This article is dedicated to my brother, Mike, who followed me into more suicidal schemes than I can count, yet through it all retained enough common decency not to tattle on me about 70% of the time.
Summer, 1975. It was a summer like no other. Good friends, blue-sky days, endless nights, games of hide-and-go-seek, treacherous dirt bicycle paths, killer fishing at the local lake, and oodles and oodles of unstructured free time. It was the closest to Nirvana (the ethereal state, not the band) that an 11-year-old boy in suburban America could hope to come.
My family had just moved to the suburbs. Our subdivision was one of about a million identical “grand getaways” springing up across the outer edges of American cities everywhere. This particular housing development carried the charmingly bucolic name of “Woodlake”. The name had the ring of actual truth, if one were willing to stretch it a bit — the “wood” consisted of diseased elm tree patches scattered among the alternating rows of new homes and undeveloped lots. And there was an actual “lake” that was small, man-made, canal fed, and stocked with enough perch and channel catfish to keep the bearings hot on my genuine Ronco Pocket Fisherman.
Woodlake had many other qualities desirable to young boys — plenty of neighboring houses, each holding a potential chum and/or rival; miles of winding streets that went everywhere on the way to nowhere, begging for exploration and exploitation; half-built skeletons of future homes, standing like x-ray photos of nearly identical ranch houses a few yards in any direction, with their hidden treasures of leftover nailgun cartridges and drywall fragments (which made great chalk sticks); spots of undeveloped countryside containing every terrain known to the mind of an 11-year-old American boy, from marshland to heavy wood to verdant grassland to murky mudpit, each in its own easy-to-explore one-acre parcel.
The neighborhood even had its own elementary school, but needless to say that neither my friends, my brother, nor myself would go near it. It was the month of May, and school was a threat that murmured on the horizon of a future three months hence. While there was some illicit appeal in the idea of playing amongst the tetherball poles and monkey bars without having to vie with the entire fifth grade, we tacitly agreed that some adventures were better left for other, less libertine seasons.
Best of all, Woodlake was a new subdivision, with row upon row of freshly-painted housing, asphalt roads still soft from their initial pouring, and brown patches that would one day become lawns, freshly scraped out of the prairie of Oklahoma. With such a large amount of scraping and leveling came copious amounts of dirt.
Dirt. Dirt was pure gold dust to any boy worth his mother’s washing machine. And this particular variety was not just any old dirt; this was Oklahoma Red Earth, with an orange stain capable of permanently altering the chemical composition of any clothing, whites and bright colors alike. For that one glorious summer, you could have my socks in any color you wanted, so long as it was red.
Most of that summer saw me outfitted in the role of explorer, complete with walkie-talkie, binoculars, metal canteen, and a goofy hat suitable for discouraging the most ardent of female suitors (girls were still nominally the enemy, although a certain redhead at school had come close to upsetting this delicate understanding). The mystical land of Woodlake was an environment never before encountered by my young eyes — miles upon miles of enclosed neighborhood, safe from the depredations of 18-wheel trucks and Dodge Darts. My bicycle, an orange JC Penney Swinger II (with sparkle-embedded banana seat and chrome sissy bar) practically leapt out of my hands every time I brought it forth from the garage. Atop this steed, I could ride as fast as the wind and with three times the kinetic energy, even with the added drag of playing cards in the spokes.
For the first time in my life, I comprehended that which drove the great explorers of the history books. I was driven onward and outward. Unlike those great explorers, I had an additional incentive to wander — my father was embarking on that great American experiment knownas “seeding a lawn.” This being a brand-new neighborhood, everywhere house sat on a plot of red earth festooned with a variety of flowering weeds. Our house was a corner lot, giving us a double-dose of nature’s preferred decorating scheme. My father was determined to make it a Bermuda-grass paradise, crafted in images that would have given a LawnBoy salesman… well, green with envy.
