The Longest Running Clandestine Operation in the History of the Zakes Family - Part III

Part III – The Room

This is the third installment of a three part story from my childhood. If you missed part one or two, please go back and read it now. (Click HERE for Part I or Click HERE for Part II).

The tunnel hadn’t taken as long as the shaft, and the room would form even faster. Since the tunnel was only long enough to reach the front wall of the room, we had to continue to tunnel another foot or two in order to begin to dig up. And that is when things got fun.

To dig the room, especially initially, required the digger to punch his digging screwdriver up into the ceiling above his head. Obviously the dislodged dirt would fall directly down – most often directly onto the face of the digger. This is when the snorkel and scuba mask actually helped. It was extremely hot and sweaty work. The humidity from being underground, surrounded by moist dirt walls, was stifling. Add in the exertion of pushing mounds of dirt down the tunnel over and around your body to be loaded and hoisted by the non-digger, and a couple of 100-watt light bulbs, and it was bordering on ridiculous. The loosened dirt clung to your body and as time went on and little critters found “the hole” it became a dwelling filled with spiders, cockroaches, and crickets. Claustrophobia was overcome daily.

In a short time though, there was enough room to sit Indian-style in the “room” and then progress began to really pick up. Before long we could both fit and then shortly thereafter both stand.

Soon the room was large enough for four people. Sure that wasn’t big enough for my entire family, but really it was bigger and better than I had ever conceptualized. And with the project complete in my mind – and just as the project had quickly been initiated by the imagination of a 10-year-old – something else had caught the imagination of my now 13-year-old mind – the bicycle. And just as quickly as we’d started, I pretty much just walked away – tired, filthy, and satisfied.

For the first several years, Dan and I had kept the entire project completely secret. As we finished the shaft though and then the tunnel, the secret became too great and we each had introduced a friend or two to the project. Dan and few friends soldiered on briefly, enlarging the room slightly by digging benches out of the walls, but it was really “our” project, and when I left, we essentially both left.

In 2005 my parents sold the house. A year before selling the house my dad replaced the pool shed floor because over the years dripping wet kids going in and out to get pool toys and inner tubes had weakened the plywood floor and eventually someone was going to fall through and get hurt.

When they sold the house, to my knowledge, they didn’t tell the buyer about the tunnel. The pool shed floor no longer had a secret trap door and what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. To this day though, every once in a while I’ll wonder about the reaction of the next guy to replace the floor of that shed.

“Honey, you’re never going to believe this…there’s a shaft going down underneath the shed floor – it’s so deep I can’t even see the bottom…”

My dad was the one who enabled all of this. He didn’t laugh at my fears or attempt to brush them aside. He didn’t tell us it was too dangerous or too…anything. Instead he supported and loved and encouraged. He did the perfect thing – he created memories and experiences for Dan and me that will be recalled with fondness and shape our lives for decades.


You can follow me on Twitter @eddyzakes

The Longest Running Clandestine Operation in the History of the Zakes Family - Part II

Part II – The Tunnel

This is the second installment of a three part story from my childhood. If you missed part one, please go back and read it now. (Click HERE for Part I).

After two years of digging the shaft, we finally had permission to continue with Phase II of our secret operation.

At the very base of the shaft, on the east end of our 18-inch wide, by 30-inch long, by 6-foot deep shaft, we started chipping away at the super hard packed clay. Bit by bit, bucket by bucket, we began to make our lateral traverse.

Since the shaft was a little over six feet deep and we were just young boys we developed an elaborate dirt removal system. Even then Dan was a rope and knot genius and between the two of us we had a multi-bucket pulley system.

Whoever the tunnel digger was would load up a small pail – usually a five quart ice cream bucket – and whoever was “topside” would hoist it out when it was full. As soon as the full bucket cleared the shed floor, an empty bucket was lowered down so that tunneling wouldn’t have to stop while the first bucket was being dumped.

The five quart pail was dumped into a five gallon bucket. We had fifteen to twenty of those. Immediately after we began the project, long before the shaft was six feet deep, we’d run into the problem of getting rid of the dirt. What do two boys do with literally tons of dirt?

