Spelunking with the hell hound

At 10 years old, there was a period of a few months when I became obsessed with exploring caves. After watching a documentary about a group of spelunkers who get lost in a Mexican cave during a flood, I fell in love with the idea of miner's headlamps and clever rope tricks used to drag yourself through narrow crevices and junctions. I searched my neighborhood for any place I could find that looked cave-like. I crouched down and scuttled around the crawl space underneath our house with my father's oversized work flashlight for hours until the battery died. My father worked nights at the rail yard and for several years wondered if his eyesight was failing because his flashlight always seemed to be dimmer than that of his coworkers.

Within a few days however, the crawl-space had been over-explored so many times that I grew bored with never finding any as of yet undiscovered glow worms, stalactites, and exotic crystal formations. And living in the suburbs of Denver, there weren't a lot of other options for me to explore. None of my other friends had a crawl-space to crawl around, there were no hidden woods that may have the unexpected cave that had been unnoticed by man since the time of neanderthals. I wanted to see cave paintings and new troglodytic creatures of the night. I read books about underground monsters and watched Daryl Hannah in "Clan of the Cave Bear" over and over until I could recite it.

Then, after a few months of scouring my neighborhood to no avail in search of secret tunnels, my mother told my sister and I one morning that we were going to visit our cousins DJ and Nicky. As a child I really looked up to my older cousin DJ. He was tall and funny and could do any number of backflips on the trampoline in his back yard. Of the family members that we ever saw, he was the only kid older than me, and somehow in my mind that made him an expert on the ways of the world.

We spent what seemed like half the morning just driving out to DJ and Nicky's house. We lived in Wheat Ridge, and they lived in the middle of nowhere in a tiny town called Aurora (of course, by the time I was older, Aurora wasn't nearly as far away anymore, and I spent my first year of college making that commute daily). Their house was in a rapidly developing neighborhood with few telephone poles and clean dry streets. We arrived in the morning and all of us kids were sent down to play in the basement. We played with star wars action figures for a while, but soon got bored with this, and DJ, who must have been about 14 at the time, said, "Do you guys wanna go explore the sewer?"

Nicky sat there quietly. He knew we weren't supposed to go into the sewer system, but at that age he'd follow his older brother anywhere. My sister had long since abandoned us to go hang on my mother's leg (she wasn't fond of playing Star Wars with us), and so DJ looked at me with that way only a child who’s planning a crime can. The look in the face asking if I had the courage to do what he proposed we do, daring me. Even though nobody had ever expressly forbid me from running around in the sewer system, I could tell from DJ's conspiratorial tone of voice that what he was proposing was against the rules. I could feel my heart wriggling beneath my ribs, but I said yes. I wanted to prove myself to the older cousin I looked up to.

Within minutes we told our parents that we were going to go play at a nearby park and went scampering down the street to where a sewer tunnel opened into a nearby creek. But when we arrived, we found the sewer tunnel was blocked by a collection of tumbleweeds. I remember it seemed odd to the three of us that half a dozen tumbleweeds had somehow managed to lodge themselves in a sewer pipe. But these flimsy obstacles weren't enough to detract us. We pulled them all out and crawled into the 3' diameter tunnel. DJ went in first and I quickly followed. It was exciting to finally be in a long dark tunnel, the damp stuffy air gave it an exotic feel, and the 6" wide dribbling stream of water made the bottom just slick enough that it seemed more dangerous than it really was. I was sure that new forms of life would be just around the first corner.

But by the time we had crawled 50 yards into the tunnel, we could barely see anything. When we did turn that first corner there was something piled up and blocking our path. When DJ rubbed his hand over the obstacle we heard a somehow familiar tinkling sound, but we had no way of seeing what it was in the near complete darkness. Nicky said he was scared, and to be honest, I was too. But overcome by curiosity, I scuttled up next to DJ and held out both of my hands in front of me. I pressed a small button on the corner of my sleek white and green Incredible Hulk wristwatch, and it illuminated the concrete tunnel just enough to identify what was blocking our path. The light was dim, but DJ and I could immediately tell what the stacks were: Wine Coolers. Our fathers were both beer men, but we knew from various parties what wine coolers were. What we didn't know was how three entire cases of wine coolers had wound up stacked in a sewer system in suburban Aurora with half a dozen tumbleweeds blocking their path.

DJ being a typical 14 year old boy immediately jumped on this chance, thinking of how fun it would be to drink them with his friends as soon as he could. So he enlisted Nicky and I to help him carry a case each the 3 blocks back to his house where we could hide them in the back yard. I didn't want to lug a case of alcohol all the way back, but I also didn't want to go any further in the sewer system without some sort of light. So in a further attempt to look cool in front of my cousin, I helped him hide his newfound loot. He called some friends of his up as soon as we got home and they made plans to drink them later that weekend. But as soon as he had them hidden, we immediately thought that maybe there was more in that sewer than just some wine coolers. Such is the attitude of children that instead of just being thankful for the treasure we had found, we immediately wanted more.

