Lost

In the back of the van are his four companions, who refer to themselves as “urban explorers.” Barry, a Cockney, has only two front teeth and a complete absence of hair. He is arguing with Angus, a retired coal miner, about which heavyweight champion had the weakest jaw. Opposite them, Phil tries to join in the conversation but his stutter gives the others too much time to interrupt. The only quiet member of the crew is Moley, who sits on the floor of the van checking ropes and lamps.

“It's the last frontier,” says Pete, talking to me. “Forty thousand miles of sewers, some of them hundreds of years old—it's a feat of engineering to rival the Suez Canal, but nobody gives your sewers a second thought. They just purge their poisons and flush them away.”

“But why explore them?”

He gives me a disappointed look. “Did they ask Hillary why he climbed Everest?”

“Yeah, they did.”

“OK. OK. Well these sewers are like Everest. They're the last frontier. You'll see. It's another world. Go down thirty feet and it's so quiet you can hear your pores opening and closing. And the darkness—it's unnatural. It's not like outside where if you wait your pupils dilate so that you can start making out shapes. Down there it's blacker than black.”

Barry leans through from the back of the van. “It's like a lost city. You got streams, culverts, shelters, basements, grottoes, graves, crypts, catacombs, secret places that the government don't want nobody to know about. It's a different world. One layer burying the next, just like rock sediments. Whenever the great civilizations crumble—Egyptian, Hittite, Roman—the one thing they always leave behind is their sewers and latrines. A million years from now archaeologists are going to be digging up our fossilized turds, take my word for it.”

“And a lot more besides,” adds Angus. “We find all sorts of stuff—jewelry, false teeth, spectacles, flashlights, gold coins, hearing aids, harmonicas, shoes—”

“I once saw a full-grown p-p-p-p-pig,” interrupts Phil. “Biggest p-p-p-porker you ever saw.”

“Happy as a pig in shit, was he?” cackles Angus. Barry joins in until Weatherman Pete tries to raise the tone.

“You know what a tosher is?”

“No.”

“Back in the eighteenth century they used to scour the sewers, panning the muck like you'd pan for gold. Imagine that! Then you had your gongfermers and rakers, who cleaned the sewers and repaired them. Nowadays they call them flushers. You might even hear some of 'em working tonight.”

“Why do they work at night?”

“There's less shit flowing.”

I wish I hadn't asked. Ray Murphy's wife had talked about him working as a flusher. Pete explains how teams of six men, with a ganger in charge, clear blockages by hauling silt out through the manholes.

“I know it sounds pretty antiquated but there's some high-tech stuff, too. They got these little boats—more like hovercrafts really—with cameras on 'em that film the inside of the sewers, looking for problems. You got to watch out for 'em. You don't want to get caught down there.”

The van skids to a halt on loose gravel in a deserted parking lot. As the rear doors open, Moley climbs out first and hands me a pair of overalls and waist-high waders. Next comes a safety harness and Sellafield gloves. Meanwhile, Weatherman Pete opens a yellow plastic suitcase and unfurls a retractable aluminum pole with a tripod and wind cups on the top.

“It's a portable weather station,” he explains. “It gives me wind speed, wind direction, temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, solar radiation and precipitation. Everything gets fed into a computer.” He opens a laptop and taps the keyboard. “Right now, you have a window of four hours.”

Moley adds a safety helmet and an emergency breathing apparatus to my outfit. He scratches his armpits one last time before he shimmies into his waders.

“Any cuts? Cover them up with waterproof Band-Aids,” says Barry, tossing a box toward me. “Weil's disease—you get that from rat urine. It gets into a cut and ends up in your brain.”

He checks my harness. “Let me tell you what can go wrong down there: fire, explosions, asphyxiation, poisoning, infection and rats that can strip the flesh off your bones. Nobody knows we're down there, so we can't guarantee the sewers are vented. There could be pockets of methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, benzene, CO₂ and gases I swear don't even have names yet. Don't touch your eyes or mouth with your gloves. Stick close to Moley. Nobody knows his way around like he does.”

He clips a gas monitor onto my harness.

Weatherman Pete gives a thumbs-up and Moley levers open a manhole cover, rolling it to one side. Then he lowers a safety lamp down the small circular shaft. Angus and Phil descend first, climbing down the iron rings. I'm squeezed between Barry and Moley.