At first we loaded it, double bagged, into plastic groceries sacks, looped a bag over either side of the handlebars of our bikes, and pedaled to a discreet dumping site, say perhaps the farm field at the end of our block, or eventually a few housing developments that were being prepared, and then nonchalantly pour the dirt out. We did it just like the POWs in The Great Escape, sprinkling it about so that “no one” would catch on.

That was great and all when we were digging a couple of spoonfuls worth of dirt out per hour. However, once summer came and we started getting into softer dirt as the shaft got deeper, the bike-bag method became insufficient.

Instead, every couple of weeks we’d load all 15 or so five-gallon buckets, each weighing over 50 pounds, into the back of my dad’s work van. Eventually we got tired of carrying the buckets out to the curb and graduated to putting them in our Red Radio Flyer wagon and pulling them out to the van two at a time. Once the van was loaded, Dan and I would “talk” my dad into driving the van to church. Our church had several acres of undeveloped property and a lot of it was very uneven. So really you could say we were just helping out.

As we tunneled we became more and more concerned about cave-ins. Logical, right? But again in our infinite young minds we were prepared.

The answer: Cave-in Drills.

Every time we dug in the tunnel we’d wear our “safety equipment.” It wasn’t much and thankfully it was never required to really work, but we had it none-the-less. In order to dig, we would usually lie on our backs and dig headfirst above and behind our heads. Whoever was tunneling would wear scuba-style swim goggles to prevent the collapsing dirt from falling in his eyes or nose. They’d breathe through a snorkel, modified so that it lay on their chest toward the mouth of the tunnel, in case a large cave-in occurred. Again in our brilliance, as the tunnel got longer, we duct taped a length of rubber hosing to the end of the snorkel to enhance its range.

Bucket by bucket load we awkwardly inched forward. A foot of tunnel became two and then three. And eventually we had an 18-inch wide, 18-inch tall, and 6-foot long tunnel. We called my dad out and after a quick inspection he approved our progress enough to allow us to commence construction of “The Room.”

To be continued… (Click HERE to read Part III.)

The Longest Running Clandestine Operation in the History of the Zakes Family - Part I

Part I - The Shaft

This is the first installment of a three part story from my childhood. It is recalled to the best of my ability. (To read Part II, please click HERE.)

What goes through the mind of a 10-year-old?

There were race riots in Los Angeles, just one state over, as a result of the Rodney King beating. By the time the police, the U.S. Army, the Marines, and the National Guard restored order, the casualties included 53 deaths, 2,383 injuries, more than 7,000 fires, damages to 3,100 businesses, and nearly $1 billion in financial losses.

The year before, the First Gulf War had ended. Every night the network news had shown missile launch after missile launch, bombing run after bombing run.

In school I was beginning to learn of and grasp the horrors of the Holocaust.

I knew that smaller race riots had spread to other cities and I had gradually grown concerned that they would move to Phoenix. I wasn’t sleeping well—I was scared.

I went and talked to my dad and told him of my concerns. Thankfully he didn’t laugh at me – instead he sensed I had a solution and asked what I had in mind.

I felt that my family should build a safe space somewhere. Some sort of combination between the European smuggler’s room that Jews were hidden in – this would protect me from race riots or a Holocaust-like nightmare – and a bomb shelter – which would protect me from Saddam Hussein and World War III.

“Well…I was thinkin’ we should dig a room under the house. Maybe put something over it to hide it.” I’d seen The Great Escape where Steve McQueen and the other POW’s had used a stove to conceal the entrance to their escape tunnel—something like that seemed pretty smart to me.

“How do ya think you’ll get through the concrete foundation?” my dad asked.

I didn’t know. I hadn’t fully thought this through—I was only 10.

Being the good dad he was, he had a different idea for me.

“What do you think of starting somewhere on the outside of the house and then digging under it?” he suggested. “Maybe you could start in the shed.”

A plan was formulated. He gave my brother Dan and I permission to dig a shaft down beneath the pool shed until it had reached an ‘appropriate depth,’ then tunnel over until we were under the house, and then, finally, we could dig a ‘room.’

I’d imagine my dad probably thought that my fears would subside in a few weeks and we’d never make it to the ambiguous ‘appropriate depth.’

