Chapter 10 - Ventilation
The next day, August 3rd, was a blast. Most of the day, it was the four of us: Win, Tom, Rollo, and myself, and it was kind of a preview of what it would be like once we disappeared, because we spent a good part of the day inside the cabin, working together and rubbing elbows while the radio, and Rollo, blasted away.
The primary objectives were laid out, and the duties assigned. Tom and Rollo would work together on the entrance tunnel, making the inside end flush with the wall and crafting two hinged doors, one for each end. Win and I would work on installing our sophisticated ventilation system.
The music was fine, and even with all the crap songs, there were enough hits by the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys and some others we liked to keep us happy. The Dave Clark Five had a new one, “Because,” that had just crept onto the charts, and I sang along to “The Girl From Ipanema,” even though the others ridiculed me for it.
Rollo, of course, started farting as soon as we got there, and never stopped. In the enclosed space, it became an issue, and we soon had to order him outside to work on the exterior door while the air cleared in the cabin. We had the battery-powered lantern for light, and it was enough. It would have been nice to have more light, but we didn’t want to use the kerosene lanterns until we had the ventilation pipes put in.
It looked like the plastic pipes were going to work fine; we had to dig out some dirt to get them in, but we had not filled in the gap completely on that side for that reason, so it was pretty easy. The biggest problem was attaching the straight pieces to the elbows. I suspected there was supposed to be some kind of heavy-duty glue or cement to secure them, but we didn’t have any, so we had to use duct tape. It wasn’t perfect, but neither was anything else in our cabin. There was space around the edges of the holes we had cut in the wall; duct tape again.
While Win and I struggled with the pipes, Tom and Rollo measured, sawed, and nailed together two square doors for the ends of the short tunnel. They had the inside one finished and hung on its hinges when we took a break for lunch.
Rollo had his disgusting baloney salad sandwiches again, but we were getting used to the smell. We still abused him for it, of course. We talked a lot about food; I said that tomorrow, we should give the camp stove a try, and have something hot from a can for lunch. We had to know if it was going to be safe to use the stove in the cabin. Rollo suggested that the ventilation system would work a lot better if we put a fan in front of one of the pipes to pull the air out.
It wasn’t the first, or the last time, that somebody made a suggestion that required electricity. The three of us just stared silently at Rollo while he looked innocently at us. It finally clicked, and he said, “Oh, yeah,” and took another bite of his sandwich.
Back to work, and by mid-afternoon, the doors were on, and the pipes were installed. We filled most of the gap on the north side and tamped it down some. The weight of the soil kept the pipes solidly in place. The horizontal piece ran a few inches below roof level, between the roots of the spruces, and ended behind the hedge. We would need to rig something for the ends, to keep the rain and the critters out; some kind of box made out of wood scraps.
“Like a bird house,” Rollo said, and we all stared at him. Once again, he had come up with a visualization of exactly what we needed.
As we were admiring our work, Jimmy and Larry showed up with a big load of canned goods, which we were happy to add to our stock. With six of us there, I suggested that we spend an hour or so shoveling and packing dirt, and that’s what we did. By the time we left for the day, we had all the sides filled right to the roof with well-packed dirt, and all that was left was to cover the roof.
Over the next few days, we covered the roof over and tried our best to make it look like the rest of the ground in our little clearing. We raked it nice and smooth, then carried buckets of pine straw from other parts of the woods and scattered it over the soil. It looked perfect. What we couldn’t do was make it feel right. It was safe enough to walk over, but you could tell it wasn’t solid ground. There was really nothing we could do about it; we figured if the cops or searchers actually walked over our cabin, we were probably doomed anyway.
We started working on making our cabin more livable. A table was the first thing, and we hashed over all the possibilities. The biggest problem was space; when the cots were set up for sleeping, there was very little room for anything else. We would need the table for eating, and for playing cards, or whatever we were going to do to pass the time, so we had to be able to all sit around it at the same time. Several ideas for tables that would fold down from the wall were rejected for this reason. In the end, we made a square of one-by-six planks, and made two simple saw-horses to set it on. We thought we might replace it if we came up with a better idea, but we never did.
We made some shelves, and did a few other things to make it sort of livable. Over the next two weeks, we brought all of our stuff inside, and that was more work than we thought it would be. Still, we had finished the cabin early, so we had time. It was looking colorful in the cabin, with dozens of cans of beans, stew, and spaghetti stacked in the spaces between the studs on our walls.