Sub Terra Vita Chronicle #28—Part VII: A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground—The Underground Tools

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

December 14, 2015

Chronicle #28—Part VII: A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground—The Underground Tools

As a child age five, I received my first real pocket-knife, as a present from my father. The gift, a 1967, Camillus, “Made in the USA,” U.S. military utility folding pocketknife, of stainless steel manufacture, contained four basic tools. A full-length 2.5” blade, a very good can-opener, a leather punch, and a bottle-opener that doubled as a screw-driver on the tip. With a metal fold-over loop on the end, and the letters “US” on its front face, the cover also featured a lattice dimple design in-set on the metal.

I used that jackknife for everything, like making parachutes from garbage bags and kite string. I left it outside often, and it always seemed to rain when I forgot about it. My father would find the knife in the yard. He would always give it back cleaned of dirt, oiled and shiny, with some threats to take it away if I could not take care of it. I learned the value of that tool as kid. I learned some other lessons of tools, too.

Across the driveway where I grew up, we had a hillside of woods above a hollow, and in the field on the other side of those woods my parents planted the vegetable gardens. My grade school friends often traipsed over to my house, and in those woods we built and maintained for several years the coolest, most hidden, and most impregnable of all the forts we built around the village of Osceola.

The trees and exposed roots around which we built the fort twisted and turned, tunneled and covered, and gave us openings and barriers, centered around a natural trench about ten feet long and four feet wide and deep. Borrowing shovels, saws and hammers from my fathers workshops, we dug, trimmed, and pounded any live or dead tree branches and scrap barn wood we found. My pocket-knife served as the prime tool in the details of the construction. I even scared it by using it to pound nails. As we made our fort on the reverse slope of the garden field, we felt confident to defeat Soviet paratroopers who would inevitably drop onto the village right on top of my mothers tomato and cucumber plants. (Of course they would, right?).

About the tools, my father would always know where to find the missing ones. He would, ill-tempered, go to the gang's “secret fort,” and retrieve them, clean, and oil them. I would hear about it, and again, whenever the gang needed tools, we would get them from his shops.

At age 24, at the time of a radical, rather bizarre, and forgettable trip through an underground outside the Valley, I lost my precious knife. My father, true to form, always reminded of it. In the twenty years since, I heard, at last, stories about him and his maternal grandpa, Emil Parent, and how they loved and exchanged pocketknives when my father spent his youth in Farmington south of Osceola during the summers of the Great Depression.

I learned something about my father's youth. I always understood the importance of the knife, as a bond between he and I. This present fall, he found at an auction the exact make and model of my lost pocketknife: A 1967, Camillus. He left me a note with it, almost of sentiment. I had finally learned a prime lesson: Good things in the Underground will usually come back, as a reward in some way, for staying true to one's own honor and memory, and the things we keep will always become more than those mere artifacts to other people.