My dad did get us started though. He cut an 18 by 30-inch section of the plywood shed floor to create our access hatch. We pounded nails into it and then cut them off underneath in an effort to camouflage our trap door—it looked like it was secured just the same as the rest of the floor. We could pop it up with a flat-headed screwdriver in the right spot.

And so…

My brother Dan and I commenced the longest running clandestine operation in the history of the Zakes family.

Quickly we settled into a routine. We’d get home from school, change into our swimming suits, and head out into the backyard for a swim in our pool—that was our cover story anyways.

After a quick dip in the pool, we’d look both ways, then round the corner into our corrugated tin pool shed. If it was even remotely hot outside then the swim wasn’t just a convenient alibi, it was a survival mechanism. It was unexaggerably hot in the shed.

The shed was hot enough by itself, but if the reflector oven nature of a tin shed in Arizona sunshine wasn’t bad enough, we always worked with the door shut. While the project was a “secret operation,” even we probably wouldn’t have gone to that length if it wasn’t for the worst neighbors ever.

No, seriously – the worst ever.

John and Jenny moved in shortly after we did. You’ve probably read books or seen movies where less than stellar neighbors were depicted. John and Jenny trumped them. For instance, one time at Christmas, my brother Dan – maybe 5 years old at the time – took a plate of Christmas goodies over to their house as a gift from our family. My parents had picked Dan because they figured the neighbors would be nicest to him – he was the youngest and cutest at the time. Dan reached up on his tippy-toes and rang the doorbell. After a few seconds of waiting, John opened the door. Dan lifted the plastic wrapped and ribbon-tied plate up to reach John’s hands and chimed, “Merry Christmas.” John looked at the plate, then down at Dan, said, “We don’t eat that stuff,” and turned and slammed the door.

Or one time we were having a stray cat problem in our neighborhood. The cat population had exploded and the cats were inbreeding and infected and dying. So we trapped a few in a humane live trap and took them to the Maricopa County Animal Control. John and Jenny called the police and the story was converted to, “The Zakes family has been trapping cats, loading them in burlap sacks, then drowning them in irrigation canals.” Once the police arrived, a quick look at the records cleared that one up.

Or one time me and my friends were playing catch and an errant throw landed the ball over the fence and in their yard. Rather than tossing it back over, John walked over, picked up the football in one hand, picked up a knife in the other, popped it, and then dropped it in his dumpster (in full view of us).

Or if you need more convincing, their were all of the times they would use their leaf blower to blow all of their leaves into our yard, or the time they called the cops on Dan for “trying to shoot their dog,” or any of the times they yelled over the fence at us to shut up, or fired up their gas-powered and mufflerless 100-gallon air compressor at 6:00 on a Saturday morning, or…you probably get the point.

Needless to say, the shed door was always shut while we were working. It dampened the noise and prevented prying eyes.

The beginning was nearly intolerably slow. We’d taken some of my dad’s tools—“he probably won’t miss this screw driver or that hammer”—and we’d hammer the screwdriver into the dirt and then pry up a chunk. The chunk would go into a bucket and we’d pry out another chunk.

Once we had a small depression in the ground, at the end of each day we would drag our garden hose over to the shed and push it through a little corner of the shed wall that we’d bent aside. With the spigot on for even a few seconds our tiny divot would overflow and that was the end of our digging for that day.

The next night when we’d trot back out there, the ground would be just slightly softer than concrete—maybe more like fresh asphalt. We’d chip away some more and finally, after perhaps a month, Dan who was younger and smaller could curl into a contortionist’s fetal position, and I could close the trap door on top of him.

We were so proud. But it was a mere shadow of what was to come.

For the next several years – I’m not kidding, really YEARS – we pried and dug our way downward. We used every conceivable tool: hammers, screwdrivers, a saw, scissors, a pitchfork, shovels (pointed, flat, even sandbox shovels). And eventually we could both stand up in the shaft and pull the lid over our heads.

The shaft was narrow and looked pretty ominous. The shed interior wasn’t big or bright and so if you stood over the hole, even with the shed door open, you couldn’t see the bottom without accessory lighting. The shaft got to the point that it was so deep we couldn’t get in or out without assistance—the hand and footholds carved into the walls were the only ingress and egress mechanisms.

