Out of the Tunnel

When I visited London on my first solo international trip in the fall of 2004, one of the highlights of my trip was riding around on the Tube. The passengers seemed to me to be a cast of characters right out of a Zadie Smith novel, with better shoes. I still remember arriving at King's Cross on my train from Edinburgh and how I randomly happened to disembark, hilariously, between platforms 9 and 10. I attempted to snap a photo of myself in front of the platform with the camera held at arm's length, eventually becoming aware that the Londoners hurrying around me were all incredibly disgusted by this pathetic display of Harry Potter nerdiness. I put the camera away and calmly walked off the platform, resisting the urge to start running toward the barrier with a luggage cart just to see if anyone would laugh.

As a regular user of SF's insanely disorganized, perenially tardy public transport system which is staffed mainly by apathetic nitwits, the Tube in comparison appeared to be a magical, punctual, easily navigatable system populated by charming employees and sparkly, courteous passengers. Also, you're allowed to drink alcohol and eat food on the Tube, a privilege we don't have here in San Francisco (or anywhere else in the US, for that matter) so in London I took full advantage of this by constantly munching on crumbly pasties and/or chugging beers as I traveled from station to station. As a final gesture of my love for all things Tube-related, on my last day in London I happily paid 30 pounds for a "Mind The Gap" cotton pajama set that promptly disintegrated in the washing machine the first time I washed it.

I was incredibly shocked and horrified when barely 6 months later, on July 7, 2005, four young British men boarded three Tube trains and a bus and blew themselves up, killing more 50 people. A couple days later, I was still following all the news on the bombings when I found a diary on the BBC News website written by a woman named Rachel, who had survived the bombing on the Picadilly line. She wrote about holding hands in the darkness with strangers who happened to be in her train car, not knowing if she would live or die, and how they escaped the smoking wreckage by walking out of the subway tunnel together. I continued to follow Rachel's story as she began chronicling her experiences on her blog, Rachel From North London. Since the bombings she has gone on to campaign for a public inquiry into the events of July 7 and has become a public speaker and writer on post-traumatic stress and terrorism issues. Eventually she decided to quit her job as an advertising executive and pursue writing full-time by publishing her first book, Out of the Tunnel.

Having followed Rachel's blog since the beginning, I was planning to wait to get Out of the Tunnel until after the American edition came out, but a couple months ago she wrote on her blog that the book was being discontinued due to the publisher having gone belly-up. So I ordered a copy from amazon.uk and it finally came in the mail just a couple weeks ago.

Out of the Tunnel describes in careful detail Rachel's haunting and remarkable journey from survivor to writer to political activist, and everywhere in between. Though I was already familiar with a good deal of Rachel's story from her blog, I was deeply moved by the candor in which she reveals some of her most private thoughts and experiences in her book. It is easy to understand why she chose to reveal so much, because in the months after the bombings the weight of her horror and sadness became a such a burden that she could only let go it of by writing about it. This theme, which continues throughout the book, is something I really connect to. The act of writing becomes as powerful as the writing itself. I don't know Rachel, but I know the need to speak out in order to banish your most terrifying thoughts from your mind, to somehow try to make sense of human suffering and violence by sending simple words out into the ether, like Morse code.

On her blog, Rachel writes, "The personal is political, more often then you'd think." The reverse is also true: something terrible happened in a place far away from me, to a person I don't know, with ramifications greater than all of us. Out of the Tunnel is a reminder how it is absolutely unforgivable and unacceptable that daily bombings in places like Iraq have become forgettable and unremarkable. If political events don't become personal to us, we lose the power to change things for the better.

Out of the Tunnel by Rachel North is still available on Amazon.uk.