The Great Escape

I’m slowly writing a book about my six kids. This happened when they were aged one to eleven.

We had just finished dinner. There hadn't been one ugly word about fish on the menu and the tidemarks on their wrists proved they'd at least passed their hands under a tap. Scott left his can of fishing worms off the table and Steven left his dissection kit in the kitchen.

"There's still some sun left, are you all going to play kick- the- can again tonight?"

Innocent eyes swivelled towards me.

"Oh no, we're going to go down to the dormitory and I'll read Treasure Island to the guys," replied Mark with the look of a seventeenth century saint.

"Tunna," said Melissa, and Mark quickly said, "Gee, she's learning to talk real well; see how she said treasure?"

A quick glance to one another and a silent agreement was reached to save the English lesson for another time. They were excused from the table and quickly clattered off downstairs. Children don't actually run or walk downstairs. If you didn't know better, you'd swear the refrigerator had broken loose from its moorings and was hurtling down at express train speed.

We had the uneasy feeling that something was wrong with the scenario we had just witnessed: our children posing as obedient polite fish-loving children, but we tried to reassure each other that they were growing up; after all, our eldest child, Mark was eleven, and so mature for his age. "That explains Mark, but are you going to tell me Scott really wants to go downstairs and read Treasure Island when he could be fishing at the pond?" The pessimist poured another cup of coffee and the conversation got sidetracked as he helped himself to the last piece of chocolate cream pie, an enormous clue right there.

Every day after school they rushed home to change into their scruffiest jeans and stayed quietly downstairs, emerging every once in a while for a brief trip outside. Melissa followed them back and forth, murmuring,"Tunna." there wasn't any fighting and I caught up on all the mending and diaper folding and tried out the recipe for marinated salmon with caper sauce.

Sure we knew we were teetering on an unknown precipice but we rashly took advantage of these suddenly perfect children to read, and, I don’t know, relax.

We'd recently had an addition tacked on to the back of the house, a necessity we couldn't overlook any longer when the snowsuits were piled so high by the back door that a small child was in danger of getting lost until spring. Along with a family room off the kitchen, we built a mudroom by the back door and underneath all this, joined to the dormitory housing the five boys, was a crawl space, about three feet above the floor. Steven made a couple of boards on casters from old roller skates, to slide from one end to the other in search of the missing hamster cage, or, often, the hamsters.

The mystery of ongoing family harmony and peace was solved one morning when they were in school and I was wrestling the dormitory into control. I leaned into the crawl space entrance to see whether they had dismantled the fort made out of my best comforter and three crib blankets and my foot skidded over a loose floor tile. I stooped down to pick it up and my peaceful time was over. Under the tile was a square piece of wood and underneath that was a hole about two feet deep and two feet wide. Closer inspection revealed a bottle of beer and a half full package of cigarettes in a dented coffee can at the bottom.

When they got home from school, I was waiting.

Mark and Scott dashed in, made only one peanut butter and honey sandwich each and raced downstairs. Soon they came back up, more slowly this time.

"You found it."

"Uh huh. Now, would someone please tell me what I found?"

Scott looked pained. "See, I told you she's never get it," he sighed. "It's a tunnel. We're building an escape tunnel right through to the street and over to the millpond. Just like that ‘Great Escape’ movie we all watched. See, we've even got bags with drawstrings under our jeans so we can fill them with the dirt we dig up, then we go out in the yard and release it, and you never caught on."

It was difficult to speak. They looked so proud and Melissa toddled over to clutch Mark’s, hand, "Tunna." Tunnel. Now it’s so clear.

"What did you dig it with?"

"Well, we started with Dad’s crow bar and pick axe, but the neat part was when we got through the cement and started digging up the dirt; we cut up the juice cans you were saving for recycling and shaped them just the way the men did in the movie."

Apparently the plan was to dig down for a while, and then sideways until they figured they were under the road, then up a manhole, which I don’t believe existed anywhere nearby.

A profound sigh escaped from me. "Tell me, is there some reason that you couldn't have just walked out the front door, if you were in such a tearing hurry to escape?"