Damsliding

041518

I just walked across the street from my house to speak with a police officer who was in the process of releasing a man child from within his shiny white Carmel PD-issued SUV.  I am currently wearing shorts and I do not have shoes on and the grass in the front yard was cold and so was the street.  The officer asked me if he could help me.  I declined help and asked him what the hell was going on in my neighborhood that necessitated two cop cars and a half-hour tongue-lashing of a moppy-headed tweener.  He said it was nothing serious.  I then said something that astounded me and probably startled the young blue-blood standing in the middle of the street with his slightly baggy shirt and pants and a loaded nine or 45 or whatever in his holster:  “Why didn’t you just shoot him?”  The kid had a shitload of hair on his head.  Like, it was sprouting out like an enormous sea-anemone or something.  Oh shit!  I just thought of it!  The kid had stolen Gallagher’s Hair!  It was figuratively Gallagher’s Hair!!  Way too much hair for one person to deal with.  Kid’s parents are probably going broke buying enough shampoo to wash that stuff.  Anyway the kid was disappearing around the corner while I was walking across the street to meet the young officer and my feet were cold and still are.  

The officer was in shock…I think…he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, fresh out of the academy…and I could feel a tension between us that was building up at tremendous speed because he didn’t know what to say next and I didn’t know what to say next and so I just sort of laughed nervously and I think I maybe tried to physically push down the invisible tension force-field between us with my hands.  That obviously looked stupid and awkward and neither of us knew what the next play was so I just said “Just some dumbass kid up to some mischief or something?”  And all of a sudden everything just relaxed.  He said that the kid had been growing weed in the woods across the street from MY HOUSE.  Well why in the hell hadn’t I thought of that?…I thought.  Never mind.  I could never grow weed.  NEVER.  Perish the thought immediately.  Back to reality.  But really?  The kid was growing a crop of marijuana in a small parcel of wooded land in a suburban housing development in Carmel, Indiana?  What an enterprising son of a bitch. 

 All of this is just a preamble to what I was really thinking of writing about tonight, which is the story of the night that I almost died at the bottom of the dam (is that really how you spell dam?  seems like a really wimpy word…dam.  it has nothing to prop itself up against.  and it literally is a thing that props something up…namely, water.  it needs another letter I think.  alas I am not the dictionary and so I can do nothing to help this poor word) at Geist reservoir.  This is a Wirtz story and for those of you who do not know Wirtz…well, you should.  Because he is a great man and has been my friend and loyal companion on many dark, twisted, death-defying adventures (literally five times that I can think of…and that means that I have a lot more to write about after this piece of whatever comes out of my head at 9:27 PM on Sunday the 15th of April, 2018)  

Wirtz/Richter stories from the era of which I will be writing tonight are almost always cursed to  end in either complete manly and glorious triumph over some preposterous made-up Quixotic challenge-OR…riding home in shame to our parents’ houses in one of our vehicles which most certainly acquired some significant damage, which we were very keen to keep hidden from the deadly view of the parents who would certainly do the unthinkable act of grounding us from those very vehicles!  Now…the thing about dam sliding is this:

You need to have a plan of action.  You need supplies.  You need the right people.  Personalities matter very much in these circumstances.  You need the right temperature and humidity and you absolutely MUST pay attention to any and all recent rainfall from the reservoir to wherever the water starts up north.  No fatties and no weaklings either…you have to be able to take care of yourself out there and that means knowing how to swim and how to climb up a muddy hill really fast, I mean REALLY fast if you see the red and blue lights a comin’.  Also…It helps to have a good mixture of boys and girls because the boys want to show off and the girls…well…the girls, they just really can make a night extraordinary, can’t they?  Yes they can.  Right, the next thing you need is a getaway driver and a vehicle, preferably a pickup truck so you can fit a lot of wet people in the back of the thing and speed away into the night.  You also need to have it stashed in a convenient, yet darkened section of one of those nearby communities along Fall Creek Road. You should be wearing whatever the hell you want to wear because you are about to do one of the most dangerous, yet strangely fun things that God himself just had to have invented and that is Dam sliding.  Yes, dam sliding.  You literally just jump off of a piece of concrete into the water just about five or ten feet from the top of the spillway, swim up to the spillway, and sit there.  You can sit there as long as you want to.  You could sit there for an hour if it suited you but I bet you wouldn’t because it would be boring and you would have to deal with all manner of whatever muck and crud ends up in the water that goes over the spillway.  Also there are huge carp there.  They swim around in circles just eating garbage all day long and growing.  I shit you not I have seen carp there that probably weighed a couple hundred pounds.  And those damned fish have enormous mouths.  They open up to the size of a goddam volleyball!  Certainly large enough to eat a baby. So it’s a good thing that most babies don’t go dam sliding.  

