Concrete and Sewage - Miles Brouard

As a child, they couldn't keep me from storm drains. There's a creek in the yard of my family's rural house, and under our driveway there are two tunnels carrying it underground to the other side. One is metal, the other concrete. The concrete tunnel never has water init unless there's a flood - an emergency drain - and it's big enough for a person to fit. In fact it's full of cracks on the inside that bugs live in. You climb in one side and there in front of you is a green, tinkling dot in the center of everything, calling for proof that if you crossed the dimmer middle part, you could really get to the outside again.

At least once my mom explained to me, that it was unsafe to play in that tunnel because a flash flood could happen and I might get trapped and drown. The highest risk, she said, was in the spring. I saw this as possible at the time but ruled it very unlikely. The creek ran from a pond about a quarter-mile uphill, which sometimes took on a few feet of rainwater, but you'd almost definitely be able to see or hear it coming. The only time I saw that tunnel fill was much later, when I was in high school, and hurricane Isabel hit parts of Maryland.     

When I grew a few years older and started playing in the neighborhood most of my school friends lived in, I stayed with drains and tunnels. Most of the ponds around had concrete sheds, half submerged, caged around the tops. They were always near to the shore – if you could get across the little channel standing in your way, you could get on top of them. My favorite one had bars spaced wide enough apart that you could squeeze through them and climb a ladder, rungs of bent rebar, to the bottom. It was always dry down there because that pond had never risen enough to overflow into the shed.

            I played there with my friend Eric, whose house was a few blocks away, and our friend Paul sometimes came too. Once in spring or summer Eric's dad got him a two-hundred-count bag of firecrackers. Not M-80's but the legal M-100's. M-100's are thick cardboard tubes, an inch long and a half-inch wide, sealed at the ends with clay and epoxy and stuffed with gunpowder. That pond and all its spheres of life took a number of those little bombs, tied to rocks, along with a stabbing of dissolved sulfur and smoke. Sometime when we weren't under any grown-up's watch we tested the echo of an M-100 going off inside the submerged shed. It shook.

            I think it was the same day he got that bag - we climbed up on top of the shed to try some out, and the thing was all covered with sideways bird droppings. Instead of round splatters there were streaks as long as my head, all running in the same direction.

Nowadays, I've been taught about momentum and how when a bomb is dropped on a city, the bomber has to let it go a small ways ahead of target. My current guess is that something like this happened with a passing flock, but it was ponderous at the time. In what I was looking at was mystery that paused my mind. I remember other similar encounters in life – sudden, pointed surges of curiosity – almost hearing the instructions, "stop everything and figure this out." In times like those, there's this sense that even though you can't see all or any of an explanation yet, one is possible. Already exists. You just have to look at it right, distill it out from all the other facts you know. All the little pieces of reality must fit together. There's a faith in this. However, I think we eventually gave up that puzzle. I considered that maybe some geese had been floating on the pond then all took up and flew away. If they all flew up at an angle toward the shed, and they'd all let go as they were flying away… it seemed unlikely. I'd seen geese take off from a pond all at once, but I'd never seen one drop a shit the moment it took off, that would make it seem like it was sick or something. Maybe they do it all the time and it's just something I would've had to watch for. I think after considering this scenario, my mind was tired and returned, delighted, to fuses.

That shed, though, was part of a larger drainage system – at its dry floor there was an opening in the wall. This led underground, through a hill to some woods, where one could more easily enter and exit the space, given time to cross the length of the tunnel. It was probably 15 yards, but it took longer than usual because you had to walk crouched. In a game of manhunt the spot was invincible.

If you looked through the bars out across the water, you saw the mouth of another tunnel. That one fed off the storm drains along the curbs of Eric's street, runoff trickling out of it. A lip around the bottom carried what came out over a few rocks and into the pond. Algae and street funk slimed the whole thing up, and stained it brown. That smell still finds me in my dreams sometimes. Not a smell of sewage, really - just water, slime, and old wet concrete. Maybe a few minor elements of litter. A few cigarette butts, soda cans, spiders.

            One of the times Paul was with us, we planned an expedition into that tunnel.

It would have been fall, to play it on the safe side. That time of year everything around the pond would have been a dry, sunny shade of tan. Eric had told Paul and I about a pair of brothers who used to live in the neighborhood, called The Troops. They'd gone in once, and were the only ones he'd heard of who made it to the farthest end of the line. They went deep enough to climb out through an opening onto the street somewhere else in town. Our plan was to get as far as we could and to make a map, which Paul was in charge of. Before that day, we had each gone a few times but not as far. At a certain distance in there was no light except the pinpoint behind you, and no cue to tell how much farther you could go.

Eventually our company got to a place where more tunnels split into other directions, but only one of them big enough to fit in. The little room opened up with a street drain ceiling that could be climbed out of, and brick walls, as opposed the concrete everything else. That next stretch of tunnel turned away from the first stretch, so if you kept going you'd be in complete darkness.

But we had flashlights, and Paul recorded this all on the map as we went. We crossed the second stretch to another identical split room, but we climbed out onto the street there while it was still light outside. I don't remember why we didn't continue on, we were probably hungry.   

In the light I actually saw that, trying to draw a good map, Paul had to just wing it – hopefully moving the pen at an even pace as we walked. Our map is lost now, and I don't think we ever used it again. We may have added to it a bit that week but we never went as far as the Troops, unless Eric went by himself sometime. Goddamn shame, too.

        While on a walk from my apartment to downtown the other day, I passed a sewer cover with finger-sized holes in it that you could hear running water through. That sound buried under the street caught me; it achieved a true pleasantness. It sounded like it could have been piling up and pouring over a brick box. Of course, from the sidewalk, the only picture that logistically accompanies that sound is the blackness under the holes in the iron disk-cap. Now, I already know pretty much what's down there. 

Usual-size red bricks, in my experience, have a rare ability to make a certain impression that no other material makes. I'm sure it has something to do with the color and the pattern made by many little rectangles. But to me, it's half-tied to something more general – a more definitive indicator of civilization or at least human presence. Especially when you see a wall or a building made of an impossible number of them, even more so when they are laid to give the illusion of curvature. I can't remember certainly, but I don't think the short walls in the split rooms were curved. Even though you couldn't stand in them, those rooms had a small way of being comforting when you got there.