Sub Terra Vita, Chronicle #24—Part III: Time Capsule: A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

November 9, 2015

Chronicle #24—Part III: Time Capsule: A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground

In my days of growing up in Osceola, it seemed my friends all grew up in basements, as indeed they might still do. While I had an atrocious basement in that century-old house (see Part II), most of my friends had functional, nice basements—family rooms of the sort. Whenever we friends hung out at someone's house, we usually spent time in their basement. In that setting, adults upstairs and kids down the steps, the kids ruled, in a sense, the underground.

My best friend, Paul, had the particular advantage of a split-level basement. In one corner, he had his room across from his sister's. On the other side, his parents had built a family room, off of which one found the utility room and an office.

Between the two sides of the basement, under the staircase that led to the front door,, in the far recesses of a storage closet, behind coats, canned goods, and through a crawl space, Paul had a small, hidden. . . fort. To get into the fort, we crawled through a two-foot by two-foot square hole cut into the drywall. As elementary school kids, the gang from the across the street and I spent endless after school times with Paul, bumming in the fort. Using a long extension cord into the hallway, Paul kept a lamp in the room. In the winter days, the fort became THE PLACE to play at that very memorable time and place.

Of course, we all grew older. We grew too old to play in the fort, and we grew too big to fit through the seemingly shrinking hole in the drywall. In middle and high school, we still hung out in basements—watching movies, games on television, played billiards, Halloween costume parties, and all the rest of the teenage things, before the reality of adulthood hit us with responsibilities, disappointments, and opportunities.

Kids in Osceola gathered at the Pizza Cellar, for food and the arcade, following Friday night football and basketball games. Other places, in the Osceola underground, hosted other chicanery, and serious violations of rules and curfews. Rock shows entertained us under the main street-ground-level; and some legends, well, have a basis in truth, as indeed all legends do. In retrospect, many things about basements remain the same, even if the same basements do not exist anymore, or now serve other functions. Some basements may have different owners, yet we still own how we remember them.

When Paul's parents moved from his childhood home in 2001, he, his three young daughters, and I, crawled back into the closet to look at the fort under the steps. Using the lamp on a big flashlight, we looked inside the hatchway. Like a time capsule, I saw all that he and I once knew as kids. We saw stickers for the original Star Wars (1977) we put on the walls; trading cards from the old, and horrible Battlestar Galactica television show tacked up on them, too. We saw posters and cartoons, and everything else from the weird 1970s, hung up, all relics from an era.

Amazing what one forgets, but like Tut's tomb in small scale, it looked of an ancient civilization entered by us in wonder and surprise. Paul left the fort as it looked when we finished. Then, we used a marking pen, and Paul, his daughters and I, signed our names, to let some future basement kids know, that “WE WERE HERE.”