the tunnel and the river
Written by Elizabeth Wenger
It was said Natalie K fucked an older guy in the flood tunnel beneath the junction of 41st street and the Arkansas River. Like, this guy wasn’t even her boyfriend, just someone she met at a party friends of friends were throwing. He wasn’t old-old, but he was older. Like twenty-something. When you’re fifteen, though, anyone who’s been driving for more years than you have fingers on one hand might as well be your dad. In other words, he was old enough that fucking her was technically a statutory case. But we weren’t concerned about that back then. So when it was said that Natalie K fucked an older guy, it wasn’t a story about illegality. It was, however, a story about rule breaking.
Rules and laws have always been different. Laws are written and belong to the adults. But rules are spoken and belong to everyone else. And the rules that governed the teenage social order of Tulsa at that time, circa twenty-teens, though unspoken, had their own logic. These rules could earn you clout or they could paint a red X on your forehead that you couldn’t wipe off no matter how hard you scrubbed. It was hard to say at first if Natalie K broke a rule and would wear her crime forever, or if she’d done something big and bold, and would reign in her own small way over a not-insignificant realm of us high schoolers.
The tunnel where the fucking did or did not happen—in other words, where a rule was or was not broken—flowed out into the river. Or maybe the river flowed into the tunnel. It was difficult to ascertain the direction of the water’s flow or, for that matter, the original purpose for which the tunnel had been constructed. It did not seem to me at the time that the tunnel was part of the city’s sewage system, for though a lingering odor of moss and rodents penetrated the air inside, it never smelled of human waste. The water at the bottom of the tunnel did not usually rise above ankle height. The tunnel itself was large enough—maybe seven or eight feet in diameter—that you could walk along its curvature and avoid stepping in the flow at all. Only later, when I’d gone to college and became interested in the world of facts, did I learn that the tunnel was built to divert water when the river flooded. It was built for the purpose of control. The tunnel is where the river goes when it gets vengeful and wants to wreak havoc on the homes that have been constructed too close to its banks.
If you viewed the river from a distance—say from the shore or from inside the tunnel peering out—it looked muddy green. Yet closer up, the water had a certain purity to it. You could scoop it into your hand and see it was clear as the stuff from your sink, only with tiny algae particles suspended throughout it. The greenness was an effect of accumulation. A certain alchemy caused by things piling up and leading to eventual transformation. It is, I suppose, with a similar magic that memories collect inside people and transform us from children into adults.
Where the tunnel and the river met, a field of rocks stood sentinel, guarding the confluence. Where the water twisted and turned among the gray stones, trash would gather. Old cans, broken glass, used condoms, and tampons. The city’s secrets caught in a net of rocks. Another kind of accumulation.
In some ways the tunnel was freedom tucked into the ground. Its opening, a yawning orifice into the belly of the city. There were no gates to enter. No fees.
While it was physically accessible to those willing and able to traverse a small hill that led from the pedestrian riverside trails, it was somehow mentally challenging to enter. Once friends and I tumbled down toward the water, and scrambled over the low-lying rocks, our fears formed an intangible barricade at the tunnel’s entrance. From within, the unknowns of it—where did it go? who or what existed in its depths? why was it there at all?—gurgled at the tunnel’s mouth. It double-dog-dared you to step inside.
Sometimes, I thought of Natalie K and the older guy in the tunnel. Their breaths heavy with want. I used to dream of kissing a girl in the tunnel. The romance of the place wasn’t the mossy ambiance, but its near non-existence. A place where one could go to not be. A place where my queerness and difference could exist unseen.
*
If you ever did get up the courage and enter, you would find a museum inside the tunnel. A gallery, unticketed and participatory. Graffiti covered the tunnel walls; it formed a dense and layered palimpsest for the first few meters from the entrance. But the deeper you went into the tunnel, the more the dark swallowed the light and the more sparse the paintings became.
To mark the walls where the daylight didn’t touch showed a special kind of ballsiness. Venturing past the hundreds of spray-painted dicks and tags, finding your own blank canvas of concrete, and writing yourself there by the yellow tint of a phone flashlight was a rite of passage.
In my mind, this tunnel has become an archetype of darkness so that now, even years after going in it for the first time, when I enter other lightless spaces—basements, darkrooms, caves—those darknesses are always compared to this original one. It was the way the darkness seemed to grow the farther you went into it, so that even after you thought there could be no darker dark, another step would reveal another, deeper blackness.
The tunnel’s heavy, prototypical darkness could possess your body and make your form invisible to your own detection. There was a certain escape in this, too—a willful disappearance of the body. At fifteen or sixteen years old, it made up for the discomfort of darkness to be able to step out of your body of un-harmonized hormones and simply exist in lightlessness.
