Memories lost and found. 01. The Sewers

Before I had played any Final Fantasy or any action video game, I had already accumulated some miles in sewer diving.
Telling stories about my childhood is always interesting because they are unusual, hard to believe, and people think that I make them up. This time, the story is not about setting a hill on fire, jumping from waterfalls, or finding white bats in the palm tree of the backyard -- all of which I'll talk about in due time. This is me simply reminiscing about the time when in my neighborhood exploring sewers was the cool thing to do. It all started when I was around ten years old and the town hall decided that it was time to create a decent sewer system to deal with all the water that flooded the streets during rainy season. If you have ever been in Costa Rica, you know that it rains an awful lot. Now, I grew up in San Carlos, a region particularly blessed with the everlasting green scenery that just does not come out of the blue. My childhood town, in addition, is called Aguas Zarcas (Pristine Waters), and they were not kidding about the name just that they forgot to mention these waters run everywhere; only in my family's lot we had two creeks. Well, if the local government did not want all this water running freely, they had to build concrete sewers underground in several points. And so they did. My friend Lilliana (the sweet girl from my church who lived the closest to the center of the town) and I watched the construction process very comfortably from her house and swore that, once they had finished placing the huge cylinders, we would go and explore.
The construction of the sewers was done by the dry season of the following year. It rains all the time in San Carlos, but one occasional rain every two days did not flood the underground structure. The first invaders? Nope, they weren't the rats, which were rarely spotted in my town. Neither was the fungi or any kind -- and they mushroom fast! It was us, the kids on a radius of five hundreds meters lurking on the sewers that connected the center of the town with the local clinic and Lilliana's house. For us, grown up unaffected by the concerns of the mothers of this generation, the humidity, the lack of light, and the narrow spaces were the perfect elements for a new environment of adventure otherwise denied to us. We didn't know about risks or diseases. We would squat or walk like spiders if it was necessary, but we wouldn't let water ruin our adventure. Down there we were explorers, riders of the lost ark, fugitives: we were immortal. For the fragments of time that we could be alone with the echoes of our voices uttering the instructions on how to move, following a trace of dim light - cause we were too afraid of borrowing our father's flashlights, and getting our elbows dyed with the gray of concrete, the upper world stopped existing. We did not have the influence of the media telling us that we were a little bit too grown up for role plays or that we should live our lives around goodies and tv shows. Our friends at school have similar adventures themselves so we could go, talk, and share our daring pastimes. Ok, we encountered rats twice, but after running away from them, we got some sticks and went back willing to fight back for our territory.
Moss grew, time passed--we abandoned childhood. With the time, the sewers became Lilliana and I's place to talk, mostly. Boys started appearing in her life, and we traded the hideout for her romantic encounters with boys in the bridge above the entrance to the sewers. I went by myself a couple of times to our former underground fortress, but soon I decided to stop trying to revive old glories and to move on. I think that getting stuck twice also helped making up my mind.
Well, that's about my first entry on "lost and found" memories. I'm glad it hit me because I had totally forgotten about it. Whenever nice memories come to me again, I'll try to share them ASAP.