That was like a primer on dam sliding.  I hope you get the gist of it.  I did it loads of times and I am still alive and yes, I must say that I would recommend it if it were legal and if it had not rained too much in the week prior to the event.  So now on to the Wirtz/Richter story of the night.  I selected this one out of my memory-mansion because it is the simplest one with which to start.  Mark and I were bored one evening and being that we were 19 year old boys with no need for sleep and plenty of cheap beer which we had stolen, very very slowly over the course of three months from our parents’ garage refrigerators, we were ripe for some feggin action!  

Wait, wait, wait.  Maybe I should hold off on the story until I explain how most damsliding trips are run.  There are two decidedly different atmospheres for the two types of dam sliding groups that usually make these portentous expeditions.  On the one hand, you have the group which contains a mix of three or four boys and an equal amount of girls, and on the other hand, you have just Wirtz and I.  One of these groups will try and be as safe as possible going over that slimy concrete beast and ONE of them will not.  The mixy group will usually start off the night by doing the Dance of Joy from Masthead to the Dam while doing their best to be invisible to any motorist who might happen to be driving along that section of road at three o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday.  The Dance of Joy is performed as such:  strip all of your clothing off.  Shoes are optional.  I would recommend them for the climb back up the muddy bank.  Sing whatever song comes into your head at that moment and just start kicking up your legs one at a time in a sort of makeshift dance-walk thing as fast as possible to the dam road.  You NEED to be fast.  The cops around there used to be called Shorewood Patrol and those fuckers were known to hide in bushes with nightvision due to all of the capers we had perpetrated around those parts which to this day are still unsolved and still legendary.  So you need to be fast and you need to pick the exact, correct moment of when to start.  It may take a few trips before you get the hang of it but keep coming back and you’ll be a pro in no time.  

So back to Wirtz and Richter and the terrible calamity that befell them.  A quick primer on Wirtz:  He is absolutely and literally the most enigmatic man I have ever met and I can confidently say that I probably know him, the real him, better than anyone else aside from his mother, his brother Neil, and his wife and two daughters.  He’s the best of the best and he’s given me courage at times when I felt like death was a real honestly good option and I’ve probably punched some sense into him (sometimes literally) during times when he was manic and maybe was chasing windmills again.  This is a man who hitch-hiked to Alaska by goddam THUMB and satchel and tried to get on a crab boat.  He does not know boundaries.  And if he senses something like one that is anywhere near, you will know it because he will become very, very agitated and will probably want to “smoke a fag” ………as they say in Ireland and he will beeline away from that boundary or just smash right through it.  This is a little aside.  There is a question of legality in all of this and I am well aware of it.  I believe that the statutes of limitations on prosecution of any of the misdemeanor crimes that Mr. Wirtz and I have committed are well and duly expired by now and so I feel at ease with the continuance of my tale.  And as such…I shall continue:

We were not so much outlaw thug criminals as much as just mischievous little leprechauns having our way with the water companies’ happenstance occurring water park which just happened to be five minutes away from our homes.  But  you know what is better than five minutes away from our homes?  Three minutes away from a friend’s home.  And that is why we now bring in Chad.  Wirtz and I could probably have pulled off many of our stunts without the assistance of Chad, plus it just would not have been as much fun at all.  Chad is a little bit like me, a little bit like Wirtz, and, sorry, Chad, but a little bit like 1980s Pauly Shore.  Minus the gross short shorts.  But the personality?  Yup. Plus Chad’s mother stayed up all night doing crafts and shit for Chad’s sister’s cheerleading camps and whatnot.  And she didn’t mind it when we filed past the kitchen table buck naked with huge grins and huge ooother ssstuff just hanging out getting line-dried.  Chad’s mom is seriously one of the sweetest people I have ever met and she was extremely accommodating to maybe around four of us who would do the naked stroll through the kitchen.  Why were we naked?  Because it was 1993 and summer and 90 degrees and humid.  Naked is best under those conditions.  Period.  And we treated Joan as a second mother and what mother has not seen her babies naked?  Huh?  That’s what I thought.  

