Brandon and I decided to drive to Mexico because we both had the day off. We both had class the next day, but we just figured we'd try to see how far we could get.
Immediately upon leaving Lincoln I could tell we were on vacation because everywhere we drove had this sort of newness about it, like it was somehow a bit magical and more exciting than just overpasses and interstate exits. I remember being particularly excited by exiting off of some highway and heading down a steep exit ramp that led to another highway way down in a gorge below that parallelled a large river. It was just such a neat view.
When we finally got to Mexico we had to leave behind our car and go through a series of bizarre traffic crossings. These streets weren't flat at all, and instead of actual ramps and overpasses, these streets in Mexico all just seemed to be tunnels bored out of the earth at different angles, with the only governing rule being "Don't hit another tunnel."
Curiously enough, everyone there spoke French. We met a man who was carrying his bicycle around town, and we caught up to him at one of the crossings. At this particular crossing, you could see over a railing down into the same gorge at the river below. We were either very high up or it was a very deep gorge. Either way, we had to keep moving as soon as the lights turned.
We met Gabe Stairs, a former classmate of ours, at Pamida. I didn't recognize him at first, partly because he looked a bit different, and partly because I was in the toy section, and when I'm in the toy section, nearly everything else is blocked out. We talked to him a bit, asked him how he was doing and so on. He had to go catch up with his wife though so we let him be. We realized that it was getting late, so we should head back up to Lincoln. As my house was on the way back, Brandon dropped me off there so I could tell my family about our short trip to Mexico.
Well since it was such a short trip, my family decided to take me on a trip to Mexico also, only this time we'd have longer to enjoy it. I was assigned to one of the back seats in the van, and right away I started to feel claustrophobic. I was thinking "I need to sit in the front seat!" but I knew I couldn't hog the front seat for the whole trip. I just imagined that I was in my car, which is much smaller than our van, and I felt okay.
Well instead of driving to Mexico we went to church in Auburn. My friends The Prids, a band based in Lincoln, were going to be the guest church band for mass. They were all dressed as you would expect a church band to dress on a sunday, not as you'd expect a band to dress. They were also playing traditional church band instruments, like acoustic guitars and a stand up bass. Dave was the only one I recognized, and he was on bass, which surprised me, because Mistina is the bass player.
When the time comes to play the "Holy, Holy, Holy" song, they played an acoustic version of their song "Window Mirror" and Father Phil sang the "Holy Holy Holy" bit over it perfectly. It sounded really cool. I got up and went back to go up to the balcony where they were to see them and say hello and good job and all that, but there were tons of people there. I recognized some of them as friends of the band from times when I had been over to their house, but a lot of them were unknown to me.
Then it was communion time, so the band had to start playing again. Some of their posse went down the stairs past me (I leaned into the window along the stairs to get more out of the way) and John Crotty and some others were coming up. I figured that these people coming up were going to give communion to the band so that the band wouldn't have to stop playing and come down to the front.
I made my way back down the stairs and decided to go on down to the basement to go to the bathroom. I got down to the bathroom door when Megan Taylor, a former classmate of mine, came down the stairs and shouted "AAH!! You already took it! I have to go so bad!" and I was really confused because I was going to the mens room and she's a girl so she wouldn't be using this one anyway. She ran around the corner and went in the other one and then I looked up at the door and noticed that since the last time I had been here, they had switched the mens room and the womens room, so now she was using the mens room and I was standing there blocking off the womens room.
I wasn't about to use the womens room even if she was using the mens room so I went around the corner into the main room in the basement to wait. I happened to glance over into the kitchen area when I saw an open door in the back of the kitchen that I had never noticed before. I looked through it and there I saw a MASSIVE underground church. It was basically just a huge room like upstairs, with all the pews and altar and stuff, but it was entirely under the ground and it was larger than any other I had ever seen.
It was in basilica style, with the center ridge being the highest, sloping down to both sides in this sort of shape _/\_ only the whole area was probably the size of four football fields, if not bigger. It was pretty dark, with just a few floodlights scattered about the ceiling. There was enough light to tell that it was very very far from being finished, and that it had not been worked on in many years. My guess was that they started building it before they built the current church building and then just gave up on it due to the size.
I walked into the room, completely awe-struck by the size of it, considering that this was underneath the church I had gone to for 21 years, plus at least parts of several surrounding city blocks. The floor was very uneven, and it was covered with rows of bricks like an old street, that had since cracked and come apart with the settling of the ground. I walked along the full stretch of the nave to the entrance at the front of the church, directly underneath the entrance to the modern church. There were even the remains of an old stairway leading up to ground level where the current stairs in front of the church lead up from ground level.
I was tickled to see that on either side of the old stairs were the entrances to the towers that surround the belltower. The belltower itself was accessible via an old rickety set of stairs up in the choir loft, but the access to these side towers had long been a mystery to me. Other people had suggested that there was a connection to them from the belltower, but I knew that wasn't right because they completely split off from the belltower at a level lower than where you can first enter the belltower. I don't know if that made sense, but let's say the entrance to the belltower is 50 feet above the ground. Well the sidetowers split from the belltower 35 feet above the ground, so there would be no way to get to them from the belltower. (Side note: these side towers don't exist on the real church, but my dream was able to fabricate enough past memory and theorizing about them, which I find really cool)
So anyway, here were the entrances to the side towers in a very signficiant sub level of the church that not many people knew about. The doorways themselves were somewhat concealed, being made of the same red brick the church is made from, and being on a swiveling post of some sort so that you had to push in just the right place to expose the entrance. Fortunately for me, one of them was already open so I didn't have to be too intuitive. I squeezed into the southernmost one on the north side of the stairs (there were two on each side) and started climbing.
