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.)