Underground Fear

I was a stupid, skinny little kid once. My mother used to say I needed a belt to hold up my slims and that was true. I could rip through more food then than I can now, that's for sure. The thing with kids is that their greatest strength is their greatest weakness, and that characteristic is ignorance. Ignorance isn't a bad thing, by any means. It just means you do not know about something, and when I think about things that are scary, I remember some of my stupidity, and consider how lucky I am that by the grace of God, I survived into adulthood.

There is one thing is particular that whenever I think about it, I am filled with the greatest fear that it could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. I have had many near-death experiences, but most of them were here and gone in a flash. I can tell of four potentially fatal car accidents that I escaped without a scratch on my fender. One of those makes me shiver every time I think about how badly it could have ended, yet this incident takes them all in my mind.

My father worked for the City of Tulsa the majority of his life, and is retiring this year. He is looking forward to it. Through those years, my parents occasionally had only one car, so we'd go with mom to pick him up from work during those times. At one place the city put him, there was a ditch just off to one side of the property and off this ditch was a storm drain culvert. I was what you might call a city spelunker in that there was nothing more tempting to me than a concrete culvert large enough to accommodate what frame I had as a youth, and being so small, I could get into a lot of them.

So I crawled in and there was plenty of room. After a little ways, the culvert got a little smaller in that they used a smaller diameter pipe for it. It was still large enough for me, so I kept going. Now, to be clear, I never went into one of these things unless I could see the other end. I never crawled into the dark. This opened up into a large area just under the parking lot and I could even see out the top. This is where the fear factor of my imagination kicks in.

While I was standing in this open space looking around, I looked back at the path that brought me there. It looked tiny. If I had seen that end before I started, I would never have crawled into that drain to begin with, and for a split second, I panicked, wondering how I was going to get out. That hole was partially buried in the asphalt on the flooring of the opening I was in, so the hole was slightly blocked. Sure the top looked like it was removable, and since my father worked on a city crew, four of those guys gathered around the "lid" could pop that sucker right off.

I reasoned at the time, however, that I had crawled into this hole, and I should reasonably be able to crawl right back out of it. So I did. No harm. No foul. I not only did it that time, but several more times over the many weeks we had to pick my dad up from there. Every time, I wondered how I managed to crawled through that gap, and every time, I crawled back out.

It's the memory of that hole that scares me. What I have now that I didn't have then was a whole lot of knowledge and experience regarding holes in the ground. I know how they get there. I know what goes through them. I know that if you got stuck in one, you were in some serious trouble. What makes this one a bit scarier was the second hole. There was another opening from this box in the ground that went further on into the culvert cave system, and I just might have been able to crawl through it. Thing is, I never tried. I looked down that dark tunnel and saw nothing, and I decided against it.

The what-if's crop up in my head. What if I had gone further? What if I had crawled back into that exit wrong and got stuck? What if I had just got through it the first time out of luck? What if I got my arm caught under me in that tight fit, and couldn't move? What if I got stuck and it started raining?

I've had many scary things happen within the course of my life, but for some reason, this one stands out more than anything else. If I were to guess the reason why, it's probably because nothing scary actually happened, but like the monster you never see, it's the probability of scariness that increases the fear factor. So many things could have happened that didn't. I count my blessings and move forward.