There is this large drainage ditch behind the house I grew up in.  We just called it “The Ditch”.

The ditch, and yes… that's the house I grew up in.

The ditch is connected to the storm drain system the city has in case of heavy rain (which we never got).  If you jumped into the ditch and walked about 2 blocks you would come to the point where the underground storm drain system met the ditch.

Entrance into the storm drain system

One day my friends and I had the brilliant idea of walking into the storm drain to see how far into town it went.  The storm drain was about our height (maybe 4 to 5 feet…who knows), so it was pretty easy to walk in.  The storm drain was dark inside, so we searched all of our houses for flashlights. Unfortunately we couldn’t find any, but that was not about to stop us from having our fun.  I had thought up the perfect solution to this… We would use fire.  That’s right… fire!   We each found a long stick, wrapped bath towels around the tip of them, put a little bit of lighter fluid on them, and you guessed it…  set them on fire!  It seemed to be working, so we started our journey into the storm drain.  We walked about three blocks or so inside the storm drain when one of my friends dropped their stick.  Being a storm drain the floor of it had a little bit of water which put out his burning towel.  A few more feet in my towel had burned so much that it fell off the stick and into the water.  With one burning stick/towel thing left we decided it might be best to walk back before we lost all light.  Unfortunately for us, my friend forgot the walls of the storm drain were curved.  His torch hit the wall, broke apart and fell into the water.  Darkness!  We all panicked and ran, screaming like girls, for the little dot of light which was the opening we came thru.  Once we made it out I looked over at my friends, and their faces were all black! Our hands were all black… we were covered in soot!!  It was such a damn mess!

I guess a burning towel lets off some pretty nasty smoke.  Let me tell you… It was not easy to clean either.

And that… is one of Nick’s Greatest Moments.