The Great Northern Tunnel, which opened in 1904, took 20 months to complete and required the labor of more than 300 souls, who used buckets, wheelbarrows, picks, and shovels. The project had its problems. According to David B. Williams, one downtown building was destroyed during the digging. The project also had its numinous moments, such as the prehistoric forest the miners found buried beneath the city. As I wrote in my essay "Young, Poor, Lucky," when the long-dead forest "was exposed to the light of day, [it] vaporized like a vampire into a pile of dust and pulp."

But the important facts in all of this are, one, the Great Northern Tunnel was made for trains, and, two, the SR 99 tunnel is being made for cars. And one has to see the deeper and symbolic meaning of Bertha's seemingly endless troubles: We are stuck with cars, a mode of transportation that is getting us nowhere anytime soon. Whenever you build for cars, which demand so much space, always expect the marriage of great expense and great waste. It is for this reason we can expect a good part of the super-expensive Interstate Highway System to be returned to nature in the future. The type of society that can afford to maintain the whole of it does not exist on this planet. The Interstate Highway was maybe made for rich aliens who never arrived. The '50s were, after all, a period of unusually high UFO activity.