Tunnels Under Campus: Infrastructure as Education
Under Chico State’s campus, warm pipes, cold lines, and humming conduit revealed a living network. Crawling those tunnels taught me the architecture beneath every abstraction—and changed how I think about systems forever.
Tinkering with Time, Tech, and Culture #25
The Substrate War (intro)
I learned systems by crawling through them. Sweat first, diagrams later.
At Chico State in the mid-1980s—back when “full-stack engineer” would’ve sounded like a sci-fi fever dream—I was knee-deep in heat and voltage, hands black with grime. The campus tunnels weren’t some ghost-town relic. Nah. They were alive: steam and chilled water snaking from the central plant to every dorm and lecture hall, electrical conduits bundled like over-caffeinated veins. Warm pipes hugging one wall, cold ones glaring from the other, insulation shedding like old snakeskin. Press your palm flat—you’d feel the whole damn campus throbbing.
Most kids up top? They saw silos: this building for bio, that one for dead languages. But down there? It was one sloppy organism—pumps thumping like a hangover heart, pipes for arteries clogged with campus bullshit, sensors twitching like raw nerves. Chasing those lines beat any textbook cold. Every fancy abstraction is just lipstick on a pig made of metal, motion, and endless fixes. You can’t grok networks till you’ve choked on pipe steam. You can’t bullshit about bandwidth without ears ringing from a valve screaming full-tilt.
Where It Started: Butte Hall
It kicked off in the Butte Hall computer lab. Freshman year, I was a fixture there, two hundred yards from my Whitney crash pad. Wake at 7:50? Pants on, sprint, slide into 8 a.m. sharp. The lab was home. Weeks in, you start recognizing the night owls—same witching hours, same itch for more. Conversations sparked between terminal beeps and that line-printer stink, hot ink and ozone, like breathing tomorrow.
One Comp Sci vet had been sketching the proto-net links between Chico and the other Cal campuses. We weren’t just swapping floppies and sneaking half-busted game images over serial lines, we were brushing against the internet’s wetware spine, pre-name, pre-hype. PDP-11/70 or CDC Cyber? Foggy. But that buzz: data tunnels yawning toward Berkeley, Stanford ports like wormholes. Fingers danced and architecture bloomed under them.
A week of digital spelunking, then he drops: there were physical tunnels too. Underfoot. Linking bricks the same way the bits did overhead. I’d eyed those ’50s radiators in Whitney and Butte—clanking like arthritic uncles.
“Boiler plant,” he says. “Out past the field hockey field.”
Questions flew. I pestered him ragged with “how” and “why.” Finally, grin splitting:
“I have a key.”
The Descent
Wait—what? Brain blue-screens. A key? Like, jangle-in-pocket, brass-and-teeth key?
Heart slamming like a solenoid gone feral—pop-pop-pop.
“You want to go?”
Hell yes.
Flashlight snatched. No hesitation. Door creaking like a bad omen.
Spring ’84, that awkward analog-digital handoff. With the key, click, we slipped past the utility room door in the lobby into Butte’s basement: a narrow concrete gut, shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze. Air thick as soup, warm and wet, humming with the rush of water. Overhead: tree-trunk pipes, insulated but sweating beads where hot kissed cold. Floor slick, footsteps slapping back like accusations.
These weren’t zombie shafts. They were alive.
Heartbeat haul: steam from the heater-chiller beast by past field hockey field, looping back as drip to reboot. Gray conduit snaked the walls, neat as a wiring diagram. Thermostats winked dim. Valves loomed like jury-rigged gods. Gauges flickered their secrets. Not hidden Oz, just an overlooked engine room. Flow and feedback in concrete skin, topsiders stomping oblivious.
The Crawl
We tailed pipes through the service runs, forks splitting toward Whitney, Shasta, and Lassen. Each jog brought fresh guts: ladder rungs slick with who-knows-what, shut-off wheels begging for a spin (we didn’t), labels ghosted by time — “Chilled to Library, 1981.” Hand on warm copper? First moment a network ever felt alive.
The hiss-vibe symphony told you everything: load spikes, pressure wars, demand surges. Somewhere between Butte and the boiler plant, something clicked.
All big systems? Same meat. Heating loops, TCP stacks, neural knots, energy and information shuttling through nodes, the invisible grind holding it all together.
We paused at a junction, a bit of faded ’72 graffiti snarling “Class of ’75 rules.”
We burst out laughing. Echoes chased us like hyenas, dying quick in the damp.
Looking back? Maybe dumb as dirt, two goofs in the gloom, but damn, it etched patterns no lecture ever could.
What We Actually Did Down There
- Poked the safe bits. No daredevil shit.
- Decoded labels. Maintenance tags were gold, building maps in shorthand.
- Touched nothing. No valve-twists “just to see.” Breaking it wasn’t the game.
- Mapped the maze. Physical topology makes conceptual topology click.
It wasn’t about what we could’ve done.
It was about seeing the bones under the skin.
That crawl flipped my learning script. Post-tunnels, no more wizardry bullshit. Every slick abstraction — “cloud,” “stack,” “intelligence” — sits on dark-shift sweat: heat shoved, electrons herded, constraints clanging. Knowing gets tactile.
Years later, at 3 a.m., chasing firmware ghosts or packet leaks in embedded guts, the same tunnel trance applies.
Track the flow.
Find the heat.
Follow the pressure.
The truth vibrates.
The Lesson
Ignore the infrastructure and the abstraction snaps.
Every age buries its code in a crawlspace.
Chico’s utility veins still pump: steam for winter sanity, chilled loops for summer survival. Just gated tighter now, lawsuits and cameras and keys traded for keycards.
But the lesson?
Still there.
Cloud kid? Go walk a data farm.
Net nerd? Trace the fiber scars.
Code slinger? Feel the hardware hum that props your app up.
Infra 101: vital, veiled, cursed until it croaks.
Those tunnels under Chico State weren’t just carrying heat; they were carrying the pattern of how I would think for the rest of my life.
Coda: From Steam to Silicon
The tunnels were only the beginning.
The next essays follow that line forward — from heat into electrons, and from electrons into inference..
Welcome to The Substrate War
A four-part series: The Substrate Wars Part I: Ideas and Execution No Longer Win — Infrastructure Does
Forty years later, the tunnels just moved from steam to cognition—and the stakes got civilizational.