Zach Guthrie
In 1997, I moved into my family’s current house in central Illinois. When we first looked in the house, many oddities pervaded, but the strangest oddities existed in my basement. As I went down the concrete stairs, black scum scuffed the stairs. Apparently, the basement lacked any kind of house care by the tenants who previously rented the house from my grandparents.
At first glance, the room was black as night; and the light switch downstairs malfunctioned. Dad got a miner’s light to brighten the basement. When the light came on, a bizarre array of objects appeared. The initial bizarre object I saw was a myriad of fish tanks. I thought the fish tanks in the basement peculiar because the former tenants did not own any fish. The tanks themselves were huge and looked as they had not been used for years.
After we got the fish tanks out of the basement, I saw an obsolete furnace that looked like a big, rickety, metal white box reaching from form the floor to the ceiling. Later, I realized to my dismay that the white metal box was the heating unit for the house. Many pipes and indescribable affixations connected to the furnace box providing the hot water for our house. When I was a kid, the thought of the white metal box scared me; but I kept that a secret, figuring that Dad could fix the heating unit later. Unfortunately, the old heating unit still heats the house today; but we keep it in good shape.
Back to my childhood, as our family remodeled and cleaned out the house, Dad found the most unforgettable yet horrifying abomination I have ever seen: a petrified rat. Originally, I thought the rat was a squirrel. First, a large tree stood forty feet away from the house out in the backyard, so I assumed a squirrel sneaked into the basement during the winter the and froze to death. Second, the rat had yellow-brown tint on its fur. (But I now realize that was sawdust covering the rat.) Before Dad found the rat, he found some old sawdust horses in the basement; and dust collected on the floor. Whenever I told my friends about the rat, I said that the animal was a squirrel. Years later, Mom corrected me and explained the rat’s appearance.
I remember the rat experience the most out of the time our family cleaned the house. When Dad discovered the rat, he held the animal up to me by the frozen tail like a Popsicle stick. I was grossed out beyond words, yet I appreciate the memory. In addition, I keep a mental picture of the rat’s image in my memories, which is the basis for a funny face I use to shock my friends.
Six years after the remodeling and Dad’s death, other fiends of nature flew and crawled into my basement such as birds, mice, and cicadas. But the worst creature ever to conquer the basement was a huge horde of yellow jackets. At first, a country-sized hive built up in the inside wall in my bedroom; but a subsidiary of yellow jackets made a corner office in the basement. In reaction, Mom called the exterminators to wipe out the black and yellow horde.
After the extermination, not one yellow jacket existed in the house from that day onward. Unfortunately, nature’s cruel onslaught caused irreversible damage to my basement. In my disgust, the equity value of our house dropped because of those little yellow nightmares.
In retrospect, the struggles our family faced gave a valuable lesson in survival. We have overcome the challenges nature had brought our way, but I gained the satisfaction in beating nature. But after this nightmare, one thought dominates my mind: I hate my basement.