Chad’s house had a walkout basement which conveniently faced Fall Creek Road just a little way down from the dam.  Chad had recently moved his belongings into the basement and claimed it as his room, which his parents allowed…I think.  To this day I really just don’t know if that was true.  Why else would Joan always be screaming down the stairs at us at three o’clock in the morning to get out and that we have school tomorrow or work tomorrow or be quiet because Suzy’s cheerleading competition is tomorrow and Suzy needs to get her eight hours.  Chad would listen to all of this barrage of orders and ultimatums and ultimately decide to say something like this:  “Fuck off, MOM, close the fucking door we are almost done!!”  

Now…if you are thinking what I am thinking right now, you are probably thinking correctly. My mother would have stormed my hastily-locked door with a battering ram and whacked me across the face with the open, bare hand!  And I sure as shit would have deserved it too!  But to everyone’s astonishment (initially), Joan just simply shrugged it off and chuckled and went back to her crafts.  The thing is, and I knew this, Joan and Chad each knew the other was simply playing a part in a long-running Butler Family Production and each was a co-executive producer.  Thus they were able to make a good show of it while still maintaining a healthy mother/son relationship.  As a matter of fact, I know that Chad loves his parents very much and that they love him.  i actually lived with Chad for a very brief period of time back in the nineties.  And I got to know a bit about the family.  Good peoples.  

Back to damsliding, or rather the Legend of the Night When Two Local Muttonheaded Ninnies Made a Terrible Decision and Nearly Killed Themselves Inside a Spillway at the Geist Dam.  The story starts with our heroes drinking a fair amount of Busch Light beer in cans.  Much laughter and conversation ensued as the boys became light-hearted and bold due to the 5% alcohol in the nasty swill.  Busch Light really is not a tasty beer.  The boys, or rather we (I will now switch to first person point of view) probably had a few too many.  That was usually inevitable.  The summer of 1992 was a very special time in the lives of a very special group of people.  We basically lived in a commune that we created in a large piece of land which included two houses, a large section of Fall Creek Road, and the entrance to the neighborhood of Windjammer, in which the Butler house was nestled.  We were, for some reason, very fond of fucking up the entrance to Windjammer.  It was well-lit with a couple of large floodlights which illuminated a couple of landscape mounds with some evergreen trees and, of course, the neighborhood sign.  We liked to periodically steal the neighborhood sign and see how long it took for them to replace it.  We also liked to take the lightbulbs from the two floodlights…just for the hell of it.  I don’t know why we thought that was so funny, but we did.  The Butler house has already been discussed so you know that we were always welcome there and Joan loved us.  The other house we used in our commune belonged to Matt Confer, or rather his parents.  Fuck, I keep getting off-track of the Wirtz/Richter Tale of Danger and Intrigue and Stupidity.  We can come back to the commune and Confer’s house and emptying the change jar to get enough money to buy a fifth of Crowne Russe, which is the cheapest, shittiest vodka, possibly in the world.  I think we paid around $7.00 a fifth and it made many a member of our group very ill.  Dammit here is the story:

We drank a bunch of beer then, if I remember correctly, drove my little red Nissan truck over to the neighborhood directly adjacent to the dam.  That was close enough that we could make a quick, clandestine getaway in case of a raid by Shorewood.  And believe me, we fucked with them so many times that we knew their patrol schedule to a T and could usually predict when they would be passing by the dam road (I just love saying that).  So we parked the truck and quickly made the forty or so yards from the entrance to the neighborhood to the dam road.  Once there we ran down the road to the gate and then to the utility shed and the edge of the actual dam.  And that is where the meat of the story begins.

Here is a step by step guide to damsliding:  

1. Jump from the concrete wall into the water about 20 feet in front of the dam.

1. Swim around joyfully, contemplating what position you will assume when you actually do the slide.

1. Try not to get a disease from the gruesome cesspool into which you just willingly jumped.

1. Swim to the spillway and straddle it while assessing the depth and speed of the water going over it.

1. Hike your other leg over the spillway wall, put  your feet together with your arms crossed over your chest.

1. Slide!  

1. When you reach the bottom, allow the current to push you out.  Do not fight the undertow.

1. Swim to the bank and climb up the muddy embankment to the flimsy little fence at the top and climb over it to the blessed asphalt pad adjacent to the dam where all your friends are waiting for you.

1. Scream in triumph!…as you have just done a fucking daredevil thing that most of your buddies don’t have the stones to do.  

