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Year: 1997?
Region: Residential suburbia
Drain accessibility: A (now) open entrance where one is relatively likely to get wet, but several manholes upstream from there are relatively easy to open topside and more or less invisible to the general public.
Drain exitability: Harvey's manholes are heavy bastards that one would be hard-pressed to pop from underneath. No alternate exit other than the entrance has yet been found.
Traversability: The entrance tunnel is relatively large but beyond there the drain consists, at best, of pipes that one can crawl on all fours or sort of hop through. At worst, you can't fit your arm into them. The manhole chambers are high-ceilinged near the downstream entrance and relatively entertaining, if you're into that sort of thing, and the distance between them isn't totally unforgiving.
Interesting features: Not much. There are some deep catch basins one can access that are quite bright in the day but not particularly special. There's a waterfall in the third chamber from the downstream entrance, but it's concreted over in front so that you can't see it. All things considered it's a pretty damn boring drain, which doesn't explain why we come back to it so often. Maybe it's because there's a motherfucking beaver.
Hazards: Pipes this small tend to be exhausting and if you proceed under the roads no doubt oxygen would become a concern. Some of the drops going downstream are dangerous and, oh yeah, and there's a motherfucking beaver.
Recommendation: An endless, hot, crawling journey underneath the roads of suburbia. If that sounds good to you, do it. Otherwise check out the first three or four chambers just to say you've been (and meet the beaver!), and don't push it. We've been up to the first junction under the road and beyond, and it's pretty uniform all the way through. To be fair, it's rather forgiving for a crawling drain. It's your call. Personally, I'd go do Queen's first...
October 13th, 2001
Yeah, that's right, film. Finally we've got some photos of the damn thing and, yes, we have the picture of the beaver.
The original write-up, of course, from Way Back In Th'Day, is below the photos.
Woop!
And a fine, sunny day it was on this return to the wildlife preservation
site that is Harvey Drain.
There's no denying the entrance looks welcoming but a little too high did
the water run on this day,
so it was opted that we take the more straightforward way in.
And we're in. A nice shot of the sky through a grate in the main (and
only noteworthy) chamber of Harvey.
Foreboding signs of occupancy...
Down the next pipe we scamper, until tiny, all-too-familiar splashes are heard, followed by the "shhhhhhiiikk" of a wet mammal going down a concrete slide and a slap of a large, leathery tail... everyone freezes, myself in the lead, Asher and Grebin in rear, as my wet, irate nemesis crawls into the other end of the pipe and begins to charge -- my previous warnings to Asher and Grebin are no longer a laughing matter, as we scamper as much as is possible in the four-foot RCP to escape the beaver's fiery wrath...
"Grrrr, argh!" One must admire Grebin's courage in taking the risk to
stand in one place long enough to photograph
the vicious beast.
Having caused us all to soil our respective undergarments, the beaver
swims off into the sunset...
Are you SURE it's gone?
Grebin and Asher wanted to see more of the drain but I hardly wished to encounter the beaver once again, so we elected to pop a manhole further upstream, past some waterfalls that the beaver couldn't possibly have climbed up.
Asher does the Harvey Thang.
Ah, the pipes of Harvey are so delightfully roomy in their
three-point-five-footness. I'm moving to Melbourne.
A warning from the to-be UEC to the drainers of the future...
And now, the original write-up.
- Flame0ut
April 17th, 2001
When we had first found this drain the main entrance was locked up tight, but over the course of a few hours we managed to deal with it. We were aware that leaving it open would mean that other, perhaps more foolhardy, drainers could enter it easily, but until today I never actually expected to meet one.
Nonetheless I was just bored enough to pay this drain a visit. I packed light -- a crowbar, a sledge-mallet and some flashlights. I figured I'd test the efficacity of the little mallet in popping manholes from below, and failing that I'd... I don't know, meditate or something.
