Straight Jacket, Apartment D12!!

I hope you all know how much I trust you. I'm about to recount a story which, should you relay it to anyone in the psychiatric care profession, would probably be grounds for involuntary admission.

Tonight, 7:15 pm. Shelly needs to take a break from her studying for her DE exam. Yesterday, I noticed a new mother duck with six babies on the lake (we saw her two weeks ago but hadn't since; we'd thought they'd met a bad end but yesterday happily proved otherwise). Shelly decides that the perfect break would be to go see/feed the baby ducks and goslings. I concur.

We travel down to the lake, spread out the grain on the shore and go to the dock to feed them bread. The ducklings and mother are nowhere to be seen.

We content ourselves to feeding the other adult ducks, but keep randomly hearing plaintive peeping emanating from somewhere nearby. Soon the mother and four babies emerge from the bushes along the shore. The peeping continues unabated.

Triangulating on the source, I get a bad feeling. The peeping has a faintly echoing sound and is coming in the direction of the shore near an overflow drain. Leaving the dock and walking around to the shore, I'm relieved to see a fifth baby racing across the grass towards the lake, where he rejoins the mother. Still no sign of baby number six.

From the shore, there's no doubt: The peeping is coming from the drain, which lies 7-8 feet off shore. Here's a picture; the drain is circled in white.

Since I had my fishing pole with me (don't ask), I tested the depth. It's only about a foot deep in between. Shelly, still on the peer, incredulously asks me what I'm going to do- I can't use the fishing pole to get the baby out?! No, I just want to look down into the drain and see what I can do.

First set of inhibitions reluctantly set aside, I kick off my sandals and wade into the water, out to the side of the drain. Immediately I see that the drain is only about five feet deep and dry on the bottom. A lonesome but healthy duckling is running in circles peeping his head off, but there's no way the mother could have gotten him out and she's apparently given up on him.

Shelly suggests I lower a bucket into the drain, coax the baby into it, and retrieve him. Having once raised ducks myself, I know the last thing that duckling will do is get anywhere near something that has anything to do with me. In fact, as soon as he sees me, looming over the side of the drain, he immediately panics and runs to the other side.

So, what's a rational, well-adjusted person to do? Probably not lower himself into the drain, complete with a dead, decomposing fish at the bottom, but that's what I do. Trying to be gentle, I slowly corner the duckling, reach towards him and...

...he darts into the overflow pipe on the drain's side, running twenty feet down this dank, dark, slimy tube before stopping and continuing to peep shrilly.

I swear creatively. Shelly, on the dock with three, highly amused Asian girls, is laughing hysterically. I look out over the side. Fortunately, only the four of them have seen what's happening, but I'm definitely the center of attention.

I take another gander at the pipe. It's maybe four feet high, and I can see light at the other side of it, about a hundred feet away, where it ends at the little creek that runs through the middle of our apartment complex. It ends in the general area of the red circle on the picture, well over that hill that cuts off the view.

What's a rational, well-adjusted, already grimy individual to do? Certainly not stoop over and stalk into the pipe after the duckling, but that's what I do. Maybe I can drive it out the other side and catch it more easily in the creek?

Ever seen Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers? Shelob's Lair? It was kind of like that. The light gets less and less. At first, the spider webs are sparse, but they get thicker and thicker as I proceed. There's a small amount of standing water at the bottom of the pipe. I can occasionally see it rippling as the duckling runs through it away from me. I keep talking to the duckling, trying to keep it in front of me.

It gets very, very dark. I'm maybe two-thirds of the way through the pipe. I'm hoping to God there's nothing else in here. I think the duckling's let me get closer, probably because he also can't see me. I'm straddling the bottom of the tube slightly because I don't want to step in the foulness that is that water and don't want to crush the duckling.

Something brushes past my foot, going the other direction. The duckling? A rat? A snake? Some unclean, noisome creature of the underworld? I hope for the former.

I turn around. The water is rippling in a hurry back towards the drain. I catch a glimpse of the duckling's profile against the light. I turn around and head back.

No more messing around. I corner the duckling, grab him, and lift him up over the side into the lake water. Shelly, watching from the pier, tells me he circles thrice, peeping crazily, before getting his bearings and making a b-line for his mother, who nudges him and gratefully welcomes him back to her flock. Shelly later tells me "You know, he thinks he just got away somehow!"

I hoist myself out of the drain and wade back to the shore. Shelly can barely speak she's laughing so hard. The Asian girls continue to smile at me knowingly. "Back in China, they shoot the mentally deficient!", their grins say to me. Shelly grooms reams of spider web off my clothes and hair, still in hysterics. I'm not able to laugh about it quite yet. Having had enough adventure for one evening, I decide that I've never needed a shower worse, and head back to the apartment.

That duckling had better go on to have a full, productive life, that's all I can say.