(no subject)
Heyas, I wrote this story a week ago, after it happened (or is it fiction har har), umm... so if you feel like reading something clickity click.
The Best Places are Where Nobody Goes
(Or is it where no one would ever find you?)
Today was Thursday, two days before I fly back to school. I got easily frustrated. Perhaps it was doing badly at online pictionary. Perhaps it was watching 2004's Magnet Arts Night for the first time and wishing I'd done something bigger in high school. Perhaps it was missing "Hotel Rwanda" because I had slept in too late. Perhaps I'm not satisfied with my break, with a terrible sleep pattern and not enough adventures had. All in all, I wasn't quite happy -- in fact, I got restless.
It was after dinner. For petty reasons I declined to go out. I passed the time playing games on my laptop. I was sitting in my bedroom in the basement of the home I grew up in. After pictionary, it was keyboard DDR and small poker tournaments for fake money. I'd like to be good at all that stuff, but it couldn't be my lifestyle. Then I remembered:
1) I'd recently devised a way to electrically bypass the alarm on a door down here, which I wouldn't have a lot of opportunity to test for real
2) The temperature was a very nice 62 degrees outside
So after my breakfast cereal at 1AM, I removed my wallet from my back pocket, stuffed two string cheeses in there, took a pocketknife and pocket-size flashlight, and went out the back. Actually, it wasn't that simple. Staring at that sliding-glass door with the alarm on, I was too afraid to open it -- I was confident in my workaround, but the alarm would wake up the whole family and likely some neighbors if something went wrong. So I got my soldering iron to secure that the wires would stay together, especially for when I had to trust my luck upon returning. It wasn't quite enough to allay my fear, though, so I turned the alarm off upstairs (halfway defeating the purpose), went back downstairs to open the door, verified the circuit remained closed, and then turned the alarm back on as I was sure my little hack was still working. What a pansy.
I stepped out into this damp summer night in the middle of winter, wearing just khakis and a gray T-shirt. I climbed the hill to the front of the house and noticed a stick of bamboo on the ground. What was it doing there, under evergreen trees? I was reminded of the bamboo that used to grow in the neighborhood park where I went to summer camp for several years, and affirmed I'd head over there for this jaunt.
Another memory came, too: the times I explored on foot when Hurricane Isabel hit last year. What fun it is to wander around when there's no electricity, no artificial light. I'd done at least one daring stunt at that time: after watching the eerily desolate interstate from an overpass, I'd finally followed the wooden stairway in the woods nearby, well after midnight in the midst of a powerful storm. And I remembered wondering on my way out if anyone would notice the footsteps I'd left in the thick mud at the construction site of some new cosmetics building.
It was a little disappointing to return my focus to the well-lit street. Despite the tingle of exploration, I wasn't going out for an adventure tonight. On my way to the park, I witnessed what nearly was an accident between a pair of the few cars I saw in the neighborhood all night. Wouldn't it be weird if I was that guy who happened to see the accident nobody probably saw? But they didn't collide and my imagination wandered elsewhere as I walked on through the perfect night. My footsteps softly whispered in the sleeping ears of suburbia.
There's a lot of time to think when you're walking alone. It was such a peaceful, warm night that I fancied walking many miles to meet a girl I used to know. This impossible plan wouldn't turn out awkward; it would be a pleasant and secret meeting with no one around. But daydreams aside, the last east park entrance lay ahead. Of course, the park was officially closed at night, so I got out my flashlight and ducked in -- as if it could be done stealthily from the open sidewalk.
The secluded path paralleled what was once a creek and, across from it, a busier road. I half-wanted to investigate the creek and its mouth next to the park entrance, but felt a bit too cautious to do so. Could the late night drivers see me? Surely not through the thin woods, and they wouldn't care besides. I got to a triangle in the path and turned right, finding the hill that for all my life has been my basic protoype for a hill. Really it was nothing more than a mound, but, it occurred to me how out of place it would be in a flatter region. I climbed over it, through more mud than I expected in the grass, to get to the playground and its swingset.
