Down By The River

Disclaimer:  I do not condone any of the things I mention below; and Mom – definitely do NOT read this particular blog entry.  Okay, well, it was the fall of 1984 and it was time to go off to college so I moved from my parent’s house in Waukesha, WI to the Pioneer Hall dorm on campus at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.  It is right on the East River Road overlooking the Mississippi River.  I did not know anybody when I moved in, but in the dorms it was easy to make friends and pretty soon I had a fairly cool crew of guys I would hang with.  One of my favorite things to do was to hang out on the banks of the Mississippi.

The first guy I met at the dorms was Reinhart (Reiney) Simpson who was in the neighboring Frontier Hall.  Then he introduced me to Ron Bronson and the rest of the guys from his dorm, as well as Sean Morrison from his hometown who was now hanging in Minneapolis.  The first day Reiney introduced me to Sean, Reiney was busy for the day so he said that Sean and I should just hang out.  We clicked the moment we met.  I worked in the dorm cafeteria and I thought he might be hungry so I brought him some sandwiches.  Sean in turn had some acid and he offered me some.  We had nothing to do all day so we each took a hit and went down to the river.  We then spent the next 8 hours climbing around the banks of the river, exploring the winding river and getting to know each other.  Sean is the closest thing I have ever met to Jim Morrison in person…full of life but wild, crazy and reckless...somehow managing to stay alive while always on the edge.  He is the catalyst for countless crazy nights and you will see his name again.  He stood up in my first wedding and we still hang out after almost 3 decades.

The river flats down below the dorm was a good place to study, but also to meet girls.  I used to wrap my 5 foot Ball Python ‘Damien’ around my neck and go down to the river with my school books.  Before long a girl would notice Damien and would come over wanting to know:  Is he real? Will he bite? Is he poisonous? Can I touch him?  Of course I was more than happy to let the girls touch my snake.  But in addition to being a place to meet people, the river banks were a great place to come down with your friends and smoke pot and hang out.  One warm, sunny afternoon in the spring of 1985 Ron and I were down by the river passing a joint when we noticed off to our left a big white blob of snow and ice about the size of a large pumpkin.  We looked all around and it was the only snow you could see anywhere.  It was the very last of the last of the snow from that winter.  So we finished our joint, dug up the ice boulder, carried it down to the river, and ceremoniously dumped it in thus officially ending winter in Minneapolis.

Almost from the beginning we also took to exploring...the banks, the cliffs and soon the undersides of the bridges over the Mississippi.  The Franklin Avenue bridge, the I-94 bridge, the Washington Avenue bridge, 10^th Avenue bridge, 35-W bridge, Stone Arch Bridge, etc.  Most of the bridges had some sort of metal gate, fence or barrier to discourage people from climbing them, but they were all fairly easily bypassed by climbing over or around them.  The toughest one was the I-94 bridge.  The only entrance on to that bridge was blocked by a thick sheet of metal that stuck out several feet over a drop-off that was a good 20 to 30 feet.  It was manageable for a guy to climb around, but tough for a smaller girl.  One night we had Mark Smith’s girlfriend Mindy dangling over the edge as we passed her around the barrier…from me on land to Mark on the bridge on the other side of the barrier.  It was hard but for some reason she completely trusted us and we managed to get her safely up on the bridge.

Once safely around whatever barrier the bridge had to offer we would climb out on the stone or metal or concrete arches and trestles that made up the undersides of the bridges.  But making it past the barrier did not mean that you were safe as there were catwalks to maneuver, concrete slopes to address, slick panels to hang on to and gaps to jump.  It was always an adventure.  One winter afternoon I was coming back from class, walking on the Washington Avenue bridge on top of the bridge the way you were supposed to and I saw some commotion up ahead.  A bunch of people were looking over the edge of the railing down to the river below.  I looked down and there was a body with a dark circle around it laying on the ice that was jutting out from the shore.  Suicide.  For some reason the image of that dead person fallen from the bridge did not translate to what could happen to me if I climbed under the bridges.  It was exciting and dangerous and we were extremely high above the water, but when you were 18 or 19 you had that feeling of invincibility and you had absolutely no feeling that you could die.

Case in point…have you ever seen the vampire movie ‘The Lost Boys’ with Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, and Corey Haim?  There was a scene in the movie where all the vampires are casually hanging under a bridge by their fingertips.  I thought that looked like a lot of fun so one night Mark and I were under the I-94 bridge and I decided to try it.  This bridge is all metal beams so I lowered myself over the edge of the bottom of an I-beam and hung there for awhile, looking around and taking it all in from this unique vantage point…nothing but my fingertips holding me up a hundred feet over the middle of the Mississippi River.  I was fearless and nothing could hurt me...but in addition to Mark urging me to come back up my fingers starting getting tired.  So I pulled myself back up on to the beam, heart pounding with exhilaration.