Every so often my fantastic father would come out and check on us and our progress. At last, the day arrived when he came out and said the hole was deep enough and we could begin the part we’d been dreaming of – the TUNNEL.

And to this point we’d told no one.

To be continued… Click HERE for Part II.

A Plea for Amnesty (or How Dan Became "Brother Dan")

I’ve sat for a month or two trying to think of the next significant story for my blog.

I’ve worried that maybe I’ve disassociated some of my readers after suffering long bouts of mogigraphia (a fancy word for writer’s cramp). Now that I’m in my house I think I’m cured, but this will be a more accurate test than my recent efforts. For the few of you who remain, I hope you enjoy my work.

The most encouraging praise came from my brother Dan recently. He wrote me a note after reading “How Far?” a post from back in June.

Don't know why I hadn't read it till now, but I just walked away from reading this with a renewed sense of respect for your principles as regarding independence and adventure. Makes me wonder what I was doing then, and remember that you didn't talk about it much, but I know you told me the story of the day and recalled much of it. I was only 12 then, so I didn't quite get it.—Dan

That made me want to write again. To make people think about adventure and independence.

This story is dedicated to my brother Dan.

You’ll know why at the end…


When I was seventeen, my brother Dan and I got permission from my parents to go camping out in the desert. Even in the first sentence here, I notice something of significance that anybody that has heard me talk about my brother Dan would recognize.

Brother Dan.

It is an extreme rarity for me to call my brother Dan anything other than “Brother Dan.”

There was no specific day that I can remember starting to call him that. I’ve called him that for years. It isn’t derogatory, quite the opposite. I want people to associate him with me. I want them to recognize our relationship, our tie, our connection. He isn’t just some kid, some friend, some anybody. He’s my brother. It isn’t meant to be a “tag-along” title, and more than likely it probably started in college when the people I was meeting hadn’t met him or didn’t know who I was talking to if I just referred to him as Dan.

It didn’t take long for my friends to get to know him though. Since he accompanied me on nearly every significant trip and witnessed practically every important event of my life, I’d reference him in stories left and right.

Well, one day, we got permission to camp out for a quick overnighter in the desert. We’d been asking my parents for a while. It wasn’t hard to pack. We tossed a couple of armloads worth of stuff, the majority of which had something to do with water, into the back of the station wagon that was our ticket around town.

We drove north on I-17 for half an hour and turned east into the desert. We followed the Carefree Highway—which was a perfect street name for the day—for 10 miles, then turned north for 18 miles of graded dirt road to a free campground hidden down in a little depression. This little impression in the high desert plateau is something of an oasis amidst the arid high scrub and gravelly buttes in the vicinity.

I got my driver’s license when I was sixteen. Driving came naturally after years of riding my bike trying not to get squished between city buses or pan-caked by distracted drivers. I had gotten my permit six months earlier, hours before a family vacation when my parents thought I might be helpful as a third string driver. I was hooked. I loved to drive.

“My” car was a 1983 Grand Marquis station wagon. I thought it was especially meaningful that it was born the same year as I. It was awesome. Maybe it wasn’t the coolest car on the road—especially without air conditioning, but it met my needs with the perfect combination of attributes. It was big. I once took 14 people to a high school football game (12 of them were girls—bonus points for Eddy). There were seat belts for 12. The hood was like a queen size bed.

Usually though when you get a car that can ferry an abundance of passengers you lose gas mileage. Granted it wasn’t exceptional, but if I was conservative with my accelerator I could get the “Beast” into the 18-20 mile per gallon range. The other thing that usually suffers with passenger capacity is acceleration. Again the wagon was nothing extraordinary, but it could hold its head high with rear wheel drive and a 5.8-liter, small block V-8. The speedometer only went to 80 miles per hour, so I have no idea how fast it could really go, but I had it pegged a few times. Pegged at 80, the pedal was only a third of the way to the floor.

But if you have a fast car, you usually get a harsher ride. Not so with the wagon. That baby floated—speed bumps, no problem. It was so wide and heavy, even with the soft suspension, I could corner as fast as I wanted to.