It had been raining on and off, so I had to flip the wet swing seat to use it. I swung for a few minutes, going as high as I could while keeping the swing silent. There's no way of stopping both silently and quickly, I realized, so I spent some time getting off. The water fountain across the mulch area was cut off for the winter, but I went and tried it anyway just because it was so warm out. No luck, though.
My next endeavor was examining the patches of forestry in the park. I couldn't find that bamboo I was thinking about, which I expected to find adjacent to the fountain, nor could I find the canopied dirt forest paths that my dim memory was suggesting to be near the shelter. I found open grass between two areas of dense trees, and I couldn't make my mind up whether a patch had split over the years where a narrow path once lay, or my memory had simply embellished it to look more like a jungle; I suppose I'll never know.
I went around aimlessly for a while longer. This wasn't a vast park. I came across the sign that read, as expected, "Closed sunset to sunrise." I came across the basketball court, at first thinking it had changed but then realizing the fence had been there all along. I noticed the power meter on the shelter, reading 4,856 kilowatt hours. My path criscrossed itself a few times in this small area. I ended up on the sidewalk on the north side of the park and cut surreptitiously at a tree with my knife as I passed for the sake of leaving a mark. It sounds silly, but I asked myself, "Why not?" I shined my flashlight at metal boxes in the ground, wondering what their purpose was and why I never asked or couldn't remember the answer; and I noticed a sculpture-like piece I'd never given a thought to, and read the plaque reading simply "Art in Public Places" with what was presumably the artist's name. I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to represent, so I continued back on the sidewalk.
The east side of the park, where I had entered from before, was on my way around the circle back to my house. Impusively, I turned at the first entrance instead of continuing on. I looked at the tennis courts and trees remembering the little activities I'd done at camp that didn't really matter. They're hardly worth remembering, but I probably won't forget them. When I reached the playground I decided to use the swing again because I love the motion of it. I got on the second swing, again facing the darkened greenery instead of the distant street. I set the goal of touching a tree's high branch with my foot on the forward peak of motion. No sooner had I succeeded at it than I heard something behind me. I hastily slowed, jumped off noisily, and turned around to find nothing to worry about. It might have been a car, or it might have sounded like a person; I don't remember and I may not have identified the sound at all. I sure felt like a pansy when it was all clear, though.
I returned to the neighborhood streets via the way I'd come in the first time at the second entrance -- rather, I almost did. The creek was next to this path again and I was curious how large the hole was at its source. Checking this out was my main reason for going back into the park. There was actually water in the old creek due to the rain, which had begun again very lightly. I descended through the slippery brush to the creek's level and found the mouth to be a sewer 3 or 4 feet in diameter. There was graffiti inside and I couldn't see how deep the sewer went with my small flashlight spreading light widely. I decided to cross the creek and get up next to the mouth for a better view. There was a small stream of water not an inch deep coming down the middle of the concrete cylinder of the mouth. I shone my flashlight in, but the light was still too unfocused for me to gauge how far the sewer went.
The choice to enter the sewer was quite easy, being right there in front of it. For one thing, it was clearly not human waste sewage but runoff. Had I known I would do this all along? I don't think so, but it had crossed my mind, and very few ideas like this cross my mind only to be rejected. To me, exploration is always worth it; in fact, I could hardly believe I'd never done this before. I crouched into the hole and sort of crouch-walked for a minute to a turn in the sewer where there was standing room. Above on my left was another sewer, perhaps a little smaller. I followed the turn to the right, though, losing sight of the scant moonlight from the mouth fifty feet back. I didn't dare turn off my flashlight in case I dropped it; everything was pitch black upon merely covering up the light. I did check to see that my watch's illumination could give some light, but it wouldn't reveal anything more than a few inches away.
