Mole People

I was reading a science journal last night. In it there was an article written by a woman who has been studying this small community of people in Martin City, Ohio, who live underground.

It started off as a mining town, and mining became it's primary source of income, and then, eventually, it's only source of income. The people took to it with a special vigor, and the population grew, so there wasn't enough places for people to live within walking distance from the mines where they worked. They started building houses IN the mines, where all the coal and whatever other shit they get out of mines had been exhausted. Eventually, half the houses of the community were little enclosures a mile underneath the surface of the earth. it's crazy. then they started putting major buildings there, like schools and the town hall and all that other stuff. So slowly the town kind of just sunk into the mine. The only people who ever really got OUT of it were people who ran the grocery stores and post offices. Then they rigged up these special levels and roads that allowed trucks and other outside vehicles to come to THEM, underneath the surface, so not even the PO or grocers had to leave.

It's really crazy, how people will just spread and manage to live almost anywhere. As i was reading the article, i was picturing this dank little community that looks something like the inside of an ant hill, all dark and covered with coal dust. Imagine the lighting system they must have had to set up. how much electricity that would have to take.

According to the article, this all happened around the 30's and the 40's, the quick migration of the town into the sub-levels of the earth. They all got really cozy down there, and it's stayed kind of in a stagnant time frame for a bunch of decades. There's no TV, a little radio, but no real connections to the outside world. You'd think the newer generations would want to go out and do stuff, but according to the article, only six people have left since 1961...and they were people who had lived there less than five years.

The scientist in charge of studying this little community took pictures that went with the article. She had photos of the town above the ground, all the abandoned houses with broken shutters and caved in roofs. It looked like a setting for a ghost town.

I haven't even gotten to the wierd part yet.

Around the 40's, the lights system stopped working and going out in places. It was sort of hard to fix because it was so elaborate, and entire sections of the town would be plunged into pure black. Yet no one moved out, just because they were old fashioned people who liked to stay where they were. so there they were, probably hundreds of people, living and working and going to school in complete darkess. and during this time when all the blackouts started to occur, only %5 of the population moved on to more normal places. It really makes you wonder what is down there that draws everyone.

So eventually the entire town went black. And no one seemed to mind really. This was around the mid-50's when the final light buzzed out. And they are still living there now. So that means for 50 or so years, the people of this little town have not seen any light. Anyone under fifty years old who has never been outside has never seen the sun.

So this scientist. while she's down there, she's interviewing people, observing thier schools, thier jobs, thier hobbies. She's got this infa-red camera thing set up so she can see everyone, and al kinds of crazy equiptment. She was trying to figure out not only why people would stay there for so long, but how they go about living in a place without any light.

Now she knows to expect to see some strange things. But i saw some infa red photos she took of a lot of the people, and i think i would run screaming as soon as i stepped down there.

Everyone looks like a mole. this makes no sense, since there hasn't been anywhere near enough time to evolve into mole-humans, but that's what they look like nonetheless. and this wasn' just some tabloid science fiction thing i picked up off the supermarket line. this was in an official, SAGW (Scientific American Government W...something) approved journal.

Everyone had these beedy, squinty little eyes, and big round foreheads. I suppose maybe that's what happens to you when you get no sunlight? Since infared doens't show color, i didn't see how white their skin was (the entire town is caucasian) but the detail in the picture did show kind of a wierd bumpiness to thier skin. Since they were always squinting, all thier mouths were pulled up in this creepy looking grin, exposing thier teeth, enhancing the rodent look. It was wierd. But at least they didn't have extra limbs or anything. What was the worst was the animals. Since the people all moved underground, they also took thier pets, and thier pets had children, as pets are prone to do. The cats looked normal, probably just becase they are nocturnal creatures anyway, but the dogs looked....ugh i don't know it was just so wierd. All the dogs walked with thier tails between thier legs and thier ears pressed flat to thier heads. They all had this wierd expression on thier faces, like they were squinting, but i really couldn't tell since i've never seen a dog in the normal world SQUINT. like the humans, thier lips were drawn back and thier teeth showed, so it looked almost like the dogs were GRINNING. All of them walked hunched over or crouched, like trick dogs do when they pretend to crawl.

Ok so that's the first part of the wierdness. But it gets also stranger. Because the writer talks about WHY she was down there, how she was studying thier way of life, and why they choose to live there. And she did answer some cool things, like how they all have learned to read brail, and they all recognize each other by sense of smell, and how there are differently textured pipes along the edges of the streets that lead to main buildings. how the floors are carpeted and textured differently, depending on what room you are in. But she never really answered why they STAYED there. She said they were old fashioned and didn't want to move...but even eskimo's get sick of the snow sometimes.

The article was done in installments. She would send a section of the article to her publisher each week for ten weeks. Around the seventh installment, she started talking, not like an interested, curious scientist might, but like a religious zealot might talk. About how wonderful the town was, how thier systems and thier culture was not only unlike everything she's ever seen, but also superior to anything she's ever seen before. Towards the ninth, she was talking about staying there, about how she wants to study the Martin City mole people for the rest of her life, how she's thrown all her equiptment away and has started to do things the way they do. how she wants to start her entire life all over again and live as a member of thier communit. I can't believe the journal published this. Just the way it was written is enough to freak me out, nevermind hte fact that not only ARE there REAL LIVE mole people, but this woman, after less than two months, has decided to give up her entire life to live with them.

The worst part, was the blurb at the bottom. You know how the articles have kind of a mini-bio of the writer/researcher at the bottom? Well her's went on about past articles, journals she's written for, her education, etc. But it also mentioned her LIFE. It said she had a husband and two children. Now i don't know about you, but if i had two kids, or even one kid, NOTHING could keep me away from my children, certainly not some underground community of mole people. So it makes you wonder...what really is making her want to stay down there? Or rather, is she staying there of her own choice?

There really isn't any point to this entry. It's just wierd. it's just something you gotta talk about to other people, something you just can't let people NOT know about. like the blue people in kentucky...and the amish.

09.05.01