Chapter 2. Planning
We worked on Tom all week, trying to convince him. He really wasn’t buying it, but he agreed to meet us at Big Rock Saturday morning to have a look. We started up the trail and into the woods, I with my shovel again, and we stopped for a few minutes at the top of the cliff. Tom had brought his transistor radio and he wanted to see how well WDOT would come in. It came in loud and clear (which was a huge plus for us all summer) and we trekked through the woods listening to “Twist & Shout,” “Love Me Do,” “Bits and Pieces,” and a new one that we loved called “World Without Love,” by Peter and Gordon. Tom was our music expert, and he told us that Lennon and McCartney wrote the song for them because Paul was dating Peter’s sister. How Tom learned stuff like that we never knew, and sometimes we thought he was making it up, but it turned out to be true.
Anyway, we got to the clearing and showed the whole setup to Tom, trying to convince him it would work. He was skeptical, but the very thought of putting something over on Brinker and the rest of those teachers was enough to convince him to give it a try. I showed them how loose the soil was and how easy to dig. Tom asked where we would put the dirt, and I showed him the gully. If we filled that, there were plenty of others, and plenty of brush to cover it up with. He pointed out the flaw in my plan, and I agreed that, yes, we would need a wheelbarrow or some big buckets. Alright, I said, let’s sit down and go over the things we’re going to need to get started with.
So we sat on the ledge and had a soda. I had brought both root beer and orange; I liked to mix them half-and-half. Some people thought it was disgusting, but I liked it. Win and I had told him of our plan to enlist Karl’s help for the big stuff.
“Obviously, we’re going to need lots of wood eventually, but we have to get the pit dug first. So what do we need right now?”
“More shovels and a wheelbarrow.”
“Yes, but not just more shovels. We need different shovels.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, part of making this work is going to be having our parents, and the cops, believe that we’ve gone somewhere else, so they’ll be looking for us somewhere else. If my Dad thinks ‘Hmmm, Denny borrowed my shovel every day all summer,’ and your parents remember the same thing, they’ll come looking in the woods right away.”
They both nod and ponder. Then Win says, “I’ve got it!”
“What? What?”
“Behind the Villa Drive development, where I used to live, there’s a big construction storage area, fenced off. Karl’s already raided it.”
“Sure,” says Tom, “I know exactly where it is.”
“So we’ve got to get Karl in on this,” I said.
“Is Karl going to be our ‘scrounger?’” Tom asked.
I looked at Win, and he shrugged. “I haven’t asked him yet, but I think he’ll do it.”
“Well, I hope he will; I really can’t think of anybody else old enough who would help us. But we’ll need to do a lot of scrounging ourselves, and recruit some people we can trust. For the small stuff.”
“Like food?” Tom asked, “by the way, what are we going to live on, and will we be able to cook?”
“We can’t have a fire,” Win said, “that would lead them right to us.”
“How about a camp stove?”
“That’s a good idea, Tom. We could even use a camp stove inside the pit, if we ventilate it properly. We’ll have to steal one.”
Now that Tom was all enthusiastic about it, he was coming up with ideas one right after the other.
“We’ll have a whole system set up; a network of scroungers, spies and lookouts, just like in the movie.”
“Yeah, we will!” says Win. Of course, we would have a whole different set of problems than the POWs in The Great Escape did, but it was a great model for us anyway.
We did some more planning while we sat there, Win agreeing to try to get Karl to meet us the next afternoon. Tom was going to try to get a couple of the neighborhood kids from Villa Drive to come out, too. Kids we could trust.
Win called me after supper that night and said that he and Karl would meet me on Lost Nation Road the next afternoon at 3:00. I would have to hike out from the woods and be at the right spot when they drove by.
I went out after Sunday dinner again the next day, and Tom met me at the bottom of the hill with Roy, who was in our class, and Jimmy, Win’s brother, and Larry, Karl’s brother, who were in fifth grade. Tom had told them we had a new place to show them, but he hadn’t filled them in on the details of the plan. We waited until we got to the site and had shown them the set-up before we sprung it on them. They were all delighted, Larry howling with demonic laughter, and they all agreed to help out.
None of us had a watch, of course, but we had Tom’s radio, so I knew when I had to hike out to the road. It didn’t take long, and I leaned against a tree and waited. There was no traffic; there hardly ever was on that road, and the first car that came along was Karl and Win. There was a turn-off pretty close by, an entrance to an abandoned hayfield, and Karl was able to park behind some trees where no one could see the car from the road.
We hiked in to the campsite and I have to say that Karl was pretty impressed with the set-up and the plan. He laughed out loud at the thought of what we were putting over on the teachers. As Win had said, it was just the sort of thing Karl would have done, and he loved it.
We talked over the plan and the process, and I gave Karl a verbal list of the things we needed to get started with. He nodded his head and said he would see what he could do. We walked back out to the road, all of us this time, so we would all know the route, and we picked out a hidden drop-off area where Karl could leave stuff for us, and we could haul it in to the campsite.