Within this narrow cylindrical chamber was a very flimsy metal spiral staircase. The steps would bend beneath my weight, but they were still firm enough that I could keep going up. I only got as high as the first window, which would have been about 15 feet above the ground, until I had to stop. This particular stairwell was narrowing quickly and I couldn't keep going without fear of getting stuck in there. So I looked out the window at a view I'd never seen from that perspective and made my way back down.
When I got down, I saw that there were more people inside the old underground church. I figured that Father Phil must have announced coffee and rolls were being served in the basement and some people made the same little wandering that I did (as coffee and rolls are typically served in the basement room where I first noticed the big church). Then someone mentioned to me that they were going to continue work on this room and try to fix it up to make it useable. I thought that was kind of neat (I was fascinated more by the abandoned ruins aspect of it though) but I didn't want to talk to many people so I decided to leave. I saw light coming from the corner of this room (the room with the old stairs and the tower entrances) so I was going to look for an exit to the outside world. It turned out you could climb out of this room and be in the bushes beside the front stairs.
I was out and made a quick look back in and saw on the southern wall of the underground church something that disturbed me. There were a row of large lit up signs from advertisers. There were at least six, but I only remember Lee jeans and Amigos. I hadn't been able too see them from where I was before, and I had probably just attributed the light they gave off to the floodlights on the ceiling. This annoyed me greatly, but I figured that they had to pay for finishing this church somehow, and Catholics have to eat and wear pants too.
I was walking through the church yard when I saw Mr Novell, my middle school shop teacher. I was telling him about my discovery of the side tower entrances and he was really interested, so I took him back into the underground church area where I had just been so he could take a look at these little doorways. We looked at the first one, the one that I had climbed up in, but it was too small for him. He's a big guy, and he had trouble just squeezing into the little doorway. So we moved over to the next one on the north side of the stairs, which looked to be the main access to the tower. Upon opening the door to that one, however, we saw that the inside had been all bricked up so that it was no longer accessible.
This was a major downer to me but it excited Mr Novell greatly because he noticed something in the brickwork. He was pointing out small chips of color in the individual bricks that we had not noticed before. They were visible in the normal bricks, but they were so faded and dirty that it was hard to notice them. But then after seeing these clean bricks from inside the tower, whose chips of color were much brighter, the colors in the other bricks became much more noticeable.
He explained to me that these colors were placed in inch-thick horizontal bands that spread all around the bricks of the church, and they were used to represent different families of the church, and they were also used for practical reasons, such as to give the builders an idea as to how much the church walls were settling. He also pointed out that the chips formed larger pictures as well as serving as these other identifiers. We took a step back and could see a large Chi-Rho symbol that just sort of "appeared" when you'd alter your focus. But when he pointed out the Chi-Rho, he said "There go you, it's an M-P symbol, meaning the "Many Persons of Christ." I said "No, those are the greek letters Chi and Rho, which were the first two letters of Christ, and that was the symbol that Constantine saw in the sky that he made into his own. Mr Novell insisted that it was actually an M-P but I didn't really care cos I thought his interpretation was nice enough.
It was basically like a mosaic that was baked into the bricks instead of a mosaic that was put together on top of the bricks. He explained that such decoration was so elaborate that it involved years and years of planning, with plans that involved each individual brick before they were even formed from the clay. This, he said, was probably a good reason why this underground church was never finished.
We knew that there had been a change of the priests in Auburn around the turn of the century, when the current church was built, so we figured that the old priest had been pushing this grand underground masterpiece, but when his functioning church and school above ground burnt down, he ended up leaving town or dying (we couldn't remember which). The new priest in town must have seen the immediate necessity for a church, as the formerly functioning church was now a pile of ashes, and the church in progress was an unrealistic underground monster that could probably not see completion in his lifetime, and diverted all funds and efforts to constructing a new church above the now-idle church-in-progress.
We wandered around inside the main room for a while, just marvelling at the size of it. In the _/\_ diagram from before, the highest peak wasn't a proper ridge; it was a wide flat ceiling, more like _/ \_. So anyway, the highest flat part was so wide, that it went as far north as the edge of the school building, which branched off perpendicularly from the modern church. In fact, the northern edge of the school building ended above ground exactly where the ceiling of the underground church began sloping, so Mr Novel and I figured that the builders of the school must have used the nave ceiling as a convenient foundation for their new building.
There was actually going to be mass held in this new church that evening as a symbolic start to the continued construction that was beginning, so I stuck around with my family to help set up for it. As mass was about to begin, though, I really had to use the bathroom. Someone was still in the mens room from before, so I ran around the church basement, knowing that there were four or five restrooms in there somewhere. I finally found one and made my way through the maze of stalls. I could hear my sister Erica crying out from the main basement room for me. I asked her what she wanted and she said that the Spice Girls were on the line because they were going to come to mass and they wanted to ask me where they should sit. I told Erica to hold on and I'd be through in a minute. I heard her saying on the phone "You hold on, he's through with you." I ran out of the bathroom and was like "That's not what I told you to say!!"
Erica went into the dressing room and asked my dad to guess who was coming to church. She was trying to give him hints charades-style but he was being a dork and intentionally guessing wrong when he knew full well that she meant the Spice Girls. We went in and had a seat and waited for mass to start.