‘Down the Tube’

Press, 20 January 1987, Page 18

‘Down the Tube’

9sr

JEFFREY

BERRIDGE, aged 12 Hi, I'm a raindrop and I would like -to tell you about one of my experiences on earth as an all-too-common raindrop. Well, one day I was sitting up in a cloud admiring the view, waiting to come down, when there was a sudden rumble and then a shake, then a wave of juddering swept over the cloud getting stronger every second. Soon it was teeming with rain. All my friends, all 25 million tonnes of them, came bucketing down, all bracing ourselves for the thud at the bottom of the 7500-metre fall. After about 15 seconds of descent I came to an unusually soft thud at the bottom. Suddenly there was more vibrating and the pipe I discovered I was sitting on buckled and a sudden rush of water threw me forward and in the distance I caught a glimpse of the dreaded reservoir, a huge black concrete tower. Oh no!! Now why do I hate the reservoir? Well the problem is we could sit in there for months on end. But it didn’t turn out like that and after a few weeks I found myself nearing the bottom — where were we to drain out? “Where are we going this time?’’ I thought as we neared the pipe.

Suddenly there was a huge roaring sound and I was swept down the pipe into a long thin darkness. Sometimes we reached speeds of up to and over 70km/h. Occasionally we saw a light ahead and thought, “this is it,” only to find it was a man with the lantern checking the pipe. Then suddenly it was all over and after three hours in the pipe and three weeks and four days in the reservoir we came out into light and into the bottom of a bottle. Obviously we had just come out of a tap. The man who was carrying the bottle trekked outside sloshing us all over the'place. Not the car, I thought as he stopped beside his shining red Lamborghini Countach LPSOOS. (I’d learnt a lot about earth people and their machines in my visits.)

It looks like windows for me, I thought, again, as he poured us into the windscreen washer container. Well about a week later we were racing along, well over the speed limit if the engine was anything to go by, when all ot sudden I felt this immense. sucking vacuum and I was sucked up a pipe, zoomed around corners, then wham! I hit the windscreen knocking off a piece of dirt in the process. Then I was blown over the top of the car and thud, I landed in a gutter. Evaporating time five minutes, I thought, as the sun beat down its radiant energy. And I wished it was because then there was a sudden cloudburst and French raindrops started teeming down muttering French oaths about landing in New Zealand. I was thrown bumpily forward, then there was darkness. About an hour later I heard a dripping noise, the rain had obviously subsided, I was in a drain, it stank of mould and decay. Slowly we were dragged down a dirty, slimy pipe until we landed in a creek about 100 m from the road. The next day I felt lightheaded. I knew where I was going. Slowly but surely I started to float up into the sky, back to my life in the clouds.