Going Deep: Life Below the Surface

The underground lake was 150 acres, though you couldn't see all of it, not all at once. Most of the lake disappeared into the dense darkness of the mine. My host and tour guide, Gary McPartlin, the facilities operations manager, mentioned the lake in passing. Its waters, he said, were pumped throughout the mine, maintaining its constant chill, a temperature ideal for preserving not just paper, but spools of magnetic audio tape, reels of old film stock, file cabinets filled with many of the world's rarest and most valuable photo negatives and prints. I'd just visited the cavern with the photos and seen several of its most iconic, including Einstein with his stuck-out hair, stuck-out tongue, and that one with workmen eating their lunches on a beam high above Manhattan, on break while building a skyscraper. I'd already filed away enough notes on my interviews with the subterranean photo archivists for the story that had brought me down here, to this former limestone mine owned by the Iron Mountain corporation and called, simply, "The Underground." The lake wasn't on the agenda. It was off topic, unplanned. But it was too intriguing. I asked if I could see it. McPartlin seemed a little surprised. But then he wheeled his golf cart around, and off we went.

On the way, we passed a door to a cavern storing files for the US Patent Office, including the trademark material for the Statue of Liberty and the Furby; another door that led to a whole wing for processing and storing the Social Security applications filed by every single resident of the United States; another, behind which were stored the master recordings of Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Dolly Parton, and Elvis Presley. We passed a cavern with rows and rows of towering racks of hard drives: backup storage for banks and hospitals throughout the country, updated frequently, in the event of a catastrophe. Finally, nearing a particularly dark and distant corner, McPartlin took his foot off the accelerator, and we crawled to a stop. "This is where I don't often take people," he said. We had arrived at the lake. "I mean, it's just water," he added. There was nothing to see—or, nothing I could see.

McPartlin peered out into the dark. Then he jumped off the cart and fumbled around beside a rough wall for a moment, searching for something. I stepped off, too, and out toward where I supposed the lake should be—an area that felt like a space opening up, where the temperature dipped. "Oh, here's a light switch," McPartlin said, then flicked it on. I gasped. The water was so clear that at first it didn't register as water. I was practically standing in it already, and I bent down to the lake's edge, then gazed out across its surface. It looked like—and here I still find myself struggling to describe what it looked like, the memory of it is like a hallucination—a vague disturbance in the distance, a koan. What do you see in an expanse of clear water, way underground? Nothing? Everything?

"I mean, it's just water," McPartlin said again, only now he was staring out at the lake as well. I'd like to think the underground lake impressed him, and that he could tell I was impressed too. That we both knew what he was saying—about it being just water—was not entirely true. The clarity of this pellucid water felt strange and vaguely holy down in that sunless cavern. Of course, plenty of water is underground, and an underground lake isn't such a rare thing. There was no reason it should have felt so unexpected and special other than the fact that I was there to see it.

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The earth below us is a strange place, full of strange creatures. Recently, I was digging in my yard—something I do as often as I...