The last three weeks of school were filled with intrigue and excitement. School sucked, of course, but we had something to plan and to talk about. It was just the four of us in sixth grade who knew about it: Tom, Win, Roy and myself, plus the two kids in fifth at Summit Street School. But there was another kid, Rollo, who was always hanging around with us, and he knew we were up to something. After a few days, Tom and Win told me that they wanted to let Rollo in on it. I didn’t know him that well, because he had gone to a different elementary school, but he was from the neighborhood, and those guys trusted him, so I was persuaded.
Let me explain about “the neighborhood.” The Villa Drive development was in the west end of the village, off of Pearl Street, and consisted of Williams Street, Villa Drive, Warner, Rotunda, Murray and Grandview, and maybe another street I can’t remember. Win’s family had lived there until they moved to Hillcrest in ’62, Tom lived on Pearl Street, just a stone’s throw away, and all the other kids in this story lived in that neighborhood. I was way over on the other side of town, but my best friends lived there, so I was a frequent visitor.
Anyway, we let Rollo in on it, and we got him up there the next weekend to show him. He loved it. There was no thought, at first, of Rollo actually being in on the disappearance. That came later; he was just a helper for the time being.
Just a couple of days after we had shown him the site, Karl came through with his first big scrounge. Win told me on Tuesday, and we decided to go out Wednesday after school. We had to make up something on the fly, so we each told our parents we were doing homework together at the other’s house after school, and staying for dinner. We hiked out to the campsite, and out to our dropoff spot, and there we found three brand new shovels and five five-gallon plastic buckets. Not as good as a wheelbarrow, but we would take whatever we could get. The word from Karl was that he had some other construction sites to check out, and he would be on the lookout for the stuff we needed.
We both got home before dark, but the flaw in our plan was that neither of us had actually had any dinner, because we were lying about that. We each had a quarter, so we split a pint of fries at Al’s before going home. Of course, we didn’t get any homework done, either, but who gave a shit about that?
So that Saturday we had our first dig. The three of us were there early, and we just dug and dug for hours while we talked about the plan and listened to the radio. We went over everything we could think of, trying to come up with solutions to all the problems we would face. Ideally, we would like to have a wooden floor, walls, and a roof for our pit, but we didn’t know exactly how to do it. Not many twelve-year-olds are construction experts; certainly we weren’t. And it wasn’t like we could ask our parents for advice. Still, we had the confidence of the ignorant, and we thought we could figure it out.
Tom had a lot of ideas about security. He said since we were going to be coming out every day all summer, and the other kids as well, we would have to change our routes; figure out different ways to get here without being seen. We didn’t want people to remember seeing a familiar pattern when we disappeared. I had a few alternate routes from my side of town, and Tom was figuring out some for the Villa Drive kids.
Early that afternoon, Jimmy and Larry showed up, with what would be the foundation of our larder. To my astonishment, Larry opened up his jacket and dumped six cans of Spaghettios on the ground in front of me.
Now, let me make it clear. Larry and Jimmy were two of the finest shoplifters Essex Junction has ever produced, and we couldn’t have lasted a week without the stuff they collected for us over the summer. How they did it, I don’t know. The usual practice, then and now, was to slide something down your pants or under your shirt. How you do that with one can of Spaghettios, much less six, I cannot tell you. Larry just smiled and shrugged. Jimmy’s contribution on this occasion was a pocketful of Kit-Kats, which only lasted a few minutes, but were just as appreciated.
Anyway, this delivery prompted a long discussion on food storage, a problem we would have to solve. After we had the pit dug and roofed over, we could simply line the walls with cans of food. We knew we would have to live out of cans, with the occasional loaf of bread or whatever the guys could sneak out to us on weekends. In the meantime, what would we do with the food we were accumulating?
Well, the cans weren’t going to rot, or spoil; they would rust, eventually, if we couldn’t keep them dry. But we didn’t need to worry about someone stealing our food. Our whole strategy was based on the belief that nobody else was ever going to find our spot, at least until sometime after we disappeared. If we were wrong about that, the whole thing wasn’t going to work. We talked about getting a big footlocker, or building something out of wood, but we decided that, in the short term, we needed a big tarpaulin, or maybe two, and we would bury the cans, wrapped in a tarp, in the gully.
Over the next three weeks, the last three weeks of school, we went up on weekends and did some digging, and did lots of talking and planning. Win kept in touch with Karl, and we had a list of stuff we needed, which we kept adding to, of course. Every once in a while something would show up at the drop-off spot, not necessarily in the order that we asked for, or needed them, but we were grateful anyway. We couldn’t have done it without him.
We got the tarps we needed, and, one day, a bunch of brand new hammers and a fifty pound box of nails. They all laughed at me when I couldn’t even pick it up, but, even though the other guys could lift it, they couldn’t carry it very far, so we ended up putting it on one of the tarps and dragging it. One weekend, we got a load of two-by-fours and some one-by-six planks. We would need a lot more wood later on.