On top of all of that it was old, so it was cheap to insure.

Fast, big, comfortable, reasonably fuel efficient and very safe—built like a tank in fact.

On the dirt road run into the camp ground I drove aggressively. Too much gas in the corners, fishtailing on the dirt having fun. I was too cheap to wear out my tires on asphalt and afraid of getting tickets anyways so the dirt roads were where I let loose.

We got there in one piece. We set up our meager camp, built a fire, ate a few hot dogs and way too may marshmellows as the sun went down painting a firestorm of pinks, red, oranges, purples, and blues across the cloudless sky.

We sat in our lawn chairs late into the night with the fire hissing and popping. Coyotes howled in the distance. The desert cools drastically in the night, and the warmth of the fire illuminated our ruddy, boyish faces as we laughed, debated, and teased our way through the typical conundrums of youth.

We slept.

In the morning we woke up. After a simple breakfast we packed our gear back into the wagon. We made our lunch and then drove a few miles back towards Phoenix to the jumping off point for our hike.

The solitude of the desert is immense.

"...In sublimity - the superlative degree of beauty - what land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky! You shall never see elsewhere as here the dome, the pinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fire at sunrise and sunset; you shall never see elsewhere as here the sunset valleys swimming in a pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus fading into blue distance, the gorges and canyons banked full of purple shadow. Never again shall you see such light and air and color; never such opaline mirage, such rosy dawn, such fiery twilight. And wherever you go, by land or by sea, you shall not forget that which you saw not but rather felt - the desolation and the silence of the desert..." — John C. Van Dyke, 1898, The Desert

We hiked for an hour up a narrow canyon, ate our lunch, and hiked an hour back.

What happened next irreversibly tied me to my brother Dan—interminably made him brother Dan.

I decided to continue with my foolishly aggressive driving. No one was in danger other than the two of us. I took the twists and turns, rises and drops inspired by rally racing videos I’d seen. I’d brake hard into a corner putting the car sideways, drifting my way into position to accelerate hard on the exit.

I went up a short hill semi-blinded by the slope, turned right at the top, and dropped down continuing to the right. We were on the flank of a mountain. At the bottom of the quick descent was a left hand bend. To the right of us was the mountain, to the left a hundred foot expanse as the slope fell away from the unprotected side of the road.

The left hand bend was my undoing. I drifted too much. As the back of the wagon slid through behind me, it pointed the hood of the Beast towards the gulch. I was skidding out of control, heading for sure extermination.

Growing up in Minnesota long before I’d gotten my turn behind the wheel, over and over I heard coaching that to regain control you’ve got to turn your tires in the direction of the skid. The problem with that advice was that to steer my tires in that direction was to steer to certain destruction.

Somehow my muscles overcame my fear and for the briefest moment I whipped the wheel to the left, toward the edge, gained a fraction of traction, then wrenched the wheel back to the right.

My overcorrection, drove the car into the side of the mountain.

The impact was lessened by the pile of loose dirt that accumulates on the side of graded dirt roads. When we hit that berm, it lifted the right front corner of the car into the air and the car was promptly high-centered on an 18-inch pile of scree.

The engine was killed by the impact.

Dazed and scared, but completely unhurt we sat in the car. I broke the silence first, but unfortunately even with my memory for story telling I can’t remember what was said.

I tried to open my door but it wouldn’t. The car was at such an angle that the door was pressed into the ground. Dan pushed his door open and climbed out and I followed, climbing up and out across the front bench of seats.

After surveying the damage we set to work. The mound of dirt ran between the front two wheels and exited the side of the car between the front and back right tires. The back left corner of the bumper was resting on the ground supporting the car. Both of the right side tires were suspended in the air, most importantly the right rear which was the driving wheel.

Dan started scooping out the dirt and I pulled out the jack. Fortunately it wasn’t one of the new small jacks that stows away under the hood of the car—it was an old-school jack for an old-school car.

Around this point the first car drove by. The driver rolled down the window of his Subaru and asked us if we needed help. We certainly did, but refused. We’d only been there for 10 minutes at most and weren’t ready to throw in the towel yet. Plus I was scared that he’d call the cops, my parents, or a tow truck and I’d be stuck explaining my stupidity.

