Bruce Cameron

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The Dark Tunnel to Stupidity

W. Bruce Cameron

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2007.

There are many people who are experts in how to raise children, and we call these experts “people who have never had children.” Anyone who has actually been through the experience of parenting knows that it requires patience, wisdom, kindness and love — so if your kid doesn’t have those, you might as well forget it.

My own parents decided on a system based on redundancy: With three children, they figured they could afford to screw up on two of them. But they did their best with all of us to provide guidance for surviving in the world, most of which could be boiled down to my father’s words, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Well, let’s define “stupid.” Was it stupid when, as a third-grader, my friends and I decided to explore a sewer tunnel that ran underground behind the elementary school? Tunnels can trap dangerous gasses, can provide hiding places for serial killers and are prone to suddenly filling with water, since that is their purpose.

They can also harbor sewer rats (though not, interestingly, harbor rats). So no, we didn’t think it was stupid. If there was a serial killer in there, he’d have to be at least as stupid as we were, because who was he going to find to kill in such a place? And if there were dangerous gasses, they would kill the serial killer. So we were safe.

Probably there should have been a sign reading, “Do Not Enter Because That Would Be Stupid.” Though if there had, we would have decided the sign was probably put up there to try to trick us into not going in.

To light our way, we carried candles, padding forward in the dancing shadows like a bunch of 8-year-old monks. The hot wax spilled on our fingers, which was very painful, and as we carried the open flames none of us stopped to consider that if we encountered any methane in there we’d be fired out of the tunnel like cannonballs.

We actually believed we were pretty smart to have thought of the candles, because flashlights tended to go out suddenly when their batteries faded, and then where would we be?

We’d be in the same place we were when the candles burned down to nothing — stuck underground in the darkest darkness you can imagine. The candles we’d brought were birthday candles. Though we had two whole boxes of them, they tended to melt down in a real hurry, and we never did come up with a system for lighting a new one that didn’t involve all of us coming to a halt while we fiddled with it.

By the time one boy’s candle was replaced, someone else’s was low, so the fact that we made it as far as we did is testimony to our sheer tenacity and inability to count the remaining candles in our supply.

I do remember being somewhat nonplussed when the candles started winking out. The return dash back to the mouth of the tunnel took us maybe 30 seconds, all of us screaming the whole way. When we burst into the sunlight, we were unable to stop because of the filmy layer of frog eggs and algae coating the cement, and wound up toppling into the muddy creek waters, one on top of another. Climbing out, our pants soaking wet, we all agreed that the whole episode was just about the dumbest thing we’d ever done.

When we tried it again the next day, we had bigger candles.

The trudge seemed endless, though perhaps time passes more slowly when your flesh is being coated in hot wax. Mentally, I calculated that we had walked at least 11 miles, and might even be going back in time, when suddenly we encountered something we’d never expected to find in such a place: water. Some junk had washed into the tunnel, forming a dam, behind which stretched what appeared to be an endless, bottomless black sea.

You might think we decided to climb over the dam and either wade or swim on, but that would have been stupid. We turned around and left the tunnel.

To go get a boat.

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