On those occasions when I woke up late, too dim-witted to see the pile of freshly-deposited topsoil on the front lawn and recognize it for the evil it was, I was drafted by my father for “yard work.” Tilling, weed-pulling, watering, gypsum-mixing — work that was pure anathema to my inner explorer. I soon mastered the art of slipping away undetected (or perhaps I had worked hard enough that Dad graciously decided to look the other way). I would then be off on the grand Quest for Adventure.
For a boy with imagination and a few hours to kill, there was no end to the possibilities. I fished the great deep of the man-made lake and slew the mighty Catfish of Doom; I scaled the cliffs of the Great Divide (a division down the center of the neighborhood where one street had been cut into a hillside); I built a tree-house in a dying elm, and then lost a valiant fight to keep it from the carpenter ants that moved in exactly one day later. I even braved the wilds of the swimming pool maintained by the neighborhood association, complete with Melissa, the sixteen year old lifeguard armed with the darkly mysterious weapon known as “bikini.”
My brother and I even dared to ride “Mean Mountain”, the one hill in the neighborhood where a determined kid on a speedometer-equipped bicycle could breach the heretofore unattainable speed of 25 miles per hour. My brother became the first one to shatter that barrier, at the cost of a broken wrist and two months of life in a cast. Chump change to a boy on the move.
But no adventure, no jaunt, no exploration could rival the great Drain Pipe Expedition of 1975.
My brother and I had found the Drain Pipe early on in our neighborhood survey. It was situated at the far end of the lake, ostensibly serving as the outlet from whatever spring was used to feed it. But we never actually saw it being used for the actual conveyance of water; it never appeared in less than a “bone dry” condition. For all we could see, the lake had been filled as a one-shot job long before white man had come to the land.
The entrance of the drainpipe was about four foot in diameter (a cavern to an 11-year old), fronting a tunnel that led off into the distance, a series of concentric cement circles fading into inky blackness, with a small white pinprick of light at the end that teased us, as if saying, “Come on over, boys! Have I got some secrets to show you!”
But the cavern remained unexplored for several weeks. There were so many other things to find and places to go, none of which involved the potential hazard of getting spiders caught in your hair.
All this changed with the coming of Forrest to the land of Woodlake.
Forrest was my best buddy from school. Forrest and I hit it off early in the year, misspending most of our fourth-grade career in each others company. We were both bright and imaginative, which is to say that our potential for getting into trouble increased exponentially with our proximity to each other. Forrest and I were both rabid Star Trek fans (he was usually Kirk and I was Spock, although at times he would try, and fail, to imitate Scotty). Our school recesses and free periods were spent exploring the surface of Gamma Hydra IV or reversing the polarity on recalcitrant warp engines. We quietly sneered at the merely normal boys who, lacking the imagination to trade phaser fire with Orion slavers, were forced to pursue the more mundane pasttimes like flag football or “chase the girls.”
Forrest was a school buddy, which meant that we had almost zero contact outside the confines of Overholser Elementary. At the end of the school year, Forrest and I bowed to the inevitable. We shook hands, wished each other a fine summer, and vowed to restart our friendship when the fall came again, both of us knowing that all school chums make those kinds of plans but seldom keep them.
When Forrest’s mom contacted my mom and suggested a July sleepover, I saw it as an act of divine providence. I felt a conviction not seen on this Earth since Cortez first heard the name “El Dorado”. I knew that Woodlake was to be mine by Divine Right, and that the coming of Forrest would serve only to solidify my hold on this wild frontier.
The only problem was that Forrest was singularly unimpressed with Woodlake.
Forrest lived in the country; specifically, in Piedmont, Oklahoma. At that time, Piedmont was a community for which running water was considered one of those new French customs. Forrest didn’t have to use his imagination to turn a stand of trees into Mirkwood, or to jump a drainage ditch and mentally will it to become the Grand Canyon. Forrest lived in an area with real jungles and real canyons, all within walking distance of his front door. He took one look at my little microcosm of Terra Incognita and began hunting around for the TV Guide.