When we were teens, my brother and I once talked about an ideal existence: just being disembodied minds floating through space, conversing with other minds. Without a body, we thought, you could be free.
My brother was skinny in high school, and while not short, he’s never been particularly tall. I never knew what to do with my body, how to dress this girl I lived within. Your body could dictate where you stood in the social hierarchy. It shaped how people saw you, if they saw you at all. If you lacked breasts as a girl, or had too much of them, if you lacked height as a boy, or muscle—these things determined the unspoken ranking. It would make sense that we would be drawn to the idea of releasing these vessels that so trapped us. And in the tunnel, in the lack of light, you could live like that—just a voice echoing in the dark.
Even as the tunnel possessed all this power, it was also just a tunnel: concrete burrowed deep under 41st street, beginning at the Arkansas River, and shuffling off into the nowhere of the city.
*
No one could tell if it was badass. Natalie K’s fucking, I mean. Or if it was something we shouldn’t look well on. No one was even sure if Natalie K actually had fucked the older guy in the tunnel. Maybe she had fucked the older guy and maybe she had been in the tunnel. Whether the fucking had actually taken place in the tunnel or in one of the more usual and therefore acceptable venues (a bedroom, a backseat, the park off Peoria and 21st) was obscured by an assemblage of whispered embellishments that a story tends to gather when passed from lip to ear of so many young and interested parties. Truth is a mercurial thing. And in some ways, the event itself didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was said.
I knew this already. I remember once, a friend of mine, a pretty girl on the cheer team, told me about a rumor someone had spread about her. Pretty girls were especially subject to rumor.
“Did you know I was fisted by Greg P at a party last weekend?”
“No?”
“Neither did I,” she said with an angry laugh. “But I just heard I was.”
There were other stories about the tunnel. These were more or less believable than the story of Natalie K and the older man. It was said, for example, people held raves in a cavernous room somewhere beyond, where the tunnel curved out of reach of the sun or moonlight. I imagined the bass reverberating off the concrete. The drop of synthetic notes resonating in the tunnel’s stretching body. People rolling on molly, rolling through puddles, bouncing around the bowing walls.
I have a story I tell when I’m drunk at bars in Tulsa and someone brings up their own tunnel story. Once, the story goes, my friends and I took leftover fireworks down to the tunnel, imagining how the booms and pops would sound so much louder in the echoing space. We lit a Saturn Missile Battery and tilted it so it would shoot into the tunnel, illuminating the darkness as each of the tiny lights flew down. That was the plan, anyway. My friend lit the fuse, but something went wrong. Either the lighter tilted the battery, or my friend kicked it when they started running away—whatever caused it, all we knew was that the missiles were now aiming at us. We took to our feet, running for the mouth of the tunnel while the missiles whizzed past. We made it out.
I’ve told that story so many times now, I can’t remember how close the missiles flew past my head. How many pops I heard. I even forget who exactly I went down there with in the first place. It is a story I have repeated though, and with each retelling it becomes more a part of myself.
It was said, too, that Penny G found a recently abandoned backpack in the tunnel when she went down there with some folks. She called the police because she was sure that somewhere deeper in there, a dead body would be waiting, bloated and face down in the shallow water. Maybe this stranger had gone down there to ride out a high, but overdosed like so many others in our blighted state—no one close enough to Narcan him to safety.
There were reports of used needles—hundreds of them—swimming in the shallow water of the tunnel. Needles that the tunnel spat out anytime a heavy rain came. Needles that flowed into the river and swam with the alligator gar, largemouth bass, and flathead catfish that populated the green-brown water of our city.
*
It used to seem strange to me that the river was called Arkansas because it was not in Arkansas; it was here, in my city, my state. Oklahoma. The things in my life had a firm place in the world, and that place was always in relation to my experience with them. You could say I had object permanence issues. That the river had a whole journey before it met me seemed as bizarre as imagining my parents’ lives before I was born.
A far-off Colorado basin births the river from the mountains. From there it flows southeast through the plains until it meets the Mississippi and joins its course all the way into the Gulf. People drink from the Arkansas, splash in it, fish in it, before it reaches me. In the 1500s, conquistadors sighted the river on expeditions through the rough center of the country. In the 1700s, French traders knew the river, too. They named it and renamed it, were baptized in it, bathed in it, and were reborn by it. In 1859, people found gold in the river around Leadville, Colorado, then pulled it from the river until the river had no more to give.
All these discoveries, just processes of calling old things new.
