Now, where was I...?

They say there is a tunnel that runs under the Ohio River from S-town to, well, the other side of the river.

I have heard this urban legend, old wives' tale for years.

Most people, I am sure, would simply pooh-pooh it, or dismiss it out of hand. (Or is that the same thing?)

But, I ask you: what if it were true?

What if there really were, was, be’d a tunnel under that there river???

I certainly believed it whole-heartedly as a child growing up in S-town.

The story we were told was that a tunnel ran underneath the river and the local Indians used it to travel back and forth from one side to the other.

This made complete sense to me at the time. I was a savvy kid, too; smart enough to know there was no S-town Bridge back when the Indians lived in the area. And no ferry, either.

The Indians would have had to paddle their birch bark canoes back and forth, and that probably would have taken a long time as the river looked pretty darned wide to me as a little kid peering out across a stretch of the Mighty Ohio.

And even though the Indian braves were probably in really good shape from all of that hunting and canoeing and war-fighting stuff, it would have been kind of hard to paddle when the weather was bad and it was windy and the water choppy. Or if it was raining really hard, or winter and chunks of ice were barreling downstream like fat women in the middle of the aisle at K-Mart during a Blue Light Special.

And what about the squaws with papooses on their backs? And all their small Indian children? And all those elders who had to make deer skin soft by chewing on it with toothless gums? How would they ever have been able to paddle back and forth across the river in a canoe?

I was sure, as a kid, there must have been plenty of reasons for the Indians to want to cross back and forth across the river, even if there was no town over there then.

Or a mall.

Or a Wal-Mart or Costco.

(Although there was no Wal-Mart or Costco over there either when I was growing up, but you know what I mean.)

All the same, I am sure there were good berry patches or bigger deer. Or something enticing.

Other tribes wandering up from West Virginia or Ohio wanting to trade stuff like pemmican and baskets and raccoon pelts and whatnot. You know, there could have been any number of reasons for people to want to cross back and forth over/under the river.

My reasoning followed: If the Indians could have simply walked through a tunnel to cross the river, wouldn’t their lives have been much easier?

It made perfect sense to me.

Plus, it was a well-known fact that there were lots of caves up in the limestone cliffs between the S-town Cemetery and the town reservoir. It would make sense if one of those caves was really just a super long cave (or tunnel!) and that it ran all the way under the river.

Afterall, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher had gotten lost in a really long dark cave in Missourah with that mean Injun Joe guy after them. So, clearly Indians liked caves and knew their way around them much better than silly little white children who wandered off aimlessly from Sunday School picnics when they weren’t supposed to.

All my friends and I needed to do, when we were young ‘uns, was to find the entrance to this really long cave that no one knew the location of any longer, as the Indians were long gone, and then we could criss-cross the river simply by going under it.

Now, wouldn’t that be cool?

I mean, not only were we not allowed to cross the S-town Bridge by ourselves, we weren’t even allowed to cross the Boulevard that ran between S-town and the river because we might get run over by cars, buses, dump trucks, or eighteen wheelers.

Our parents would never need to know we were crossing the river. And we would be totally safe because we would be using a tunnel that Indians had used. Even the squaws and little children and old people had used the tunnel, so it had to be safe.

Right?

It sounded like a perfect plan to me....