Desperate to engage his imagination at any level, I took him down to the lake, thinking that I would throw him at Melissa the lifeguard, who I was fairly certain was indigenous only to the Woodlake area. On the way, we passed the Drain Pipe. He took one look at it and whistled a low, deep whistle, the kind I had learned he reserved only for chrome-plated spaceship models. “We don’t have one of those,” he breathed, not taking his eyes off the darkness of the tunnel.
At that point, I knew the day of reckoning had come. The Drain Pipe had stood all summer, unconquered and unexplored. I vowed that, by the end of this day, the secrets of the Drain Pipe would be mine, ripped out with my own bare hands.
We ran home and geared up, adding a flashlight, three Oreo cookies, and a ball of string to our regular exploratory arsenal. For headgear, I chose my Action Jackson walkie-talkie helmet, only without the walkie-talkie attachment (it made the helmet look less dorky. Yes, to a boy, there are levels of dorkness). I felt the helmet would more than protect me from any unexpected stalactites or man-eating insect life.
Helmeted, girded, and flashlighted, we sauntered into the tunnel, ready to explore the secrets of the deep. Hail the conquering heroes!
Ten seconds later, we were back outside again, frantically clawing at our chests in an effort to breathe. Neither of us had ever considered the possibility that we were in the least bit claustrophobic. That concept had crossed the line from probability to reality, as we had both just suffered our first-ever case of the “heebee-jeebees.”
Yet we dared not give up. Did Cortez turn back at the first sign of intestinal distress? No! He just cut back on the fibre and went on! Forrest and I looked at each other grimly, and we knew we had to continue. Plus, my kid brother was with us. I wasn’t about to go all sphinctery as long as he was there to witness it.
We decided on a systematic approach using staged acclimatization (a phrase picked up from a bad science fiction book at the library). We planned to enter the tunnel and go in only a few feet, marking our progress with windings from the ball of twine. Once we had gone as far as comfort allowed, we would drop the ball to mark our place and head back outside for a breather or five. We decided to number our progress by counting the number of concrete seams passed. Forrest labeled each section a “quadrant”, using our old standby Star Trek jargon. The fact that there were considerably more than four of these “quadrants” showed that Forrest was marginally worse at fractions than I, but such concerns paled when compared to how cool it sounded. “Quadrant” it was.
The tunnel was just wide enough for us to traverse while slightly hunched over. We adopted an unusual loping gait that had our legs out at 30 degree angles (to better grab the curved walls with the soles of our Keds sneakers). The resultant sound of our passage was an echoing “clomp clomp clomp” that sounded uncomfortably like those coded knocks you always see Alcatraz prisoners using in the movies.
Clomp, clomp, clomp. After about four quadrants, the heebee-jeebees grabbed firmly onto our stomachs and yanked hard. Back out we went, hyperventilating so much that local fires died from lack of oxygen. Back in again, clomp clomp clomp, and this time we made six quadrants before fear drove us back.
Forrest actually used that phrase: “Fear drove us back.” It’s like we were playing for an audience, except this was about 25 years too early for reality television. He uttered the line during one of our “rest stops” where we had gotten used to the idea of being underground for more than ten seconds. We were sitting at quadrant twelve, dealing with a new idea — we were afraid of the dark. This came as a mild shock to boys who stopped believing in closet monsters long ago. The entrance was a small circle of light behind us; our destination an even smaller circle of - light? flame? fusion reactors? Only one way to find out. We hunched our shoulders, gritted our teeth, and wimpered a battle cry as we pressed on through the dark.
Clomp clomp clomp. In we went, out we went. Slowly, minute by minute, quadrant by quadrant, Forrest and I worked our way down the tunnel. My brother, Mike, had dropped off the search party long before we breached quadrant twenty and had gone off to play with one of his own friends. In all, Forrest and I spend about an hour and a half running back and forth through the first half of that blasted tunnel, spending most of that time at dangerously increased heart rates.