I came to another spot with standing room. Above was a storm drain to the street and a manhole -- I had always wondered what it was like beneath those. I noted where I was relative to the streets and continued to the left, soon encountering a similar juncture after crossing under the street. I climbed up for a glimpse of the park behind me through this second storm drain. Moving on, I switched to propelling myself with my arms to avoid splashing the water running in the opposite direction. My legs had become tired, also. I held the little flashlight between two fingers. I wondered on this leg of the journey if I was going underneath someone's house. I hit a third storm drain fairly soon and realized the sewer probably followed the street, which had turned ninety degrees. I paused here to climb up on the slippery brick and see if I could read an address across the street, but the angle and light were poor. If anyone was awake, I didn't want to freak them out by shining a flashligt out of a storm drain. I thought I recognized what part of the neighborhood it was, and it lined up with my sense of direction, so that was sufficient.
I was somewhat tired, but ready to go on. What I noticed then was that the water was coming quite a bit more now. It was at least an inch deep, perhaps two; it ran audibly, echoing madly like all other sounds down these long tubes. The rain must have picked up. I decided to turn back, considering:
1) It was moderately dangerous not knowing how much water might come from upstream, in the dark with a plentiful supply of hard surfaces
2) I was pretty tired (getting good excercise! -- my thighs were painfully sore the next day from the crouch-walking)
3) I could return when it wasn't so rainy
Since I had determined that this was the neighobrhood's runoff system and examined it, this seemed reasonable, so I made my way back without much trouble. There was a clear increase in the waterflow from every hole in the standing areas. My hair, oversized of late, absorbed most of it. Some bricks were dislodged or bulging in two of the standing areas. I actually bumped part of an unstable-looking pile and counted myself lucky that a bunch of loose bricks hadn't fallen. But I traced my way downhill (downpipe?) back to the creek mouth without incident and clambered atop the drain to reach the sidewalk.
Although the sewers had all been bare, my hands were dirty. I washed them in the curbside runoff at a storm drain of which I'd just been privy to the innards, and started on my way home. As I felt the tiredness of my legs, I saw that I had not travelled very far beneath the surface.
Bored again, I finally remembered the string cheese in my back pocket. Smushed. Great thinking. I partook of the rations anyway, needing my knife to open them. Streetlamps' reflections on the wet street followed me home as I pondered the night. Not one car passed. I turned off the sidewalk at the side of my house.
The stick of bamboo cracked under my tired foot.
The Best Places are Where Nobody Goes
(Or is it where no one would ever find you?)
Today was Thursday, two days before I fly back to school. I got easily frustrated. Perhaps it was doing badly at online pictionary. Perhaps it was watching 2004's Magnet Arts Night for the first time and wishing I'd done something bigger in high school. Perhaps it was missing "Hotel Rwanda" because I had slept in too late. Perhaps I'm not satisfied with my break, with a terrible sleep pattern and not enough adventures had. All in all, I wasn't quite happy -- in fact, I got restless.
It was after dinner. For petty reasons I declined to go out. I passed the time playing games on my laptop. I was sitting in my bedroom in the basement of the home I grew up in. After pictionary, it was keyboard DDR and small poker tournaments for fake money. I'd like to be good at all that stuff, but it couldn't be my lifestyle. Then I remembered:
1) I'd recently devised a way to electrically bypass the alarm on a door down here, which I wouldn't have a lot of opportunity to test for real
2) The temperature was a very nice 62 degrees outside
So after my breakfast cereal at 1AM, I removed my wallet from my back pocket, stuffed two string cheeses in there, took a pocketknife and pocket-size flashlight, and went out the back. Actually, it wasn't that simple. Staring at that sliding-glass door with the alarm on, I was too afraid to open it -- I was confident in my workaround, but the alarm would wake up the whole family and likely some neighbors if something went wrong. So I got my soldering iron to secure that the wires would stay together, especially for when I had to trust my luck upon returning. It wasn't quite enough to allay my fear, though, so I turned the alarm off upstairs (halfway defeating the purpose), went back downstairs to open the door, verified the circuit remained closed, and then turned the alarm back on as I was sure my little hack was still working. What a pansy.
I stepped out into this damp summer night in the middle of winter, wearing just khakis and a gray T-shirt. I climbed the hill to the front of the house and noticed a stick of bamboo on the ground. What was it doing there, under evergreen trees? I was reminded of the bamboo that used to grow in the neighborhood park where I went to summer camp for several years, and affirmed I'd head over there for this jaunt.
