There’s a secret that I’ve kept for all these years. Between each long row of apartments, down in the valley of a big ole’ field, was a sewer pipe. Buried about 8 feet down and running in a thousand different directions for probably more than a thousand miles, and at least 3 or 4 feet around in diameter. It was runnin’ under the city of Oak Ridge, and it exposed itself at a creek that was about 100 yards from our backdoor.
Now, Doyle and I had a code that said “Nothing was off limits that was unknown or had a flavor of fun”. So… off we went.
Down through the hole, a kid couldn’t really stand up, but we almost could. Did you know some of those culverts can go for miles, and miles and miles. I think we could go anywhere in Oak Ridge we wanted to go, and all underground.
One time we went from Prairie Lane, where we lived, all the way to that monstrous, giant swimming pool in the middle of town. Hey, that thing had to be at least 2 or 3 miles away. Anyway, that was fun, or at least we thought it was 50 years ago.
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No one had to tell us how to have fun; we might have even invented it during the early 1960’s. The reason I kept this a secret is because my Mom would have hurt me bad and my Dad, well I have no doubt he would have killed us.
Looking back, this was no causal thing. There was probably a dozen different ways we could have died; disease, bacteria, floods, rats, alligators, fumes, methane gas, or who knows what could have swam up from the Gulf of Mexico- I’m talking electric eels or the dreaded great white shark. It didn’t take us long to figure out we’d best keep this to ourselves. Did I ever mention that (I know for a fact) God takes care of us, especially kids that’s got about as much sense as a pile of rocks.