It was during our most daring push to quadrant twenty-four that something inside me snapped and I decided that this was going to be the push. No more mincing about back and forth for me, I thought to myself. I looked behind me, past Forrest’s eyes wild with the fog of claustrophobia, at the receding pinprick of light at the tunnel entrance. I then looked forward, and discovered to my shock that the light at the end of the tunnel was larger. The end of the tunnel was at hand! With a blood-curdling yell of determination (unfortunately magnified by the echoing properties of the tunnel) I surged forward, dragging a gibbering Forrest behind me.
Thirty. Clomp clomp clomp. Thirty-five. Forty. Clomp clomp clomp.
And then there was light! We were out the other side of the tunnel! We found ourselves standing in a concrete bunker of some sort, the floor thick with red mud (and thus passed yet another pair of white socks). The light came from a concrete slit at the top of the far wall, and through it I could see the weeds and grasses from some unknown hillside. I realized that the slit was just wide enough for someone my size to squeeze through.
My heart quickened at the prospect. Forrest and I had done it — we had conquered the Drain Pipe — and the reward for our valor was to be the exploration of a new world! There could be anything out there — a new neighborhood, new hills and valleys, an enchanted forest, a land of dinosaurs and cavemen. Anything!
The last thing I expected was to see the faces of my brother, Mike, and his pal Brent, peeking through the slit at us. “Hey, Joe! What are doing down there?”
To my brother, he had simply crossed the street to investigate an interesting-looking concrete slab in the ground. He had crossed the street.To me, my brother was the destroyer of all my hopes and dreams for the grandest of adventures. After almost two hours of madness in the dark, Forrest and I had succeeded in finding not a new world, not an unexplored jungle, but simply a darker alternative to a perfectly good crosswalk. It was almost as if Magellan had come home after three years circumnavigating the globe only to find that, in his absence, someone had invented transatlantic jet travel.
I’m sure I learned something important that day, but I’ll be damned if I know what it was. If anything, I was annoyed that my Action Jackson helmet had suffered a dent where I had whacked it on the wall during my final plunge for the goal.
However, for one brief moment, the spirit within my small and immature body had struck loose its earthly bonds and had surged outward with the strength of all the Spanish conquistadors and Italian circumnavigators combined. I had dared to go where no kid had gone before. It was a rush that stayed with me long after my dissatisfaction with the conclusion had faded away.
Forrest and I didn’t keep up our friendship for much longer after that incident. The effort to keep up a long-distance relationship was beyond our young faculties, and my loyalty and friendship went to more immediately-available kids in the neighborhood. I had a few more adventures, including the incredible exploration of the tree stand known as Reese’s Point (an incident refreshingly devoid of claustrophobic elements). But none approached the grandeur of that adventure down the Woodlake Drain Pipe.
Thirty years later, I still have some of that wanderlust left. I love a good exploratory hike, only now I have replaced my Action Jackson helmet with much more sophisticated headgear (and all of my walkie talkies work). I’ve even been known to ride a bike or two in my day. But as I blaze a new trail through a mountain forest, I can still hear and see the ghosts from the past — the “clomp clomp clomp” of sneakers as they echo off a curved concrete wall; the bright circle of light of my destination, shining with possibility; with potential; with the promise of discovery.
And if I ever run the danger of taking all of this entirely too seriously, I can always count on my kid brother to peek at me from the edges.
This is an article about 
One of my coworkers is a finalist in the 
My wife has asked my why I have never blogged about the dog. I could say, “it’s been done before” but it’s not like the blogosphere is exactly riddled with originality. Therefore, here is my official Dog Blog™.
But let me start with the cat, as she was here first, a fact that she would point out to you if: A. you had bothered to ask her, and B. she could grant the time out of her busy schedule to tell you. She’s the loveable pile of indignation at right.