Another memory came, too: the times I explored on foot when Hurricane Isabel hit last year. What fun it is to wander around when there's no electricity, no artificial light. I'd done at least one daring stunt at that time: after watching the eerily desolate interstate from an overpass, I'd finally followed the wooden stairway in the woods nearby, well after midnight in the midst of a powerful storm. And I remembered wondering on my way out if anyone would notice the footsteps I'd left in the thick mud at the construction site of some new cosmetics building.
It was a little disappointing to return my focus to the well-lit street. Despite the tingle of exploration, I wasn't going out for an adventure tonight. On my way to the park, I witnessed what nearly was an accident between a pair of the few cars I saw in the neighborhood all night. Wouldn't it be weird if I was that guy who happened to see the accident nobody probably saw? But they didn't collide and my imagination wandered elsewhere as I walked on through the perfect night. My footsteps softly whispered in the sleeping ears of suburbia.
There's a lot of time to think when you're walking alone. It was such a peaceful, warm night that I fancied walking many miles to meet a girl I used to know. This impossible plan wouldn't turn out awkward; it would be a pleasant and secret meeting with no one around. But daydreams aside, the last east park entrance lay ahead. Of course, the park was officially closed at night, so I got out my flashlight and ducked in -- as if it could be done stealthily from the open sidewalk.
The secluded path paralleled what was once a creek and, across from it, a busier road. I half-wanted to investigate the creek and its mouth next to the park entrance, but felt a bit too cautious to do so. Could the late night drivers see me? Surely not through the thin woods, and they wouldn't care besides. I got to a triangle in the path and turned right, finding the hill that for all my life has been my basic protoype for a hill. Really it was nothing more than a mound, but, it occurred to me how out of place it would be in a flatter region. I climbed over it, through more mud than I expected in the grass, to get to the playground and its swingset.
It had been raining on and off, so I had to flip the wet swing seat to use it. I swung for a few minutes, going as high as I could while keeping the swing silent. There's no way of stopping both silently and quickly, I realized, so I spent some time getting off. The water fountain across the mulch area was cut off for the winter, but I went and tried it anyway just because it was so warm out. No luck, though.
My next endeavor was examining the patches of forestry in the park. I couldn't find that bamboo I was thinking about, which I expected to find adjacent to the fountain, nor could I find the canopied dirt forest paths that my dim memory was suggesting to be near the shelter. I found open grass between two areas of dense trees, and I couldn't make my mind up whether a patch had split over the years where a narrow path once lay, or my memory had simply embellished it to look more like a jungle; I suppose I'll never know.
I went around aimlessly for a while longer. This wasn't a vast park. I came across the sign that read, as expected, "Closed sunset to sunrise." I came across the basketball court, at first thinking it had changed but then realizing the fence had been there all along. I noticed the power meter on the shelter, reading 4,856 kilowatt hours. My path criscrossed itself a few times in this small area. I ended up on the sidewalk on the north side of the park and cut surreptitiously at a tree with my knife as I passed for the sake of leaving a mark. It sounds silly, but I asked myself, "Why not?" I shined my flashlight at metal boxes in the ground, wondering what their purpose was and why I never asked or couldn't remember the answer; and I noticed a sculpture-like piece I'd never given a thought to, and read the plaque reading simply "Art in Public Places" with what was presumably the artist's name. I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to represent, so I continued back on the sidewalk.
The east side of the park, where I had entered from before, was on my way around the circle back to my house. Impusively, I turned at the first entrance instead of continuing on. I looked at the tennis courts and trees remembering the little activities I'd done at camp that didn't really matter. They're hardly worth remembering, but I probably won't forget them. When I reached the playground I decided to use the swing again because I love the motion of it. I got on the second swing, again facing the darkened greenery instead of the distant street. I set the goal of touching a tree's high branch with my foot on the forward peak of motion. No sooner had I succeeded at it than I heard something behind me. I hastily slowed, jumped off noisily, and turned around to find nothing to worry about. It might have been a car, or it might have sounded like a person; I don't remember and I may not have identified the sound at all. I sure felt like a pansy when it was all clear, though.
