Preface To Wells: Never Been Down A Well

Maybe I've told this story before, but during my third grade year, I had two amazing experiences that I thought would lead to more amazing experiences but that ended up being singular experiences.

One is that, while we (a friend I think was named Kyle, my little brother, & I) were playing in the undeveloped area behind our apartments, we found an abandoned, derelict house, which was basically hidden in tall grass.  It hadn't been occupied for a long time, & this would've been around 1976 or 1977.  It wasn't far from the apartments, but it obviously had been built way before them - probably before the road that the apartments were on.

We had a blast playing in that ruin of a house.  There were places were there were still walls - or the rotting wooden framework of walls - & there of course were concrete steps & well-delineated areas where one could imagine a front door, a back door, & rooms.  As an imaginative kid, I had pretended many places were homes, but this was an actual home.  Again, we had so much fun.  At home, I told my mother what a great discovery we had made.  She told us it wasn't safe & we could never go back there again.

You know what?  We didn't.  It's amazing my mother had such control over us.

The second was, we discovered we were tiny enough to crawl into the sewers.  We could slide into them, & suddenly we found ourselves a world underground.  Again, my brother was with me, & I think our friend Maxie.  I believe these would've been the rain sewers, not the ones that carried waste - there was certainly no waste when we were down there.  The pipes weren't small, in some places we could even stand up a little, but it was a real revelation to scamper down a pipe & discover, when you looked up, you were peeping out into the road in front of the apartments.  I think my little brother & I discussed using this new method to get to school.

Of course, my mother, when told, forbade us from ever going into the sewers again.  & you know what?  We didn't.

So, alas, I never went down a well, I've probably never even seen a well up close before, but I did spend a glorious day one time when I was eight playing in concrete pipes under the apartments where I lived.  That's gotta count for something, right?