1. Remove all of your clothes and proceed directly to Chad’s house where festivities are certain to be happening.

So that is how you damslide.  It usually goes smoothly, just like in the guide above.  But…sometimes it does not.  When Mark and I are in sync and are dead set on getting into some mischievous adventure, very bad things tend to happen.  We tend to take things too far.  I think there is a certain personality type that cannot be truly satisfied in life unless they quite regularly have a sort of very visceral, awe-inspiring, almost…shocking experience that very nearly nudges them over the edge.  Hunter Thompson described the edge better than anyone ever could in the Hell’s Angels book.  I will not quote it but suffice to say that Mark and I are of that personality type and we were never satisfied back then unless our “expeditions” included a chance of death.  I am quite serious about that.  I think we just needed to thread ourselves into the world in such a way that the experiences we created were so elevated…so sublime that we were left exhausted, both physically and mentally.  At least that’s what our over inflated egos were tossing around inside our big, bloated minds.  That’s not to say that one or two of our outings weren’t sublime, in some sense.  I think that on occasion we produced a pretty damned good adveture, worthy of an article in Outside magazine or some such rag.  

Anyway I really am going to tell the story of how we almost died at the bottom of the dam now.  Mark and I had been somewhere doing something and were probably bored so we decided to go damsliding.  So we did.  We probably did the “four-timers” club thing, which is where you slide down the dam four times in four different positions:  feet first, head up—head first, head up—feet first, head down with arms supporting you—head first facing down with arms in front supporting you.  That is the four-timers club.  We probably did that or maybe tried to slide down the damned thing on our feet.  That part of the story is not really important.  The important part comes now…when we get tired of sliding and start to explore at the bottom of the dam.  You see, if the water flow is not too fast, you can stand at the bottom and walk around.  The dam is made of concrete and the bottom is curved to aid the flow of water.  There is a lot of algae and slime but it is quite walkable.  So we walked around the length of the thing and came upon one of the concrete walls that supports the embankment leading to the road.  The thing you need to know is that dams have little doorways at the bottom that can open and close to control the flow of water in the dam.  And we found one.  And so, naturally, we went inside.  To get inside you needed to swim under water and through the gate and about five or six feet of concrete tunnel to get to the other side of whatever the thing is and the most terrifying thing was that you didn’t even know if there was room to stand up once you got to the other side and you didn’t know if there was even air.  Add to that the fact that it was night and once inside the submerged tunnel there was absolutely NO LIGHT.  I mean it was as if you were actually blind.  I could not see a thing and I was scared shitless.  We made it through the tunnel and into some sort of chamber underneath the dam that was obviously used to control water flow.  We stood up and thankfully the depth of the water was the same as outside the dam so we had air.  But, as I mentioned before, there was honestly no light and we could not see our hands in front of our faces.  Mark and I decided to hold on to each other so we wouldn’t get lost.  At first we just stood inside the entrance to the chamber and tried and tried to see something…nope.  I have never been scared of the dark but I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced true, actual dark like this.  I admit I was terrified and I know damn well that Mark was also.  

So what would you do in this situation?  Call it an experience and immediately swim back through the tunnel to the safety of the gently flowing spillway?  That’s what we should have done but nooooo no no.  We were very very close to the edge and when you get that close and you have a friend with you who is so like-minded that communication is instinctual and sthere is no need for words when you need to make life or death decisions, well…

I’ll try and explain the feeling.  It starts like a small electric current that originates in your chest and radiates throughout your body.  The current gets stronger as you approach the edge.  You feel electricity and energy coursing through your core and your arms and your legs and suddenly everything gets very icy feeling and also very hot at the same time.  Your heart begins to pound in a way that is very distinct from the way it may pound in, say, a track meet.  It almost beats in rhythm with your carefully timed movements…if you stop and stand very still to listen for something, your heart stops and waits with you just to give you that little extra stillness needed to really listen to your immediate environment.  Your muscles begin to tense and your senses are all magnified…it’s almost too much to process.  As you move dangerously close to that hideous yet magnetic place (and it is a place, it is both a physical place—where you currently exist, and a mental place—your current state of mind) your body and mind revert to an ancestral, even archetypal state wherein the mid-brain takes over and all semblance of ego and personality are locked safely away so they do not interfere with the business at hand, which is of course, survival.  And then comes a feeling of resignation  and peace as you realize that you WILL go forward with the task at hand and you DO accept the grave danger that comes along with it.  There is a sort of buzz and a sense of being locked in to something and nothing and no one could break this sort of preternatural concentration.  

And that is it.  It is the most satisfying feeling in the world to get to that point, survive whatever predicament you were in that caused you to get there, and wind up at a steak and shake somewhere, anywhere, drinking coffee and drying yourself off with napkins.  

We decided, very much like idiots, to use our remaining senses, blind as we were, to explore the inside of the chamber.