Convinced that if we had just gone further, we would have found mountains of hidden pirate treasure or perhaps a keg, we gathered all the flashlights in the house. Any kind of portable light that could be emitted, we grabbed it. This only amounted to a pair of toy flashlights shared by my cousins, while I was given a special glow-in-the-dark tennis ball, and told that I could always use my Incredible Hulk wristwatch.

I didn't like it, but I didn't have much else to work with, so I swallowed my pride and said OK as long as I was in the middle so I could still see some stuff. We snuck back out through the back yard and quickly marched back to the sewer opening with thoughts of buried treasure floating in our heads. We'd already found one amazing thing, now we were explorers, and all fear of the sewer system were gone. But as we started approaching the entrance, we saw an older teenager crawl out of the concrete pipe with an annoyed look on his face. He walked to the nearby road where a friend of his was waiting in a pick-up. They were talking and arguing, but we figured it had nothing to do with us. DJ, being a bit older picked up on what happened, and quietly explained to Nicky and I what was going on. These were the guys that hid their wine coolers there and now they were looking for them. But they were still at the truck arguing with each other. The one we had seen emerge from the tunnel was now yelling at his friend, and the dog in the bed of the truck was barking at him.

It of course never occurred to us that we could just walk away now and never get caught by them. There had to be more stuff in there for us to find, all we had to do was sneak in the pipe while they were arguing.

With the kind of cunning and stealth rarely seen outside of 10 year olds, we took advantage of the situation and sidled up the trail as quickly and as quietly as we could. DJ snuck in with the hurried grace of a ninja, and with my pulse thrusting me forward in an adrenaline rush, I followed knowing that I was definitely getting cool points with my older cousin for how quiet and smooth I was. Nicky darted up behind me, but not quite fast enough. He was spotted by the teenagers, who immediately ran to the entrance and started yelling after us. "HEY!! Are you the guys who stole our coolers? Give us our stuff back!" We could hear his voice echoing down the concrete tunnel behind us but we were crawling forward as fast as we could. The further and further down the tunnel we got, the less we could make out what he was yelling after us, as all the echoes started to blend together.

But after a minute or so of us crawling as fast as we could, me scraping my bare knees badly on the concrete tube, we heard a vastly different sound coming from the tube behind us. It was the sound of a dog barking. The bastards has set their dog on us. DJ immediately started cursing, and Nicky and I started crying. The adrenaline was pumping through all of us, sneaking past the teenagers had gotten all our hearts racing, but now we were all crawling forward for our lives. And let me remind you, a dog can run through a tunnel a lot faster than a human child can crawl through one. We still heard the teen's voice getting louder as it came on as well, but it was the dog that put the fear of god into us. I can still remember that echoing bark rattling all over the walls of the concrete.

In our fear, DJ crawled a lot faster than Nicky and I, and left us behind. Nicky dropped his flashlight in terror, and we crawled for what may have been blocks in the darkness. I kept crawling and crying towards DJ's light.

And then...with a dog rapidly catching up to us, and our knees and palms bleeding, we looked up and saw...nothing. I found out later that DJ had turned off his light in the hopes of loosing the teenager that chased us, but the result was that he lost us both. Or rather, just me.

I crawled blindly, terrified, as fast as I could grinding my bare knees and palms deep into the concrete until they were bleeding. My cries and screams blended in with the echoing cries and screams of Nicky, the raging curses of our teenage pursuer, and the incessant barking of that demonic hell hound, and all I could do was crawl forward as hard and fast as I could.

Even now nearly 20 years later, after being on military deployments and getting in various troubles and dangers of trying to live a slightly less ordinary life, when someone asks me what was the time in my life when I was the most afraid, this moment is always within my top 5 misadventures. I was 10 years old, and I had absolutely no doubt that at any second that dog was going to sink its teeth into my leg and the last thing I would have ever seen would be my cousin's flashlight winking out in the hopes of losing his would be captor.

Somehow, in those dark tunnels, all reality was lost. It's in the dark places of the world that you first lose all sense of perspective. It's why we fear the dark as a child, we fear the loss of our world. And when we open our eyes, we still can't see the light. I lost my cousins in that darkness. Somehow turning one corner or another, I got split up from them. But I could still hear that damn dog, coming up right behind me.

And then, with no sense of where my cousins were, or how far I'd crawled in the pitch dark, I felt the stuffy air shift into something just a hint fresher, or perhaps I just imagined it. But what I didn't imagine was the light I saw. I had somehow emerged into a small room in the sewer system and looking up there was a small circle of 6 points of light shining down from above me. They were coming from the small pick-holes in a manhole cover. In the complete dark, those small beams of light illuminated a series of thin rebar ladder rungs in the side of the wall leading up to the light. Crying, and covered in sewer slime and my own blood from horribly scraped up knees and hands, I scrambled up the ladder rungs just as I heard the dog getting louder and louder. Then he was there, the dog was right below me, and I was clinging on to the rebar, climbing as high as I could to get out of the dog's biting range. It barked up at me, louder than anything I'd ever heard. But I made it. I reached the manhole cover and held on to the wall with one hand while I tried lifting with my other.

