What Goes Down Must Come Up
Deep down in the subterranean cavities of my mind, one can find all kinds of metaphors for my favorite room in our house, the basement.
It’s no wonder that I labored so long and hard in making our basement an exemplar of a fine 19th Century, English manor house basement. The basement is where one can find all the mechanics and secrets of the life above. It is the room (in this case rooms) that provides all the how’s and why’s of how to get back in the high life again. In the mechanical rooms, where the boilers provide the energy there are clinks and clanks of fine copper pipes, surging heat through an obscure course into the smallest recesses of the property. It’s where if one looks closely, the problems of ones life are located and often solved, the mechanical grist is nurtured and vitality is restored.
Most people abhor or avoid their basements, but it is where below the surface that I am most comfortable. When there is a problem it is usually the first place I look for my solutions.
This seems always to have been the case, and perhaps it is no wonder that when personal problems arise in my life, I look not above for solutions, but below into my feelings, angers, and fears.
When I was a very young boy, if you were looking for me, there was a good chance you could find me in the basement. At first, at a very young age, my father built an elaborate train confabulation, which ran around the whole basement in our small suburban house.
But, this was not just any train set. He had two men labor for months, setting up a huge elaborate train system. Where three of four trains could run at once, each having their own mysterious black transformers with levers. There were hundreds of switches to change track courses, switches to open and close gates, trees that seemed real and a long tunnel that went behind the oil burner to reappear some minutes later as if transgressing the Alps. If something happened on the far side of the oil burner, it would take a rescue squad weeks to reach into the out recesses of the tracks. A 747 cockpit had nothing on the control system that ran this mini/major inter-rail system.
This was all wonderful, not only wonderful, but spectacular. Typical of my father, even before his great wealth, to not just do something ordinary, but to create something truly extraordinary.
There was one problem; he left me alone with his masterpiece. It’s not that I didn’t love it, I did. It was just that he left me alone with this beautiful combination of Lionel trains. When on occasion some weekend day, he would come down and we would spend time together, this was the perfect day, but mostly it was me alone with my thoughts. Something must have always held me back because I do not remember ever having friends down there. I guess even then, I was a loner.
The trains always ran on schedule, never too fast and always punctual. There never were derailments changing the basic schedules. I was always ready to welcome aboard someone of importance.
Well life moved on and by the time I had become a middle schooler, we had moved to the grand estate with an even larger basement.
By now I had become interested in chemistry. I was curious how one could change things at the most molecular level. I loved combining ingredients and making something new, or taking things apart to find their hidden identity.
True to my father’s fashion, he built for me the most beautiful chemistry cabinets and work benches imaginable. My school would have been jealous, but then at the last moment, right before lift off, he informed me that he would not allow the basic ingredient of chemical life in the basement, fire. There would be no Bunsen burners to do my experiments. As usual the very basics were being left out.
I was left to make things look beautiful and to play on the fringes of any sort of real experiments. Around this time came Bea.
She was one of the myriads of help employed to keep everything up to shape. She was a large black woman whom I adored. She was our laundress who came a few times a week to wash and press our clothes and was relegated to work at one end of the basement. You could usually find me at the other end, alone with my chemicals.
Bea would hum and sing beautiful gospel hymns and was always a great comfort to me. Unfortunately, it did not go both ways. She was terrified of my fiddling at the other end of the basement. She was sure I was going to blow us all up one day, and tried to stay as far away as possible. Sometimes we would laugh together, and often I would hug her, but not this one fine afternoon.
One afternoon all my efforts at the fringes must have come together. I do not to this day know exactly what I did. I remember reading something a week earlier about chlorine gas, and thought it might be interesting to try some experiments. I remember reading that it was lethal and that it was a visible gas. To this day I have not bothered to figure out if it was fact or fiction, but I do remember creating this gas that hung like a yellow fog in the atmosphere of the basement.
I remember seeing it slowly making it’s way towards Bea, and seeing her incredulous face as she was neatly ironing the collar of some shirt.
I remember screaming to her, “Bea Duck” and with this she yelled, dropped the iron, knocked everything on the floor and ran as fast as she could up the stairs, out of the hidden labyrinth of pipes and chemicals to the safety of the ground floor. I quickly opened all the windows and dropped to the floor, as the gas quickly vaporized outside.
Everyone in the house was terrified, and was sure I was getting ready to blow the whole house apart. No one ever told my father, I guess no one could figure out if his wrath or my explosive experiments were worse. To this day I am still inclined to venture down the stairs where most people fear to tread. I am still happy in the basement with all my thoughts.
