tunnels, tunnels, tunnels
why are people on the internet digging? why do other people care?
In this post I’m thinking about Kala the TikTok Tunnel Lady, my landlord who dug a cavern underneath the house I lived in years ago, MrBeast burying himself alive in a video last year, Wikipedia rabbit holes, Louise Glück, and a few other things.
But most of all, I am thinking about Tunnels.
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Kala the Tunnel Lady has been digging a “suburban mine” underneath her Northern Virginia home for over two years now and documenting the progress on TikTok (full disclosure: she and I are mutuals). The mine is clearly very expensive and time-consuming: she spends a massive amount on equipment and devotes hours of hard labor to the project (both doing it and filming it). Everyone online is asking why.
Some of why she’s digging is to get “building stones” for various construction projects aboveground, mostly turning the front of her house into a castle. Some of it is possibly, for clout: she’s now quite popular on TikTok. But in a deeper way, she seems to be digging for the sake of digging. Because it’s there. Because she can do it. Because she yearns for the mines. As a consequence of that yearning, she’s possibly gotten in legal trouble, imperiled her neighbors, and stirred up a hornet’s nest on the internet.
This isn’t the first time tunnel-digging has catapulted someone to “main character of the internet” status. You might remember this /r/Advice post on Reddit about a boyfriend who just won’t stop digging, which went viral on Twitter and TikTok in the spring of 2022.
The Tunnel, as some might say, is Eternal.
For a period in pre-school, one of our favorite activities was digging in the sand pit. One time as we walked back into the classroom from some outing, all in a single-file line, we saw workmen digging a big hole in the courtyard just next to our playground. Look, my friend said, touching my shoulder, and I turned to see. The thought running in my mind was jealousy. I wished I had tools like that, I wished I was as large and strong as an adult man. Then I could dig as deep as I wanted. They had dug down past the first layers of soil, and the earth they exposed was a color I’d never seen before.
Now that I do have access to a shovel and I am big, I wonder — why am I not digging?
When the tunnel of entomologist Harrison Gray Dyar Jr. was discovered in Washington, DC in 1924, he told the papers “some men play golf, I dig tunnels.” Elton McDonald (seen below) in 2014, when asked about his tunnel, said “Honestly, I loved it so much. I don’t know why I loved it.”
Dutch artist Leanne Winjsma, talking to VICE about her tunneling in 2015:
…I just want to be an animal, really autonomous like an animal. Sure, we are free, but we are free behind our computers. I just wanted to dig. So it is really simple; it wasn't really an idea, it was an instinct.
Essay to be written about the tunnel as site of radical self-discovery, as locus of resistance to capitalism and yet paradoxically peak individualism, etc.
Why Tunnel?
Tunnel-digging is so delicious precisely because it is so opposite the ways we are usually asked to be and work. Underground is a place where the pulls of obligation, logic, morality, and convention don’t apply. You can be you under the earth.
Tunneling is a solitary activity, you’re “autonomous,” unbothered, in your lane, thriving.
The point of tunneling is the lack of a point. The tunnel could always go deeper and longer, it’ll never be finished, you’ll never be without it.
Tunneling is pleasantly irrational (i.e., not goal-oriented, not tied to making money or gaining some benefit)
Tunneling is an expression of pure will to do something 100% for yourself and not for anyone else (they ideally don’t even know it exists) it’s about pure love of the game
Tunneling is anti-social. In 1924, Dyar’s tunnel was discovered because a truck fell into it. Kala’s tunnel has reportedly led to her neighbors feeling the ground shake. According to an investigative reporter covering the story on TikTok, these neighbors are uncomfortable going to the authorities due to their legal status.
A few years back, my landlord’s hobby tunnel consisted of two main chambers with a connecting passageway between them. The tunnels were accessible through a little window underneath the front porch. They were dark and filled with strange things: old trash, a set of cabinetry, a lot of dirt, and a locked suitcase which, if you shook it, definitely seemed to have something inside. When I told her about it, our next-door neighbor said she always wondered why everybody else’s backyard was on a slope but ours was flat. The earth dug up from the tunnel system must have been deposited there.
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