So I went on my way to the Harvey drain. The water around the entrance was irritatingly high so rather than go in that way I decided to open a manhole going into the entrance chamber. I employed all my great, brutish strength to pop this manhole with my insignificantly small crowbar, put on a pair of silly-looking flashlight glasses and clambered my way down into the tunnel.
It occurred to me once I was inside that if I wanted to test my mallet I would have to travel down the crawl-pipe to the next chamber, as the manhole above me was now open (you see).
I squeezed into the pipe next to me and began awkwardly hopping my way down the thing. Suddenly I heard a loud "sploosh" from upstream, and froze. Strange noises were a rare thing in this part of the drain, what with the nearest road being several hundred feet away and lightly-used.
I moved a few more feet before another wet sound, much closer this time, stopped me in my tracks. My heart began racing, and I contemplated that perhaps there was someone else already in this drain.
I looked at the pipe floor below me and saw wet prints on either side of the meager flow of water. Someone had been through here recently.
I decided to turn around, as I was only about thirty feet into the pipe. I reversed my direction with some difficulty and began hopping back out, when I heard a series of splashing noises rapidly accelerating towards me.
I turned, panicked, and saw a dark shape several feet down the tunnel. It was just sitting there, and in the dim light of my flashlight glasses (which I only use to see my way through these pipes, not to examine anything) I could only get a vague shape. It was clearly a large, wet mammal of some kind -- perhaps an unusually big raccoon.
We sat and sized each other up in the gloom for a moment, until I decided to take action.
"Hey," I said. It didn't respond.
I was given to briefly ponder who here had the advantage. On the one hand, in this environment it was definitely faster and more maneuverable than me. On the other, I was a sentient human being, with all the wits, resourcefulness and intelligence thereof. Confident in my grasp of the situation, I said, "you're fluffy, aren't you?"
This it seemed to take offense to, and it took a step towards me. I made the executive decision to get the hell out of there, turned back towards the exit and began hopping like buggery. As soon as I started running, so did it, and it was much faster than I was.
Looking back I suppose the animal had made it as far as I had in the drain and knew that if it went back there it would be trapped, but at the time I was convinced that it was going to kick my ass. I threw myself out of the mouth of the pipe and grabbed onto a high rung of the ladder I had entered by, a split-second before the animal hurtled out after me and landed in the water of the main entrance with a tremendous splash.
It began paddling its way downstream in far too capable a manner for a raccoon. I decided I couldn't leave without finding out just what this thing was, so I hauled myself back out of the manhole, put away my flashlight glasses and pulled my big ol' photon-blasting lamp-flashlight. I hopped the fence around the downstream entrance and shone my light in through it, but the animal was too far away to really get a good look at. As such I hopped the fence again and clambered my way back down the manhole, then began the awkward, bow-legged process of walking over the waters in the entrance tunnel towards the animal.
At first it seemed agitated by my presence but I did manage to get within a dozen feet of it. It had a broad, brown back, and it was clear that it wasn't a raccoon. I considered that it may have been a muskrat or something of the design, or perhaps an exceptionally hydrodynamic groundhog.
At this point the animal decided to turn around and check me out, which, to be fair, scared the hell out of me. It swam right up to me and I was able to see that it had a wide face with a large, squarish black nose, small eyes, and a huge, flat, leathery black tail.
A motherfucking beaver.
Eighteen years I've lived in Canada and damned if I've ever seen a beaver in the wild.
After that, the beaver went his way and I went mine (note: when your legs are splayed out across four feet over a foot of water, turning around without soaking yourself is well nigh impossible). As I left and replaced the manhole, it was still swimming around outside the entrance.
Could this add a new dimension to draining?
"Why do you drain?"
"Personally, I do it to see the wildlife."
At any rate, I submit that we add "beavers" to the list of dangers of Canadian drains, and that "storm sewers" be listed as one of the official habitats of the beaver.
Damn, they're scary bastards in the dark.
-Flame0ut
.