At first, I recall having experienced an uneasy feeling when we used to drive through those long tunnels in Japan.  I was struck by the oddly coloured glow that emanated from the lights installed in the tunnel ceilings at regular intervals, fascinated by how it changed the colour of the polish on my fingernails.  At times when the unwanted thought of the potential of a tunnel collapse entered my mind, I would shove it hurriedly aside and go on to think of other things.

I was impressed with the immensity of the Fraser Canyon in British Columbia when we stopped beside the highway at an impossible height to stand astride the roadway, looking down on the chasm below us, and to the right a train entering a tunnel forged into the side of the mountain.  The yawning O of the tunnel mouth, very visible from where we stood looked like a fragment of nature once the train had disappeared into its maw.  The immensity of the scene and the thought of human ingenuity and the engineering and toil that resulted in the tunnel allowing trains to barrel through the mountain grasped my imagination.  With some misgivings, bringing me back to those thoughts of the Tokyo-centric tunnels.

We had been watching a film, Dante's Peak, one of those horrific natural-disaster epics that so fascinate people on Saturday evening, after which I went over to my computer to have a look at the latest news.  We have no working television set in the house, and haven't had one for a year and a half, so the computer comes in handy for the news.  And there was the first report of the latest catastrophic tunnel collapse in Japan.  Bringing back memories and presenting a horrifying mental picture of the terror and panic that those trapped within the tunnel must have felt before death overtook them.

And I wonder why it is that engineering geniuses don't think of building a road going over or around, instead of through mountains; saving labour, time, money?  Sometimes the quickest route is straight through.  And sometimes the quickest route to catastrophe at some time in the future is the quickest route to perdition.