Take the Sound of Music, Add a Dose of Carbon Monoxide

At 14,000 feet, we entered the dark pit of the Salang tunnel. Black billows of exhaust plumed from the high, arched passageway, and I felt a bit like Pinnochio in the whale’s belly (the Disney version, of course). Orange-colored lights shone from the ceiling, casting a hellish pall upon the black smoke. I glimpsed the figure of a man standing motionless in a crevice along the wall. His presence seemed so weird, that I briefly fancied him a demon, or a carbon-monoxide induced hallucination. But I didn’t want to go down that road, and decided he was my canary in the coalmine instead. If someone could breath that air, I’d be okay in the SUV. Fortunately, we made good time, and in five minutes we were on the other side of the pass.

We descended through a landscape of snow and ice into mountain fields bursting with green. I had a brief Julie Andrews moment, also possibly attributable to remnants of CO in my system, but I managed to suppress the urge to leap from the car and spin around, singing.