Back in the 1980s, a friend confidentially informed me that he knew of a “huge old sewer lid” in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis and, peering down through the ventilation holes on that lid, he had seen deep into the bowels of the City. Although it smelled rather funky, he admitted, it sounded like there was quite a stream flowing down at the bottom. Would I like to see it? It piqued my curiosity at the time, but I had no idea of what we were in for.
When we arrived several days later, I saw a large, hexagonal lid in the weeds off to the side of the street. The lid was almost four feet across, and was divided into two halves, each of which could be removed separately. My friend lifted one slice of the immensely heavy lid just enough so that I could squeeze through the gap into the deep shaft below, grabbing ahold of the steel ladder rungs as I entered. He eased the lid back down into place. Kerplunk, total darkness, and the sound of rushing water below, or, as I could tell by now, raw sewage, from the sulfurous aroma. I turned on a flashlight, shining it into the depths below, where I could see, through the fog, wild, churning gray water. Looking back up, I could see my friend’s eye peering through at me, as though it were some sort of morbid peepshow, watching a man possibly go to his death. After giving him my take on the situation, I began to descend.
About half way down, the steel ladder rungs felt a little spongy, giving slightly as I rested my weight on them. A dozen feet more, and the rungs began to snap off when I stepped on them. The corrosive sewer gas had eaten them away to the point where they had all the strength of large pretzels. I stopped immediately, and yelled up to my friend that I was coming back up. No response, as I suppose my message had been garbled. There was more than a hint of panic in my voice, as I had a long way to drop, and indeed as I went upwards, the rungs began to crumble under my hands, too, and for a split second I braced myself to fall. Stepping on the stubs of the rungs that had already broken away, however, I struggled to get upwards more frantically now, finally reaching the solid steel rungs near the top with a sense of relief.
My friend lifted the huge lid for me to exit. Before I had the chance to get out, however, I watched it slip from his grasp, in slow motion. Still on the ladder, and not wanting to retreat down the hole and have the lid clip me on the way down, knocking me from my precarious perch, I moved upwards to close the distance and let it bounce on my back as I held onto the rungs tightly. Slowly, I then angled my shoulder, allowing the impossible load to slide from my back, which it did, scything through the air as it fell, striking the ladder and crashing with a loud bang at the bottom of the shaft. Looking back on close calls like this, I have to ask myself how I ever ended up in such a predicament.
This book SUBTERRANEAN TWIN CITIES tells my story.