Nothing happened.

I pushed harder, but it didn't budge. I pressed up as hard as I could with my bloody hand, but the blood from my palm made me slip with the force of my pressing and as my hand flew off to the side, I could feel something painful twist and snap with my wrist. Somehow I had gotten my favorite possession, my Incredible Hulk wristwatch, caught on a piece of metal and the cheap plastic band snapped. The watch went tumbling into the darkness below and landed in the muck after bouncing off the devil dog's forehead. It stopped to sniff it, and then continued barking at me. I tried to lift the manhole cover again, and again I slipped, this time nearly losing my grip on the ladder. I couldn't lift it. I started screaming for help. There was nothing else I could do. I couldn't lift the manhole cover, I couldn't go back because of the devil dog below me. I clung on to the side of the ladder while the dog barked up at me, and after a minute or two of crying, I reached in my pockets, hoping to find anything in there that I could use to help.

The only thing I could find was a glow-in-the-dark tennis ball.

I hurled it down at the evil canine below me. I missed. But the ball still glowed and bounced down the tunnel. And suddenly the dog was silent. He ran after the ball and grabbed it, brought it back to the bottom of the ladder, dropped it in the slime and started barking at me again.

The mutt wasn't evil, he just wanted to play.

But I wasn't falling for it. I shifted position, and instead of pushing up with my hand, I placed my shoulder against the manhole cover and lifted as hard as I could. I could hear metal grinding on metal as the cover shifted and slid. And the world burst into light again.

I was never so happy in my life. I shoved the manhole cover to the side and shot out of the maintenance entrance with a joy only a child can feel at narrowly escaping death. I stood up, took two steps backwards away from the hole and screamed into it.

And there I was, covered in sewer slime, blood and mud, tears streaming down my 10 year old face, and screaming nonsense at a dog in the sewer.

Then I heard the screeching of car tires and I looked up and saw a large blue wall with a chrome word mounted on it charging me with a rapid velocity. The word was DODGE.

And so I did.

I jumped backwards and fell flat on my back as the cargo van that was about to run over me slammed to a solid halt. I had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the street, and the driver tried to hit the brakes to avoid hitting me, but he couldn't do it in time. He knew he was about to his me, no matter how hard his foot slammed the pedal to the floor. The van screeched a long whining pitch and then a small explosion happened with a loud crack and the vehicle slammed to a very sudden and solid halt. It would have hit me for sure if its front tire hadn't fallen into a manhole someone had rudely left uncovered.

I ran off into the neighborhood. I was terrified. The sewer, the dog, the darkness, the van. It was just too much for me. I ran down the street as long as I could, relieved to be out in open air and still alive. And within a few minutes I realized that I was hopelessly lost. I knew nothing about Aurora, or where my cousin's house was. I wandered around the streets sniffling to myself and trying to brush off my hands and knees for another 45 minutes before I found my cousins sitting at the entrance to the sewer pipe. They had been caught by the teenager and dragged out of the tunnel, but they just denied knowledge of the wine coolers until he let them go. What else was he going to do?

DJ had gone back into the sewer twice to try and find me, and the teenager had gone in as well to try and find his dog. But when DJ came out empty handed, he and Nicky started getting really scared that I had vanished for good. When I popped up from behind them, they were as relieved to see me as I was to see them. The teen was still in the sewer looking for the devil dog, and his friend was impatiently waiting for him in the pick-up. The three of us ran away the three blocks back to my cousin's house.

When we got there we concocted a story about how I'd fallen down at the park playing tag and that's why my knees and hands were all torn up. My mother bought it, but was a little surprised to have me clutching onto her the rest of the afternoon telling her I just wanted to go home. I'd had enough of this visit to my cousin's place.

Looking back on this, I know that many of the things in this story can't be true. It's just all too fantastic, even for one of my crazy misadventures. But though I know it couldn't have all happened like this, this is the way I remember it. And that's the only way such stories should be told.

Sometimes, when walking home at night I walk through a dog park and I run across people taking their pets out for a late night stroll. And sometimes, when I hear the dogs barking in the darkness, I wonder whatever happened to that dog in the tunnels. When I'm in a good mood, I hope the teenager found him and pulled him out, but when I'm annoyed at my classes and frustrated and stressed with medical school, I remember how terrified I was there in the subterranean world with a demon dog chasing me, and I like to think he's still down there, stupidly playing fetch with a glow-in-the-dark tennis ball to the light of a child's Incredible Hulk wristwatch.