And just as the river has been taken from, things have been spilled into it. Our river had oil wells drilled right into it back when Tulsa was a boom town. The river let us take from what was beneath it. And not long ago, a fisherman in Tulsa contacted the local news to vent worries about pollution from oil refineries like, HF Sinclair’s making a mess of the water. When asked what he saw in the water that made him worry he said, “. . . multicolor foams, sometimes it’s orange, sometimes it’s brown, like brown streaks in it [. . .] an oily sheen in the water, really vibrant rainbow color.” I marvel at how beautiful our messes can seem. Like red on the horizon near a forest fire out West, the river’s water kaleidoscopes with our spills.
Before any wells were drilled or oil spilled or gold taken, the Arkansas River went about its own business. What business a river has is as much a mystery to me as the whisperings of the squirrels outside my bedroom window and the conversations between the roots of trees and their up-high leaves. Whatever the river’s business, whatever its proper name may be (and I am beginning to believe a river is the only true knower of its own name), it has risen and dried and risen and dried and lived many hundreds of years before me and my teenage friends came along to claim it and the tunnel that captures its overflow. Long before Natalie K and that older man met at some party friends of friends were throwing.
*
In 2019, the Arkansas River rose and rose. The water jumped up from its bed and tasted all the land it wasn’t supposed to. It became a madman trying to escape a straightjacket. A flood. It rose higher than I’d ever seen it, and the tunnel didn’t help.
When it happened, my parents recalled the Memorial Day Flood of 1984. They were in high school then. Didn’t know each other. My dad left work at the movie theater and was driving back to his home in the deluge. The water got too high. To make it back home, he had to abandon his car and hop into the car of a coworker who happened to be heading the same direction. My mother was driving home from a youth-club dance that day. Her date drove his car right into standing water and the engine shut down. Her dress soaked through with dirty flood water from the Joe Creek watershed.
These scenes play like a romantic comedy in my mind. The two eventual partners, as-yet-unknown to one another, trapped in different parts of the city in that same legendary flood.
I like to imagine the water as a storyteller passing tales from bank to bank like us teens passing gossip from ear to ear. The water must surely carry stories suspended in it like those algae particles.
*
Mostly, we knew the river to be low and dry. Sometimes, it would get so low you could almost walk all the way across it on the sandy bed. The smell of dead fish would waft up from across the dry flats and into the city.
It was said that Paul O used to throw parties in the summer when the water was low. That if you got on a good pair of sandals, you could ford the river with a case of cheap beer in tow and join other kids in a late-night river romp. It was said people camped out there not far from the tunnel. And these people weren’t the people who lived under the bridges that crisscrossed the river like loose sutures—but rich kids, too, from the private schools, who’d pack a bag and spend the night under what few stars could be seen in the city.
*
No one knew where the tunnel let out.
Actually, that’s a lie. Someone knew. I just didn’t.
In high school, it was said Henry F went all the way through. It was said, at the time, he did it alone, which made the story all the more compelling. Imagining a single soul spelunking through all that dark horror. But after college, I heard from a friend that Henry F traveled through the tunnel with Kenny M, not alone like the rumor mill had spun. I heard they went straight through for a mile or more and came out at Zink Park, a patch of green in Midtown Tulsa with some tennis courts and a little creek going through it. That park, I was told, held the true exit. But whenever I went there and searched for it, I never could find it.
After I’d moved away from Tulsa, I was texting a friend who said the tunnel let out at Utica Square, a high-class outdoor shopping mall even farther from the 41st and Riverside entrance. This seemed much less believable. I’d worked in that mall at a grocery store and never had I seen anything that resembled the tunnel. It’s always been impossible for me to imagine Kenny M and Henry F resurfacing from the drainage pipe all covered in tunnel dirt and moss in the parking lot in front of the Coach store.
So, from my standpoint, only ever having gone into the tunnel a couple hundred meters before my gut told me to get the hell out of there, that tunnel only has an entrance. No exit.
*
Some years after we’d all graduated high school and either left or remained in the city, I heard Natalie K was engaged. Later, I heard the engagement was off. Later still, I heard she was doing well. I haven’t seen her in years, nor have I been in the tunnel since I stopped living in Tulsa. But I think of that world encased in concrete and its stories every time I visit the city and drive down where 41st Street meets the river. I wonder what rules govern that confluence now, whether kids are still getting high down there, fucking, painting swastikas or graffiti-doodles with spray they might huff later. Sometimes when I close my eyes I am back in that darkness, reaching out for the exit I’m still not sure is at the other end.
SOURCE:
FOX23 Investigates: Tulsa Fisherman Shares Concerns about Arkansas River. Directed by Janna Clark, FOX23, 2 Jan. 2025.
Elizabeth J. Wenger is a queer writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She is the winner of the Baltimore Review Winter Prize in flash nonfiction. She was shortlisted for the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. She was selected as a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prose Prize. Wenger earned her MFA at Iowa State University’s program for Creative Writing and Environment. Her website is wengerwrites.com.