The Ventura Pipeline

In an apartment strung with Christmas lights and littered with beer cans, five young men have gathered to plot the night’s assault on the sleeping city.

They heap their gear on the floor--leather gloves, flashlights and an assortment of giant skateboards made from thrift store castoffs such as snow skis, a water ski and a snowboard.

“Any oil, dude?” asks Greg Small, 24, a wild-haired cook for a vegetarian restaurant.

One of the others passes over a tube of Bones Speed Cream, and Small squirts a stream onto the wheels and gives them a spin. After one last equipment check, they jump into the pickup and head off into the night. Crammed in back are Small, Chris Croucher, 22, an unemployed former Marine, and a guy named Mike, who buses tables and keeps his last name a secret.

“I look like some kind of freaking woodsman,” says Mike, surveying his grunge outfit of boots, jeans and flannel.

“You look like Paul Bunyan, dude,” someone shoots back. Croucher suggests that if the cops pull them over they say they are going to a woodsmen convention.

It’s almost midnight when the band of “skunnelers” reaches the destination, a steep ravine in a residential neighborhood that contains an opening into the maze of storm drains under the city. Quickly, silently, the young men get ready to roll off into the darkness, to surf the concrete catacombs.

“We’re all junkies,” says 22-year-old Nathan Paul, the Hawaiian-shirted ringleader, a clerk in a music store. “Junkies for speed.”

Skunnel is a bastardization of the words “skate” and “tunnel.” The practice apparently dates to the ‘50s and a surfing gang from La Jolla that included legendary board rider Greg Noll. One day, Noll said from his home in Crescent City, the surf was flat, so they broke out some Flexi-Flyer sleds and hiked up to an old drainpipe.

“They put on coal miner hats so they could see,” he recalled. “They hopped on the Flexis . . . they came flying out of this pipe. I mean they fired out of this thing. Into a big puddle of crap.”

Noll, now 61 and retired from surfing, cackled to hear the tradition is being carried on in Ventura.

“Good for them,” he said, adding that it’s a good way to irritate the establishment.

Actually, the establishment is not so angry as worried about the skunnelers’ safety. Ventura Public Works Manager Mark Watkins says state law forbids people from entering underground drainage pipes.

“All kinds of gas could accumulate down there and could be dangerous,” he said. “There are pipes you could walk through. But it’s still not safe.”

That hasn’t stopped the skunnelers. They have never been injured. They have never been caught, though there have been close calls. On one recent ride a dog awakened its owners, who snapped a picture of them.

Cementing Their Friendship

There are 26 miles of drainage pipe under Ventura, and this group of tunnel surfers, all former Ventura College students whose friendship was cemented by their love of thrills, has scouted most of them. Some are too narrow to navigate: To be skatable, the pipes must be at least 3 feet in diameter. The larger ones widen out enough to walk through.

Of all the pipes they have scouted, the one they are running tonight in the hills is their favorite. It is a mile long, it is usually clean, and they can go fast.

Wordlessly, they leap out of the back of the pickup and tumble down the ravine in the moonlight, balancing the unwieldy boards on their shoulders.

A dog starts barking. The chase car speeds off to meet them at the bottom of the hill. Scrambling for cover, the skunnelers throw themselves single file onto their boards and lurch into the black maw of the tunnel.

They hurtle through the cement pipe on their backs. Being in the tunnel is like being born, or how they imagine being born would be, shooting down the canal toward the rest of their lives.

The barking dog gets louder. It sounds like it’s in the tunnel.

After 100 feet the pipe opens out to the sky. Suburban yards are visible about 20 feet up. The dog’s bark ricochets off the walls.

The skunnelers grab their boards and sprint through the open space, then lunge into the tunnel again.

It’s pitch black. The only light is from the flashlights taped to their heads, arms and boards. The only sound is the distorted echo of the wheels hitting the pipe seams. The skunnelers say they have clocked themselves at 35 mph on the street. But they don’t know how fast they are going in the cement tubes under the city.

“There’s light, and then a little circle of blackness,” Paul says. “But you never get there. There is a sense of unbelievable speed. But you also feel like you aren’t moving at all.”

Dust fills the air as the wheels roll. Cobwebs dangle and catch on ears, eyes and hair.

“Root,” yells Mike from the front, in a voice that sounds high-pitched and eerie.

Seconds later, trailing tendrils of root that have grown through a seam in the concrete from somewhere up above brush the skunnelers’ faces like beads hanging from a doorway.

“Room,” yells Mike again.

The skunnelers slow and stop in an open area 8 feet by 5 feet, where two tunnels meet, for a smoke.

Looking Out Through Manhole Covers

Sometimes, they have become lost. “We’ve stuck our heads out of gutters. We’ve stuck our heads out of the manhole covers and hoped that no one would drive over it,” Paul says.

Some tunnels are cluttered with debris. In the winter, they can’t go at all because of rain. Springtime is no good because runoff fills the pipes with ooze.

Some sections never completely dry out, even in the summer, so they just throw themselves into the goo and go.

The smelly water spatters up onto necks and clothes. “It is dirty and soggy down there,” Paul says. “It adds to the rush I guess.”

Luckily for the skunnelers, they can never completely lose their bearings underground because all the pipes run downhill to the sea.

After their break, they look down a smaller pipe going off to the left. In front of them, the pipe is corrugated and rusty, so they walk.

On the final section of the run they spread out and test their styles.

Croucher rides up the curve of the walls to increase speed. They raise their hands and feet into the air and let it rip. They yelp for joy as they go.

“If you start going fast, just monkey it, like a gorilla,” Mike yells.

At one point there is a sharp drop. Then the tube widens at the end.

It’s wetter at the bottom, finally dumping them into a wide, open ditch in the middle of an orchard.

They clamber out in the starlight and run for the waiting pickup parked at the curb.

“It’s a weird adrenaline rush,” sums up Mike. “It’s like nothing else. It’s not just a momentary thing like bungee jumping. This goes on for a long, long time.”