My Other Colorado Adventure

Last week, Cindy and I went on vacation to Colorado. We climbed Mt. Democrat. We stayed in an awesome bed-and-breakfast. We clambered and explored in Eleven Mile Canyon. We hung out with Cindy's brother Kevin and his wife Jessie, and Cindy's high-school friend Kristy and husband Ryan. It was a great week in which we occasionally wore jackets while our mid-western friends and family sweltered in temperatures topping 100.

I hesitated at first, however, to share this other story, but I have decided it's too good to miss.

Our story begins late last Sunday evening. We pulled up in front of Kevin and Jessie's house in Colorado Springs, where we were staying. It was late at night and we were both tired. I parked by the side of the road, with Cindy's passenger door directly over a drainage grate. (In hindsight, this should probably have been avoided.) Cindy gathered a large armful of various items that needed to go inside the house, and opened her door. Her phone was held loosely under one finger. When she moved to get out of the car - alas! - the phone slipped from her fingers, and she watched in horror as it fell neatly between the bars of the drainage grate and out of sight into the sewers below. She was understandably distraught - not, you understand, because she is one of these loathsome, execrable girls who experience withdrawal symptoms if prevented from texting for over ten minutes. No, her dismay was rather due to the fact that she's nowhere close to a renewal of contract, and there is no insurance on the phone; so we were looking at paying full retail price for a replacement phone. If you have ever been faced with a broken or lost phone, you know that these so-called "full retail prices" are set by servants of Sauron just after undergoing a root canal.

So, I grabbed a flashlight and checked out the drainage grate. To my dismay, the phone was far below in a large drainage tunnel about fifteen feet in diameter. It was lying on moist concrete out of the small stream of water, but it was definitely out of reach. The drainage grate was concreted into the street and wouldn't budge. Kevin came out and helped me take stock of things. There was a manhole in the middle of the street. We reasoned that this manhole might connect to the tunnel twenty feet away, so we got a crowbar and lifted the lid. Unfortunately, the ladder of the manhole just led down to a tiny drainage tube that undoubtedly led to the tunnel we sought, but was inaccessible to anyone larger than a marmot.

At this point, we gave up and went to bed.

On Monday morning, I went to the Verizon store, and was essentially told, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." The full retail price in question was $399. And no, they don't package it in a solid gold box for that price. I left the store thinking vague thoughts of Ebay or armed robbery.

When I got back to the house, I looked through the grate again and saw the phone lying there forlornly, the battery cover off to one side. I noted the direction of the water's flow, started looking at the lay of the land and absently got into my car and drove around the block to find the next drainage grate downstream. It was equally inaccessible. I kept circling, headed gradually downhill. About a half mile down the hill, there was a creek with high concreted retaining walls on both sides. I strolled up and down, looking for the tunnel. This I found after some searching. I clambered down the muddy wall with the aid of a random tree that was growing nearby.

Then I approached the mouth of the tunnel. My phone has an LED camera flash on it that can be used as a flashlight, so I turned it on and looked uneasily into the inky depths of the tunnel's concrete-and-corrugated-steel maw. I checked the sky - just some distant wispy clouds with nothing really threatening-looking as far as flash floods - and started walking. In my ears were echoing the dire warnings of my parents about drainage tunnels. I ignored them and kept walking. I counted my paces from the entrance. The tunnel made a slight bend about fifty paces in, and then all daylight was gone. I started picturing scenes from several movies. I kept walking upstream and counting paces, reasoning that I would recognize the look of the tunnel under where our car was parked from my careful examinations on the surface. The tunnel never divided, and the various bends seemed to coincide with my surface explorations, so I kept walking. Occasionally there would be glimpses of daylight from a drainage pipe coming in from the sides. After 800 paces (which I estimate at about a third of a mile), I came to a place where striped sunlight was streaming straight down onto a cell phone. I picked it up and examined it. It didn't seem damaged, and it hadn't been lying in the water. I pressed the power button and got nothing, but I remembered that the battery had been low the night before. So I turned and headed back downstream. I didn't bother counting paces this time, since the tunnel had never divided and I reasoned that all I had to do was go downstream. After walking for some time, I started regretting my decision not to count paces - the blackness started creeping up behind me a bit and I heard lots of critters scuttling in the darkness. My weak little camera-flash beam showed me about ten or fifteen feet of tunnel behind me - just enough to help indistinct shapes look scarier. But to my relief, a few minutes later I rounded the final bend and saw daylight ahead. Then all I had to do was climb back up the wall, come out on the sidewalk, and nod politely to a bemused jogger who happened along at that moment.

I drove back to the house, and presented the phone to Cindy with a flourish. With trepidation, we plugged the phone into its charger. It booted up and worked perfectly. At this moment, I experienced one of those moments of manly triumph that one experiences sometimes. I felt like a HERO OF NORSE LEGEND.

Now I know this was a rather stupid thing to do. I know I'm setting a bad example for any foolish minors who might be reading this. But for $400 (or even the $200-250 it would have cost to buy a used replacement phone on Ebay), I would probably do it again... after carefully checking the weather report.