The first Magnolia rental house we lived in had a full basement. Besides having the washing machine and dryer down there, I once even set up a darkroom in the basement and we used to process and print black and white film. The second Magnolia place we lived in, a house we bought across from Discovery Park, also had a full basement. Even the apartment building that we’re now living in has got a basement.
As a little boy, the first house that my parents bought, was in Cincinnati and it had a basement that I remember playing in during the snowy winter months.
My father then went to work for one of the major automobile companies and that was very much like being part of the military, in that we got to see a large part of the country, because they moved us around a number of times.
The first place we were sent was Chicago and that house had a large basement too. In fact, the basement was even large enough that I could ride the new bike I had just gotten for Christmas down there. My basement bike route was in a somewhat small, shaky circle around the furnace; if I dodged all the support poles and didn‘t run over the dirty laundry my mother had stacked in front of the washing machine. I soon tired of that and put the bike away until we got warmer weather.
Our next stop was a move to Los Angeles in 1956, that was back when cars were beginning to grow tail fins that are still being mocked in cartoons today. I was ten and Ron, my little brother, was seven.
In Southern California there are very few basements. Our brand new house was on the very edge of Orange County and this time, instead of a basement it had a crawl space under it. Directly behind the house was a large orange grove that we used to play in before they tore it up and put in another tract of new houses.
My mother used to read books to us and had just read us “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain. We loved it. Not only did we find it highly humorous, but we also were fascinated by the descriptions of life along the Mississippi. We wished we could go on adventures too.
There is nothing more quizzical than two small boys. It didn’t take long before we found the entry way into the crawl space under the house. We just had to remove a three foot square, screened hatch cover, that was kinda behind a bush, on the side of the house.
With a little pushing and tugging, I finally got the screened cover open and we looked in. Nothing but darkness stretched out into the distance beneath the house. We could see three little points of light were it came in through the small screened vents on each of the other three sides of the house. It was awfully dark.
“We’ve got to get some light,” I told Ron, “who knows what kind of things are under there.”
“Tom and Huck” Ron answered, “used candles when they went exploring caves.”
Candles it would be. I replaced the cover and we went off to pilfer some candles. Our mother was in the back part of the house, so she wasn’t aware of us rummaging through half of the drawers in the kitchen looking for candles. We found the matches right off. They were kept in the utility drawer where we also stored the rubber-bands, a screwdriver, the scissors and all the other miscellaneous kitchen junk you might not have a specific spot for. We found a bigger stub of a candle in the cupboard in the dinning room. Little candles for the top of a birthday cake just weren’t going to cut it for the adventure we had planned.
I pulled the screened hatch cover off again and squeezed through the opening and into the under-house crawl space. Just after I crawled through Ron followed me. There was just enough height between the dirt floor and the bottom of the house to sit upright. We huddled in the light that was coming through the open hatch to the outside. Ron struck the first match and lit the candle. In it’s light we could see a little better. We now had a secret hiding spot.
One thing we were both very aware of, is the danger of fire. Both of our parents had been fire victims during World War II and had spent many, many months in the burn wards of the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. We both had seen the scars. We were extremely careful with our candles.
Around the exit hatch, we had enough room to crawl around on our hands and knees. If we wanted to go further under the house, to crawl toward the other side, the clearance space got smaller and smaller. To go any further, you’d have to belly crawl on your elbows and knees.
I was content to just stay around the hatch, at least it was cool under there.
Ron, ever the explorer, set off crawling on his belly to the other side of the house.
“Did you find anything?” I asked when he reappeared in my circle of light a little while later.
“I found an old Coke bottle,” he replied, “and a bunch of Black Widow webs.”
Black Widows were common sights around the comparatively new house sites and orange groves. Their bite wouldn’t kill you, just make you very sick.
Before we left the cool,but dusty and dirty confines of the crawl space, we used our candle’s flame to write our names in smoke on the bottom of the floor above our heads, just like Tom and Huck had done in their cave explorations. I wonder if anyone has ever discovered the graffiti?