybody. A mere child, he'd written. And all the while the two headings crept toward each other in the dark, on his figures alone. They broke through in the last week of December, eighteen fifty-six. The two sides met within a half inch. "Light now shines through the Blue Ridge," a newspaper said. The trains quit it long ago, and for years it sat dark behind concrete walls. "I had been in there many times and never seen light," a filmmaker named Paul Wagner said, of the day the walls came out. One end of this tour sits at that tunnel's trailhead. It's a walk you can take, and I've taken it. Somewhere in the middle you've lost the daylight at one end and can't yet find it at the other. That's where I stop and say my count. Fourteen, and two, and the ones nobody counted. Then I walk on to the light.