The next morning as Jackson was waking up from his deep slumber, he watched Ralph throwing things in a bag and (while attempting to be silent) checking batteries for flashlights, coiling up the kevlar rope they had, and smuggling knives and an old pair of their father's combat boots into the room. After several minutes of guessing what was happening, Jackson sat up and asked, "Are we going to do some deep-tunnel spelunking today?"

Ralph spasmed in surprise, as he had not been expecting to be observed during his sneaky pilfering. He turned and gave Jackson a frown, then responded, "No. Spelunking is what yuppies do. We are going to go deep-tunnel caving!"

Jackson snickered at his 'superior-than-thou' behavior and told him his grammar didn't make any sense, and then came out of bed and helped him pack stuff into the small sacks they'd be carrying.

"I don't think we should invite the other guys though," he said. "I might have found a really cool hideout that we can make into something more, but they'll just want to fish and catch crayfish and make mud."

"That makes sense," Ralph responded. "Can we get there through the tunnel?"

"Yeah, it's just a different direction than where I decided to go. And I don't think we'll be able to use these bags for much. The tunnels were really small." Jackson declared.

"Ok," Ralph said slowly, thinking. "Why don't I go over the ground and carry the bags, and you can come our and shout at me when you find the other side?"

Jackson picked up his bag. "Ok, that sounds good. We can probably find it pretty easily. The tunnels are completely straight, so I can point you where you need to go before I start crawling through it. It looked pretty far though."

Ralph shouldered his bag as well and grabbed one of the oak walking sticks from behind the door. "Alright. And if we fid someone watching us like the lady from yesterday, we can just look in the hole, and guess which direction to go, and we'll find out where it might end up. Who knows, we might even find the end of the tunnel!"

Jackson grinned and replied, "Let's moooooove OUT!"

They both laughed and began walking together toward their destination. Approximately eight minutes later, their flimsy hopes were dashed on the conrete hood, where the woman stood with her dog, staring fiercely at them. They guessed her desire was to keep any 'underground shenanigans' from occurring, and so they went with the second plan, checking the general direction of the pipe, and walking along that way, across the road, into the ditch, and into the woods.

Several hills and mud-patches later, after slipping and completely inundating the combat boots with skunk-weed water and rotting mud at least on three separate occasion, they found a steep cliff-like hill. At the bottom, two pipes jutted out, spraying water into rocks and trees and broken slabs of concrete.

After half an hour of climbing and crawling and holding on to trees (for dear life, of course), the two boys made it to the bottom and looked across the expanse of water before them. With the speed of running water, the pool was probably always clear, full of minnows and frogs and crayfish. It was paradise!

The duo began playing in the water, catching and releasing crayfish and flinging rocks across the water with the slings their father had shown them how to weave. At some point they realized that the sun was going down, and that they should be getting home. They didn't want to have to return by climbing all the way up the cliff (it was a daunting enough task with the aide of gravity!), and so they decided to trailblaze their own way back.

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They set off in (presumably) the right direction, going over hills, bludgeoning their way through fields of two meter high grass, scaring hordes of ducks and deer, and contracting seventeen separate cases of poison ivy. However, as their paradise was boxed in by the roads and the river/lake, there was only so far they could go without seeing civilization again.

They reached the point where the river fed into the lake and, as their father had taught them fishing at the dock there, the brothers knew their way back. Exhausted, filthy, and tracking mud through the house, the boys went straight to the bathtub, turned on the faucet at full blast, and cleaned all the mud off of their clothes and gear.

After a slightly extensive lecture from their mother, Jackson and Ralph began to plan for the next day. "We could do a bunch of stuff with it. We could turn it into a resort! Dredge it to make it deeper, so that people can swim in it, cut some of the vines attached to the trees on the cliff, so that people can rope-swing into the water. WE could dig a fire-pit, a refrigerate hot dogs in the water! There're so many things we can do with the area! And, it's a public park, so if we could prove that we had lived there for  while, we could claim it as private property!!" Ralph was full of ideas.

Jackson, on the other hand, was a bit more circumspect about the possibilities that having a paradise would bring. "Yeah, that would all be awesome. It'll take a lot of work though. We'll have to do the dredging ourselves, all the digging, finding a firepit, digging the firepit, setting up a cage to keep animals out of the hotdogs, finding metal pokers to help burn stuff, maybe getting furniture all the way down there, and then advertising. We'll be needing money too. And we don't have any good ways of making it, because doing the chores only gets us five dollars a week."

Ralph responded enthusiastically, "We could go around the neighborhood and take care of lawns! Papa showed me how to mow last year, and all of us how to rake leaves when Dana turned 9! And we've been weeding for quite some time. These skills make us the most qualified for the job!"

"Ok," Jackson sighed. "I guess I can get on board with that. Once again, I think it's going to take a lot of work. And if this is going to be a resort of some kind, then we need to make people pay to come."

"Agreed," Ralph said imperiously. Despite his desire to produce a place of relaxation and peace for everyone, he still recognized the need for pay.

"Alright," Jackson agreed. "Let's repack all this stuff and maybe eat some food."

Several hours later, having been lectured extensively by their father about the merits of being clean and the merits of not missing dinner, the boys and their family read the bible (Proverbs 11), and went straight to sleep.