Spelunking

My friends proposed an idea, an adventure per se. We would go roaming undergroung through the storm drains. Of course, in a spirit of discovery I simply had to acquiese. From town we walked to the Ledyard Bridge, where underneath is where the storm drains open into the Conneticut. We happily crawled into those concrete tubes, venturing into the darkness. The drains were too small to stand in, but a thin trickle of water on the bottom detered any comfortable sitting. So in a bent over sort of walk, we transversed the tubes. At first graffiti tags accompanied us on the walls, terse notes saying that so-and-so had been here. Soon though, they left us to stay behind. The only distinguishing features on the wall now were water stains, marking the passage of past torrents. I was surprised to find that instead of steadfastly descending into the dirt, the pipes opened up here and there, broken up by small ponds. Sometimes we encountered small obstacles: a short gap between tubes, or one tube ending with the next starting above our heads. My friends likened it to a simple video game, where the challenges steadily became more difficult, to which I concurred. Every so often we were given a reprieve from the tubes which forced us to bend our spines into a shape resembling a question mark. The pipe through which we crawled would come to an end, and we would enter into a large cylinder high enough to stand in. Above our heads the storm drain covers would rattle whenever a car passed over. Eventually we decided to escape the concrete maze. However, not wanting to backtrack all the way, we opted to see if we could fit through a smaller tube which would lead to a manhole cover just off of the main road. We fit, in a sense. The tight squeeze forced us to get down on our bellies and crawl down the passage. After what seemed like an extraordinary amount of time to travel such a short distance, we emerged from the tunnel. If anyone was watching, I’m sure that they would have been surprised to see several teenagers climb out of the street and casually dust themselves off before walking into town.