Skateboarding A Storm Drain

“You know this is stupid right? We’re going to die and they’ll never find the bodies.” I said as I pulled my backpack and skateboard from the back of the van.

Rob pulled his goggles down over his neck and tried not to look terrified as he said, “I’ve got the map, we know it’s accurate, and you’ve got the laser. We’re going to be fine.”

The only reason any of this happened is because neither of us wanted to look like a pussy.

There’s a pipe, maybe three feet in diameter, that runs halfway across the city towards the river. It’s made of concrete sections, each about eight feet long, and most of the time, it’s empty. It’s a storm drain that moves millions of gallons of water when it’s active, but most of the time it’s just an open vein in the substrata of the city.

Along its length there are thousands of smaller pipes, barely big enough to fit your head in, that go to catch basins spaced every few hundred feet. Sometimes there will be a larger pipe from a small neighborhood, maybe a foot in diameter. Every once in a while you’ll see a tiny pipe, only a few inches, coming from God knows where.

And for most of this pipe, every block or so at most, there was a ladder going up the right side to a manhole above. That is, except for the last section, which we had never explored. 

For a section of the pipe, perhaps a mile long, there were no manholes. We had been to the other end, via the surface, and we knew it came out onto a rocky crag that was called “Hobo Beach” by the river. The beach was about ten feet of pebbles and broken beer bottles downtown, with the gaping mouth of the pipe right next to it. Some dumbass thought it was a great place for art and right next to it put a giant delicately piled waterfall of cut granite rectangles attached to the flood wall. There’s a “River Walk” boardwalk that runs along the whole area downtown. Thousands of people wander by, and have the good sense to never do more than glace at these pipes.

I had gotten a good set of maps, with generations of hacks, changes, and updates. The general public isn’t typically able to get actual data about the city they live in, but the proper application of a bottle of expensive scotch will get you things a FOIA request never could. The king may get to walk anywhere he likes, but it’s the janitor who has all the keys.

We had explored the upstream side a hundred times. We didn’t even need the map for most of it. We’d left our coded street signs in black sharpie on the walls at every intersection. If you’re ever standing somewhere you shouldn’t be and see “CB” on the wall in inch-high letters, it’s not Charlie Brown who is saying hi to you, it’s me. We knew up, we knew down, but we’d never had the courage to go through the section in between. It’s too long, too deep, and there’s only one way out….through. We were scared that if we hit a pocket of bad air or something we’d die in there because we couldn’t get to a manhole fast enough.

So, we came up with the brilliant idea to blast through there on skateboards. It’s all downhill, nice and smooth, and the whole ride should only last about five minutes or so assuming skateboard speeds of about ten or twelve miles an hour. We had about a mile of pipe to get through, but it made me a lot more comfortable to think of that as only about five-thousand feet.

Now, the map showed it was just a straight pipe with a slight downward slope all the way to the river. But on rare occasions the map was known to lie. The map could have omitted things. There are lots of things that just don’t show up on the map, like cracks and breaks or cave-in’s. This is a territory where things go generations without human interaction, and small problems that don’t turn into big ones simply never get discovered. There were a lot of variables that we couldn’t account for.

We lined up in the pipe. I put my backpack on and sat down on my board. Rob was behind me. We had a 5-second rule for safety. We always stayed 5-seconds apart when moving, so that the guy in back always had time to stop if something went wrong. 

Our awesome plan was to use a laser level. We had modified one that projected a cross. Originally, if you tipped it more than just a little bit in any direction, it turned off. Thanks to a piece of blue-tack stuck in just the right place, now it worked in any orientation. Plus we could take the blue-tack out and put it back in the original owner’s toolbox before he noticed. The bottom of the laser level had a little threaded hole and that gave us an easy way to mount it to a skateboard. I had drilled a small hole near the front end of my board and put a bolt through it. On a small bar I mounted the laser on top and taped the flashlight to the bottom with blue electrical tape.

I didn’t have sexy ski-goggles, but I thought my cheap plastic safety glasses would work just fine. We each had our flashlights and a rough idea what the hell we were doing. We took a moment to finish our cigarettes before starting off into the dark.

“You ready, man?” Rob said as he looked past me down into the abyss.

“Fuck it” I said and flicked my cigarette off the wall behind him, “Let’s do this. Just remember that once we start, we don’t stop for anything. I don’t want to die like this. We can’t test the air, we don’t know what’s down there. We’re in, through, and out. No fucking around, no stops.” I said, trying to not show how nervous I was.

I adjusted my light with a gentle shove of my foot, planted my hands on the ground and gave a shove. We were off.

kaCHICKahdadakaCHICKahdadakaCHICKahdadakaCHICKahdadakaCHICKahdada the vibration was enough to make your teeth rattle and the echo of our tires on the joints was surreal and deafening. Thirty seconds in and I became very aware that I should have had a piss before we did this. The center of the cross was invisible, as it should be. That was my warning that something was coming up before my flashlight would see it.

