My childhood trip into the sewer system, underground...

Not too smart ?? Yeah...

(At the time I was too young to have any idea of 'noxious gases' that could be present down there...)

It was a very warm summer day... and I was with our little 'neighborhood gang'. (OK, we weren't really a 'gang', just all the friends in the small neighborhood, one block's worth of a city street really..)

At the south end of our street was property owned by the local radio station, which amounted to about 4 city blocks, containing their transmitting towers.... it was open, poorly maintained (nature had control of most of the area), and it was often our favorite hunting ground to capture and collect butterflies (for a year or two when we were into that), and when we were older, we would go there to smoke cigarettes, and set off illegal fireworks (which was anything more than a "sparkler", when I was young... one night me and my best friend almost set the entire field on fire, lol, but we stamped it out in time)...


Anyway.... I was a 'follower', not a leader--- but one day one of the more forceful members of the neighborhood suggested that we open the manhole cover at the north end of that space, and go down there and look around... so we all did. I think I was between 9 and 12 years old at the time--- the field in question was part of my route home via the path, from my elementary school in 4th grade, so it was familiar ground--- above ground...This was in the early 1970s.

This was probably the worst act I participated in, at such an age--- I knew damn well, we shouldn't be down there, but peer pressure and curiosity prevailed...lol. We were all boys... lol

We descended into a pipe 4 or 5 feet tall, with a tiny trickle of water running down the bottom.
There was evidence of other people having been down there, a little graffiti on the wall, and a few empty beer cans discarded...

So we began to traverse it for a distance... Every so often we could see where the "sewer inlets" from the street connected from the side... At times there was a smell of 'sewage', but no evidence of it in the tunnel we were navigating...

A block or 2 from our entrance point, the bravest of us traveled up a ladder to another manhole, and lifted it enough to "take a look". It seems it was in the middle of the road there... I was not one of them. LOL

We wandered for maybe as much as an hour before making our way back to our entrance point... We never did that again, at least I never did... it was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, at that age--- but I was usually a pretty 'good boy' so I felt extremely guilty. lol

Thank GOD my Mother never found out!!!! lol


Now in my adulthood, I realize how dangerous that could have been--- but at least it was a very dry day in mid-summer...
if a sudden big rainstorm had occurred while we were down there, that would have been a 'bad thing'..


Also, I now know, that this would have been one of the safest places to be, in case of a direct nuclear attack on our town...




Anybody else every do this ??