Rain or shine or snow, it didn’t matter…pretty soon we were addicted to exploring the riverbanks and bridges and we were out there every chance we could.  I remember hanging out with Reinhart in a small cave we had found during a pounding torrential rainstorm.  Granted we were tripping, but the lightning show that night was the most vivid and intense I had ever seen.  We were safe and warm and dry in our little cave looking out at almost constant lightning flashes over the river and the city in the background for several hours.  Another time Reiney and I were down by the river at the cave and we drank a bunch of ‘Mad Dog 20-20’ fortified wine, again in a rainstorm.  We got pretty drunk and the tricky part was trying to climb back up the steep cliff to the top to civilization.  The rain had turned the dirt and rock cliff into a slick mudslide which made it nearly impossible to climb, especially drunk.  Well we finally made it almost all the way to the top of the cliff.  Sensing victory I relaxed for a second and suddenly started to slide back down over the edge.  Just asI was about to plummet all the way down the cliff Reiney grabbed my jacket collar and hung on till I was able to secure my footing and get back up.  He saved my life that night…thanks Reiney.

In the winter we would go under the Franklin Avenue bridge where a huge storm drain lets the city’s water run-off into the river in a big waterfall.  Of course it would mostly freeze in the winter forming a huge, beautiful frozen waterfall.  It was slick and dangerous but fun to climb into the ice caves high above the river.  Another extremely fun/stupid trick we would pull on the arch bridges would be to ‘ski’ on our shoes down the concrete arches as low as we could, stopping just above the point of no return as the arch would gradually get steeper and steeper the further down you went.  It never happened, but the threat was that if you went too far you would just keep sliding till you were free-falling down to the water.

Another facet to exploring the riverbanks opened up to us one night when we were climbing around and came upon a mysterious opening in the side of the steep hill.  What’s this?  There was a metal gate over the concrete opening but we found that we could contort our bodies and slip past it.  It was a round concrete tunnel about 4 feet high with water running through it about 6 to 12 inches deep.  Cool!  So we ran back to the dorms and got flashlights and a whole new underground world was opened up to us.  It turns out there are miles of tunnels under the University of Minnesota crisscrossing all over campus, some concrete, some wooden and some dirt.  After many trips in there we eventually got to know most of them by heart…all of the various turns, cross-tunnels, stairs, shafts, and elevators. 

Our experience came in handy the time we only had one flashlight and my buddy Ron dropped it into the water.  Much of the inner-inner tunnels had some lighting from hanging light bulbs, but that long narrow water drain exit/entrance that we used to get in and out was not lit.  Luckily we were only a couple hundred feet in and we were able to feel our way back out.  After many nights of exploring we eventually found an entrance into one of the campus buildings that was built many floors deep underground.  If we did not feel like going back through the tunnels to the riverbank and getting our feet wet again, we could open up a ceiling panel into the hallway of the building and drop down and we would be in the real world again.  We would then just take an elevator back up to the surface and be done for the night.

Yes the riverbanks provided us with several years and countless nights of entertainment but it all came to a screeching halt one sad night.  Like any other night me, Mark Smith, my girlfriend Lona and our roommate Claudia Tribbiani hopped on our motorcycles with a small amount of acid and a large bottle of wine and went down to the river.  We decided to hang out on the west bank under the I-94 bridge.  We were still on land but under the bridge when we heard a bunch of voices and a beer bottle came crashing down near us.  We walked up on to the West River Road that ran under the bridge and there were a bunch of guys yelling and running down from the bridge towards us.  Mark and Lona ran to our bikes to make sure they were okay, while Claudia and I just stood there waiting to see what they wanted.  Well…they were skinheads and what they wanted was to beat up me and Mark.

The first guy took a swing at my face and missed, and then another guy swung a beer bottle at my head and missed.  I was ducking and weaving and it was time to go, so Claudia and I ran up to where the bikes were with the skinheads on my trail.  They didn't care about the girls, they just wanted Mark and I.  There were 6 of them and they couldn’t catch me, but Mark was sitting on his bike and he got punched and knocked off his bike.  I could easily outrun any of these f*ckheads in their big black boots, but I couldn’t leave Mark alone so with 3 guys on my trail I circled back to help Mark.  I tripped, fell to the ground and they were on me, kicking and punching me while one guy broke a full beer bottle over my head.  Luckily an old man in the house right behind us had seen all of this and called the cops, so when the sirens came the skinheads scattered like the cockroaches they are.  We were all bloody so an ambulance came and took us to the hospital...bleeding and tripping.  This was about midnight and we were there at the hospital waiting to get stitched up most of the rest of the night.

Getting beat up sucked enough on its own, but the worst part was that it made me deathly afraid to go down to the river anymore.  We tried it one other time and I was so nervous that it was just not any fun.  My head was on a swivel and I was jumping at every noise thinking it was a pack of skinheads coming to get us.  My college career of hanging down by the Mississippi River was over, but we had a good run.  Although we stupidly defied death countless times, we had a blast and the memories of our adventures are always with me of those fun, carefree times when the river was ours and we did not realize we had any limitations.