When I was small my grandmother read me the story of Scuppers the Sailor Dog. The Little Golden book, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams, tells the story of a dog who wants to be in his boat on the sea. That’s the only place he feels at home. I still remember the book fondly. I suppose it appealed to an instinctual urge to have the sort of shelter we need, to be just where we want to be.
As kids we were always playing in one sort of shelter or another. There were places that were built for us. Every autumn, my grandfather would construct a hut out of corn shocks in the garden and he and my father put up a fancy tree house with siding and a porch in the big apple tree behind the barn. We spent a lot of time in these shelters but there were others we made for ourselves.
On rainy days my brother and I would push together every table and card table in the house and cover them with sheets to create tent-like mazes. I liked to crayon a control panel onto a cardboard box, take it into my bedroom closet, shut the door and pretend I was in a spaceship. There's an appeal to confined spaces when you're a child. Limited environments are easier to control.
Once my friends and I found three wooden doors discarded in the nettles at the edge of the scrubby patch of woods behind our homes. We cobbled the doors together with throw rugs and corrugated cardboard to make a clubhouse. It was good place to tell ghost stories when we were allowed to stay up late until fireflies flashed in the dark bushes all around. When we weren't in the mood for stories "Joe" would swipe his dad's Aqua Velva and a pack of matches and see how long he could hold a handful of flaming aftershave.
We didn't use the clubhouse for long. The first hard rain found gaps in our workmanship, dissolved the cardboard, and turned the rugs into a sodden slimy mass. It was unsalvageable. Joe suggested we burn the remains down but we decided to leave it too be engulfed by weeds, a monument to past ages when the summer had been young.
The most intriguing place of all was the subterranean cave an older friend made in his backyard, down a hill and behind bushes, out of sight of his house. He dug a hole, laid plywood over the top and covered the plywood with sod. A hinged trapdoor and ladder provided access. The hole seemed about ten feet deep. It probably wasn’t but I could stand up without hitting my head on the ceiling. We’d sit down there in the dirt with a flashlight and pretend we were cave explorers. Sometimes we’d turn the flashlight off and pretend we were cave explorers whose flashlight batteries had died. We’d imagine earthworms emerging from the walls in the darkness. Other times we’d take a snack with us and play at being miners trapped by a cave-in with nothing left to eat but a bag of Cheese Curls.
That wasn’t even the best part. There was also a tunnel which curved around from one wall to the adjacent wall. The passage was barely wide enough to crawl through. Rocks sticking up out of the soil bruised your knees. You could feel the severed ends of roots brushing at you. There weren’t any wood supports. It was an animal’s burrow. If you paused at the u-bend you might as well have been prematurely buried. You could almost feel the weight of the damp earth pressing in all around, squeezing the dark into a viscous blackness that lay right up against your eyes.
It was cozy down in the hole in a horrible sort of way. I imagine it was dangerous. We could have ended up in the local paper, stupid kids smothered under a ton of collapsed dirt, a sad lesson for others.
I suppose I was searching for my own version of Scuppers' boat where, when he retired to his bunk at the end of the day he could place his hat on the hook for his hat, his rope on the hook for his rope, and his spyglass on the hook for his spyglass. Maybe that’s what home is about – a hook for everything we need a hook for.
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