Half-Light, Mitchell Point Tunnel

 

Near sundown, angled rays of light scraped the underside of clouds to the west as I entered the newly reopened Mitchell Point Tunnel. Constructed in 1915 as part of the Columbia River Highway, the engineer, Samuel Lancaster, modeled the windowed tunnel after a Swiss version he had seen while touring Europe. Until 1953 car traffic enjoyed views looking out of the tunnel’s row of huge, elegant windows  towards Washington State across the river. When Highway I-80 was built as a two-lane road around the base of Mitchell Point, it necessitated the closing of the tunnel above. The windows were cemented closed and the tunnel filled with gravel. In the 1960s, the widening of the highway below into becoming the four-lane I-84 highway required blasting away the tunnel’s windows, emptying it of gravel, and leaving its former roadway as a shelf to catch falling rocks from the point above.   

Some time ago, I saw a postcard showing a Model T lit by the large windows as the car passed through the Mitchell Point Tunnel. I was enchanted. Not familiar with the tunnel’s history or its exact whereabouts, I would look for the windows as I drove the Gorge. I was never successful at spotting them until a day in 2023 when I was returning from Portland and looking up was startled to see windows appearing like an apparition of black-drawn holes in the gray basalt rock face. The state of Oregon had garnered funding to reconstruct the tunnel to become a stretch of the Columbia River biking and walking path. 

I texted my friend Bryan who was in the midst of a cancer regime (Waiting for the Results of a Biopsy), sent him a link about the tunnel’s coming reopening, and suggested that when he finished treatment, we’d make a trip to walk it. He passed away five months later, never having left the confines of Seattle. (After Death, The Wake) When the tunnel opened in April of 2025, I visited and took a rock of Bryan’s, one he had gathered from the tiny Canadian island he had owned. The smooth black rock—Puget Sound tumbled—was hand-sized; Bryan's spirit held in its pleasing heft. 

Chosing a day of partial sun and partial clouds, I envisioned taking photos out of the tunnel’s grand openings. None of the photos I eventually took and kept looked out the windows. The haunting light and the mostly inky black walls held my attention. Although the tunnel windows are monstrous, the northern light enters them gently. Each opening—rough cast with imprecise edges—lets in a half-light.

When you first enter the black maw of the western entrance, you walk in darkness a few moments before a curve in the tunnel reveals the first light. As you stroll through the tunnel, the echo of children entering behind you—the shouts of their initial trepidation followed by their laughter—announce their delight. I walked the tunnel back and forth a number of times and returned the next morning. Something about that sound of the children nagged at me until I remembered the name of a chapter titled “The Generation of the Half-Light” in When We Grow Up by Bahíyyih Nakhjavání. It was a Bahá’í-inspired book that influenced me as I raised my daughter.

Half-light. That was it. The shape of the light in one of my photos resembled a cartoon’s conversational bubble. If I had to fit the meaning (as it is defined in the book) of “half-light”  into the bubble’s confines, I suppose I would describe it as: “Half-light is the dawning illumination of a spiritual dispensation.”  The generation of children growing up in that light have one foot on earth and one stepping towards the realm of the beckoning enlightenment. Betwixt and between. As one walks the tunnel you pass through a repetition of darkness and light, darkness and light. The experience is like wandering into and between the worlds’ spiritual dispensations. Each dispensation, each prophet a light followed by darkness.

Stepping from the gloom into the light of each window, I— like the children—was delighted. The darkness a necessity to appreciate the light. We are walking through a dark time in the world right now. One in which a portion of humanity is bound as if blindfolded to their own capacity to become a beacon of love and kindness, to step out of a darkness of their own making. They spread chaos while stumbling blind. Exiting the Mitchell Point Tunnel, the fullness of the light seemed almost too much. And yet, I left with an exhilaration. Bryan’s rock in my hand, conscious of his good spirit in its weight. Buoyed by the illumination of the “half-lights.”