With increasing futility and mounting frustration we scraped at the roadside trying to get enough clearance to get our right rear tire back onto the ground.

Another car drove up, this time a truck. A young guy and his girlfriend were headed out into the desert to do some four wheeling. Again we turned down their help with a “We almost got it, but thanks.

After 45 minutes an old Ford Bronco pulled up. The loan passenger was a guy in his fifties, a week’s stubble on his chin and a filthy ball cap propped on his oily hair.

“You boys look to be in a heap o’ trouble.”

Dan, knowing the drill, nonchalantly said, “Nah, we almost got it…thanks though.”

The guy dropped his jacked up Bronco back into gear, and slowly pulled away. He made it 30 feet before he put it in reverse and came back to us.

"Ain’t no way ya almost got it. Lemme help ya.”

It wasn’t a question. He was telling us what he was going to do. Thankfully he knew just what needed to be done. He clambered down with a tow strap and looped through the tow hooks on the wagon. I climbed into the driver’s seat of the wagon and he gingerly applied the gas on his end of the line. Initially nothing happened, but slowly the Beast regained its proper place on the road.

Without getting out of his vehicle the guy took the strap from my uplifted hands, accepted my appreciation, and said, “I’ll bet you’ll never be that stupid again.” He dropped it into gear and this time didn’t come back.

Dan and I gave the car a perfunctory inspection. On the exterior everything seemed sound. Underneath the car a part was hanging down, sheered from its mounting bolts by the impact. It gently swayed, held in place by its wiring harness. We found a coat hanger in the back of the wagon and wired it back into place. Other than that nothing was conspicuously amiss. Dirt was packed into every imaginable crevice under the whole front of the car.

We climbed back in, refastened our seatbelts, and crept down the remaining five miles of dirt road. The vibration of the washboard road freed most of the dirt deposits and soon we were back onto the Carefree Highway—without such a carefree attitude this time.

We were supposed to be home by 4:00. We pulled into the driveway at 3:55 and unbelievably my parents weren’t home. I reexamined the car and miraculously our initial analysis held. Somehow the car sustained no significant damage.

At that point we made the choice not to tell my parents—another bad decision in a day full of them.

My brother Dan, that day, went from being my tag-a-long annoyance to full-fledged, acknowledged and accepted participant in the epic of my life. It wasn’t just him keeping his mouth shut, it was a bond that transcended tattletaling. We shared something.

We still share that something. He gets me, understands my passions, my pursuit of adventure, my strengths, weaknesses, victories, and failures. He understands why, though separated by age and distance, we can talk as though we have never been separated.

He is indeed my Brother Dan.

I tell this story now after all of these years with the hope for amnesty. This year my parents sold the Beast. The Beast with a mythical figure to us older kids in the family. We all learned to drive on it, enshrouded by the safety of its size. As time passed, the car approached 200,000 miles and became less and less reliable. Eventually my parents replaced it with a newer car for the young drivers of the family and the wagon was relegated to the last and lowliest position in the family driveway. It sat undriven for extended periods until finally it wasn’t driven at all. We worried that the car would die an anonymous death, crushed into a cube of steel, when my parents finally got rid of it. It wouldn’t be fair for a car with such a storied life to die such an obscure death.

Thankfully my parents wanted more for the car than the $150 per ton that the scrap yard was offering. They posted it on Craigslist. A man drove from a small town over an hour away and bought the car. When he finished putting it on his trailer with my youngest brother and sister in near tears observing from the porch, my mom asked him what he was going to do with it. Hesitantly, lest he offend, he told her that he would be entering it into his small county’s demolition derby later that summer.

My entire family attended (except me—work obligated).

The Beast didn’t win the derby, but she gave it everything she had. She lost due to immobilization, but after she was towed back to the pits, the man climbed back in and fired the engine back up, one last time, on the first try.

The wagon died that day—a legend in life and a legend in death. As a gladiator in the arena, she fought, she suffered, and she ultimately succumbed. Her greatest accomplishment, giving me a brother I can’t take for granted, lives.

Eddy Zakes
eazakes@juno.com