Sub Terra Vita Chronicle #26—A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground—Continuing Education

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

Chronicle #26—A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground—Continuing Education

Recruiting his closet friends among three sophomores and two juniors, the Chief Culprit who knew where the senior class hid the kidnapped mascot, rallied his demi-legion of wayward followers across a foul-line of rules never broken by students. Skipping lunch, and traversing in stealth across the crowded new library, the band of rebels entered the northwest hall, and stood at that Rubicon River, a non-descript door with a brown plate written across with white letters, reading “Staff Only.” Here, the beyond, went down to the labyrinth of the old Osceola high school on Cascade Street.

The door held a spell, on that “Staff Only”-deterrent, giving a momentary thought of imposing consequences. The principal, our very good man, indeed, ruled the teachers and the students, quite fairly. The teachers ruled their rooms, apparently, and had their own cloudy domain in the teachers lounge on Senior Hall. Until that day and past that door in the hall, no one of the six had an idea who or what really gave that school its heart and blood, and its moral center.

Opening that door, the conspirators followed the stairs down and to the right, beneath the new library. They entered a true, hidden underground, where many things previously unknown now came slowly understood. In the corner, the mischief gang found the misplaced Chieftain, that wooden statue, under some covering. So as not to turn this treasurer of fame into an accident of infamy, they carried the statue very carefully, though quickly, on its side ends, length-ways through the underground tunnels.

In the cramped passageways, the air hung dry, but oppressively hot, as the furnace boilers heated the water coursing through the school in winter. Pipes, covered in wrapping and plastered, crisscrossed the low ceiling of the narrow underground passages. The five students carrying the statue needed to crouch in the closeness between the floor and the above, if not from the lowness, then from the danger of knocking heads in the darker paths between the light and shadow of the few bank lights hanging down in the labyrinth.

Suddenly, to their left, in this cupboard stomach of the building, the Jokesters stumbled past the custodians eating their lunch in the dry hot of THEIR basement. The Chief Culprit said, “You didn't see anything.” Happily, the oldest custodian replied, “See what?” Without chipping the headdress of a single wooden feather, the gang went out another “Staff Only” door in the main basement, walk-ran down the hall between the shop classes and locker rooms, and out to the lower level parking lot and into the back of the waiting station wagon.

After hiding the statue at a safe house three blocks away for a few days, the underclassmen proved their own errors of their wayward youth. They returned the Chieftain to the seniors, and got the honorable mention, now lost with no fame three decades later, at the halftime rally in the school gym.

In this antic tale, something extraordinary happened in the perception of things, of how things really worked in that school and life, in general. Students, teachers, office staff aside, the custodians of that school, the janitors really knew everything, and they quietly watched over the students. The Chief Culprit, and the other guys, started to listen to the custodians, especially the wisdom of the one nearer retirement, he an uncle-like figure to generations of OHS students. He gave us wisdom beyond any measure of a teacher's scathing lesson or revenge in a grade. He, the “Uncle” eventually helped the underground education by helping us realize that the depths of things, in the hidden details, far exceed the vision anywhere one can look. Wisdom, for certain. Since then, the underground never ceases to educate, and surprise.