The beam of my light showed a gaping maw, blurring past in shades of grey and black as we rocketed down the pipe. Fifteen miles an hour doesn’t seem like much in a car, but doing it with your ass two inches off the concrete flesh grater in complete darkness is a completely different experience. Imagine pedalling as fast as you could on your bike when you were ten years old. That’s about fifteen miles an hour. Now imagine that on a skateboard in a storm drain...

Things were going great for about the first minute… And then shit went sideways.

My exceptional electrical tape engineering was just fine holding the flashlight to the pipe. The problem is, the flashlight shook itself apart. The clip stayed securely mounted to the pipe, but the flashlight itself shook loose and gave a dazzling display as it bounced off my right-front wheel, slid up the wall for a moment, and then shot behind me.

Rob was cool though, he reached out with ninja reflexes and tried to catch it as it came by him, and promptly fell off his board, dumping his bag and himself and within half a second plunging us into total darkness.

I grabbed my board by the sides and planted my heels, skidding to a stop and hoping like hell he didn’t run into me. All I could see was the lines of my laser on the side of the pipe going forever into the black.

“What the FUCK man, are you alright?” I yelled, the echo blurring my words like we were in a Pink Floyd album. I tried to run back to Rob, but the pipe was too small to really move, much less run. Still, I hobbled my hunched-over-ass back to him and we made sure he wasn’t hurt. He had some roadrash on his palm, but his jacket took most of the damage. He was fine.

“Dude, this is fucked, we gotta go, now.” I said, as we dug into our packs for our backup lights. I pulled out my miniscule Minimag Solitaire and gave it a twist. It wasn’t much, but in total darkness I’ll take that over four thin red lines on the wall. The solitaire didn’t have the balls that my main light did. This barely let me see a few feet ahead. It wouldn’t show me a hole or a big crack in enough time to stop. What it would do, is let Rob see me in time for him to stop.

So I handed it to Rob. 

“Take this”

“But you're in front” he said”

“Yeah but you can’t see shit with this. At least it’ll keep you from crashing into me. I’ve got the laser, it’ll be ok. Now let’s go.” I said, and got back on my board. Our entire stop had lasted maybe a minute and a half, but it felt like forever.

I gave a shove and we were off. All I could see was a vague shadow of my silhouette cast in the blackness of the hole ahead of me, with the crosshairs of laser light making it feel like we were being launched through a rifle scope. The clicking echo of our wheels was drowned out only by the rush of air going past my ears. I knew as long as I could see my feet that Rob was behind me and doing ok, I tried to see anything ahead, watching the laserbeams and hoping like hell those lines didn’t suddenly move to show either a sudden corner or a cave-in.

We rocketed through the darkness, flying beneath downtown. The cool air had a stale and metallic taste to it. The wind whipped my hair as I tried not to imagine the spiders on the ceiling. When my face plowed through the first web I instinctively closed my eyes and took a second to realise I was wearing safety glasses, and I really should close my mouth instead.

Spiderwebs meant we were close to the river though; I’ve never been so happy to get a spiderweb in the face.

With no warning at all, like flipping on a switch, we were in the blinding light of the city in the small hours of the night. You have no idea just how bright it is when it’s “dark” outside in a city at night. It was like being birthed on the surface of the sun. We emerged and immediately fell off the end of the pipe onto the rocks just below, tumbling out with our skateboards and landing sprawled out on Hobo Beach.

“You alright, man?” I said to the pile behind me that was trying to untangle himself from his backpack.

“Yeah, I’m fine, are yo-Oh FUCK man!” Rob yelled as he yanked off his hat and started to smack me with it all about the head and chest.

“What the fuck man am I on fire or…..oh SHIT!”

I was covered in spiders. Hundreds of them. Everywhere. There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language that I could have at my command at this moment to convey this viceral concept. None of them could even come close to describing how NOT FUCKING OK that was.

I may have shrieked like a little bitch. Some people could have even mistaken me for not being the incredibly manly man who just rode a skateboard under a skyscraper. I really don’t want to know the opinions of the several people who watched me stripping half naked on Hobo Beach. I left my hat, jacket, and shirt there on the rocks. They were dead to me now. The only reason I wore my jeans out of there was because I wasn’t wearing underwear and I didn’t want to get arrested for walking naked downtown. I didn’t know what was living in my backpack at that moment so I pulled out a few feet of paracord, strapped my bag to my board, and tied about six feet of line to the front truck. I walked down the sidewalk with my board rolling behind me on its leash, looking like a shirtless weirdo, with a smile from ear to ear.

Rob and I walked all the way back up the hill, checking each other for spiders a few times as we went. He only had a couple, and I learned a valuable lesson about not being the guy in front next time.

So, if you ever see a homeless guy wearing a dark blue T-shirt with the SGI cube logo on it, now you know why.