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It was after sunset last Friday night and I headed out to check on the progress of my tree watering. I don't normally take a flashlight along even though it gets rather dark; I can navigate my way around the yard by moonlight and check wetness using the finger test.

This time, I grabbed a flashlight and thank heavens for that - a large gaping hole appeared right in front of my feet just as I crossed into the front yard next to the well house. Surely, I would have stepped right into it and broke a foot or two, the neck, perhaps, was it not for the flashlight. Armed with it I peered into the hole. Most certainly it was deep and man made, its collapse - most likely the result of the previous Sunday's massive rainfall. I left examining the hole in more detail for the morning and went about my business of finger sampling moisture around the trees.

The following morning my dad, who stayed the night, was full of advice and ready for action. I, on the other hand, was in a more contemplative mood: What did this hole lead to? An entrance to an ancient sacred burial site or a WWII bomb shelter catacombs, an emergency food supply storage? Probably nothing that exciting, yet I was curious. Eventually, dad and I decide to enlarge the opening and look in a bit closer.

Two feet underground lay a three foot diameter round entrance to a structure that must have itself been at least six feet deep. The structure was apparently made of red brick, which was covered with some sort of mortar (probably multiple layers cement, concrete or plaster) on the inside. Judging by its construction and location between the newer well house and the wellhead, it was almost certainly used to hold water - I am guessing at least 200 cubic feet of it.

My current state of the art submersible Grunfos 2HP pump takes water from the Arapahoe aquifer well 384 ft underground; it's been doing that since July of 1987, which makes it 22 years old now. The house I live in was built in 1976 and something less sophisticated delivered water from lower depths before. But even earlier, as early as 1930s there was a house here and it must have had some water supply.

The shallowest possible well would have had to have been at least 48 feet underground, for there is no water here above that level and 48 feet sounds like a whole heck of a lot of cranking with a traditional well's manual hand crank just to lift a bucket of water. So, when Bill Meyer's family first moved to this neck of the woods in the 1930s they probably used something else as a source of water.

Was it then not catacombs, but a rain water holding tank similar to this one that I just discovered? Perhaps and without more research than I have time for (even though Bill still lives next door and probably knows the answer, he is now 95 and a little hard of hearing), I will probably never know. One thing I do know with reasonable certainty though, is that this underground structure was sealed in 1980 with a huge rock (that's it sitting on its side in the center of the attached picture) placed on top of the entrance and another foot and a half of earth and small rocks piled on to cover it. How do I know that this was done in 1980? Simply because I found an old Diet Pepsi can buried just inside the entrance hole. The can design and location of its saccharin warning uniquely identify this as one from 1980.

Now, almost 30 years later, following years of soil erosion and the final blow from last Sunday's deluge, the huge rock shifted and fell in, creating the gaping and rather unsafe opening. After much more contemplation I reasoned that it would be too much work to return this underground chamber to "productive" use as either a bomb shelter or a food store. Since I also have no reason to secretly bury anyone (at least not yet), I decided that it would be best to fill the hole. It took at least ten wheelbarrow loads of rocks and earth to do the job. Dad and I spent the rest of Saturday afternoon at it and finally I feel safe again, except for that rattlesnake... it already got two of my neighbor's dogs, but that's a story for another day.