I returned to the neighborhood streets via the way I'd come in the first time at the second entrance -- rather, I almost did. The creek was next to this path again and I was curious how large the hole was at its source. Checking this out was my main reason for going back into the park. There was actually water in the old creek due to the rain, which had begun again very lightly. I descended through the slippery brush to the creek's level and found the mouth to be a sewer 3 or 4 feet in diameter. There was graffiti inside and I couldn't see how deep the sewer went with my small flashlight spreading light widely. I decided to cross the creek and get up next to the mouth for a better view. There was a small stream of water not an inch deep coming down the middle of the concrete cylinder of the mouth. I shone my flashlight in, but the light was still too unfocused for me to gauge how far the sewer went.
The choice to enter the sewer was quite easy, being right there in front of it. For one thing, it was clearly not human waste sewage but runoff. Had I known I would do this all along? I don't think so, but it had crossed my mind, and very few ideas like this cross my mind only to be rejected. To me, exploration is always worth it; in fact, I could hardly believe I'd never done this before. I crouched into the hole and sort of crouch-walked for a minute to a turn in the sewer where there was standing room. Above on my left was another sewer, perhaps a little smaller. I followed the turn to the right, though, losing sight of the scant moonlight from the mouth fifty feet back. I didn't dare turn off my flashlight in case I dropped it; everything was pitch black upon merely covering up the light. I did check to see that my watch's illumination could give some light, but it wouldn't reveal anything more than a few inches away.
I came to another spot with standing room. Above was a storm drain to the street and a manhole -- I had always wondered what it was like beneath those. I noted where I was relative to the streets and continued to the left, soon encountering a similar juncture after crossing under the street. I climbed up for a glimpse of the park behind me through this second storm drain. Moving on, I switched to propelling myself with my arms to avoid splashing the water running in the opposite direction. My legs had become tired, also. I held the little flashlight between two fingers. I wondered on this leg of the journey if I was going underneath someone's house. I hit a third storm drain fairly soon and realized the sewer probably followed the street, which had turned ninety degrees. I paused here to climb up on the slippery brick and see if I could read an address across the street, but the angle and light were poor. If anyone was awake, I didn't want to freak them out by shining a flashligt out of a storm drain. I thought I recognized what part of the neighborhood it was, and it lined up with my sense of direction, so that was sufficient.
I was somewhat tired, but ready to go on. What I noticed then was that the water was coming quite a bit more now. It was at least an inch deep, perhaps two; it ran audibly, echoing madly like all other sounds down these long tubes. The rain must have picked up. I decided to turn back, considering:
1) It was moderately dangerous not knowing how much water might come from upstream, in the dark with a plentiful supply of hard surfaces
2) I was pretty tired (getting good excercise! -- my thighs were painfully sore the next day from the crouch-walking)
3) I could return when it wasn't so rainy
Since I had determined that this was the neighobrhood's runoff system and examined it, this seemed reasonable, so I made my way back without much trouble. There was a clear increase in the waterflow from every hole in the standing areas. My hair, oversized of late, absorbed most of it. Some bricks were dislodged or bulging in two of the standing areas. I actually bumped part of an unstable-looking pile and counted myself lucky that a bunch of loose bricks hadn't fallen. But I traced my way downhill (downpipe?) back to the creek mouth without incident and clambered atop the drain to reach the sidewalk.
Although the sewers had all been bare, my hands were dirty. I washed them in the curbside runoff at a storm drain of which I'd just been privy to the innards, and started on my way home. As I felt the tiredness of my legs, I saw that I had not travelled very far beneath the surface.
Bored again, I finally remembered the string cheese in my back pocket. Smushed. Great thinking. I partook of the rations anyway, needing my knife to open them. Streetlamps' reflections on the wet street followed me home as I pondered the night. Not one car passed. I turned off the sidewalk at the side of my house.
The stick of bamboo cracked under my tired foot.